Podcast Club ONLINE: Regime Change, War, Why, and What Now?

This week's podcast is The Ezra Klein Show, with guest Ben Rhodes, a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and co-host of the Pod Save the World podcast. Rhodes served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and worked on the Iran nuclear deal.

Two sitting heads of state were removed by force just eight weeks apart under the direction of President Trump. On February 28, the US and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran that resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his senior command. Less than two months before, the US military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid.
The president seems to believe he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors without events spinning out of his control. Is he right? In this conversation, Rhodes and Klein discuss the ongoing conflict in Iran, how Democrats should respond, and whether Trump’s “head on a pike” approach to foreign policy underestimates the chaos of war. This podcast was recorded on March 2. The global fallout of these attacks has been rapidly evolving -- not just in the Middle East but also in places like Cuba. Please feel free to follow the developing news so we can discuss it at the meeting.

More about guest Ben Rhodes: HIs position when serving under Obama was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. Rhodes is a political commentator, regularly appearing on NBC News and MSNBC. He is co-chair of National Security Action, a political NGO, and the author of three books. Rhodes was once both on Time and Fortune magazines' lists of "40 Under 40" (of powerful/prominent people) and named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers.

PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast below before attending the meeting to optimize discussion.

ALSO, it's possible that either of the below links have changed between the time of this posting and when you click on it. Please double-check that you're listening to the correct episode of The Ezra Klein Show, which is entitled: The Great Lie of
War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOLUMfRLaI4 (transcript link included)

or

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000752856631

(1 hr, 11 min.)

What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm

Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.