On a special episode of Worldly, Yochi, Jenn, and Zack talk about President Trump's historic and dangerous decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, a move that angered America's closest allies and potentially set the stage for a new Mideast war. Israel and Iran started trading blows within a day of Trump's decision, and the situation could quickly get worse as American friends and enemies adjust to the new reality Trump has created. Yochi compares economic sanctions to football, Zack offers a hot take for the ages, and Jenn says the technical term for a trade war is "some real shit." Zack’s big explainer about what it means that we’ve withdrawn from the Iran deal … and some more context in a quicker form from Alex Ward. Yochi quoted Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s statements on the recent strikes. Here’s more background on that quote. As Jenn mentioned, we touched on some of the implications of an Iran-Israel war last episode. Alex also has a great piece on this that touches on the recent strikes. Yochi mentioned a previous strike that killed seven Iranian military personnel. Soon after becoming the new US Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell tweeted, “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Yochi talked about this tweet and the response it elicited from a former German ambassador. Zack dived into some fun wonky policy surrounding “blocking regulations” and how Europe might use them to deal with the current sanctions. Here’s the piece Zack was quoting when he said that an expert believes the Iran deal would have kept Iran from getting a nuclear bomb until at least 2041. John Bolton’s 2015 New York Times opinion piece “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” We played a clip of Bolton talking about that op-ed. It was from an interview he did with Jon Stewart back in 2015. Jenn mentioned a more recent op-ed Bolton wrote for the Washington Post slamming the Iran deal.    She also mentioned that the International Atomic Energy Agency and a variety of other experts agreed that the Iran deal was effective. Yochi mentioned that President George W. Bush had had a request for bunker-busting bombs from Israel and declined. Here’s an old New York Times article with more details. Here’s the “winners and losers of the Iran deal” piece that Yochi suggested. For more information on the Iran deal, please check out Wednesday’s episode of Today, Explained. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices