Welcome to the gray area Friday. My guest today is Alexander Ward, my friend, former Vox colleague, and now a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks for having me. True story. Alex is the first person I call or text whenever there is an international incident of any kind. And he always

very patiently answers my questions. How are you, buddy? I am fine. I've definitely been more

arrested, but I'm fine. And when you, when you ring, I answer. So I happy to do this for you.

We really do sincerely appreciate you doing this on very short notice.

We are speaking on Monday afternoon, March 2nd, and it goes without saying that things are changing very quickly by the end of this taping.

There may be a completely different situation on the ground, but...

Probably during this taping. Yeah, and so, look, all we can do is assess things as they are right now, and that is what we will do. This is not my beat. You know, I don't fully understand the situation. I am like a lot of people. I am worried. I'm confused. I'm a little angry. You are here to walk me through it.

So at the end, I can probably still be worried, but maybe at least informed. So what do you

think about that? Happy to take our text chain into the audio sphere. Let's do this.

All right. Before we get to where things are now, I just, let me just go back to the decision

to strike Iran in the first place. Why did we do this? Why now? It is actually the

multi-million dollar question because I'm not sure I can even answer that question. I'm not even

sure President Trump can answer that question. But let's start with what the rationale that

they now say is. The rationale, we got to go back to January. It started when there were

major protests against the regime. And Trump promised,, unquote, help is on its way.

Now, that help didn't come.

But what happened was in large part because Trump was worried about what it could unleash.

And also, there were allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel, who said, hey, you, the U.S.

are not well positioned enough to protect us and your own troops should the Iranians retaliate to any strike.

So what happens?

From those protests, the U.S. amasses a pretty large, what Trump would call it, Armada, two carrier strike groups, jet fighters, other warships, off the coast of Iran, while the U.S. says to Iran, hey, why don't we negotiate

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