International Relations and Defence Committee
18 March 2026
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International Relations and Defence Committee House of Lords
00:05 - 02:32
Speaker 1
Of all, declare an interest. I'm a senior counselor with the Cohen Group in Washington, so it's to put it on the record. We are looking at the issue of what is happening in Iran today in the context of a study that the committee has been doing about UK US relations. This got somewhat disrupted because over the last couple of weeks, things have moved, and we therefore thought that we should take some additional evidence from some experts in the area in order to clarify the position before we finalize the report, which we hope is going to come out in the middle of next month, and which will attract inevitably a fair degree of attention and therefore developments as they stand at the moment are of acute importance. Therefore, we're hopefully going to complete this within an hour if we can manage it, and we'll ask a series of questions to each of the members around the the committee.
We we we had a Ukrainian delegation in before who were remarkably economic with their answers to the questions. Well, we're hoping desperately that that is going to be a model that will be adopted by subsequent by subsequent witnesses as well. Because I'm in the chair, I get to ask the first question to Laurel, and if you would probably, possibly, when you answer the question, introduce yourself to the to the committee and and say anything openly that you wanted to say to the committee, first of all. But I I am concerned about the the the national security strategy of the of The United States, is only a few months old, which said the days in which The Middle East dominated American foreign policy are thankfully over. So is what is happening today in regard to Iran an aberration, or is that an indication of the way in which American foreign policy is now fundamentally changed?
Well,
02:32 - 03:11
Speaker 2
thank you very much for the invitation to appear before the committee this afternoon. We've been following the report at Chatham House with great interest, that will be forthcoming from this committee. Laurel Rapp, I'm The US and North America program director at Chatham House. Recently arrived from Washington where I was a US diplomat for fourteen years, dealing with some of the issues before this committee today. So it's a really important question, and we have seminal foundational grand strategy documents from the US administration, the national security strategy as as you referenced, the national defense strategy, and then we have the actions the administration has been undertaking.
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