Akbar Shahid Ahmed

speaker

116 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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7am · Is this the most dangerous era of the Iran war? · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

now for almost 15 years, I'm truly shocked by the degree to which foreign partners are willing to embarrass themselves for Donald Trump's foreign policy.

And I continue to be shocked.

I mean, the cost that this war has had on the global economy, on growth rates, is just tremendous.

And certainly what I hear from officials is they're still resistant to the idea of openly challenging Trump.

All of that said, I also hear that governments, including Australia, are kind of quietly hedging their bets and building these relationships that are outside their U.S.

dependence, right?

So not just relying on the U.S.

as their partner,

And I think you'll see more of that if Trump does, as expected, do very poorly in the US midterms.

I think you'll see more of allies kind of openly challenging him the way that Spain and some countries have so far.

And certainly you've seen some European leaders speak up a little bit about international law, that it's been a position of fealty, largely.

What's scary is that President Trump has genuinely considered a huge range of escalations.

And also the Iranians have a lot of options for escalation that we haven't seen them activate so far.

So of course, Trump could go for ground invasion.

He could go for even broader and bigger bombing campaigns.

And the Iranians could

pursue targets not just in the Middle East, but beyond that.

So yes, I think with the breakdown and with the real distrust, particularly on the Iranian side, and the kind of lack of direction on the US side, the US side just doesn't seem to have a clear understanding of where they want to go.

For a while, the idea was, like in Venezuela, we want to pick a partner in Iran and work with them.

But who would that be at this point when the U.S.

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