Welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jacobin managing editor Micah Utrich.

We seemed terrifyingly close to an open war on Iran recently after the Trump administration's drone assassination of Iranian

General Kossam Solomani.

It seems like we've avoided the worst case scenario, at least for now, but the assassination really highlighted just how brazenly American

imperial power is wielded around the world and how easy it could be for the American imperial

presidency, whoever is in that presidency,

to drag us back into another major war.

It also is a reminder that we don't have a real anti-war movement in this country that can effectively

fight back against these kinds of

escalations.

I talked about all of these issues with Daniel Bessner.

Daniel is a historian and professor of international studies at the University of Washington, as well as the

author of Democracy and Exile, and a forthcoming history of the Rand Corporation.

He's also a regular contributor to Jackman. Here's Daniel.

Danny, hello.

Hello.

Thanks for coming on the show.

So we are recording this on Wednesday the day after the Democratic debate and we were expecting

a substantive discussion or at least a discussion.

I don't know if we were expecting it to be substantive. But we're just expecting a discussion I don't know we're expecting it to be substantive but we're just

expecting a discussion on foreign policy to come out in this debate given that we almost

just had a major escalation in war with Iran.

...