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We attacked Iran. The region is collapsing and we’re paying in higher gas prices and lives, yet DC calls it winning. Check out my NATSEC TALK episode with political economist & Mideast expert Kieran Andrieu.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
We attacked Iran. Now the region is collapsing and we are being made to pay for it in the form of higher gas prices & lives—and DC calls it winning! Check out my latest NATSEC TALK episode featuring my friend, political economist & Mideast expert, @kieran_andrieu ⬇️ https://t.co/YBjWF0Er2K
Video Transcript AI Summary
Brandon and Kieran Andrew discuss the mounting regional dynamics as the Iran war drags into its fourth week. They agree on the possibility of serious unrest in at least one or two Arab countries in the coming years, though they caution not to overstate things. They note that the Gulf states lack a strong social contract, so economic volatility and external shocks could push instability, even if regimes recalibrate and survive.
Kieran argues the perception in the region is that Iran has punched above its weight, pursuing a strategy of absorbing losses while raising costs for opponents, especially the US and Israel. Across the region, people are furious with the disruption and violence, privately blaming Israel and the United States for attacking Iran, even if publicly they maintain official narratives. Sovereignty violations against Iran are seen as justification for Iranian retaliation, with regimes prioritizing survival and counterattack.
They touch on Bahrain as a case study: civil and political fragility, with Shiite civilians allegedly assisting Iranian targeting, and the Bahrain monarch’s status complicating regional dynamics. This feeds into the broader idea that a new Arab Spring is plausible in the Gulf as governments face popular pressures and a deteriorating social contract.
Brandon reflects on the American role, noting the US prioritized defending Israeli targets over its own bases in the region, which erodes trust among Arab states. This feeds a fear that American retreat could materialize, altering long-standing regional alignments and making it harder to maintain bases or security commitments.
The conversation shifts to the US-Israel relationship. They discuss the “wolf’s milk of nationalism” and how many Israelis are conditioned to view themselves as besieged and exceptional, which shapes policy and public opinion. They critique a top Israeli official’s stance that the Strait of Hormuz is not Israel’s concern, calling it insane and arguing that open sea lanes affect everyone. They contrast Israel’s unified national narrative with the region’s broader interests, suggesting that the Israeli leadership often acts in ways that may be unsustainable in the long run.
They discuss the economics of the conflict. The IEA highlighted that oil shocks in 1973 and 1979 produced a combined loss of about 10 million barrels per day; in this war, about 11 million barrels per day have been lost on average. Gas losses are also significant, with 2022 spikes reversing and accelerating inflation. They warn about broader macro effects: rising inflation (Goldman Sachs predicting 4.5% in the US), higher interest rates, stock market risks, and potential AI-related energy and helium shortages that could undermine tech-driven growth. They emphasize that this energy shock could feed a broader recession in the West.
They debate possible endgames. Scenario one: Trump constructs a narrative that the US won, reaching a face-saving deal with Iran to “cover up” a catastrophic outcome; Iran then consolidates a more entrenched, economically weakened regime, and the US must manage the fallout with bases and allies. Scenario two: deployment of US troops leads to a quagmire, with escalating casualties and a draw-out conflict that could push toward nuclear risk. Scenario three: arguably not distinct, but a continued escalation toward wider conflict, potentially drawing in adversaries or increasing regional volatility. They see scenario two as more likely, driven by Israeli pressure and ongoing US engagement, possibly culminating in escalation to nuclear threats.
They consider Russia and China’s roles. Russia is viewed as aligned with China; China is playing a cautious, calculating game, avoiding direct involvement while expanding its influence through trade and joint exercises with client states. They argue China’s approach could accelerate American decline and shift influence toward Beijing’s orbit over the next 15–30 years, with Pacific allies and others gravitating toward China for stability and economic ties, even if not openly allied.
Iran remains central. They discuss Iran’s resilience: even if economic conditions deteriorate, the regime could deepen its internal consolidation and broaden its persistence through institutions and praetorian guard support. If nukes were used or if retaliation escalates, the regime’s survivability would hinge on its decentralized structure and potential for hardline consolidation.
Brandon asks about the possible brain drain and long-term sustainability of Israel if the conflict endures. Kieran warns that even if Israel survives militarily, it faces a Pyrrhic victory with existential threats from within, including demographic shifts, brain drain, and an economy sustained by a war footing and American aid, which may not be sustainable in the long run. Brain drain and domestic social fractures could undermine Israel’s stability and economic vitality, especially once the immediate military crisis subsides.
Towards the end, they acknowledge that the war’s trajectory will likely redefine US influence, the Gulf’s political landscape, and Israel’s future. They conclude with mutual acknowledgment of the complexities, agreeing that the situation is poised to reshape regional and global power dynamics for years to come, and that the path forward remains uncertain and dangerous. They sign off with plans to reconnect, noting Kieran’s Navarra Live and other media appearances.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Do you think that's a possibility? How do you think it's playing out on the ground for these people?
Speaker 1: I think it's an enormous possibility. It is an an enormous actually, I would say there is a probability, a likelihood that let's not get carried away or over egg the pudding as we say in The UK. I don't know if that's a phrase in The United States.
Speaker 0: No. But I know what you mean.
Speaker 1: They get carried away, but I think that there is enormous probability that you will see serious unrest, civil unrest in at least one or two Arab countries over the next few years.
Speaker 0: We're winning. We're losing the rest of the Middle East. That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And, you know, the Western Europe became pro American because America piled money into
Speaker 0: those. That's right.
Speaker 1: Right? Through the Marshall Plan. And and and and that was an ingenious step. It was ingenious form of statecraft, really, or or empire building or or hegemony, you know, because it it pacified all potential enemies. It made your allies rich, but in a way that was still in your national self interest because you were creating markets to sell Right.
Goods. So it was all calibrated very intelligently. I don't say that those same conditions exist now in the world economy or for The United States or balance of power in the international system is the same, such that The US could do that. But the two things are completely, you know, there's night and day.
Speaker 0: Kind of Gen X, younger Gen X to Gen Z, there's definitely a skepticism to say the least about the US Israeli alliance. This is What are we getting out of it is the question. Right.
Speaker 1: Just, you know, it's it's a huge cost, a huge price that's being paid, but I am happy at the least in the midst of this wreckage that you guys are asking this question because I haven't been able
Speaker 0: to work.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm biased. Right? I mean, it's historically been pro Israel, but that's certainly shifted. And not at the government level, but at the society level. Why is and, of course, you read Mishheimer and you read And these are brilliant kind of investigations into what's going on.
Speaker 0: With another edition of the national security talk, With this time, it's a day what? Three weeks now. We're into the war and, doesn't seem to be ending soon. Please, everybody, be sure to follow and subscribe to Nat Sec Talk on Rumble. We are getting a YouTube page going soon.
Everybody keeps asking. It's coming. Also, check out the Wednesday night, 8PM eastern on iHeartRadio, national security hour. That's the companion show to this where we have we take parts of these interviews and put them together and make it really fun. And and then we have other, our other cohost Mike Shoyer, former Bin Laden unit, CIA director.
He comes on and and shares some stuff. So it's a fun time. That's at America outloud.news. I can be followed at We The Brandon, Twitter x, and I'm very happy to bring back for the second time my guest. Really, one of the one of the on the ground experts of what's going on in the Middle East region is Kieran Andrew.
And, Kieran, it's great to have you back.
Speaker 1: It's a absolute pleasure to be here with you again, Brandon.
Speaker 0: Thanks for call. Yes, and I should say that you are a political economist. Correct? And
Speaker 1: Yeah. Correct.
Speaker 0: By training. Training.
Speaker 1: A lowly commentator of late, but but generally
Speaker 0: Yes. Where I'm A a a member of the pundit class.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's
Speaker 0: right. It's a punishment, not
Speaker 1: a not not a problem. That's how it feels.
Speaker 0: Well, it's great to have you back. Thanks again for doing this. I know there's a time difference. So let's just start out. You know, there's a lot of stuff being said in The US and Israeli media, that doesn't ring true.
So why don't you, as somebody who who knows the region very well, you're from the region, what's really going on in this war in the third week going into I think we're going into the fourth week soon of the the seemingly endless Iran war?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, thank you, Brandon. I mean, I I should say, first of all, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I am in London in The UK, so I'm I'm lucky enough to, you know, to be out of the war zone. But, yeah, my family are based in East Jerusalem. Anybody who tuned in last time will know that.
And, yeah, we have families scattered across the entire region. So I would try and bring us up to speed a little bit by saying that the perception, and it might be wrong, and it might be in some ways wrong, some ways right, the perception in the region is that Iran has massively punched above its weight Mhmm. And that Iran had a strategy, which we discussed last time, which we could recap now, which was basically one of we know that we don't have military capabilities that are equal to Israel and The United States. What we have to do then is expect losses and take our ability to raise the costs across the board wherever we can. And when we talked about this four weeks ago, Brandon, we said that that that's it seems to be that's what Iran is doing.
It's it's sitting back. It's you know, it it might lose the Ayatollah. It might lose the new Ayatollah. It might lose senior members of the IRG. But where what where it is is willing to do that in order to counter fire in ways that raise costs economically, militarily, and otherwise.
And that seems to be where we are. That seems to be the perception across The Middle East as well. It's very difficult to get a read on, you know, how the population in Bahrain feels, for example, or how the population or the political class for that matter in Saudi feels more to the point. But I know from speaking people who have family members in those countries, in some cases, have friends in those countries, virtually everybody is blaming Israel and The and The United States for what has happened. And though they might publicly be saving face or, I don't know, parroting official narratives around Iran, privately, everybody is furious with Israel and with The United States for attacking Iran, and their reckoning is, I think, sound, which is that Iran has to fight back.
You know, when that happens
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: When your country is is attacked, as they see it, their sovereignty is violated. I happen to agree with them on that. I mean, I think it's incontestable that the the sovereign Iranian sovereignty has been violated. Whatever we might think about what goes on within the context of that sovereignty, it's incontestable that by the framework of sovereignty has been violated. And so under those circumstances, of course, you know, regimes fight to survive.
Right. Good or bad. They fight to survive. They have this kind of unitary logic, which is survival, you know, state survival, regime survival, those are things that are hardwired into the nature of the thing. And so I think we can get into the particulars and the specifics, but generally across the board and particularly as you rise, as you head head further north through The Levant up to Syria and Lebanon and Jordan.
Again, it's difficult to get a read of what people are thinking, but you could be pretty confident that everybody is furious with the disruption, the chaos, and indeed the violence that is being wrought by this.
Speaker 0: Yep. That's my read as well. And, again, it's it's kinda hard to get an honest assessment because of the censorship that's going on. And, it is going on and, from official sources. So, you know, it's it's difficult.
But from what I can tell, just using human, you know, human, you know, rationality. If you're sitting in Saudi Arabia or you're sitting in Dubai or Bahrain and you have a pretty good thing going on, and then the next day, American and Israeli bombs start dropping on Iran. And a week later, you're basically you don't have water. You don't have a job. You don't I mean, who are you gonna blame?
Because the Iranians Yeah. You know, I'm no fan of the regime in Iran, but the Iranians did not launch missiles out of the blue. There was a triggering. And Yeah. You know, and I think it's important that we all understand this going forward because, you know, this I think historians are gonna be writing a lot about this this period, who started what.
So I agree with you. The US and Israel has done this. Let me ask you something. What is your read though? Because you mentioned Bahrain, and Bahrain's a really interesting country because it's mostly Shiite.
And I have been told by by people in the military here that they are convinced civilians in Bahrain are helping the Iranians range targets like the hotels where the Americans were supposedly secretly staying. You know? And so it seems like and and I believe correct me if I'm wrong. The Bahrain monarch, he withdrew from Bahrain. He's been persona non grata from the country since the start of the war.
So it's almost like who's who's running the country? How is the country being run? It seems to be in complete chaos. So so what do you think? Because I said this to Steve Bannon two weeks ago.
We got into a back and forth about it. My fear now or my theory is this goes on. There's gonna be a new Arab spring against these these leaders that are relatively friendly to America and Israel, and they're probably gonna be replaced by leaders that are, let's just say, not as friendly. Do you think that's a possibility? How do you think it's playing out on the ground for these people?
Speaker 1: I think it's an enormous possibility. It is a an enormous actually, I would say there is a probability, a likelihood that let's not get carried away or over egg the pudding, as we say in The UK. I don't know if that's a phrase in The United States.
Speaker 0: But I know what you mean.
Speaker 1: They get carried away. But I think that there is enormous probability that you will see serious unrest, civil unrest in at least one or two Arab countries over the next few years because of it. Now that doesn't mean the regimes won't be able to recalibrate and reconsolidate power because that tends to be what happens. I mean, it's true that, you know, in the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012, you had several regimes that fell most violently and and kind of iconically, if you like, Gaddafi's. You also had in Algeria, Benalis, in Tunisia.
You had multiple regimes that didn't survive, and then you had regimes that did survive like Assad's, and they had to use outside support, the Russians, of course, and they did it very and the Iranians as well. Mhmm. And they did it very, very violently in a way that, you know, in in part paved the way for the rise of ISIS. Mhmm. So, you know, the the these are catastrophically risky things to be doing.
Really, really I mean, you you think about the fallout from the war in Iraq, and there is a question. Right? How far can you stretch the line of causality? How elastic is causality? Can you really say the war in Iraq led to x, led to y, led to ISIS, led to
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Okay. Fair enough. But it's clear that it it helped create conditions in the region. There's a
Speaker 0: butterfly effect at least.
Speaker 1: A butterfly effect. Exactly. Right. And I I happen to think there is a change clear change.
Speaker 0: Oh, I do too. Oh, I do too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But but even for the more kind of skeptical, you you they would have to acknowledge that it it dislocated. It helped create the sort of situation in which the Pandora's box, the lid was lifted. All kinds of horrors flew out of it. And that's what we were you know, when we we did a while ago, we were both trying to sort of convey that.
Speaker 0: The Israeli wasn't listening.
Speaker 1: The Israeli was not having reasoned. At all. It was and then, you know, they have a very specific line that they
Speaker 0: That's right.
Speaker 1: To be fair, one thing I'll say for the Israelis is that they and I'm sure you I know Tucker feels this way because he he says it often. I I think you have as well is that they really have a clear minded sense of what they think their national interest is, and they Yes. Do it doggedly at the expense of your country That's right. And the entire region, and, of course, my my dad's people in Palestine.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a few a few of us could learn a few lessons from that. Mean, seriously. You know? So, anyway, that's that's in parenthesis. But but I think that there is a very serious chance that some of these regimes, particularly The Gulf regimes Yep.
Where there's never really been a strong social contract, Brandon. Mhmm. I mean, these places are places, forgive the the analogy or or illusion, but the the foundations are built on sand. The, you know, the the state is the arrangement is kind of an inversion of no representation without taxation. It's it's kind of no taxation, and we won't represent you either.
You know? You don't pay tax, we won't represent you. Those kind of threadbare institutions Mhmm. Were the bedrock of Gulf States and Gulf development over many years. Now, of course, that's kind of shifted.
There's been, you know, serious attempts to pivot the economic strategies in those countries around, and and they're very, very socially conservative. We know that. They're built on a particular interpretation of of Islam. But I would argue that the thinness of the social contract, the lack of kind of cultural almost cultural ties between elites and the people in those countries makes them even more vulnerable, makes them even more fragile to this kind of thing. You know?
You can kind of make it work. There's a modus vivendi there for the people that that they'll they'll shut up. They'll dummy up. They'll be passive. So long as economic returns are decent.
So long as the standard of living is increasing compound year on year or generation on generation. And so long as the state doesn't take an overly you know, take a right turn or something or or, you know, break that turn and starts foisting all sorts of crazy, whatever, ideology of the rules to go along with that. So long as there's continuity and stability and and, you know, assimilation into the global economy and so all those things were part of the Fredbear social contract in The Gulf States for many years. That has been unpicked Yeah. In twenty eight days.
