Will Trump Lead the US to War with Iran? Local Experts Sound Off
Stephen Henderson speaks with two foreign policy experts and Jason Rezaian, Washington Post reporter, about escalating tensions and how close to war we really are.
Late last week, President Trump says the United States was just minutes away from a military strike against Iran. The president says our forces were “cocked and loaded,” and that the strike would have been retaliation against Iran for shooting down a U.S. drone.
Trump claims he called off the attack because of how many people would likely die.
Iran is a country with which the United States has a tense and complicated history, and even at the height of the hostage crisis in the late 1970s, the United States has never been so close to war with Iran as it seems to be now.
Why is that? What is so urgent about this moment in relations between the countries that war could be so close at hand?
On Detroit Today, Stephen Henderson speaks with experts about the situation, as well as how this escalation compares to how wars have begun in the past.
Peter Trumbore is chair of the political science department at Oakland University.
Saeed Khan is senior lecturer of Near and Middle East history and politics at Wayne State University.
Jason Rezaian is global opinions writer for the Washington Post and served as The Post‘s correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016. He spent 544 days imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January.
Trumbore and Khan are both skeptical about claims that the U.S. and Iran were so close to war last week.
They also discuss how sanctions work, how we’re using them with Iran, and whether they’re losing their bite.
