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Foad: In the name of God, the compassionate and merciful, hello everybody, hope you are doing great. You’re watching FoaDebate. Over the past few weeks, the Middle East has witnessed a mix of intense tension and diplomatic movements. On one hand, indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. took place with both sides expressing willingness to continue the dialogue. On the other hand, the Trump administration has ramped up its maximum pressure campaign, sending naval forces to the region and threatening Iran. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was heeding to Washington to push Tel Aviv’s demands for including Iran’s missile program and regional activities in any potential agreement.

In such a heated atmosphere, the key question is, are Tehran and Washington moving forward a new deal? Or is the region on the brink of a full-scale conflict? To explore this, I sit down with Dr. Kevin Barrett, a senior American journalist and well-known political analyst. Welcome back there, Kevin Barrett.

Kevin Barrett: Thank you, Fouad. It’s good to be back with you.

You’re welcome. As I said, over the past week, we have seen two conflicting signals from the U.S. On one hand, talks in Oman and Trump’s expressing satisfaction with them. and on the other hand, an escalation in military and economic pressure. How do you interpret this duality?

Well, I think that Trump is basically conditioned by his history as a kind of a, let’s face it, a somewhat corrupt businessman and indeed a money launderer for organized crime who built up hotel chains and casinos and so on, and took a kind of a bullying approach to business negotiations. He would threaten people and pressure them and try to get the upper hand over them and then try to come out with the best deal that he could, thinking that by applying pressure, he could get better terms in a deal. And so that’s just his standard operating procedure. And for whatever reason, the foreign policy establishment is letting him do that.

But I don’t think that we should take the aircraft carriers being sent into the region at face value as preparations for necessarily for war, because frankly, I don’t think that the United States and its Israeli partner, or some would say occupier, is ready for that kind of war. As we saw during the 12-day war in June, Iran, even when taken by surprise by another dastardly surprise attack during what was supposed to be negotiations, was capable of regrouping, and its missile force was extremely formidable, forcing the Israelis to beg for the Americans to give them a face-saving way to end that war.

And since the Americans are unable to basically even disable the rocket program in Yemen by Ansar Allah—and Iran is many orders of magnitude more formidable—it seems unlikely that the American leadership is looking forward to a war that would certainly leave a large number of Americans dead with tremendous damage and the prospect of either an American defeat or an attempt to throw good money after bad money and essentially keep digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper for another forever war, which the U.S. would have no real expectation of winning in any meaningful way.

After Trump met Netanyahu, it seemed that Trump’s statement on his platform, Truth Social, and then Netanyahu’s statement in Hebrew just before he got on the plane to go back to Israel, indicated that Netanyahu didn’t get what he wanted, which was a kind of a promise from Trump that Trump would indeed go all the way with a