Yeah. You know? And, actually, I'm I'm interested in your view on this, Brandon, but you said rightly, you've said that it's gonna be very, very it's gonna be non impossible to convince those countries to have US bases going forward because that's that's what that's what's made them a target. Right? That's the bull's eye.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And then we didn't protect them. We we, you know, we sent and and the the reality is the reason we didn't protect them is is partly or largely because we sent most of our we drained most of our interceptor stockpiles in Ukraine. I mean, this is this is not widely acknowledged. They dare not acknowledge us, but Zelensky drained us and then this thing pops off in the Middle East.
And so we prioritize and and and again, here's the Israeli connection. We prioritize defending Israeli targets rather than defending even our own bases, you know, in the I mean, that that but, you know, Tucker talked to me about that. And he asked me, and I said, look. If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said there's no way we're gonna prioritize defending Israeli civilian targets over our own bases in the region. And that's exactly what happened.
And the Arabs are rightly saying, look. Because you didn't defend your bases, that also meant you didn't defend us.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: So I I if I look. If I were sitting if I were sitting in Riyadh, if I were sitting, you know, in some of these capitals in the Arab states, I'd be like, whatever happens next, the Americans are not coming back. Yeah. And, honestly, part of me is all fine with that. Yeah.
How we leave though is very troubling to me. Just like Afghanistan, I was all for ending the war, but how we left was deeply humiliating for The United States. Mhmm. So and I do think that there there is percolating now because how can these people in these countries ever trust their governments again? Because the governments led them to this place.
Speaker 1: You know? Yeah. And and just just to jump off the back of that and tie the loop on this general theme. The the thing is is is you're right to to kind of probe that disjuncture between the elites and the people on this. They most of them would rather yeah.
There's this this kind of idea in the in the Muslim world of ummah, which is that there's that actually your loyalties are are across countries, not within them. They they they're across they cut across class. They cut cut across nation
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Nationality. And, actually, you're a Muslim. If you're a Muslim, you're joined in your unity with all other Muslims wherever they are, especially if they're geographic, you know, but but actually everywhere. You know? If you're Muslim, you're Muslim, and that's where your ultimate loyalty is.
And, you know, in some interpretations, Islam is is one nation, and everything else is superficial. Those the people in those countries will have always been instinctively very pro Palestine.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: They will have instinctively always been aghast at Israeli occupation and what Israel does to Palestinians, and that's done in Gaza. They will be instinctively they they might not like they they if they're not Shia, they won't agree with the theology. They won't agree with the interpretation of the Quran, of course, if they're Sunni. Mhmm. But they will still have more natural accord with an affinity with Iranian Muslims than they will Israel and The United States.
Of course. Of course. Right? Right. And that is something.
That is a that is a circle that those regimes in The Gulf, however much they wanted to become western through the Abraham Accords or any other accords or any other mechanism, they're just never gonna be able to square that circle. Yep. It's just and and they know it. And so they've always Arab states have always had to be Janus faced, you know, looking what in two directions.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: The one hand and it's it's always been a dance. How much can we get away with? How close could we get to Israel? For economic reasons, we can couch it in the cold, hard language of rational, national interest and all the rest of it. How far could we go or how near can we go to them before we spark a revolution?
Yeah. And those countries are made of of people who also just wanna get by, and they're ordinary people. So it's not like they're highly politicized people waiting to revolt for Palestine. The evidence speaks to the counter. But but and so they were happy.
You know? I'm sure they were happy. Many of them that that at least there was a critical mass of the of the merchant classes of the, you know, class composition, makeup of the country that was happy with the Abraham Accords, that was happy to go along with those things even if they might not like Israel. You know, they might not like The United States, they were happy to do it. But in fact, if the if the if the fruit born by that starts to rot, starts to, you know, go in reverse, they're gonna stop.
They're not going to Right. They're not going to just support their regimes blindly.
Speaker 0: That's right. And I think that's where this is headed regardless of how the Iranian war or the Iran war shakes out. I don't think that the political dynamic in the Arab states will ever be what it was before February 28. And, you know, that that is a failure of US foreign policy because it was since 1945, really, it has always been part of our kind of regional plan for the region to preserve some semblance of the regimes there because they do business with us and they're they can be relied upon, you know, keep the oil flowing, keep the lanes open, the sea lanes open. You know, that's gone now.
Even if those regimes want to continue doing it, they're gonna be facing a real different dynamic. And, again, that that gets us back to the question, you know, Pete Hegseth, secretary of of war, whatever, he keeps saying we're so totally winning. And it's like, well, if you just look at what we just talked about, that certainly doesn't look like victory to me. I mean, you know, after we won World War two, Europe at least the the the Western part, became pro American and became stronger and more aligned with America. That's not the case here.
If we're winning, we're losing the rest of the Middle East. That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And, you know, the Western Europe became pro American because America piled money into
Speaker 0: those That's
Speaker 1: right. Right, through the Marshall Plan. And and and and that was an ingenious step. It was ingenious form of statecraft, really, or or empire building or or hegemony, you know, because it it pacified all potential enemies. It made your allies rich, but in a way that was still in your national self interest because you were creating markets to sell Right.
Goods. So it was all calibrated very intelligently. I don't say that those same conditions exist now in the world economy or for The United States or the balance of power in the international system is the same, such that The US could do that. But the two things are completely you know, there's night and day, really. Right?
And let's just talk briefly about the economic consequences. Yes.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you could you could take any metric, but I think the one that I found most striking was did you see the International Energy Agency guy the other day saying, look. The 1973 and 1979 oil shocks combined meant that we lost 10,000,000 barrels a day. If you combine both those crises Mhmm. Averages about 10,000,000 barrels a day lost on the global market. What did they mean, those resulted in certainly across Europe, less so in The US, but still a bit in The US, stagflation as they called it.
You know? A a lost decade. And then the rise of Reaganomics
Speaker 0: and Right. It it caused a political regime change in The United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. We're talking 10,000,000 barrels a day. Okay.
In this war, we've lost on average 11,000,000 barrels a day alone in this war, not 73, 79 combined, just this war. Yep. And then if you look at gas, it's even more alarming. Yep. So the the the metric that he used, the International Energy Agency guy, So he said in 2022, when the Ukraine Russia war was at its most ferocious or more or less at its at its at its inception, we were losing 75,000,000, excuse me, 75,000,000,000 cubic meters of gas.
We lost that in the entirety of 2022. We've already lost a 140,000,000,000 cubic meters of gas on the global market. That's that's almost double that. It's more than double that. Excuse me.
More than double that in in twenty eight days.
Speaker 0: Yeah. With no one in sight. With no
Speaker 1: one in in sight. I mean, it's it's you know? And, again, it caused massive 2022 caused massive inflation.
Speaker 0: Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Right? And this is So where is this going?
Speaker 0: Goldman Sachs says inflation in the next several weeks or the next quarter, they said that they're anticipating at least a 4.5% inflation rate here in The United States, which there goes interest rates coming down. Right. And, you know, it's it's a spiral.
Speaker 1: Interest rates go up.
Speaker 0: The Trump White House did not factor this in, I guess. No. They don't care.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. And then there's the risk to the to to the stock markets. People are just talking about stock market collapse because all of these things are helium, we haven't even talked about helium, but all bring
Speaker 0: that up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. All of these kind of commodities, which energy commodities, which are inputs into so many other things. So helium is really important for, they say, it's really important for thermal imaging for MRI scans and for detecting cancer and so on and all that. Aside from that vital health and social stuff, it's actually helium is a really important input into AI, into the production of the technologies.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Right? And so what? We're gonna get an AI bubble burst, which we've been hearing about, what's been on the horizon for or at least in the conversation for the past year. If anything's gonna burst it, if anything's gonna finally pop it, it's gonna be this. Right.
And then what? You know?
Speaker 0: Plus, gotta remember AI is an energy hog too. So you've got you've got the the depletion of the energy reserves plus the helium, you know, issue. So, yeah, I but I've been saying that this thing's gonna lead to an AI bubble burst, which will in turn the American economy is being held up by the AI bubble. So if that thing bursts, the whole thing comes down like a house of cards, I think, like, 2008. Yep.
I think so.
Speaker 1: And then you've got what? Recession you know, triggers a massive recession across the entire West. And for what? I mean, what was the game? You know, the Strait Of Hormuz was open.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: Now Well, and it's funny.
Speaker 0: I was I was on Al Arabiya with Yaakov Armador.
Speaker 1: I saw rather than I watched this this morning just to do my homework a little bit. What a fucking excuse me.
Speaker 0: No. You're fine. That is yeah. I didn't know what to say. Mean, you could tell.
I just I didn't I gave up because there's there's no reason talking to him because this was completely he's just parroting a line. But I thought it was interesting. He kept saying he's clearly speaking for whatever remains of the Israeli government. He he kept repeating, we don't we don't have an opinion on the Strait Of Hormuz being open or closed. That's not an Israeli interest.
And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, what what do you mean? It's not an Israel it's the world's interest that this thing remains open. Are you nuts? Then nothing's gonna survive.
Speaker 1: It was disgraceful.
Speaker 0: Absolutely. That was insanity.
Speaker 1: It was insanity. And I I I had to stop myself shaking with anger because to hear him say that, mean, this is what I mean about these. And you're right. I could say earlier as I did earlier that that the Israelis have a very good sense of their own national interest, but actually, they don't. They may have, but they're they tilted over into them.
Speaker 0: They do. They start to fixate too much on, you know, the too narrow of a you it's know, funny. I was talking to someone right before we started. I did a show in Canada, and she was asking about the education of Israelis. And I said, reminds me a lot of what Lee Kuan Yew right before he died.
He was the prime minister of Singapore, he was one of the great men of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. He A
Speaker 1: sainted guy.
Speaker 0: That he was. Yeah. And he gave a speech in Beijing in 2010 in which he told the young people in China. He said he said, your parents' generation knows the pain of cultural of ideological excess because they went through the cultural revolution. He said, your generation doesn't.
He said, you've all been raised on the wolf's milk of nationalism. And I was telling the this this this interviewer just an hour ago. I said, you could say the same thing about the Israelis. Is that they this current generation knows only the wolf's milk of nationalism, which is why you get comments about, you know, from these very top leaders about we don't care about the straight or it's like, well, you you probably should.
Speaker 1: Yeah. A 100%. I mean, I tell you what, Brandon, in my experience, it's even worse than that. It's that these guys have been born into a society where they are told all the time that whatever problems they may have, thank god they're not Palestinian. Yeah.
And that they are psychologically, as much as anything else, above them, you know, that they are able to do whatever they want to Palestinians who is this you know, it's just it's forget that they're the Palestinians. This is a, yeah, a group of people who live in the same land, and they are told that group of people, you are allowed to do whatever you want to them, basically. Basically. We see that on the West Bank right now. If and and, actually, not only are you allowed to do that, but you it's it's almost your duty to make sure that that message is passed down to your children because we're we're here to colonize all of this land.
Nobody can do that kind of thing to another person or to a group of people unless those people have been dehumanized systematically, education system through the and so now we're we've gone from the economic to the psychological, but I think it's important. I think it it it creates Well,
Speaker 0: because economics is really in part a study of psychology. Right? I mean, market forces and whatnot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And if we wanna talk about the rational national self interest versus the irrational, you know, Israel has been has created this kind of mother's milk, which is which is a blend. It's a formula, And it's it's predicated first and foremost and above all else on a sense of superiority to every all of your neighbors. All of your neighbors, but particularly the Palestinians who are in the reckoning animals or subhuman or or less than you at any rate. And not every Israeli believes this, of course.
Not every not every Israeli believes this, but a startling and alarming number do, and it is kind of, as I said, baked into
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: A kind of the political class, the elite ideology, and that's reflected in the institutions and the way they operate. I submit that that doesn't make for a very sustainable sense of proportion, perspective, fitting in with the comity of nations. You know? Sometimes you have to work with other nations for your own national self interest, but if you've been told that everybody is inferior to you, except The United States who you have to be nice to because they give us loads of money Yeah. Is kinda like the most spoiled kid in the world who kinda hates his parent but but takes all their money.
I mean, to be honest with you, Brandon, the way that guy was talking about The United States
Speaker 0: Oh, I I had a problem. Well, you you heard I saw.
Speaker 1: I saw it. I'm glad very glad you called him out, and and you did it with you know, you were measured, but it was passionate and clear. And I I'm glad because the the cheek of the guy to say, 2015, the the Americans abandoned us, and so they went off and signed a deal.
Speaker 0: It's like
Speaker 1: I mean What do you do you your your country would not exist.
Speaker 0: Without The United States.
Speaker 1: There's no there's
Speaker 0: no Israel without The US. Oh. And Dan Crenshaw, the congressman says, oh, without Israel, The US wouldn't exist. It's like, no, dude. It's the other way around.
Look at how much money we give them alone and then all the weapons.
Speaker 1: Mean, nothing waking up every morning and saying, hail, where is
Speaker 0: Well, this is yeah. Tucker said that to to me. He said, you know, it's the, he goes, they're the housekeeper. We're the we're the house owner. You know?
It's that's that's really the relationship how it should be, but it's flipped somehow. Yeah. And, well, that gets back to the Israeli lobby. So so, yeah, we have this weird psychology, and it really does seem, and correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, it seems like really the one driving this war is the Netanyahu government. And I make it very clear because I do know that there are Israelis who don't agree with I mean, I read Gideon Levy at Heratz, and I read some of these these dissident really wonderful thinkers in the Jewish community.
So I know it's not universal. And, actually, let me just ask you because this is a debate I've been having with a friend. Yeah. We see these polls coming out. 93% of Israelis support the the war in Iran.
Do you think that that number because it just sounds a little North Korean to me. Like, that's like one of those, you know, maybe it's high, but 93%, that sounds like, you know, Hosni Mubarak levels of approval. You know? Those words Yeah. 100% approval no matter what.
You know?
Speaker 1: When when Saddam was reelected in 2002 with a 100% of the vote. That's right. That's right. Or 2001, whatever it was. Yeah.
No. It's it's shocking. Now I would ask you when how recent was that particular poll? Because I saw one from about March 7, March 8.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's a was it was a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I saw Yeah. My instinct is without any way of properly knowing Yeah. Is is that that it's probably a fair reflection of Israeli public opinion, which is crazy. I know. Absolutely insane.
But, again, I think in order to understand it or begin to understand it, because maybe we never can, you have to understand Israel as a as a nation that has been reared only ever on war and the belief that it is a benighted Yeah. Besieged country forged, this is the mythos, forged for the ashes of the Holocaust Mhmm. And hated not because of what it does, but because of what it is, which is to say a Jewish state. Now we know that that's nonsense, but that is what every and I'm just trying to get into the head of my enemies because, really, you know, people who believe this, they are my enemies, but I wanna try and and I'm always trying to understand it. That is what they've been reared to believe.
And and I think the Palestinians were patient zero for that kind of what that means in terms of behavioralism. But I I think, actually, even Israel's allies, even The US is starting to see, oh god. We've created a monster.
Speaker 0: Oh, there's no doubt. I mean, you just look at the young people you just look at the young people here in The United States. You know, we're I think I'm a millennial. I think you're a millennial. You know, Gen X, I you know, that that kind of Gen X, younger Gen X to Gen Z, there's definitely a skepticism to say the least about The US Israeli Alliance.
Speaker 1: This is the
Speaker 0: What are we getting out of it is the question.
Speaker 1: Right. And this is the question that you're asking, and Takasaski said this to you before. I don't wanna be, you know, too kind of overly sycophantic about it, but it's a really important question that I've been waiting for prominent Americans to ask for a very long time. I'm just you know, it's it's a huge cost, a huge price that's being paid, but I am happy at the least in the midst of this wreckage that you guys are asking this question because I haven't been able to work. You know, I'm biased.
Right? Right. Because because I'm Palestinian, and I'm I'm in The UK, so we've got a different slightly different relationship. I mean, it's historically been pro Israel, but that's certainly shifted. And not at the government level, but at the civil society level.
And I'm trying I've always been trying to work out, okay, Kieran, see beyond your biases. Why is and, of course, you read Mishheimer and you read yeah. And these are brilliant kind of investigations into what's going on. But it it it is fascinating how effective the Israel lobby has been.
