The House of War - Neocons and the Attack on Iran

We sat down with Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Associate Professor of History at California State University Stanislaus. He specializes in the history of the modern Middle East, American foreign policy, and the political economy of oil and natural gas. His previous book The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq was the subject of one of our first interviews at After the End of History. The book details a number of historical transitions: the shifting of American business and political coalitions as the Texan oil majors gained the upper hand in setting foreign policy, especially in the presidency of LBJ, the origins of OPEC as developmentalist growth model for Arab nationalists, and the conflicts between layers of the Iraqi military in 1960s. Brandon has also published articles in the journals Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, and Reviews in American History. 

In this episode, we discuss the continued power of the Neoconservative tendency in setting the agenda of American foreign policy, the nature of the Israel Lobby, and comparisons between the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the current US/Israeli war on Iran.