Know Your Enemy: Trump’s War Against Iran

Know Your Enemy: Trump’s War Against Iran

Matt and Sam talk to Matt Duss, a leading foreign policy expert on the left, about the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

On February 28, both the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s Supreme Leader, along with other political leaders and government officials, destroying various military targets, and bombing a girls’ elementary school that took at least 175 lives, many of them children. Just under a week into the war, where are we? Why did Trump decide to attack Iran now? What reasons did they give, and were any of them plausible? What have the consequences been so far? And what can Democrats do to fight back? To answer these questions, we had on Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders. Other topics include: Michael Ledeen and the right’s fixation on Iran; Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and the Iranian hostage crisis, and more.

Sources:

Matthew Duss, War With Iran Would Be Illegal and Stupid. Democrats Should Care, Foreign Policy (2026)

Zachary Basu, Trump’s Lethal Presidency, Axios (2026)

Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, et al., How Trump Decided to Go to War, New York Times (2026)

Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We’ll Win (2002)

— The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (2007)

— Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West (2009)