Reza Aslan interviews Jimmy Carter

"The best way to constrain Iran’s potential movement towards nuclear capability is to have peace in the Middle East, peace between the Israeli and the Palestinians," former President Jimmy Carter tells Ploughshares Fund board member Reza Aslan in a far-ranging interview about prospects for peace in the Middle East. "To end the official war that still exists between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon. I think that would remove, to a substantial degree, the threat that Iranians feel if they need to defend themselves, and that would lessen the inclination to move to a military weapon... So the end of the Iraq war and peace in the Middle East would be the two things that would put Iran back into a place of less negative influence to potential terrorism, and less of a feeling that they would need to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves."