First tonight, the latest from the Middle East after U.S. strikes on Iran Saturday and Israeli strikes that began last week.

This morning, President Donald Trump blasted both Israel and Iran, claiming they both violated the cease fire announced yesterday.

But later, the president said the cease fire appeared to be holding.

Netanyahu says Iran's nuclear program is now in ruins thanks to Israel.

But the Associated Press reports a U.S. intelligence report that says U.S. strikes set back Iran's nuclear program by a few months.

Now, earlier today, we spoke with Doctor Robert Farley with the University of Kentucky's Paterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

He says it appears both sides are now honoring the cease fire.

And he breaks down how exactly this war could impact Kentuckians.

It looks like as of this morning, something seems to be holding that, that the Iranians more or less seem to have agreed, at least implicitly, to the cease fire.

The Israelis seem to be backing away from additional strikes.

And so it does look a bit really, this is not that unusual, right?

It is not atypical for a ceasefire to be broken in its first hours and then people to pull things back together.

Emotions are really high.

People are trying to negotiate.

And that seems like what's happening here, that the president got a little ahead of events in terms of declaring that there was a ceasefire.

But then essentially leveraged that declaration, to put pressure on the Iranians with the threat of more bombing and put pressure on the Israelis with the threat of withdrawing military and financial support in order to get to where we are in terms of the ceasefire.

So yesterday when, the Iranians responded to the attack that we launched on Saturday, they responded by firing ballistic missiles that I believe it's called alluded Air Force Base, in Qatar.

And this is a U.S. facility.

It's been a U.S. facility for a long time.

It was definitely a response to the decision of the United States to strike Iran, Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Iranians gave notice.

And the attack itself was quite small, but the Iranians gave notice indicating that missiles were coming.

And they probably did that because they wanted to convey to the United States, both the U.S. government and the U.S. people, that we are responding symbolically.

Right?

We are, we are intentionally pulling our punch on this strike back because we want this war to end.

And I think you can infer that the Iranians probably have a pretty good sense of what the balance of power here is, that the United States is vastly more powerful, and that the United States could conduct all kinds of attacks across Iran if it wanted to.

And we are trying to very carefully calibrate the diplomacy between the two countries.

And the Iranians are indicating to us that we don't want this fight.

Right.

We will respond.

But this is not a fight that we want to fight.

The deal we were trying to arrive at this time, and the deal we arrived at during the Obama administration, concerned strictly the Iranian nuclear program.

Right.

So it was a deal which was explicitly designed just to arrest the nuclear program.

Right.

It didn't have anything to do with their ballistic missile programs, and it didn't have anything to do with all of the militias that they have trained and funded, around the Middle East.

That's not good enough for Israel, right?

Israel wants some kind of restrictions on the Iranian ballistic missile program, and also wants to disrupt their relationships with the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas and all these militias.

And this deal, the negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran were never going to arrive at that.

And so I think it's one of the big reasons that we got an attack.

So the question of whether Iran is going to continue to pursue a nuclear weapon, or it's going to come to some sort of arrangement with the United States and with Israel.

I mean, it's a pretty complicated one, but it's also it's not either or, when people talk about the kind of deal that we want to make with Iran.

I mean, that's a question that made sense two weeks ago.

When the United States and Iran had been negotiating, we were very close on the terms.

The terms were very similar to a deal that we had already struck, back during the Obama administration, it was called the Iran deal or the JCPoA.

And it was a deal that was supposed to basically arrest the Iranian nuclear program.

Iran would have certain rights.

We were really close to getting back into that before.

Two weeks ago.

I am not sure now what the content of any deal would be between the United States and Iran.

We have blown up the things that were really problematic, the enrichment facilities and some of the other stuff.

Iran already has all of the other equipment, human expertise and so forth that it needs in order to pursue a small number of bombs.

Right.

People estimate somewhere between 8 and 10, weapons, that they have enough material for that.

So I don't think it's impossible that Iran will try to do both at the same time.

They'll try to come to some kind of agreement with the United States.

The details of that are pretty unclear.

While at the same time devoting a lot more effort to, attempting to to sort of jump that last, chasm and actually build the nuclear weapons that it wants to have.

How does this matter for Kentucky?

I mean, there are a couple ways.

One is the economic effects.

So thus far, the Iranians have not decided to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, which is where a lot of the world's oil goes through.

We don't buy oil that goes through the Straits of Hormuz in the United States, but if there's any kind of disruption, it will affect oil prices globally, which means that gas will get more expensive here in Kentucky, if prices stay up for a longer period of time than it will, it will wreak more changes in Kentucky's economy.

The other thing is that the, the economy of Kentucky is, pretty substantially invested in the defense industrial base.

We make a lot of aerospace stuff here in Kentucky.

And so whenever there's anything like an air power campaign, airstrikes like this, we in Kentucky should be paying attention because there are a lot of firms around here that make the parts that go into those planes.

And, it does concern how our economy functions.