LIVE w/ Alex Jordan & Courtney Rawlings : Who Benefits When America Stays At War

About this episode

The episode discusses the complexities of US-Iran peace talks and the influence of pro-war narratives in American media and politics.

Peace talks with Iran don’t just face obstacles overseas, they run straight into a buzz saw at home. Kelly Vlejos is joined by Quincy Institute colleagues Alex Jerdon and Courtney Rawlings, co-hosts of Always at War, to unpack a Memorial Day weekend news cycle that swung from talk of a US-Iran breakthrough to renewed strikes and a full-blown meltdown from the usual hawks. We dig into the messaging coming from prominent pro-war voices, including the claim that America must “negotiate while fighting,” and why that framing turns diplomacy into a stepping stone for escalation rather than a way out. We also question the contradiction at the heart of so much cable news commentary: if Iran was supposedly “decimated,” why is the answer always more bombing and more open-ended objectives? Along the way, we connect the debate to intelligence realities, including repeated assertions that the Iranian nuclear weapons narrative does not match the available assessments. The conversation widens to the bipartisan politics that make peace harder, with Democrats sometimes attacking negotiation from the right, and to the deeper culture of the Washington foreign policy blob on display in the Monk…

People in this episode

Host: Kelly Vlejos

Guests: Alex Jerdon, Courtney Rawlings

Topics covered

• US-Iran relations
• war and peace
• diplomacy
• foreign policy
• media analysis
• bipartisan politics

Keywords

• peace talks
• US-Iran breakthrough
• pro-war voices
• diplomacy
• cable news
• bipartisan politics
• foreign policy blob

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Quincy Institute, Always at War

Places: Iran, United States

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