This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 8th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The maximum pressure the US hopes to impose on Iran is causing some problems for US allies.

It's also punishing Iran for complying with the Iran nuclear deal.

And it may encourage the country to escalate into a more threatening crisis.

Cato's John Glazer and Emma Ashford discussed the strategy now at work against Iran.

So there's a couple of ways we can look at this.

One is that this deployment, at the very least the deployment of the carrier, maybe not the bombers, was planned. It was announced a long time ago. The carrier already, you know, left and sailed away.

So this is not something that was done explicitly in response to Iranian actions.

But the statement that was issued does seem to have been Bolton responding to these

intelligence reports that we've heard about. So it seems like the administration is trying to portray the carrier group going into the Gulf

as something that's a response that they're trying to look tough,

even though it was something they were basically doing already.

Why now?

Well, we patrol Navy warships through the Persian Gulf on a regular basis.

Our Navy's fifth fleet is based in Bahrain, right, to Iran's south. We do these

rotations somewhat frequently and so you know the temperature on Iran is

particularly high right now primarily because the

Trump administration has been relentless in its approach on economic sanctions

we've just begun to or I think this month we're eliminating the waivers for

countries to import Iranian oil which is gonna do more harm to the Iranian economy.

It's also causing problems with our allies and roiling oil markets to one degree or another.

And so the temperature is quite high. gets to one degree or another.

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