Speaker 0: It really is. I mean, it is just a question of money. I mean, really. I mean, I saw I worked on the Hill, APAC Yeah. APAC was a thing.
And they would have they had two two APAC lobbyists minimum per member of congress. And they would take an entire week. They would schedule a whole week, and they'd be in the halls, and you could not say no. When they came in to meet with the staff, you did not say no to them. And, you know, that and that's for both parties, not just the Republicans.
I think the Republicans are actually, though, the worst. I think they're the most flagrant in terms of being captured by Zionists. But I think the Democrat Chuck Schumer level Democrats are all still very, very pro what we're doing, which is why they're not really raising too much of a stink, about the Iran war. Right. Right.
Which get yeah. Which gets us to now, the Iranian the the Iranian seem to be able to hang on. What what do you think is the end state of this war? I mean, Trump keeps saying he's gonna win, but I can't figure out what win what is winning? I don't even know.
Speaker 1: So I suppose there are the the the best way to do it, and I'll seek your view on this as well, but the best way to do it is to talk about scenarios Mhmm. Rather than saying, you know and then we can talk about which is the most weighty scenario, most likely scenario. I guess scenario one and I'm just thinking about this on the fly, really.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Of course. But turning it over in my head for weeks, like all of us, you know, how does this happen? But I think scenario one is Trump uses discourse to try and cover up the fact that he has lost this war catastrophically on the terms that the war was for. Right? So so you got Hegsef, and you they kind of create this parallel universe of, you know, where they they say we won and nobody's ever lost this bad, and we've done a deal with them.
And the Iranians say that we haven't spoken to them, and Trump says we're speaking to them every day. And it's impossible to know who's lying, but you know it's probably Trump. Right? If that happens you know, so so that's scenario one. That is the healthiest way out.
That is the most low stakes, low cost exit strategy from all of this. I pray every day that that is what will happen. Yeah. That that they will save face, that the Trump administration will save face, and we all just have to treat the Trump admin like a like a child, right, that's claiming it won the gold medal when we know it came last. Right?
That's that's scenario one.
Speaker 0: That would be the most Trumpian outcome, wouldn't it?
Speaker 1: It would be the most Trumpian outcome. Exactly. Create your own reality. And then the Iranians the Iranians, what comes after that in scenario one? I think, you know, the Iranians will be the regime, and this is what we said would happen.
The regime will be much more dug in. Mhmm. It will be hugely strengthened by this. It will be victor it will be see it will see itself and project itself as victorious.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And then that will have the economic consequences it's going to have. God knows the political consequences that we'll issue from those economic consequences, but we shall see. Then The US has to pick up the pieces with the bases and the allies and the so on. That's scenario one. Scenario two is troops and US troops being deployed.
You'll know more about this Yeah. Than I will. Right? And so I wanna kinda come to you in a minute and ask what you're hearing about that. Mhmm.
So scenario two is troops and quagmire. Yeah. You know? I call scenario two quagmire. You get stuck.
You get bogged right down in it, and you keep it's like bloodletting. You keep losing some to try and save the the the whole body, and in the end, the whole thing you know, you drain the whole system out. Yep. Yep. And I think that that's a very real, very possible
Speaker 0: I do too. Scenario. Especially because of the Israeli influence because the Israelis do not wanna stop.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. They are they are massively, massively against scenario one.
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's scenario two. And, you know, who knows how that ends? That could end with escalation, escalation all the way to the nuclear Yeah. Pressure. Right?
So that's scenario two. Scenario three, I suppose maybe there isn't a scenario three. It's one of those two. What do you think?
Speaker 0: Now I I I I wish for scenario one, but I think we're in an escalation trap. I think that we're going up. I think that I think the whole diplomacy thing, I think he used it again as a, you know, a fake out to buy time for the markets to not freak out and to buy time for the marines to get into position Yeah. And for the army airborne rangers, the eighty second. Now now those are light troopers.
I don't know what they're going to do on a facility like Karg Island. It doesn't really make sense to me what they I mean, those guys are gonna get slaughtered. And part of me is starting to think that actually they want a slaughter because that might justify one of two things. Either Trump then says, these guys are gonna be taken care of. I need 50,000 troops.
And, you know, when we do the Vietnam thing where it's a graduated escalation from there on out, which is just it's that's the the American empire is done at that point. Whatever happens, it's over. Or the other solution is Trump after losing those guys is like, I got a taco. I'm out. Trump always chickens out.
I got I'm done. I can't do this anymore.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: And maybe at that point, congress, because Mike Rogers already started raise apparently, he chewed out Hag Seth in the closed briefing two days ago. Hag Seth didn't know what to say, and Mike Rogers is a full blown neocon. I know Mike. So, like, congressman Rogers, the head of the armed services committee for the house, going at Hagsett like that indicates to me that maybe we're gonna get lucky and congress steps in. And if that's the case, though, America gets cold feet after losing all these guys, what is Israel gonna do?
I think Israel's gonna pop off nukes. If they know we're leaving, that's my fear. I think this is ending in a nuclear exchange. That's where I think no matter what we do, even if Trump does chicken out at this point, Israel's I mean, you saw it in that guy I spoke with. Israel's so deeply committed.
I mean, that guy's a grandfather. He shouldn't be like that at this age. You know, that that guy is, like, so deeply committed. You know, they're they're gonna pop off nukes, I think, if they know the Americans are out. And that's my fear.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's the more likely scenario, unfortunately. Yeah. And taco would be scenario one. Right?
You know? Trump Trump is chickening out. He's chickened out. He hasn't Which I'm fine with. And thank god.
You know? Thanks god. I mean, I wish he got started in the first place.
Speaker 0: But That's right.
Speaker 1: We pray for a taco right now.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: But I think I think scenario two, and I I think it is it is the Israelis importuning The US having such a firm what did you make, by the way, of the reports that Vance was taken to negotiate rather than Kushner and Witkoff.
Speaker 0: Do you I was told I was told that wasn't real.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: I was told that there was a state department official who was a political appointee who was set to already set to fly to Pakistan. And the news got out and it was they said it was Vance and he was not Pakistan. I'm sorry. That that state's provision was going to India, and the news somehow got out that Vance was supposedly going to Pakistan or talking to Pakistan. I was told that that was all BS, that whole thing.
Speaker 1: Right. Okay.
Speaker 0: Which I don't think Vance would step out of line like that. I think Vance is very much enthralled to Trump, and we're seeing this because he was the anti war guy. And yet every time he's had an opportunity to speak, he's praising the war.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: You know? And I don't believe he's further war. I just think he's a coward. You know? I just think that I mean, look.
If you go against Trump and look at anybody who's gone against Trump in the Republican Party, you know, they they don't make it. You know? So
Speaker 1: They don't make it. No. It's true. So then then assuming that we both think scenario two is the more likely, the long term costs of that, like you say, you alluded to the American empire, are gonna be catastrophic for Trump and his political project
Speaker 0: first of for the country.
Speaker 1: But for the country off Right. So, you know, we can look to we can look to midterm. We can look to the economy. I mean, that the the kind of specter of recession might rise for the midterms. But in any case, either looking at it as a kind of political the on the narrow political career front or the national interest front, it is gonna be
Speaker 0: It's a it's a nightmare.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's gonna be disastrous.
Speaker 0: What I wanna know, what do you think? If if this thing goes where we think it's going, what are the Russians and China are they just gonna do nothing? I mean, I don't believe that. If if if it looks like there there's nukes gonna go off, what does Russia and China do?
Speaker 1: Well, I I I can't speak to Russia. Uh-huh. But I think Russia is broadly under the wing of China, right, on this kind of stuff. Uh-huh. So I think that China is playing a very clever game, actually.
Speaker 0: And I think
Speaker 1: is doing is it's not really getting involved. It's sitting back. It's it's it's never really been an ally of of Iran. It's it has a kind of informal or spiritual sense in that it's the nonaligned, you know, the non kind of Western imperialist. But but but they're not gonna they're not gonna spill any you know, they're not gonna risk anything or waste any resources.
Speaker 0: Well, they're not losing anything because they're still sailing ships through the Strait Of Hormuz.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so and so they're playing a very clever game. They're sitting back, and they're allowing their orbit to expand.
Mhmm. And that right now is is just a kind of expectation or conjecture about the future, but it's gonna start to bear fruit soon. I've I've said this before. I think I said it to you, but and I've also said it on Navarro Life, but the show I'm on once a week. But, you know, when we say this is going to speed up, precipitate American decline, and in turn speed up Chinese expansion, We don't just mean that in kind of abstract because we like to sound like IR scholars, you know, saying things like the balance of power and orbiting one state or the other or sphere of influence.
Those are lovely terms. But what it means in material terms is that China is going to carve off US client states and allies Mhmm. Over the next fifteen to twenty to twenty five to thirty years. And it's gonna carve them off not for invasions or Mhmm. It's gonna carve them off by signing trade deals with them.
Yep. It's gonna carve them off by doing joint military exercises with them. You
Speaker 0: know? The Philippines The Philippines, you know, very important country for The US defense posture, has already the the senate the president of their senate, who's very pro American last week or three days ago, said he goes, the Americans did this to us because they're having fuel shortages. He said, we're gonna start doing business again with China. That's That's just a snapshot.
Speaker 1: That's just a snapshot. It's just the very beginning. You think about when the economic pinch really starts. And joint military exercises, cooperation, treaties, you know, with trading blocks as well as individual states. That is what we mean when we say relative American decline and relative Chinese expansion.
Yes. That and that is gonna tilt the balance of power in the international system strongly towards in or in China's favor. And I think China's playing an incredibly smart band because what it's do what it's showing to The Philippines and every other state is that we are we are the calm one. We are the rational one.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: Yes. We're a superpower, but we're not behaving like this dysfunctional, hysterical, declining superpower that is going around lashing out on behalf of a colony or a tiny state that it's you know, and and also because of its dysfunctional political class. We're not like that. Now this is a, you know, to some extent, it's a facade. There's there there are problems in China too, and there are problems with the political class and the system.
Of course, there are. But it's about the image that it's able to project in the midst of American hysteria. That's the really important thing. It's able to say, yeah. Sure.
No longer trust The US. It's it's like a protection bracket. You know, that's how the international system is.
Speaker 0: That's right.
Speaker 1: No longer trust your boss who's running around kind of foaming at the mouth with a knife and saying it's gonna stab all of you if you don't join here. Come to us. We've got the we've got this we're we're sitting around the table feasting, and we've got this you know, that's that's how it is.
Speaker 0: Well, it was a lot like how America used to be at the turn of the twentieth century. We didn't go around telling the rest
Speaker 1: of the world.
Speaker 0: We they wanted to do business with us. That was the entry point was business and trade. 100%.
Speaker 1: And this is why I say 1945, the Marshall Plan. You know, that was such an important piece of American empire building or statecraft. And and and, you know, expanding the sphere of influence, consolidating the sphere of influence against the Soviet bloc. And that's the moment that China is is probably in now. You know?
You had Yeah. Obviously, the empire has declined the same way, and the world system is totally different. All of those things taken as red, the analogy stands that, you know, you had these European powers that have been colonial powers that were it totally and utterly eclipsed from Roosevelt's time, the second Roosevelt's time onwards. Mhmm. And and and The US was able, you know, in the person of Roosevelt's much as anything else throughout the war to kind of broker these Potsdam, Tehran, Yalta, not in that order.
Right. And they were able to, you know, strike a very composed Yeah. Very redoubtable ally and patron for the coming latter half of the century. Mhmm. And and and that's broken down completely.
Speaker 0: Completely.
Speaker 1: And it's China that's
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Now trying to do that or at least presenting that front.
Speaker 0: And it's very disturbing to see because it didn't have to be this way. This is all what we're choosing to do. Yeah. And so what from let's I know that we're running out of time. I think maybe another what?
Eight, ten minutes you think? Or what would you say?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Okay. So let's put ourselves in the Iranian position. We've talked a little bit about it. What what where is Iran going from here?
Because I think they're gonna survive. But, you know, is there a chance that the government is overthrown eventually? Or or or is it, you know, any yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's a really good question. I think that there is every chance in generations to come, but everything changes in Iran. Right.
Speaker 0: Because this is a long term. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's a long term. And, you know, there is you have to look at the class relationships within Iran as well to understand where the regime is in its kind of, you know, cycle popularity cycle, whatever. And, you know, the merchant classes were the were the the classes who were really rebelling against economic reforms that the regime brought in before all of this fiasco. Mhmm. And I think that that presented the most promising signs if, you know, you're interested in the regime collapsing in on itself or encoding or being dislodged.
Mhmm. That was where the most promising signs of light were coming from. Yeah. Right? But that's been completely disrupted now because, you know, you had a senator.
I think he was a US senator. After World War two said, politics stops at the water's edge. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Right? Was it Vandenberg?
Speaker 0: Think it was Vandenberg, and I know that JFK also liked to say that too.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. Exactly. And there's some truth in it. There's but but where there's truth in it is that that if you attack a country and you're a very clear outside enemy, of course, you're going to yoke people who knit people who otherwise are opposed to one another together in a common endeavor to try and protect your fatherland, your homeland, whatever.
Right?
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: So there's that. But then there's also the so that's the kind of civil society level of things in terms of, you know, how this war has actually prolonged the life of the regime, probably. And then there's there's the fact that the regime vets the material stuff. You know, the regime will be able to crack you know, it will be embedding itself. Its roots will be going deeper and deeper into the Iranian topsoil because it will now be perennially I mean, it was always perennially fear fearful of being overthrown, but now it will be even more on guard for that process.
Yep. And it is going to consolidate its power through institutions, through its relationship with its praetorian cards, you know, with its with its Mhmm. Guard and with its with its allies within the state. It is going to make sure that it it buffers itself by bolstering those institutions, those mechanisms, and those cohorts, those groups around it in the Iranian state and beyond. That is just the way that this is going.
Yeah. That's assuming it doesn't get nuked. If it gets nuked, then you can't really say
Speaker 0: Well, okay. Because I was gonna say, what would they? Because, obviously, I don't think it would knock them out completely because of how decentralized the regime is. What are some things that they could do if they get nuked in retaliation?
Speaker 1: That's a good question that I don't really have the answer to militarily. But what but but you're right to point out the decentralization.
Speaker 0: Mhmm. Because
Speaker 1: I know from speaking to people in Iran that that that admittedly are more aligned with well, some of them aren't even very pro regime. They're just like, look. We've got a fight. We've a fight. We're going to they they're diffused.
They're diffused. They're diffused around the country, and they are not going to accept huge swathes of Iran being nuked by Israel. And then from the kind of atomic dust, decide that they that they have to, you know, create a new form of government that's more pro Israel in America. That's just not going to happen. What it's gonna do is create a generation of real hardliners who, depending on the state of the the regime, will either get behind the regime, or they will create a new a new radical.
Yeah. Probably radical is the best organization.
Speaker 0: And it's also possible that they have some rudimentary nuclear capability in reserve. You know, if they get nuked, I mean, we know they had an order if the Ayatollah gets whacked, we're gonna do certain things with our attacks on the Gulf countries and on Israel, and they did it prearranged. Yeah. So there is a chance, and we don't know, but there is a chance that they do have maybe a small group or maybe even just a single rudimentary bomb, nuke. I mean, maybe they maybe they can maybe that's their fail safe.
That's their Samson option. They'll pop it off in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Speaker 1: And Yeah.
Speaker 0: I mean, this is you know, and this is the real scary part, and I just don't think anybody in the White House is certainly nobody in Tel Aviv, the leadership, they don't care. The Israelis just don't care. I've never seen anything like it because it's gonna be their country that's getting crushed. You know, it's really it's really shocking to see because they're the ones getting hit the most. It's not America.
I mean, our bases got hit. They don't seem to care. They just, you know, keep going.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then I come back to and, again, I I understand that it's it's not something that you probably hear often in America, but it is if you really wanna understand the anatomy of that, it it it is a fanatical state.
