History As It Happens

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The 9/11 families are still awaiting their day in court. In lawsuits, hundreds of victims’ relatives and injured survivors claim that Saudi government employees directly and knowingly assisted Osama bin Laden's hijackers and fueled al-Qaeda’s development by funding Islamic charities that exported a radical strain of Islam to places like Afghanistan.
What did the Saudi government know, if anything, about the plot? Why did Islamic charities export Wahhabism to the Muslim world? Who was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset who befriended two of the hijackers?
Our guest is Peter Bergen, the author of All the Presidents’ Wars.
Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, and vice president for global studies at New America, a D.C. think tank. He’s a national security analyst for CNN and professor of practice at Arizona State University.
Further listening:
Who Was Osama bin Laden? (podcast w/ Peter Bergen)

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Nicaragua has a dictator for life. President Daniel Ortega, 80, announced the country won’t hold elections anytime soon, underscoring his effort to extend his nearly 20-year rule and dashing the opposition's hopes that he might allow a modicum of democracy, according to the Associated Press. Few expected next year's election to be free and fair, but Ortega won't even uphold the pretense.
Who are Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, a leftist revolutionary movement founded in the early 1960s? Why is Ortega, who was first elected in 1984, still on the Central American political scene? Our guest is historian Jeffrey Gould.
Jeffrey Gould is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Indiana. He's an expert on Nicaragua as well as Central American social movements, ethnic conflicts, and political violence.

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Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains invisible more than 7 months into an existential war for the regime's survival. He's yet to be seen in public and was reportedly seriously wounded on the war's first day in an air strike that killed his father.
So, who is running Iran? Who is directing the war or making decisions at the negotiating table? Our guest is Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. He is an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and Middle East geopolitics.
Parsi discusses Iran's leadership, the state of negotiations with the Trump administration, and whether a return to major combat is possible.

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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the country was paralyzed by the Great Depression and fascist jackboots were trampling democracy in Europe. As the 1930s wore on, the president and the American people came to see fascism as not only a threat to societies on the other side of the Atlantic, but as a danger to the American way of life, too. But what to do about it?
How did FDR prepare the country for what he correctly foresaw as an inevitable war against the fascist powers? How did public opinion compel the president to leave neutrality behind?
Americans then tangled with the same questions we’re grappling with today, although under a dramatically different set of circumstances. When do problems in faraway places necessitate U.S. involvement? Does our democracy depend on the survival of other democracies?
Our guest is University of Virginia historian William Hitchcock, the author of "A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II."

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The Middle East is undergoing transformative changes. It's difficult, if not impossible, to see where things will end up. What is clear, however, is that political Islam — what the scholar Mohammed Ayoob says was "the dominant ideological challenger to the region’s authoritarian political systems" — is declining. Public confidence that Islamist movements, whether radical or pragmatic, can affect positive change for their societies is low. What might emerge instead?
Our guest is Nathan Brown, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He's an expert on religion and politics, authoritarianism, constitutionalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Further reading:
The End of Political Islam? Not Quite by Mohammad Ayoob (The National Interest)

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