Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable?

Transcript

Listen: With all eyes on Israel’s escalating war with Hamas, what’s Iran’s next move?

Iran gets around. In Southern Lebanon, Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters have a missile arsenal that dwarfs Hamas’ rocket supply and could overwhelm Israel’s famed “Iron Dome” air defense. The Pentagon recently redirected the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier and its strike group of destroyers to the Middle East instead of the eastern Mediterranean, ready to intercept missile and drone strikes by Iran-backed Houthi militias in Yemen aimed at Israel. Days later, American F-16 jets carried out airstrikes in Eastern Syria on facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and its proxies, in retaliation for a barrage of recent rocket and drone attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria.

But there’s a big difference between skirmishes with Iran proxy forces and an all-out US-Israel-Iran war. So how close is Israel to all-out war with Iran...and how will Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza up the ante? What are the implications for Israel's Western allies? On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer asks Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.