Speaker 0: Yes. We
Speaker 1: don't not raised to think of Israel as a fanatical state.
Speaker 0: Certainly not in America. We're not raised that way.
Speaker 1: No. Yeah. Exactly. Mhmm. But we are raised to think that rather than a fanatical state, deaf cult.
You know, they we're always hearing deaf cult trotted out to
Speaker 0: describe I'm guilty. I'm guilty of saying that at one point. Yeah. You know? And
Speaker 1: the reality is that every civilization, every state, you know, has the potential to become death cult, like, in its in its in its universe. Survival. Yeah. Survival. And and I think, actually, the difference between Israel and Iran in that sense is that, you know, you could argue Iran has is is showing the kind of martial courage of a death cult like thing where it doesn't care that you're hitting it.
It's gonna hit you where it hurts, which is to say, in the economy, and it's going to fire as many pop off as many rockets as it can to try and hurt you wherever it can below the radar. But that's that's they didn't start this war. That's self defense. It's it's under it's under that duress from The US and from Israel. The difference is is that in Israel, they don't have any such onslaught on them.
You know, they started this war, and now they are prosecuting it, and they have better protections. Like, the guy yesterday that you or two days ago. Jake Jacob, is it? Jacob Armador. Yeah.
Who was going on and on about
Speaker 0: About how everything's great. They're having parties and
Speaker 1: How everything's great. And yeah. Exactly. It's fine. They're willing to accept that.
Well, you know, that typifies a strap mentality in Israeli society, and it's not and it's, you know, it's it's true that you could ever do that line of inquiry or line of kind of reasoning because they are heavily protected by their technology and by The US. Mhmm. So I think if you really expose them to penury and misery and difficult conditions, they might not show such kind of martial spirit. But right now, they are high on their own supply, and they have been for many generations. They it's a
Speaker 0: highly Yeah. It's hubris. Yeah. And we know what happens.
Speaker 1: Massive.
Speaker 0: Hubris leads to the fall, which is my last question for this episode because I know we're running out of time. But I'm looking at a lot of wealthy and professional class Israelis looking for escape hatches out of Israel. We see a lot of people fleeing to Cyprus, to Crete. Some are going back to sort of the Slavic countries, Georgia, even Russia, I'm hearing in some cases, they're going back. These are the people who actually make the society work, and obviously, they're coming back here.
They're going to Canada, Britain. Do you think that even if Israel is able to physically survive whatever is happening, whatever is going to come, that it will never be the same? It will not be able to rebuild the way that they think it will be rebuilt?
Speaker 1: Let's be clear. This has been a Pyrrhic victory, if a victory at all. Mhmm. If a victory at all, it will be a Pyrrhic one. Mhmm.
And what does that mean for anybody who doesn't ever term pyrrhic victory? It means that it will be a win so costly that it will ultimately lead to a much more severe loss in the longer term. And I really firmly believe, and you're absolutely right to point out the brain drain
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: In Israeli society. Israel's tech sector is in pretty good health, and Israel is able to survive on American aid and credit, and that has a multiplier effect in the economy. So Israel's managed to come back from where it was economically at the '23, early twenty four when the genocide began, and the world was starting to take notice, and it's a it's been able to come back from that. Yeah. You I would have to acknowledge that as a political economist, but it's come back from it on the basis of two things, powered by the AI bubble and whether that's positively impacted the Israeli economy and US aid, US money being pumped into the country.
It's as simple as that. Beyond that, it's a war economy that can't survive in long term without war, and yet the war creates massive economic dislocation and hugely anemic growth, you know, in the in the region of the global economy. If growth at all, I mean, we're probably heading for recessions. Right? So that's that.
Demographic brain drip brain drain, demographic shift, all of those things are significant, and I would argue, probably existential threats facing Israel, and they come from within. You know? And Israel's always talking about existential threats from its neighbors. These are things that they've chosen to done as to do, as you said earlier, in the context of The US. There is the things that they you know, these are things that we've chosen to do.
Mhmm. We didn't need to choose them. And then I would also say that Israeli society is is is sick because it's been built on the displacement of people. And in all and those people haven't gone away. They've been there, so they've erected cages and fences.
They've, you know, instituted and instated, you know, apartheid like systems and so on. And then, laterally, they've committed systematic mass murder called genocide in international law. Not yet, but I mark my words, Brandon, it will be determined to be to have been a genocide. And so all of those things rive a society. You know?
They they cut it into a million pieces, and I do not think that Israel is a sustainable project as a result of that. And then, of course, you've got you guys in The US who is who is saying, what the hell is going on here? Why are we artificially clumping up this country and keeping it keeping it going?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I I think, yeah, I think however this thing shakes out with Iran, I think the Iranians are gonna that regime's gonna survive a lot longer even than the Israeli regime. And, and how's that for a poetic, ending to, the war? Because, it's it's not what any of us thought when you know?
Or that's not what the Trump team and the Netanyahu team thought when they when they kicked this thing off. They thought this thing was gonna be, you know, Nicolas Maduro two point o. Yeah. And, you know, greatest intelligence failure in US history since 2003. And it's it's gonna be and there's gonna be no reckoning.
Nobody will lose their jobs just like nobody lost their jobs after Iraq.
Speaker 1: No. Exactly.
Speaker 0: And so we'll we'll be twenty years down the line. Again, if we're lucky to live through this, they will it will happen again because the same people keep getting promoted. So Yeah. That's my that's my happy thought for the end of this.
Speaker 1: Well, god bless it, Brandon. I mean, at least you're you're speaking truth to power over there, so thank you.
Speaker 0: Well, thank you. I mean, it's you know, I'm new to this because I was once a neocon, and I was once part of part of that club. It's what you were if you were a republican. It's just what you were, but we are I'm working on, trying to do the right thing here and trying to make up for But
Speaker 1: you're being you're you're being very honest about it, and I think that's, you know
Speaker 0: I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Well, with that note, Kieran, Andrew, thank you for joining us, and he can be found on you have a you have a TV show that you do, don't you?
Speaker 1: So I'm on Navarra Live once a week. That's N 0 V A R A. Okay. Navarra Live. And that's that's a daily live news show.
GMT, so British time or British Standard Time, as they say now, 6PM to 7PM. So you have to work it out wherever you
Speaker 0: are. No. It's alright. I'll put up the link in the screen. I'll add the graphic for it, and people can find it.
Speaker 1: I'm on I'm on I'm on every Tuesday, and sometimes I'm nice as well. And they can find me on people can find me on Instagram and on x as well just with my regular name.
Speaker 0: Okay. And then I'll you're also on Piers Morgan occasionally. So
Speaker 1: Occasionally on Piers Morgan, offered on Alarabi. Yes.
Speaker 0: That's how we met. Yes. Yes. Well, thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking a little bit more than an hour out of your day.
This has been very interesting, and I'll have you back, I'm sure, and we'll we'll talk a little bit more because this thing's not ending anytime soon.
Speaker 1: No. It's not. It'll be an honor to come back.
Speaker 0: Well, thank you. And, you know, hopefully, I'll I'll see you on LRB soon.
Speaker 1: So Yes.
Speaker 0: Have a good one.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
Iran isn’t going to stop a U.S. landing—they’re going to ALLOW it. Then they shut the door. ✅Drone swarms. 🚀Underground missile cities. ⛰️Mountain warfare we can’t touch. This isn’t D-Day. It’s a trap—and we’re walking right into it. @Matt_Bracken48 joins me ⬇️
Video Transcript AI Summary
- The speakers compare Iran and its Revolutionary Guards to Japan in World War II in terms of fighting will and doctrine, arguing that Iran’s forces will fight with fervor similar to Bushido; they emphasize that the notion of American technological superiority or easily defeating Iran is dismissed as crazy.
- They discuss Iranian tunnels and underground facilities: Iran allegedly has 40-foot ceilings in tunnels bored into granite, with entrances that can be re-excavated if one is blown. They argue Iran has planned excavator equipment and tunnels with missiles, trucks, and dual-use infrastructure, making superficial bomb damage insufficient to deny underground resilience.
- The conversation covers Iran’s strategic geography: Iran is described as highly mountainous, with 18,000-foot peaks more numerous and higher than several U.S. states; the Hormuz coastline is compared to the Badlands. The implication is that Iran’s terrain favors defense and complicates invasion.
- They contrast Vietnam-era bombing and lessons with current Iran: drawing parallels between Ho Chi Minh-era campaigns and Iran, they argue that overwhelming air power did not win in Vietnam and would not automatically prevail against Iran’s terrain and defense. They note that Iran could absorb leadership losses and continue resistance.
- Iran’s long-term strategy and education are discussed: after forty years of Revolutionary Guard influence, Iran reportedly trains for a state-scale, persistent defense, with strong ideological motivation, and a leadership that refuses to retreat or surrender easily. They claim Khamenei’s public stance—refusing to go into a bunker—signals resolve.
- They discuss warfare in the Gulf and across the Strait of Hormuz: the difficulty of a large-scale amphibious invasion is highlighted; the difficulty of moving large Marine units through the Strait is noted, given that Tripoli and Boxer amphibious groups would face serious risk and may not be able to operate in the Hormuz area. The navy’s willingness to risk operations in the Strait is questioned.
- They argue that future warfare will rely on drones, precision mass, and non-traditional tactics: Shahed-type drones, sonar-like mine and sea-denial capabilities, and the use of mines with coded triggers are cited as capabilities Iran (and possibly others) could employ. They discuss the potential for drones to collapse airframes on the ground, the vulnerability of air bases to drone swarms, and the need for rapid, distributed, autonomous targeting.
- The danger of decapitation-style strikes is debated: while discussing attempts to kill Iranian leaders, they argue that decapitation can backfire by elevating a more aggressive leadership, and that such strategies require accompanying political and military restraint. They note that Israel and U.S. policies in decapitation have not yielded stable regimes, and warn of “hostage” scenarios if larger invasions occur.
- The Red Sea and Gulf disruptions are described as potential flashpoints: the speakers discuss the Houthis threatening to close the Red Sea; they argue that such actions would trigger cascades of fuel and food shortages globally and could prompt revolutionary pressures within Gulf states as water, energy, and basic services collapse.
- They discuss the broader geopolitical reshaping: the world is seen as breaking into blocs, with a decline of U.S.-led order; Russia and China are described as pursuing energy and security strategies (e.g., pipelines from Russia to China) that bypass traditional sea-lane chokepoints. The Belt and Road initiative is cited as part of a broader shift toward alternative logistics and supply chains.
- The contingent risk of economic and humanitarian collapse is stressed: the potential for famine and mass migration if the Strait of Hormuz or major Gulf infrastructure is disrupted is highlighted; the cascade effects would include fuel shortages, water scarcity, and social upheaval in the Gulf and beyond.
- The plausibility of a direct US/Israeli invasion of Iran is discussed with cautions: landing Karg Island is described as high-risk and potentially catastrophic (a Gallipoli-like disaster), with arguments that large-scale amphibious landings would face entrenched Iranian defenses, tunnels, and coordinated local resistance.
- They discuss strategic planning culture in the U.S. military: the importance of rank progression (O-5 to O-6) and the pressure to assign missions to elite units to justify promotions, which can distort strategic choices; bureaucratic dynamics may influence decisions about using special forces and taking on high-risk operations.
- The panelists reference recent geopolitical events and media coverage to illustrate tensions: drone warfare in Ukraine, Israeli strikes and covert activity, naval incidents, and the potential use of false-flag operations or provocations to shape public opinion and political decisions.
- In closing, the speakers emphasize that Iran, with its decentralized yet disciplined command structure, underground cities, chess-like strategic planning, and advanced drone capabilities, represents a formidable and evolving challenge. They stress the need to rethink assumptions about tech superiority, consider new paradigms of warfare (drone swarms, precision mass, non-traditional operations), and acknowledge the broader risk of a cascading global crisis should Gulf security collapse or major shipping lanes be disrupted. Matt Bracken and Brandon Weichert promote further discussion with their platforms and projects, inviting listeners to follow their analysis and work.
- Notable names and affiliations appearing or referenced: Matt Bracken, Brandon Weichert, Steve Bannon, Joe Kent, Dan Davis, Farid Zakaria (Zakari), and Steve Weinstock-style contributors; the discussion is aired on National Security Talk and Nat Sec Hour with promotional notes for iHeartRadio and social channels.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Anybody that thinks that we have a technological upper hand and that, like, marines are somehow tougher than than the Persian revolutionary guards, I think that they're really crazy. Yeah. The Persian revolutionary guards, and they've evolved to the same point in a different way, are going to fight with the fervor of the Japanese fighting for the code of Bushido.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: You know, when they said, oh, on Iwo Jima, only 30 people only 30 Japanese surrendered, Partly, a lot of them, if they tried to surrender, the marines weren't gonna take a prisoner. That's right. But, I mean, seriously, they would they would, like, lay on a hand grenade. Yeah. So roll so when you rolled me over, I could maybe take out one more marine.
They did that.
Speaker 1: This is what I told Steve Bannon the second to last time I was on with him. And I said, look. I go, you have triggered we have triggered a group of people who are so ideological. They are welcoming death. They don't mind dying for their cause, if we're the ones invading
Speaker 0: the Yes. This is their highest this is their highest achievement.
Speaker 1: This is Matt Bracken. I am Brandon Weichert. This is another edition of the National Security Talk. You can also catch the hour long radio show on iHeartRadio, National Security Hour. Parts of this interview will air there probably next Wednesday night at 8PM.
Be sure to like and follow us over at America outloud.news. Be sure please to like and subscribe and follow Nat Sec talk on Rumble. We're building up the page. So far so good, but we need everybody to smash that subscribe button as soon as possible because we get great guests like Matt here. And so, Matt, you were just telling us about, boring into mountains.
And, you know, I was told that even with the mountain sites that we and the Israelis have hit, we're hitting them with 2,005 pound bombs. I was told that's insufficient to actually end the existence of these underground cities. In fact, I was told that the Iranians preposition excavator teams with heavy equipment waiting for the bombs to be dropped, and then they just move in and start you know? Because we're basically only destroying superficials. It's the top layer or it's the doorway, which is a problem, but they can overcome that.
Have you heard this? What are what are you hearing about these underground missile cities?
Speaker 0: Yeah. When when I I I go back to Vietnam era in terms of being cognizant. I was born in 1957, but my I was number nine out of 10, and my family was very political. Mhmm. My mother subscribed to National Review.
We watched Firing Line with Bill Buckley, you know, when Pat Buchanan was like a child. I've been following conservative politics since then. So at the end of the Vietnam War and it's really, such a deja vu to see Hagsef and the other admirals coming out and giving, like, lists of numbers of bombs because it's straight out of Vietnam. Yeah. So we dropped three times more tons of bombs on Vietnam than we did on Germany in World War two, and we lost the war.
Yeah. Okay? When people are talking about air supremacy over Iran, they have to compare it to Vietnam, which is one tenth the South Vietnam is one tenth the size of Iran. Mhmm. And we didn't have to, like, fly from a thousand kilometers away to get to Vietnam like we do today to stay out of the missile defensive missile range.
We had bases right in Vietnam. They could take off and be hitting a target in ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: And we killed millions of Vietnamese. Millions. So, like, as far as taking out some leaders in the country who will quit, we killed millions of Vietnamese that only made them fight harder. You know? And it and it wasn't that all the Vietnamese, South Vietnamese were Vietcong, just like not all the Iranians are are Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Right. But when you have an enemy bombing the crap out of your cities, you know, you're going to tend to pick up a gun and go with whoever's already formed up. Right. And people misunderstand so much about Iran. I've I just mentioned how big it is.
It has more and higher mountains. It has 18,000 foot mountains, more and higher than Colorado, Idaho, North or, Montana, and and, Utah put together. It's extremely mountainous country right down to the Hormuz. The coastline of the Hormuz looks like the, badlands in the Dakotas. I mean, perfect for defense.
If you wanna invade, terrible. Same thing with even Keshem Island. There's videos of Keshem Island. It looks like the badlands.
