This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 23rd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The outgoing Trump administration appears to be making more work for the incoming

Biden team in the realm of foreign policy in particular

US policy toward Iran. Cato's John Glazer explains why. You know that kind of

political strategy towards the end of a presidential administration is not all that uncommon.

I think what's uncommon is that Trump is a lame duck president.

He's on his way out. He lost the election and he's rushing to implement all these policies in an attempt. I think the motivations vary actually, but many of them do end up kind of sticking a wrench into the Biden administration

spokes in terms of their policy agenda. That kind of hasty rushed effort as we've seen in the past couple of days and weeks

is less typical I would say it's more common for

lame duck presidents after an election to try to hold steady and perform a clean transition so that the new president can start fresh.

Okay, what does that involve with respect to Iran and Yemen?

Well, amid the president's kind of rapid set of military decisions and orders in the past couple of days was number one a

discussion he had with his top security officials asking for military options to strike Iran.

This is reported as very unusual.

It's unclear from the reports that whether or not these are just

discussions about asking for contingency plans and occasionally those need to be

refreshed and we have such plans all the time

where they're not the president asks for them but the reporting suggests that other

principal officials in the cabinet pushed back against Trump's request to see options to possibly strike Iran,

including Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo, who tend to be more reliably hawkish than Trump is on these

questions. So the report itself is a little confusing and I feel like we do not

...