This is John Batchelor, a conversation with colleague Anertol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft, about the phone call placed by Abraham Rahini, the president of Iran, to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia following the attack on Jusam Bethlehem, Israel, in general.

What did they talk about?

Anatole has very good information and his response is quite in proportion to what we know.

He then looks to how it is we came to this place where we're in a contest between major

powers watching wars of our allies and adversaries of a small scale always threatening, increasingly

threatening to break out into a large scale. And it's only even Quincy Institute

for Responsible Statecraft, the conversation between

Mr. Putin and Mr. Rouhani following the Iranian attack from Iranian soil and on the soil of

its surrogates on Israel. More of this later.

Well, they're not allies. I mean, you know, Russia is not going to go to war with the United States if the US attacks Iran.

And Iran is not going to send troops to fight for Russia and Ukraine.

So they're not allies in the sense that, you know, members of NATO are allies. But Iran has become a very important supplier of drones to Russia and I am quite sure that as well as

money Iran is getting you know military technology in return.

I would be very surprised if the conversation didn't include requests and probably promises in return, in particular of anti-aircraft missiles, which of course

Iran would want to use to shoot down any incoming Israeli or American planes.

So, yeah, I mean, there is now a considerable degree of military cooperation between the two.

But, I mean, you know, what exactly did we expect I mean America had a chance at you know reconciliation

some form of detente with Iran and it blew it years ago and to a degree under a well

I'm mainly under Bush and then again under under Trump of course We had a chance at you know trying to prevent conflict with Russia.

We blew that as well. We just have to pray that we don't blow the chance to avoid conflict with China

because then of course we would really be in an interesting world.

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