Speaker 1: There's also an underground missile city there I just found out. I didn't know that.
Speaker 0: So where I was going with Vietnam was when the war was over, we always heard during the war about the tunnel rats. I mean, I was just a kid watching television. Yeah. But we always heard about the brave tunnel rats going in. And when when the war was over, it's now called Cu Chi, there's a tunnel complex that spanned a lot of South Vietnam.
And these were, tunnels like you would see in Gaza Yeah. Between Gaza and Egypt. Or like the border
Speaker 1: with Mexico and The United States.
Speaker 0: Six feet high, four feet wide Mhmm. With rooms for, clinics and barracks and things like that. The tunnels in Iran make them look like mouse holes. Yeah. The tunnels in Iran have, like, 40 foot ceilings, all bored out of granite, you know, 50 feet wide with rows of trucks with missiles on them, their own planned excavator equipment.
So if they get the one entrance blown off or or closed by a bomb, they can either go out other exits or as re excavate that exit. They've been planning for this. The the Persians invented chess. This is something that people don't grasp. They have an extremely high IQ.
Americans that are veterans of the Jiwad think of of of the the rag heads as, like, some Iraqi, Saudi, Kuwaiti Mhmm. Pashtun, you know, in sandals. Right. These are not that. So Persia was conquered ideologically conquered, not militarily in a sense, but it was taken over by Islam in the June.
There were some battles, but, essentially, it was more of an ideological victory. And that's how strong Islam is, by the way, that, you know, the the, the Mongol horde, the Tatars in in Crimea, they they wiped out everybody, settled in Crimea, nice territory. They became Islamic. Mhmm. Right?
They were not strong enough to withstand the slow erosive force of Islam. So, anyway, Persia becomes Islamified, but they're still Persians. And so you could say it's it's Islam with a Persian characteristic, meaning highly intelligent. They don't need to bring German or Dutch engineers in to, like, build their waterworks or a bridge. They've got their own universities a thousand years ago.
You know, they've they've built they had cities with waterworks when Rome did. So we're dealing with yes. They're Islamic, and the people in charge are Islamic fanatics. And as we've seen in America with, you know, a couple generations of woke in the schools can turn people woke.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Well, forty years of of revolutionary guards on top, That's their teaching. That's in their schools. Kids are brought up on the on the their great patriotic war is nineteen eighty to eighty eight
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: When 500,000 to over a million died, including the use of poison gas against them. Like, I I saw just today sorry. I'm going
Speaker 1: off on these No. Please. This is great.
Speaker 0: They they're we're we're on freaking out on this side about they're reducing the recruitment age to 12 in Iran. People, if they studied any of this Iranian history of the last half century, when the when the Iraqis Yep. Backed at that time both by Russia and America Yep. Because we both saw Islam
Speaker 1: We were giving Iraqis chemical WMDs. That's the
Speaker 0: same as Grumsmell cursors. Yeah. The cover story was pesticides.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Yeah. But they made sarin gas and put it in artillery shells.
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. And this was such a surprise to the Iranians because they had just, consolidated power barely.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: You know, our the the the hostage crisis wasn't like a settled government decision, the embassy takeover. Yeah. This was in the midst of chaos like nineteen seventeen, eighteen in Russia. This is in the midst of chaos. Radical students took over the embassy.
There was no government that could say stop that. Delay that. Release them. So it evolved as the Iranian hostage crisis, but it wasn't like a top down central command decision. This was in the middle of chaos.
So all of '79 is chaos. 1980, I think June, Saddam Hussein invades like a blitzkrieg, like the Russians going in or the the Germans going into Russia across a broad front. And they're aiming to take the key waterway that splits Iraq and Iran, the Shat Al Arab and key oil and gas fields we're all talking about now
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And the and the the export facilities like Karg Island. That's what their goal was. Mhmm. And Iran was just gobsmacked. They were still figuring out how we run a country when this invasion happens.
They didn't have a a, you know, a a plan. The military was in disarray because the the there had been purges and people just taking off their uniforms, so not sure who they're gonna work for in terms of, you know, the military officer corps of the shah who had fled.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: You know, they're afraid if they show up as a colonel, they might be hanged as a, you know, traitor to the Islamic revolution. Mhmm. So in the midst of this disarray, they're attacked. They withheld. They never buckled.
And part of that was sending children with a plastic key, a key to paradise.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: They used human wave tactics, including children, to clear minefields. Yep. The the Iranians did because they had nobody else at time.
Speaker 1: If I remember.
Speaker 0: Children is young. They they trucked people to the front and told them, you have no gun, but you'll find a gun out there maybe.
Speaker 1: What the Soviets, the Red Army did in, I think, Stalingrad is they'd give one guy a gun with no bullets, and the other guy next to him would have a bullet. And they'd have to the idea is they would get shot, and then somebody would pick it up and put
Speaker 0: it together. And, yeah, that excellent movie. There's excellent movies
Speaker 1: about that get
Speaker 0: shot very well. But, also, the the, Chinese did it in Korea with mass human wave attacks. And what the Chinese did in Korea also was they put the the, defeated Kuomintang soldiers. Not everybody made it to Taiwan. Right?
The grunts didn't make it to Taiwan. The elites made it to Taiwan. They could pay for an airplane or a boat. The grunts are stuck in communist China. They used the suspect loyalty Kuomintang privates to do the mass, invasions that where Americans are talking about stacking them up.
Yeah. You know? And that they literally were sent with no gun. You'll find a gun when you get closer. But, anyway, going back to going back to Iran, these people invented chess.
It it's it's unbelievably great human terrain. I'll put it that way. Mhmm. It's a sweet spot in the world. Mhmm.
It's got access to everything. It's got all the timber, minerals they'll ever need. They developed very smart, strong people. And it's so self contained they've never felt the need to, like, let's go invade some crappy desert. Right.
You know, crappy desert, like, maybe you can bring us something, but there's no reason for us to go to to the, you know, the Gulf States. There's nothing there.
Speaker 1: Although now they are talking about maybe taking Bahrain, which I think the Bahrainians would would welcome because they're mostly Shiite Muslim anyway.
Speaker 0: But I I think that this is this is talk like maybe Karg Island is talk. Yes. Because one thing that the Ukraine war is very definitive about, as, Carl MacGregor and Dan Davis talk about, the era of big arrow movements is over. Yeah. It's a new paradigm.
Drone warfare if if you try to if you try to line up a 100 tanks in some rear area 50 miles from the front, As soon as they're identified, they're hit as a target.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So you have Russian soldiers on motorbikes that are going in twos and threes because you just can't form a big target. Yeah. So the same the same paradigm that will work against Americans landing in Iran would work against Iranians crossing The Gulf. Yeah.
As soon as you get on a boat with a 100 troops, you're a target. So I think that's just talk. What they're gonna do is what, is is what Joe Kent said this morning on deep dive, the colonel Davis show. Yep. They're going to let the Americans in.
Yep. They're gonna turn off radar, turn off defenses. Remember, these guys invented chess.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: They invented the Shahed drone, a whole class of missiles that nobody else had. They have tunnels and mountains with rockets better than we have, hypersonics with steerable warheads that we don't have. Mhmm. So anybody that thinks that we can just land there and defeat them Right. Is crazy.
But at to raise it to the next level, the chest level, they're going to allow us in. Yes. They will the more people we put on carguiling, the better. Then they'll close the trap. And and today, you don't even need to have a boat go out and drop a mine.
Right. They have the potential to for the flexibility of it, but there are mines now on seafloors with that can receive an ultra low frequency coded mess digital message saying, turn on at this time. Turn on and only go after this class of ship. Yeah. Current you know, that all the recordings of propellers are in them to distinguish between an American destroyer and a tanker.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: So it's not like just a magnetic influence my next ship over. It can be
Speaker 1: And they're probably Huawei bait as well because the Chinese have really pioneered a lot of this this technology with listening for propellers and whatnot in the South China Sea.
Speaker 0: And and we've been doing it forever. Yeah. And and so so anybody that thinks that we have a technological upper hand and that, like, marines are somehow tougher than than the Persian revolutionary guards, I think that they're really crazy. Yeah. The Persian revolutionary guards, and they've evolved to the same point in a different way, are going to fight with the fervor of the Japanese fighting for the code of Bushido.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: You know, when they said, oh, on, Iwo Jima, only 30 people only 30 Japanese surrendered, Partly, a lot of them, if they tried to surrender, the marines weren't gonna take a prisoner. But, I mean, seriously, they would they would, like, lay on a hand grenade. Yeah. To roll so when you rolled me over, I could maybe take out one more marine. They did that.
Speaker 1: This is what I told Steve Bannon the second to last time I was on with him. And I said, look, I go, you have triggered we have triggered a group of people who are so ideological. They are welcoming death. They don't mind dying for their cause, especially if we're the ones invading
Speaker 0: the Yes. This is their highest this is their highest achievement.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: And this is why Khamenei this is why Khamenei refused to go into a bunker.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: His final gesture on this earth was to show his people, I'm not afraid of dying. Mhmm. And he did that not just for some symbolic reason, like maybe they'll make a, you know, grotto fountain memorial out of me. He doesn't care. It was so that the soldiers down to young boys are going to say, be like him.
Mhmm. You know, your goal should be to kill as many Americans as you can. And the coast of Hormuz looks like the Badlands.
Speaker 1: It does. It
Speaker 0: does. It's immediate cliffs. You know, when we look at d day, it's, like, mostly nice beaches, but there were those guns at what's it? Ponta Hawks, where the rangers had to shoot grappling hooks Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Pontehook? Something like that. It's yeah.
Speaker 0: It yeah. But it mostly, they just landed on beaches. Yeah. But there was an area with big guns up on top. So the the the rangers had to scale with Yes.
You know, grappling hooks fired up. Mhmm. That's a thousand kilometers off the beach of Iraq.
Speaker 1: When was the last time also the marines have had to conduct a landing like that? I mean, I know they're trained, but it's like we haven't had to conduct a landing like
Speaker 0: can't get there. Even talk people still talking about Karg Island. It's 500 miles Yeah. Because you can't fly over you know, the straight line takes you over Iran. So you fly a big loop.
It's 500 miles from off of the East Side Of Oman. Mhmm. Where our ships can can safely loiter if they're moving and careful. Mhmm. You know, don't anchor.
500 so so the Tripoli, if our if our Burke destroyers, if our Burke class destroyers can't go into the Strait Of Hormuz
Speaker 1: Which they cannot. The navy won't let them go in there.
Speaker 0: Right. There's a joke going around. What was the first navy to refuse to go to the, Strait Of Hormuz? The US Navy.
Speaker 1: The US Navy. Right.
Speaker 0: Because they'll say, I want that order in writing.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: And I'll want that order in writing with a note notice on there that I'm doing it against my better military judgment.
Speaker 1: Well, I was told that the admiralty the the the head of the the navy basically told Trump, I'm not doing that. I'm not giving that order. This is this is what I have heard, and this is, to me, a big problem for other reasons. I mean, I don't think we should go in there, but it does sound like the military is not really following.
Speaker 0: Yeah. They can't they can't possibly support a landing like it's Camp Pendleton or or, on the East Coast, the marine base, Camp Lejeune.
Speaker 1: Camp Lejeune.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Because their their whole paradigm, well, works. We extended it a little bit because we have hovercraft Mhmm. You know, which you can hear the day before coming. They're so loud.
Right? So the the hovercraft, which was, like, cool technology of the nineteen seventies, these things are, like, falling apart. They're old old aluminum cracked all over the place. Mhmm. So they can't go full speed.
They break down all the time. So the whole concept was the ship can stay over the horizon, and the first marines will go in on hovercraft. Okay? Which, like I said, they're so loud. You can hear them and see those the, rooster tail from miles away.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Well, we can't even do that because the Tripoli and Boxer amphibious ready groups are not going to go through the Strait Of Hormones. Our navy guys have heard of Gallipoli. They know how this ends. Three battleships were sunk right off the bat Yep. In the Strait Of Dardanelles hitting mines.
Yep. And then it was like, well, I guess we'll have to dig in for the, land part. Mhmm. And 250,000 casualties a year later Yep. The British left in in utter defeat.
Speaker 1: Yep. Ended Churchill's career for a while. Ended
Speaker 0: his Ended Churchill's career. That was his brainstorm.
Speaker 1: That was his another guy
Speaker 0: that didn't listen to anybody.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: The Admiral said don't do it and he overrode them.
Speaker 1: That's right. And so, you know, you're hitting on something that I have spent a decade writing about at the National Interest at 1945.com. Basically, our technology, military technology, is not as great as the Hollywood, movies would have you believe. It seems to me like we're still using technology based on nineteen seventies assumptions and gears, you know, geared toward that kind of a fight. Fourth what is it?
Fourth generation warfare or third generation warfare? And, yet we're in a whole new new way of fighting.
Speaker 0: Yeah. We're in the we're in the drone era, and we're still hasn't the
Speaker 1: Pentagon figured this out? I mean, we did pioneer drone use in the GWAT. And it's like the Pentagon just stopped figuring
Speaker 0: For for ISR. But the Yeah. Of all of all people, what's his name? Farid Zakarius?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Zakari.
Speaker 0: Yeah. He had a an excellent, like, three minute clip on the new paradigm
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: That that it's now precision plus mass. Yes. It's not like 10 tomahawks that hit 10 buildings. Now it's it's a thousand Shah head drones that exactly hit. So some of the in the early part of this war, after, for example, fifth fifth, fleet headquarters is abandoned because of it being hit
Speaker 1: That was slammed.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And our navy fleeing the Persian Gulf. Mhmm. So the whole deal was, oh, we'll protect you if we have a base here. We fled.
Mhmm. So the the military personnel and the spooks moved into the Hilton. Yep. And, like, the next night, the Shahed drone knows it's the 8th Floor on the left side. Mhmm.
Because the the these are primarily Shia personnel outside of the elites that rule The Gulf The Gulf States. So the the night manager that that sees these guys checking in, the driver says in in Arabic, this is the CIA safe house. They're moving in. And the night manager calls his contact and says the CIA is now on the 8th Floor left side of the building.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: And then a Shahed drone goes into it.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: This is going to come to America. I don't see how people don't see this. We were Well, we might
Speaker 1: have already last week with the Yeah. With and Port Arthur, but also Barksdale, the incident there that's not being talked about nearly enough. We still
Speaker 0: have a meme I made years ago, and it could have been at any one of dozens of bases, But it's it's aerial views from, Google satellite Mhmm. Of Charleston Air Force Base where where you have, like, a 100 c seventeens parked. Mhmm. Okay. It's like a fractal.
You can keep zooming down
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: To see, like, four on a revetment and zooming out like petals of a flower fractal. Mhmm. It would be nothing to fly the the drones that they're the size that police use and news stations use. They're not like the little Yeah. You know, 18 inch diameter.
They're like a yard diameter. Mhmm. They can land on a wing of an aircraft with an with an incendiary grenade, a thermite grenade
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: That'll burn through the wing and the fuel tank and destroy the airplane. You could have that now with pilots flying them or with just one more modification to the chip Mhmm. And AI just saying, look for this silhouette. Yep. Go for the furthest one.
And then the network of of these drones says, I go for the next, the furthest. I go for and in one night, you could have billions of dollars worth of aircraft Well destroyed on the ground.
Speaker 1: And remember, we sort of tested this theory in the real world or at least our friends, the Ukrainians did last year when they sent those truckers into Siberia, and they blew up all the t u one sixty white swan bombers in the Russian nuclear base.
Speaker 0: And in the and in the twelve day war, the Israelis opened the war
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: With covert trucks that were prepositioned That's right. With drones that would fly out to take out anti air SAM radar sites, things like that. That's
Speaker 1: right. And when we say trucks, we're meaning like they look like semi trucks, like, you know Right. Moving trucks, semi trucks.
Speaker 0: The wooden the top comes off, and there's and there's, you know, eight different pods with four on each. So there's, like, 32 that can fly out of one truck.
