The Attack in Saudi Arabia
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2019
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tensions in the Middle East are at a high point. Over the weekend, large Saudi oil facilities were attacked. The Yemeni Houthis jumped in to claim responsibility. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. President Trump tweets that the U.S. is 'locked and loaded' and ready for potential response. But what has actually happened in the Arabian Peninsula? What does the future hold for conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians? And what role will the United States have?
To talk it all through, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Gregory Johnsen, a researcher on Yemen and Middle East conflict; Suzanne Maloney, a Brookings senior fellow whose research centers on Iran; Samantha Gross, a fellow in the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate; and Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior editor at Lawfare. They talked about what we know about what happened over the weekend, the geopolitical context for the attack, potential American responses, and the legal authorities that could justify American military action.
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Transcript
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| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | There was widespread anticipation that this kind of escalation was almost inevitable when |
| 0:40.3 | President Trump made the decision to exit the nuclear deal in May of 2018. |
| 0:46.1 | It took another year before the Iranians began to react in any serious way. |
| 0:50.8 | And even then, these attacks that we saw over the course of the summer, the efforts to |
| 0:56.0 | begin to back away from their own commitments under the nuclear deal were relatively incremental, |
| 1:02.4 | relatively small scale and enabled us all to sort of go back to forgetting that this |
| 1:07.0 | was in fact a very live point of friction in the international system. |
| 1:12.6 | I don't think we're going to be able to forget in the near future. |
| 1:15.6 | I'm Jacob Schultz and this is the LawFair podcast September 17, 2019. |
| 1:23.0 | Tensions in the Middle East start at a high point. |
| 1:25.2 | Over the weekend, large Saudi oil facilities were attacked. |
| 1:28.7 | The Yemeni Houthis jumped in to claim responsibility. |
| 1:31.8 | Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blames Iran. |
| 1:35.1 | President Trump tweets that the US is locked and loaded and ready for a potential response. |
| 1:40.3 | What has actually happened in the Arabian Peninsula? |
| 1:43.2 | What does the future hold for conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians? |
| 1:47.1 | And what role will the United States have? |
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