[NOTE: This event has been rescheduled to October 6, 2020]

Since Trump pulled out of the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the United States continues to ratchet up sanctions and threats of military action against Iran, keeping the two countries locked in a dangerous cycle of brinkmanship and violence. Tensions are high in the crowded and over-militarized sea lanes of the Persian Gulf. The US continues to provoke, and while both countries have staged cyber attacks, Iran has mostly chosen not to respond in kind to the military threats.

What will it take to reverse the current US escalation trajectory, and what about after the election? Is there a potential for a diplomatic solution, and can Washington and Tehran find common ground?

David Barsamian is the author of ReTargeting Iran, a new book of conversations with experts on the US-Iran relationship. Co-sponsored by Institute for Policy Studies and City Lights Books, David talks with two of those experts, Nader Hashemi and Trita Parsi, in an event moderated by Phyllis Bennis.

REGISTER for the talk here: https://ips-dc.org/Iranretargeted. Copies of the book can be ordered here.

• David Barsamian is one of America’s most tireless and wide-ranging investigative journalists, David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio show Alternative Radio—now in its 33rd year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Richard Wolff, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said. David Barsamian is the winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.
• Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His articles appear in the New York Times and other newspapers and journals. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy and co-editor of The People Reloaded, The Syria Dilemma, and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East.
• Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also the founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council, author of Treacherous Alliance, A Single Roll of the Dice and Losing an Enemy. He is the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Moderator Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS, focusing on Middle East, U.S. wars and UN issues. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her books include Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer. She has also written Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power.