Speaker 1: There was a facility I was at, about two it was Biden's last year. I was asked to go out and give a talk and, US Air Force facility out on the West Coast, and they had a lot of a lot of sensitive aircraft there that were kept under the canopies. And the colonel there was telling me they've had because there's this mountain range nearby. He said they've had a lot of wanderers, he said, going in to these mountains where they're not supposed to be going. And he said, and they're basically, like, getting full view of of all the equipment and the gear that's beyond the mountains in this base.
And he tell he told me, he said the concern is that that there's gonna be some kind of a drone attack. And the problem with the planes that we're talking about, they have to be pulled out from under the canopy in order for them to link up to the satellite and actually turn on. So he's like, you know, it's it's a big problem for us because if they're sitting under the canopy, we can't just turn them on and move them. He's like, we gotta do a whole process to get them out of here. And if there's drone swarms, we're not gonna have time.
And that that to me is very scary. And I think that's where this is headed.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Mike I went down to Darien Gap two years ago with Michael Young.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He's a friend of the show. He's been on
Speaker 0: a bunch of times. Yeah. Others have been at the border filming. And one of the things that's filmed are because some of the videos have come back from The Middle East that have, like, superimposed Hezbollah fight songs, like Arabic, you know, rah rah songs, showing, like, obviously, a 100 Hezbollah fighters coming right through the barbed wire, like, you know, a year and a half ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: But the but in San Diego and other places, the Chinese that come through have got great packs, great gear. You know, shoes are proper. Yep. They, you know, they look like, you know, military field grade down to staff sergeants. Yep.
That their orders are to get to America.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: And and we have these these Chinese run, quote, unquote, pot farms that under Biden, we weren't even going after, where they'll put up these these, tents that look like a Quonset hut.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: You know, these are high dollar items to to That's right. Become marijuana grows.
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. And it's like, well, the sheriff's been told don't bother with them because they're immigrants or whatever. But you don't know at what point does that go from being a pot grow to a barracks or a a safe area or a drone assembly in Los Angeles. They're right next to an air force base.
Speaker 1: That's right. And you're seeing this with the farmland as well that everybody's been talking about the last few years as these Chinese nationals buy chunks of farmland that just so happened to be next to very sensitive US military facilities. And it's like, okay. Maybe they are doing farming for now, but this is a expanse of expanse of area. Nobody's out there.
The base the base security I remember there was a, out in California, there was a very very important facility for us. And I was told by the base commander that they kept catching in the, we call it the lake bed at the end of the runway. They kept catching what he called Chinese campers. And he said they were Chinese families from China, and he said, but the thing is we weren't, during the Biden years, allowed allowed to actually arrest them because they were clearly surveilling our takeoffs and whatnot. He said, because it was on it was on a private property.
He said it was on property not belonging to the air force. And he said, so I had to fight to basically get the government to purchase that plot of land that was on the other side so we could actually, if people did get in there, pull them and arrest them and figure out what's going on. But this is a common problem where the the if you have private property next to a base, it's not necessarily that that the base security services are gonna be able to just interdict. They have to have cause.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Even easily, I would say for the last, five to ten years, but definitely ramping up in the last five years. And just the ones that I've seen in open source, which probably 10 times as many.
Speaker 1: I'm
Speaker 0: sure. They'll catch Chinese guys in civilian clothes Mhmm. That are infiltrating bases. They may be scamming their way through the gate with fake ID and delivering pizzas, you know, or go through the wire. And and they'll they'll be in civilian clothes, you know, with a camera and a phone, but they clearly know exactly that they're going right to the top secret comm sec area.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Okay? This is, like, you know, the most secure part of the base where the uplinks are Yep. Or there's a a what we used to call an elephant cage, like a big circular array antenna. They're going right for the the most critical communications part just to see how far these are probes. Right?
Right.
Speaker 1: Eventually a few years ago down here in Key West at the
Speaker 0: New York. In Key West. It happens all over the place. Guam, San Diego. And, you know, the one that was that made a lot of press was the one in Key West down the Truman Annex and all that.
So so when these guys are arrested, they're just deported.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And my presumption is a week later, he's in an auditorium in front of a thousand cadets
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Talking about what a joke American security is. So when after you go through the Darien Gap, don't worry about it. Right. You know, this is he's probably he's taken selfies of himself with the MPs. Uh-huh.
You know? And then I'm deported, so don't worry about it. The American security is a joke.
Speaker 1: Because joke.
Speaker 0: It's hard to it's you know, when I was when I was a young man, a SEAL, it was, you know, hard to think some of our missions could virtually be a one way mission. Like, you know, that that you're going in at the time, you're going into some place like, you know, Murmansk or East Germany. Wow. It's not like these guys are not on the ball. Right?
Right. And so you're wondering what are the odds of coming back from this mission. So part of it is to if you could get somebody that you knew had been in and out of East Germany Mhmm. And I knew a a former, high ranking officer at what was then SEAL Team six, the rumor was that he had been in and out of Germany because he was a native German speaker. Okay?
And, you know, we use we have very good advantages with submarines and mini submersibles to get people very close to a beach. Anyway, that builds your confidence. Like Right. You know, we so if you have a if you have a Chinese, young officers coming back in front of the auditorium of cadets saying, American security is a joke. Yeah.
Well, it is. Catch I was in I was close enough to take out this thing with a platter charge
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And all he did was deport me.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. Which, of course, now brings us to the Iranian question because we know Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. I know people say they're the biggest, but, you know, that that's debatable probably, but they are definitely a state sponsor of terrorism. And they use these unconventional methods because that's that's how they play. Sam Faddis told me Yes.
About two weeks ago when he was on with us, he said that the largest consulate Iranian consulate in the world is in Mexico City, and it ain't because of all the Shiites living there. It's because they're probably running covert operations into next door United States. Right. So we're talking a lot about China and the Chinese and what they could potentially do or likely will do if it really comes down to a fight. What do you think the Iranians might be willing to do if this war continues in terms of terrorism?
Speaker 0: Two two points. First, the Iranians are playing a very, very long game. I saw another Sam Faddis interview where a defector from the IRDG told them some things to look for and that they bore out, which was they not they they don't just come up with a plan ad hoc. Right. They have standing plans for all of our embassies.
And he said he said, for example, like, every six months, they'll update the plan. Mhmm. And part of it will be a guy drops off a bag of trash next to the wall of the embassy, and they've they've got an apartment in view of that. How long does it take for American security to notice it? You know?
What what procedures are what happens? Who follow do they send EOD or a dog? So they're updating their plans constantly. So it's a very efficient military and intelligence apparatus. Mhmm.
K? So so that long term planning, there are areas in South America. There's a triangle region. Yep. It's like Paraguay, Brazil.
I think Uruguay as well. Or or yeah. I think it's I I but it's like a free trade Tri
Speaker 1: state area. I know. That's what they Yeah.
Speaker 0: Unmarked seven forty sevens flying in and out with fake Rolexes. Yep. So so because of the earlier Lebanese Christian diaspora
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Through South America, they speak Arabic. They it's easy for for people to just infiltrate South America. I'm kind of from The Middle East. Spend enough time to learn Spanish Mhmm. And even build up a a a support network.
It could be multigenerational. Yep. You know, a business, an actual business, and then become a pipeline for people coming through. But the but it doesn't take that long to learn Spanish. If you can speak Arabic or Persian.
Right. Spanish is even much easier.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 0: Absolutely. Much easier. So to be able to fake out a per a border patrol guy that your Spanish is not a hard thing.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 0: So you have to assume tons of them are in here. Now I've always assumed that the the Metcalf, California attack, like, ten years ago
Speaker 1: Okay. Remind us. What was that?
Speaker 0: This was a power substation Yeah. That was shot up with, standard bullets. Like, I think it would they were actually AK 47 rounds. Oh. So showing that it's not like, you know, some 300 Win Mag with a scope.
Mhmm. Just like a gun anybody can buy. Mhmm. The these transformers that are, like, you know, 20 feet high are filled with oil. The lead time to replace them is, like, years, and they come from China.
Speaker 1: They come
Speaker 0: from China.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: So if you shoot a hole at the top and bottom, the oil drains out, and it burns up, destroys itself. And at the time and still a lot today, there's they're just behind a chain link fence.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: Okay? Yep. And what told me this is not just random, this is a proof of concept app, is that at the same time and miles away, an underground fiber optic trunk communications node was sabotaged. Okay? So unless it's, like, the most amazing coincidence of all time.
So the the the way that I imagine it is at a planning meeting in in Iran at military headquarters where the youngest junior guy at the table is the brigadier general in charge of special operations, America division. You know, he's the youngest, smallest budget guy. He's at the table with the rocket guys and the drone guys Mhmm. And the espionage guys. And they're talking about if we did a breakout, like, the fatwa was called off and if we did a breakout for nuclear weapons or what if we never get nuclear weapons and America and Israel decide to destroy us, what is our what are our options for counter, you know, for for, countering what they do to us?
Now we know Iran has said they'll take out all the, desal and power plants in The Gulf Yeah. Which which will extinguish them because they can't live without the desal.
Speaker 1: At that point if the Strait Of Hermosa is ever opened because there's
Speaker 0: But what if America says we don't care about that? Mhmm. This brigadier general says, I can turn off the power across any part of America or all of it on one night, in one night. And and I'll and a proof of concept operation will be, they say, okay. Put up show us an op, Low probability of being caught.
We don't want any blowback. Nobody's killed. You know, not an act of terrorism. Blamed on Iran. And then within two weeks, with using people he already has in country, Metcalf happens.
And and the and this guy has, you know, a 100 teams like the same team that did Metcalf. They don't need specialized training. They're just gonna, you know And now
Speaker 1: with drones, they could even not even have to be on-site. They could be And
Speaker 0: now with drones. But our our grid is extremely vulnerable in that way.
Speaker 1: Well
Speaker 0: And something about the drones. The drones has shown that that, you know, a $30,000 Shahed drone propeller driven can take out 15% of Qatar's Yeah. Natural gas production facility. Yep. You know, which Yeah.
Which if and these these crazy people that are talking about now what we can do is stop the Iranians from sending tankers out. The whole point of Scott Bessen saying we're gonna allow the Iranian oil in the market is we're trying to prevent a worse oil shock. That's
Speaker 1: right. Which is coming.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So the next step of our brainiac retards is is to stop all oil coming from the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: So the infrastructure that it took to build the Persian Gulf, and it's not just gas and oil.
Speaker 1: Over decades. Over decades.
Speaker 0: Fifty years. Yes. Trillions of dollars. Yeah. You can destroy it all in one week.
Mhmm. And then you can be so crippled that you're like a man that bleeds out before you get to the hospital.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: So you it doesn't matter. You don't have another fifty years and a trillion dollars. People die right now. In fact, the Gulf States where 90% of what they drink is diesel Mhmm. If those plants are taken out before they can be flown out on aircraft Mhmm.
And remember, the airport may be under attack. Right. Before they can be flown out or bust out, they will be dying of thirst. Yeah. I mean, this will be a cascade that people won't believe.
Speaker 1: It also will trigger, and I said this to Steve Bannon, about two weeks ago, it will also trigger, Arab Spring like revolutions against the governments in those countries. Because people are gonna be saying, hey. What the hell? Like you know? So we went to war ostensibly to go and stop the spread of Islamism or revolutionary Islam, and yet this could end up where the whole thing spreads, not
Speaker 0: just And there'll be a total social implosion because the Gulf States use use, like, Indian and and Filipino labor.
Speaker 1: They're already fleeing. All the foreigners are already
Speaker 0: fleeing. Can even get out if they have a passport that's not held somewhere. So you they've got they've got a high percentage of of non Arab workers. Mhmm. You have British and American managerial class.
Mhmm. And then you have the Arab elite that just get paid to to breathe. Uh-huh. And when the water stops and the power goes out, the Shia minority, the the the native Shia minority are going to say, we're done ever being ordered around.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And and
Speaker 0: and they know where the Americans are because they're the driver and the night manager at the hotel. So they know exactly where the Americans are.
Speaker 1: That's right. And they will turn us in. They will turn us in and we will be targeted. So we're we're looking at a complete breakdown of The US led Middle East order. I think many people are like, well, it's wouldn't be the worst thing if we got out, but I keep telling them I agree.
But what's bad is how we're getting out because how we're getting out is very important. And it certainly is not a good look for the way I mean, we're gonna be leaving with our tail between our legs, and they're gonna be throwing tomato and darts at us.
Speaker 0: And not only not not only that, but the lesson will reverberate around the world. Nobody will even take seriously that we can defend Taiwan, Japan, or Korea. Nobody
Speaker 1: I will even think this I I I said this last year, and I got a lot of flack from my friends at the Naval War college. I wrote a piece saying, Taiwan's already lost. I think that's already been I think the Chinese already know. We we can't we blew our WAD in Ukraine. We blew through everything in Ukraine.
Whatever What
Speaker 0: was left in defending Israel.
Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. And and look
Speaker 0: at the message to Korea and Japan when they see pictures of us putting the THAADs on the Globemasters and take them away to protect another country. You're not our priority.
Speaker 1: No. And, you know, the South one of the parliament members of the in South Korea actually was quoted when we put in the request to recall the THAAD systems. He said that the Americans have betrayed South Korea. And he was a fairly I don't remember who it was. It might have been, like, their version of the speaker of the house, but it was a very prominent member of the Korean legislative body.
And that went viral. And I think that if I were South Korean, I'd probably be feeling the same way. And the Philippine, the head of their senate who's very pro American, he said a few days ago that the the Americans have they're abandoning us, and we're gonna start doing business with China again. Have to. Yep.
So this is the end of The US led world order.
Speaker 0: The world is breaking into blocks, and I could see this during the Grenada part and, you know, pushing China trying to push China out of Panama. Yeah. If I one of my favorite images, is the monopoly or not excuse me. The risk Yeah. Playing board.
Yeah. If one of depending on how many players you start with, a great strategy is just take North America. Yeah. You can defend it and build up slowly while they're while they're just annihilating each other, fighting in the middle of Asia.
Speaker 1: That's right. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 0: So and then you've then you've got the whole, admiral Mahan versus, McKinder McKinder. World Island strategy. Right? Everybody watching this show is probably familiar with this. We don't need to go over it.
But, you know, for the American century, it was admiral Mahan and choke points, naval power, which was an extension of the British, the the British great game. You know, keep our keep Asia split apart. Yeah. One one one decade, you're fighting against Russia in the Crimean War. A few decades later in World War one, Gallipoli, you're fighting with Russia.
Yeah. But the whole point is is to never let anybody take over Asia. Well, we've Right. And since World War two, the state department's number one mission was never let China and Russia be together as allies. We've we've absolutely pushed them together.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: You know, it's the old Brzezinski chessboard, all of that. But we've pushed them together. They don't even need, sea lanes that much anymore.
Speaker 1: No. Because of the Belt and Road. That's what the whole Belt
Speaker 0: and Road is. North to south, you've got the international North South Trade Corridor. That's right. So you can go from Moscow to Mumbai to Bombay, Mumbai, with train and ship faster than a ship leaving Russia and sailing all the way around through NATO territory.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: The North Sea Mhmm. The Mediterranean. You can just bypass all that. One of the interesting things I've seen this week related to that is supposedly Iran or IDF fighters have encountered, maybe not Russian flagged, but ships heading for Yes. This can spiral into a World War two.
Speaker 1: They're they're based in Azerbaijan, these fighters. I thought the Israelis were launching from Azerbaijan because, you know, they're secretly involved there. Sure. Sure. And they were buzzing these these Russian container ships in, I think, the Caspian Sea, was it?
Speaker 0: Right. The Caspian.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And and it's I mean, this is why I was telling another another show I was on. I was saying, look. The world war is already here. Because because not only are you having this situation with Israel buzzing these these Russian ships, civilian ships in the Caspian, but also if the Houthis really do decide to squeeze the Red Sea, the Ethiopians are making burblings that they're going to move against Eritrea to try to create some kind of a buffer along the coastline of Eritrea to let the Americans and Israelis establish Well,
Speaker 0: that's the Somali land.
Speaker 1: That's the Somali land. Yeah. Yeah. So it's already spreading.
