This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 8th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

Iran has retaliated against the United States following a US strike that killed Iranian leader

Kasem Salamani, attacking US military installation in Iraq, but there were apparently no casualties.

The President claims that Iran has taken no additional action.

Caters John Glazer and Chris Prevel discuss what ought to happen next.

We may have been last night, sort of at the precipice of the next round of escalation, but then the scale

of the Iranian attack against the base in Iraq and did not result in American casualties.

It did not apparently result even in Iraqi casualties.

And so the anticipated U.S. retaliation for that strike never occurred.

That doesn't mean that there won't be another Iranian attack.

It doesn't mean that there won't be another US retaliation but we were it seemed

trapped in a tit for tat escalatory cycle and for the moment we're recording on

nine o'clock on Wednesday morning,

for the moment, that has not occurred past last night.

You know, it it feels like everybody wants to de-escalate this and yet the

natural expected response to anything that either side does is escalation.

Right, I was disappointed by some of the folks that I follow on Twitter who I expected better of commenting on how the

United States could retaliate sort of commenting on U.S. capabilities without pausing to consider whether or not that actually made sense from an American national interest in American grand strategic perspective.

So, and this is, you know, I might sound like a broken record. This is the power problem when you have the ability to hit anything anywhere whenever you feel like it. That doesn't mean that it's a good idea to hit anything you feel like wherever you know it's it's this is the this is the problem that

US foreign policy is in but it's also revealing how nonsensical this the general strategic approaches because you know with each escalation with each

TIT that is then met by a TAT one decide that is acting thinks that okay this will be the final this will deter

any further action by the other party this will demonstrate to them that we have

...