Anne Applebaum

Iran has, for many years, been spending billions of dollars on Hezbollah, on Hamas, on the Houthis.

It spent billions of dollars on this nuclear program that

We don't know how much of it was destroyed, but enough of it was destroyed that makes it look like it's pretty unviable.

Meanwhile, people are short of food.

They're short of medicine.

They're short of, in some places, of water.

You see people on the streets in Iran right now who are genuinely desperate and angry at the regime for misspending their national wealth.

And I think that's the most important source of anger and frustration.

Could there be other foreign spies?

No doubt.

But I don't think that's the main thing that's happening.

Have I already suggested What We Can Know, the Ian McEwan novel?

It's called What We Can Know, and it's by the really great British writer Ian McEwan.

And what's interesting about it, it's not quite as on-the-nose related to these same subjects, although in some ways it is.

It projects something not that far into the future, maybe 100 years into the future, but

And it's a group of historians looking back on our time and trying to understand it.

And in the meantime, in the interim, there's been a climate change disaster and a nuclear war.

And, you know, the world looks very different.

And the first part of the novel, you think it's about...

It's a kind of lecture, moral story about the impact of climate change.