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And, yeah, and and there's no way to, at this point, I think, put this genie back in the bottle.
Speaker 1: You don't buy you don't buy that Trump's gonna get a deal?
Speaker 0: No. I and in fact, I had this idea last night because I was just thinking, what are the you know, I've got that map that was, from, the history legends guy
Speaker 1: Mhmm. On YouTube. Fantastic channel. Great channel. I recently, Barnes, gave me that
Speaker 0: link. What are the feasible landing sites? The only feasible landing site even possible without a massacre on the way in is the far southeastern corner on the Gulf Of Oman, a place called Chabahar. Yep. And and, yeah, that that maybe can happen.
But the odds of
Speaker 1: that really help open up the strait, though, because it's
Speaker 0: kind of
Speaker 1: far away still.
Speaker 0: But but Trump may just say, we plant a flag in Iran Yeah. That's gonna get me through the midterms. And I think it'll be like Da Nang, only 5,000 marines to secure the airfield.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: You know, a year later, 150,000 marines and soldiers in Vietnam. Because you can't just secure the airfield because they're mortaring it. They're artillerying it. Right. So you gotta extend your perimeter and extend your perimeter.
Protection. Right. But if the other thing that I think Trump might do, remember beget a week or so ago, he's told the tankers to just have some guts and make a run for it. Okay?
Speaker 1: And the only ones who have so far are the Chinese.
Speaker 0: But they're going through the toll booth. They're going through the the Keshem Warak toll booth, which is all in Iranian waters.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And then they hug the Iranian shore on the way out.
Speaker 1: Uh-huh.
Speaker 0: So Iran is asserting control over
Speaker 1: it. Of course they are.
Speaker 0: And our brainiacs are saying, well, then let's shut it down a 100%, which wrecks the global economy. Uh-huh. I mean, they're already the consequences are just beginning. Mhmm. This this guy that was throwing coffee and a mic this morning, Art, games with a b.
Anyway, he was saying he has so many great analogies in that show. They say that after a big earthquake, that the seismologists can can detect the echoes of it Yes. Reverberating around the the earth Yeah. For, like, weeks. Yeah.
Weeks. Yeah. Okay? So we've only it's like we just swallowed a a, you know, a baseball sized chunk of concrete. Uh-huh.
And we haven't choked yet. Yeah. But we've got an El Paso, and that's if the Strait Of Hore moves open today. Yeah. So already, they're out of they're out of gasoline, which means people don't go to work.
Right? Can't can't go to school. In Australia, Japan, Korea
Speaker 1: Philippines, they're walking to work now. There's
Speaker 0: no car. These are and so the countries that have some reserve, some some pad to work off of are already hurting. This means countries, say, in Africa and in South Asia, where people are just living on a good year with their lips at one inch above the waterline.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: This puts them underwater. Yeah. That's why Michael Jan's been saying this is going to lead to famine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think they're saying
Speaker 0: that The fertilizer's not coming out. Yep. Even in Kansas and in
Speaker 1: China, far isn't just fertilizer. That's right. I keep telling people it's not just the third world. It's not the developing world only.
Speaker 0: But but when the third world goes into mass starvation, when, you know, when a third of the planet looks like Ethiopia Yep. Nineteen eighties, they're going to come here or they're gonna try to come here. That's right. Or if they can't, they'll burn down every vestige of the West. They'll burn down every embassy That's right.
Out of anger.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: If they can't do Camp Of The Saints in France, they'll just do it where they live.
Speaker 1: That's very, very depressing to think about, but very
Speaker 0: But the consequence I was writing about this. We people have been writing about it. I read a substack more than a year ago called if if if America attacks Iraq, you
Speaker 1: know,
Speaker 0: there will be a global economic catastrophe. Right. Because they can close down the Strait Of Hormuz.
Speaker 1: They could. They've demonstrated that they can keep it closed. And the crazy thing is, and this is what Jan and I were talking about, Michael Jan, about two weeks or a week ago, is that they haven't even really used hard power yet to shut it down. They've just said, oh, we're just we're we're gonna do this.
Speaker 0: They're waiting for warships.
Speaker 1: They're waiting for warships. Wanna sink an American war ship. That's what
Speaker 0: Or multiple. That's why I think they would they would because, you know, remember, the invented chess. They've got underground cities full of, you know, like, a 100 fire truck sized all over the place. Yep. More mountains than Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho together.
Right? So these are people that are very serious. They will let our ships pass. And since we have used perfidy, which is an actual defined war crime
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: You know, let's wave the white flag. Let's talk.
Speaker 1: Yes. Like, in in Braveheart Kushner.
Speaker 0: Yeah. In in Braveheart, perfidy is the scene where, oh, the British are gonna meet our nobles and have a talk, then they hang all the the Scots. Yep. That's perfidy. Yeah.
So we did that twice. Yep. In the June war and the February attack. So the Iranians might say, sure. Let's have a peace treaty.
And you wanna take Karg Island as a part of it? Well, they'll hint that no no harm and then sink 10 of our warships. Mhmm. Why wouldn't they? We've done it to
Speaker 1: them twice. That's right. That's right. And they're crazy enough and committed enough where they would do that. They don't care.
And the
Speaker 0: more we decapitate you know, this is another, like, perennial lesson of history. Yep. Decapitation strikes often help the military you're decapitating
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Because the guy you killed is General McClellan.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And his replacement is General Grant.
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. So all you did was you cleared away the cautious old guy.
Speaker 1: They You the yeah.
Speaker 0: You the the major is the hothead, and suddenly, the major is double promoted to general in charge of the Strait Hormuz Defense. You know? So I just today, Israel's bragging about killing the, the head navy guy for the Strait Of Hormuz Defense.
Speaker 1: That's not
Speaker 0: He's probably the conservative.
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. His lieutenant commander is the one that's always been saying, come on. We got these weapons. We can use them this way.
Speaker 1: Right. That's right. That's right. Well, it's interesting. You're saying something that Chris Hedges had, his most recent episode, an Israeli writer.
I'm forgetting his name. It wasn't Ilan Pop, but it was a it was a notable Arets writer. He's an older guy, and he is very much opposed to the war, and he's very critical of Israeli policy. And he actually spent a long time talking about how absolute how much of a failure the Israeli doctrine of assassinating the leaders of their enemies is. Because as he just said what you just said, he said it it created Hamas.
It created Hezbollah. He said it's creating these the Iranian problem where we kill these leaders. And then guess what? An even worse guy pops up, And now suddenly we find ourselves in you know, we're now mired in an even longer war that we might not be able to win now. And, the the the doctrine of assassinations, regime change through assassination, I don't think has ever worked.
I can't I can't remember a time it's ever worked. It didn't work that long.
Speaker 0: Think that it in as it applies, to Iran, the American goal, which was very undefined, no strategies, it's basically we were dragged into it by Israel.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: I agree a 100% with Joe Kent. When we heard that they were going to attack, therefore, we should attack with them Mhmm. Trump should have said, if you attack, you're grounded. There there that's you've seen the last anything from America. He can't do that.
And and as long as we're supplying the air in midair refueling tankers, we're complicit. And when people hear about decapitation strikes, it's not like we're sending Mark Wahlberg, with a sniper rifle. Right? Even in the movie Scarface, in the New York scene, he re Yeah. Al Pacino refuses to blow up the car when he sees the wife and kids get in
Speaker 1: it. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Right? I'll shoot the guy the guy, but I'm not gonna blow up his wife and kids.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Okay? I this is Israel's stock in trade is to put an American 2,000 pound bomb through an apartment building
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Because the Palantir lavender Yep. AI targeting program says there's, you know, a 50% chance of three Hamas guys in that building. Yeah. We haven't seen them.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: Right? But their social media and their telephones so let's put a 2,000 pound bomb into a
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Apartment and kill a 100 people. We're now strapped to that policy. So when when we put a 2,000 pound bomb to we say, oh, we decapitated another leader. Mhmm. In many cases, we blew up an apartment building.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah. You think this
Speaker 0: is winning hearts and minds?
Speaker 1: No. It's not. And, actually, that bomb strike that, you know, Trump apparently told them not to do on Northern Tehran when they blew up the oil, facilities in Northern Taiwan caused this black you know, this billowing black smoke and the streets are on fire like in Dresden.
Speaker 0: Basically Long long effects forever.
Speaker 1: Forever. And, basically, I was telling everybody, well, if you were hoping the people would overthrow the regime, you just gave the people back to the regime because
Speaker 0: they And this is what but, see, this is where Israel and America's goals diverge so much. Right. Israel's goal is clearly to just utterly destroy Iran and turn it into giant Syria, giant Iraq.
Speaker 1: Well, that was confirmed yesterday to me. So, by the way, I don't know how much time you have left. It's two zero one. I wanna be I think we've been talking for about an hour. Do you wanna keep going?
Is this Yeah.
Speaker 0: I I can
Speaker 1: go another half an hour. Perfect. Me too. Okay. This is great.
Yeah. So I was on it's gonna air today, but I was on El Arabiya English, and they put me on a panel with Yakov Armador or Avador, who was the former national security adviser to Netanyahu. He was the head of the IDF military for many years. He's older now. But, he and I got into a bit of a debate over this because he kept saying the Israelis do not care.
He goes, our government does not care about regime change. If the people of Iran can overthrow the regime, great. If not, we will still do what we need to do. And I said, well, what does that mean? He said, we will continue to bomb.
Even if the Americans pull out, the Israelis will continue to do what we need to do. And so what I took away is exactly what you're saying, that the Israeli the Israelis don't really care about, you know, the people of Iran. They don't really care about overthrowing. They don't even really care about the nuclear issue, which I thought was interesting because he talked about that a little bit. What they care about is we just wanna create chaos around us so that we're strong in the middle and everybody around us are just Right.
Speaker 0: Know? Libya. The Libya model. And and one once you turn, Syria and Iraq into into, Mad Max land
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Now you can use them for aerial refueling
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: To leap to lily pad your bombings out to Azerbaijan and everywhere. Yep. So so Iran but what what they're failing to to understand, most of these countries are fake geographical areas designed by the British and French at the end of World War one. Sykes Picot. Sykes Picot.
There was there was no Iraq. You know? This is like a like Africa. They're just pushed together Mhmm. Drawn on a map in Paris and London, and we're living with it.
But the Persians aren't like that. No. And if you if you had a world calamity this is where we're going. If you had a world calamity with a world famine and everybody's power grid is out for ten years and the population of the world just is reduced 50%. In a hundred years, there'll be a Persia again because the 50% that survive are going to be just as smart, just as Persian.
They still got the sweet spot of the planet that has everything that you need. You know, people don't understand. Even today, where they got a severe drought, there may be some weather mechanics involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: There may be some, dams in Turkey involved, things like that. But they've got a water shortage. Right? But they're very smart. They'll figure it out.
But water shortages are cyclical. Mhmm. I can remember when Atlanta, ten years ago, Atlanta was like, oh, we're at the death zone, the bottom of the reservoir. You can't break that stuff. Now the the wells, everything's overflowing.
Speaker 1: Same thing here in our local town in Florida. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0: So so the Persians, even if the whole world has a 50% die off as a result of this madness we're plunging into, the area has the timber, the minerals, rivers, the access to the Caspian, access to to the to the, Indian Ocean from and they control they'll always control the Strait Of Hormuz. So geography put them in a great position. They've got excellent human, capital based on thousands of years of development there because it was such a sweet spot. Today, Iran only imports less than 20% of their food. Compare that to Japan, Taiwan.
Speaker 1: To The United States. We became a importer of food in the second year of the Biden regime.
Speaker 0: And some something about sanctions, we should have learned this, say, even from Rhodesia, Zimbabwe. Mhmm. When you put sanctions on a comp a country that's not ready to surrender, they get tougher and smarter. They do workarounds like crazy. North Korea.
Really smart.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at North Korea. I mean, people make fun of them, but, their military is now probably more advanced and powerful than even the South Korean military at this point in terms of what they can achieve. That's because of their relationship with Russia. But North Korea has figured out how to how to outmaneuver these things.
Speaker 0: But the but the and they have food problems, I understand, but maybe a lot of that is propaganda. There's a lot of Western propaganda.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But their military is well fed. The North Korean military
Speaker 0: is Sure.
Speaker 1: That's that's the key.
Speaker 0: Yeah. But the but there's so many talking points that are just, like, repeated ad nauseam that that, people don't understand any of the background. It's sort of like with Ukraine. Where do you start the history? If you start the history with, you know, you know, 2022, or do you start it at 2014?
Do you start it, you know, back when when, Lenin gave this to Right. Or or Khrushchev gave other parts of Ukraine of of the Soviet Union to Ukraine, just an internal USSR thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: You know, you have to say, where do you start the history? For the Iranians, the history at least has to start, in 1953 when the CIA overthrew their guy who is gonna nationalize their oil.
Speaker 1: Yep. Interestingly, the Islamist element actually helped the CIA because they were pro shah at that point. And then after the shah in '62, after he met with JFK and JFK told him you've gotta start reforming if you wanna keep getting aid from The US. Once the shah put in the land reforms in the sixties where he was taking the land from the the Mullahs Sure. Giving it to the people, that's when the Islamists really started turning against the Shah.
People don't remember this, that during the fifty three coup, a lot of the people who overthrew the Shah in '79 were actually pro Shah, and they actually were feeding the CIA information on Mossadag. And and it's a very interesting backstory.
Speaker 0: But It's why it's why history is so important. Just, you know, looking at history during the whole, like, Martin Luther era, Thirty Years' War Yeah. So much of this is land reform. It's the church owns all the land. Now it's gonna go to these nobles.
Well, where do the peasants fit in? How are the peasants used by either the church or the nobles to be their cannon fodder?
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. What's really just a struggle for the wealth in that era was just land, period.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Right? Whoever controlled the land, controlled the food production. But, you know, who controls the land and the peasants are just this army or that army.
Speaker 1: You know, it I've always said for years is that the Islamic Republic Of Iran reminds me a little bit of the Soviet Union. And I always believed we don't like the Soviet Union, we didn't actually get into a shooting war with them. No. We contained them. We deterred them.
And, basically, over time, we let the internal contradictions of the system tear itself apart, which you saw happen in the eighties. And I thought that's what we were gonna try to do with Iran on a smaller scale. But apparently, now we're all in. And I don't know where this is going.
Speaker 0: Well, there's big there's some there's some parallels, but there's some fundamental differences between the USSR breakup and Iran. Number one, as as the USSR was collapsing, they just they said, you wanna get out, go. And millions went millions of Russians
Speaker 1: It's also because we lied to them, though, and said we wouldn't expand NATO. But yes.
Speaker 0: You're right. But millions of Russian Jews went in to the West and to Israel. Yeah. And and what was my other thought there? It was a two point thing, and one of them just flew out of my head.
But, yeah, the the the the when the Russians broke up, they lost a lot of their territory, but they they actually are in a way stronger as just a Russian corps. They don't have to waste effort Mhmm. Holding Kazakhstan and all the stands. That's right. They can they have a a much more united corps.
Oh, another something else I meant meant to mention when we're talking about the Caspian. The the Leningrad refinery that was or oil facility that was just blown up. Yeah. Apparently, these fairly long range Shahed type drones, like 1,100 kilometer range, used NATO territory for the flight.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 0: This is Casas Belli.
Speaker 1: Well, to be fair to the Russians, there have been a handful of incidents that should have been Casas Belli. And Putin is a cool customer and hasn't taken the the the he hasn't taken a bite yet. Yeah. There have been a
Speaker 0: few Russian ships that have been sunk that are that Yeah. You know, they're they're not in seizing
Speaker 1: Russian ships in the open waters up until a couple months ago. You know, the shadow fleet. We were we were taking Russian flag
Speaker 0: So, eventually, there's a Russian tanker that was heading to Cuba that turned around.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That actually is interesting. We had Luis Canone on who's very closely aligned with the kind of Latino wing of MAGA, and he he was an intermediary for Trump to Maduro for a period of time before Trump basically threw away that plan. But he was telling us a few weeks ago on this show that Claudia Scheinbaum is basically working with Putin on trying to figure out how to resupply Cuba because Cuba, of course, is, you know, collapsing. But, it looks like that so far The US unofficial blockade is working on Cuba.
