Quincy Institute Founder On Surprising U.N. Security Council Vote

I wanted to have a conversation with someone who actually knows what's going on uh with Iran with geopolitical issues that we talk about on this show . And uh joining us now is Trita Parsey, executive vice president for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft . He also has an incredible Substack that I highly recommend you all follow and subscribe to. I just became a founding member to day. Trita, . Trita, thank you for the work you do and thank you for joining us today . Thank you so much for having me for the kind words . Really appreciate it. So . So before we get started with updates on Iran, I wanted you to kind of fill me in because I know nothing about it about some of the developments with the UN Security Council today . Absolutely . So today was a vote to see who would be the next elected members of the Security Council . As you know, the Security Council currently has 15 members . Five of them are permanent and 10 of them are elected members that come from uh that get two uh year seats on the council . Uh but they don't have a veto or anything like that . Germany is because of the historic diplomatic role that has played . It's the second largest donor to the UN as well . For the first time ever, Germany lost the vote to join the security council today . it lost it to Portugal and Austria . So essentially Europe has two seats that it could fill and it was a competition between these three under normal circumstances, Germany would absolutely have gotten the seat and the competition actually would have been between those two other states . But because of Gaza and because of Germany's support for Israel , the genocide, its betrayal of international law and Germany historically , at least post war World War II, of course , has been a very strong defender of international law . It's been very principled on this issue and its turnaround in order to please the Israelis have just been absolutely shameful . And today the uh repercussions