We're not the Mexicans and the Russians are not sending in.
Speaker 0: And it's funny how some of these peripheral peripheral elements repeat in history, like Cuba
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: The Philippines. Yeah. And somebody on X responded to me. I always check my notifications. I always do.
Yeah. Because I retweet a lot of I retweet a lot of comments. But somebody said, we're Spain in 1898. You know? And I and I compare it also to the Ottoman Empire early twentieth century That's right.
On the map covering a huge swath of the globe like the Ottoman Empire did. Yes. Yet it's it's really only an inch deep and ready to evaporate at a moment's notice. And what we're showing the world with Iran is our aircraft carriers can't even get near No. The target area.
Our aircraft off the aircraft carriers have to midair refuel Yes. Going and coming.
Speaker 1: And those refuelers are now targets for you know, if they're flying over Iraq or they're flying you know, those midair refuelers now become and we just saw that. A bunch of them, a couple of them were were damaged or taken down.
Speaker 0: I think we're gonna see some some naval attacks because we opened this door with firing at a a brand new Iranian frigate, which was unarmed Yep. Which was on a diplomatic mission when February 28 happened. And it was essentially an assassination. We're not in a declared war. You know, generally, before you start torpedoing ships, you have a war.
Yeah. So it's sort of traditional. So so we sank that ship and gloated about it, like, basically laughed. Yeah. Stomped you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Paulie Anne Pete Hegseth was out there celebrating. It was actually, I thought, a very shameful act on our part.
Speaker 0: But Yeah. And because we could have just had it trailed and seized it. We could have easily the submarine follows it, got overhead coverage, intercept it with an American warship, ultimatum. Now we have conquered this ship. Yeah.
And we treat the crew humanely Mhmm. Show them how American instead, we murdered them. In in terms of
Speaker 1: And pictures of the funerals of the sailors. These were people who had, they seemed like normal people. They had families. Their wives are out there.
Speaker 0: There's video of them of their band playing in a a parade in India. That's right. Their ship's band. That's right. So so some of the things that we're opening the door to.
Mhmm. Like using perfidy, the the the sneak attack assassination raids, I expect something's going to happen like an LNG tanker exploding in a port. And it could be a false flag. Israel could do it to blame it on Iran. Mhmm.
Anybody could do it now. When a ship explodes, it could have been a torpedo. We've already seen a torpedo used. We used it. So what happens when an LNG tanker explodes in a port?
Israel could easily do that and blame it on the Iranians. Oh, a miss a a misguided Shahed drone. And and an LNG tanker in a port Yeah. Burning could just be like almost a tactical nuke.
Speaker 1: And this is actually something that I said on another show was I was asked, you know, about the Iranian terrorist threat to the home front. And I said, yes. It's absolutely they could there's a lot they could do. We talked about that earlier. You and I did.
But I assess that the Iranians have demonstrated such a remarkable grip on strategy and marrying ends ways and means and understanding the psyche of the American people
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: That, actually it's not in their interest to initiate a terrorist wave in The United States only because the Iranians have to know this war is nowhere near popular. And if they did do a nine eleven or something like that
Speaker 0: Oh, no.
Speaker 1: So then that gets us into false flag because I keep hearing from my friends on the inside in the FBI, and they're getting all these these threat vectors. Oh, threat this this threat coming in. A terrorist attack might be coming. And I'm like, why would the Iranians they're they're winning this thing. Right?
I mean, do you agree that the Iranians are basically at the strategic level dominating this war so far?
Speaker 0: Absolutely. We can if we people don't still don't understand how big Iran is. From the Strait Of Hormuz to Tehran is 700 miles, which is Chicago to New York. Mhmm. If we dropped a if if Israel dropped a nuke on Tehran
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: They wouldn't hear it or see it at the Strait Of Hormuz.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: The fallout would go somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And the regime is decentralized. They're not running everything out of Tehran.
Speaker 0: That's right. The the and and and that decentralization plan, has multiple layers. Mhmm. So if if there's, you know, 35, provinces that have a commander, They also have standing orders. In the event of complete lost comms, you will do these things.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Like like, your your dead man switches, keep the Strait Of Hormuz closed. And they'll do that like Japanese holdouts in
Speaker 1: the Pacific. That's right.
Speaker 0: Because their their Shia Islam, people still don't understand. They mix up Iranians and Arabs.
Speaker 1: They Right.
Speaker 0: They don't understand that the whole schism at the death of Muhammad was over succession. Yes. Over the the Saudi said, no. The council of elders will decide the next leader of Islam. Yep.
And the and Ali and the and then the what became the Shia Mhmm. Said, no. It has to be a descendant of Muhammad. They were
Speaker 1: willing to die for that. That would they were that was solidified at the battle of Karbala.
Speaker 0: They were willing to die for that, and they did. Yes. And and that has been their bottom line ethos. So it's as strong as Japanese Bushido. Mhmm.
I was in Guam. They were, like, famous guy who wasn't like, didn't surrender till, like, 1977 or something.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: Right? He was told to to never surrender, and they had to eventually fly over. And it wasn't just Guam. They had to fly over like his old sergeant. Yeah.
It's like 80. You know, corporal, the war is over. I order you to surrender. Leaflet drops. His it was like, I was told not to surrender.
I won't surrender. And that's Iranians. And there are and people are saying, well, Matt, if if those cliffs are so bad, they can't stay in those cliffs either. It's like, come on. They've had 50
Speaker 1: The marine expeditionary unit, I think there are now two that are deployed into the area.
Speaker 0: Tripoli will get here on Friday. Boxer will take another week.
Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. So there that's about that's What's that?
Speaker 0: Boxer will take at least a week
Speaker 1: more or two weeks. But I'm trying to run the numbers here. So that's like 2,400 marines times two, if I'm not if my math is wrong. I thought I think it's 2,400 per
Speaker 0: any boots on the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah. For the boots on I'm not even talking. I don't care what think the media keeps saying, oh, 8,000. It's like, yeah. But you're including the sailors and the people who not gonna, you know, land.
Speaker 0: What yep. 2,500 boots on the ground plus a thousand spec ops that are already in the region.
Speaker 1: That's right. And then
Speaker 0: So all the seals and green braves and rangers were already over there.
Speaker 1: That's right. And then they're flowing in. I know this for a fact. The eighty second is definitely going in. So
Speaker 0: that's light troops with no sustainment capability.
Speaker 1: And this is like that's another 3,000 parat paratroopers, I think, or 2,000?
Speaker 0: This why this is why at the at the debates where I'm sure people are literally screaming at each other and careers are being lost Uh-huh. People are slamming doors Uh-huh. In in the Pentagon over this. Yeah. When people are talking about Karg Island, I guarantee you there's a subordinate that stands up and says, have you never heard of Gallipoli?
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Are you out of your mind, General Custer? That's Because people the the I'm I'm glad I got to this part because I really wanted to touch on this military culture part. Mhmm. The people that are the the shot callers in the military at the operational level are are the o fives, o sixes, and then the the one star flag ranks. Mhmm.
Those are the guys that are like, the policy comes down, but they're making the operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: And in the Navy, an o six is a captain in the Air Force and Army and Marine Corps. It's a colonel. An o six is a colonel. Yeah. These guys, your goal as an o five is to make o six before you retire at twenty years.
Yeah. If you've nailed that yeah. I I graduated from BUDS with, like, six other ensigns. They all made captain. I didn't stay in for a career.
I wanted to go sailing and do other stuff. But all the all my friends had stayed in and made a career out of it. This was when special warfare was really taken off Mhmm. You know, in the eighties and nineties. They all made captain o six.
And and one of them was an admiral, like, vice commandant of SOCOM in Tampa. Wow. So they you succeed in your military career at the top level if you make o six, bird colonel or navy captain in your twenty years. Mhmm. So you're coming up on 20.
You're, like, really on the you you've gotta find the admiral that's gonna be the the big leader. Mhmm. Several of the wars that we fought, desert storm and operation Iraqi freedom, you have you have, a military bureaucratic impetus to find the war. Yeah. If you're, like, coming up on 20 and you're in some backwater, odds are you're not gonna make o six
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Colonel, navy captain. But if you get deployed to the war and, you know, you're leading the tank charge or, you know, leading the squadron, you're probably gonna make captain for sure. And the captains that at at nineteen, twenty years that are that are o sixes, their goal is to get a star Yeah. To retire at with a star. Now in the civilian world, you're like moneybags because all these corporations will hire you.
Mhmm. You know? And while you're an admiral, you're, like, steering contracts to them, and your reward comes after retirement. Mhmm. So it's a very you know, the you get the payment after you do the bribe.
So the bribe comes later. You know, you do the you do the dirty deal first by steering the contract. Uh-huh. Then they pay you off putting you on the board while you play golf.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: So so I know of situations where, like, the most elite guy, top unit, but he's in Germany or Korea. He's like the top guy in that unit facing the commies. Mhmm. Well, you can't pull him out to go to Persian Gulf for for, Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom. He's too important.
So he never makes captain or or he never makes bird colonel. He's like a hard charging lieutenant colonel, but he didn't go to the war. Mhmm. The guy from Georgia or Texas who gets deployed to the war, he makes o six. Mhmm.
So everybody wants to get that war. Yeah. You know, it sounds like GWOT just happened, but GWOT's old old news because it really was winding down a decade ago. Yep. Right?
The numbers were getting real small. So the guys that that were just ensigns when Joe Kent was, they're the ones that are now, you know, Joe Kent was, like, 18 when nine eleven happened. Yeah. Right? So his whole, you know, twenties and thirties was the military CIA.
Yeah. So the guys that are just coming out of West Point ten years ago or fifteen years ago, they didn't go to the GWAT. No. They didn't go to they they weren't way desert storm ancient history. So this is now their shining chance.
If we're gonna do a damn amphibious landing, I'm gonna lead it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: That's the that's the guys that are seeing rank above everything. And another factor in this, and I saw this even when I was in in seals both as active and then later at reserve in reserves. I went to some big massive exercises that were that were, command post exercises, CPX, like Fort Bragg, thousand officers. And you've got guys playing Soviet naval aviation. You got guys playing all these parts in the game.
And and it just as an example, you'll have in this cut you know, Orangeland or Pineland, it's like it's Russia, okay, or North Korea. There's a key bridge, and all these targets were on the map. All these targets. And it's like a bidding war. The air force has already got five targets.
You know? The rangers wanna take that bridge. It'll be the bridge at Ramagan so that the second item infantry division can come in like like Market Garden. And then the seals what what are we gonna do? Well, we could swim under the bridge like the bridge on the River Kwai.
Uh-huh. So this word that we started hearing all the time called deconfliction
Speaker 1: Deconfliction. Right.
Speaker 0: You don't want the air force to bomb the bridge while the seals are planting mines on it. So you have to have joint and combined liaisons to make sure multiple actors aren't bombing the same target at the same time. And you can imagine the Israeli and US air force deconfliction going on now Uh-huh. Because they're flying in the same airspace. Yeah.
So so I saw this bureaucratic push both to make rank and in a theater to I gotta my group has to have a target. It's like the old bureaucratic example you would always hear, at the end of the fiscal year, you gotta spend your budget.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: If you turn money back in, they'll say, just go to the warehouse and buy a thousand shares. Uh-huh. We don't need any chairs. We buy a thousand shares. Yeah.
Because if we don't spend the money, we'll lose it. Yeah. So if the seals aren't used in this mission or if the rangers aren't used in this mission, they say, well, we didn't need seals. So the seals and the rangers are at the table saying, you gotta give us a mission. And and at that point, the men down below them are just are just, conceptual pawns.
Yeah. And Yeah. The fact that they might be on a one way mission, some of the people will be like Dan Davis getting up and saying, won't participate. Yeah. Or Joe Kent.
I'm I'm punching out. Yeah. Because this is a this is cuss you're sending Custer to Bighorn. Yeah. But nobody at this point is willing to to call it off.
Speaker 1: And I think that the president is going to go through with the land. I think he's gonna try it with a very
Speaker 0: strong even order the ships to run the Strait Of Hornets.
Speaker 1: I think that's where this is headed. And I think there's gonna be a slaughter. And then after that, maybe Trump then gets cold feet and says, I'm over it and tries to pull out. But the Israelis have a opinion on that. I mean, they're not necessarily you know, they could crack off
Speaker 0: a noob. Yeah. I I recommend the Joe Kent, Danny Dan Davis deep dive from this morning, highly or this morning. It's, what? Thursday?
Yeah. As we're speaking, it's Thursday, the twenty sixth. Yeah. But, he says the only solution for this is the president has to put the Israelis back in the box.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's what they bust them off the ship a week ago.
Speaker 0: Yeah. They have to be back in the box.
Speaker 1: Happen, not with APAC and not with all these influence.
Speaker 0: And he and he used another term. The Iranians are are delirious at the idea of the marines and the airborne land, you know, like troops with no sustainment landing somewhere, then they'll become hostages. Yes. They'll be armed hostages. So we think we're going there to to lick the Iranian army or something, and they're just going to be hostages.
That's right. We're setting them up for a and because it's 2026, not 1915, the Gallipoli disaster will unfold much faster. Yeah. The Gallipoli could take place in a week or two.
Speaker 1: So in our final final few minutes then, what where is this going? Like, there's no off ramp. I mean, are we gonna go so high up the escalation ladder that we're dropping nukes, or is China and Russia gonna get more?
Speaker 0: Israel might. Israel could.
Speaker 1: I think Israel will, but I think there's a high probability of that. But beyond that then, what what is
Speaker 0: But that won't open. I always every all of these Fox News green room people. I I I'm kidding, Jim Hansen all the time and, others that haven't banned me yet. Say, what are they are they pumping happy gas into that green room at Fox?
Speaker 1: Well, Jesse Waters is unwatchable now. I can't watch
Speaker 0: Oh, he's completely unwatchable.
Speaker 1: He's got the pom poms out, and he's
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. It's hard. And and it's I'm doing screen captures like crazy of all these people. But I always end with, how does that open the Strait Of Hormuz? Because, you know, I've got a meme that shows a wrestler in a chokehold.
Yeah. And and the caption is is, I've beaten the other wrestler in every category except for the fact I'm in a naked blind chokehold. So how does it open the Strait Of Hormuz? Right. I don't care if you nuke every city in Iran.
Right. If if there's 10,000 devoted fanatics guarding
Speaker 1: the civil war. And they're hardened.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And their their version of revenge on the world is no ship is ever going through again. So, yeah, Israel could do something crazy.
Speaker 1: Expect does China and Russia do, though? Are they gonna I mean, what I had heard through the grapevine that Russia Putin apparently told he apparently in the last week or so had a very tense call with the Israelis and said, don't you dare drop a nuke. And the Israelis don't care. So, like, what the last question I have is, what is Russia and China gonna do if this goes where we think it's going in Iran?
Speaker 0: Well, Russia has energy security and food security.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: And they are building pipelines like crazy, natural gas pipelines to China. Mhmm. And and this is the Mahan, McKinder Yes. Dichotomy.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: And with the McKinder World Island, internal lines of communication are always going to beat sea lanes oak keeping sea lanes open, which is obviously becoming impossible today. Yes. There's no more even even starting with Gallipoli, we could see the writing on the wall. And and Strait Of Hormuz is con confirmation. The Houthis can close the Red Sea.
Who are the hell are the Houthis?
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. They can close the Red Sea. They can drive aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea. Mhmm. So the idea that that, like, we could just keep the Strait Of The Malacca open or closed.
It's not in our hands anymore. Any country's on the littoral. Airplane lands, gives them the weapons, ships can't pass. Yep. So internal lines of communication become way more important.
And so when you when you build a a pipeline, every for every kilometer, you lay an extra 100 meters of pipe. It's just you put it there. So you can repair a a terrestrial pipeline, like, in a day. Welders are there. A welder, tiger team shows up.
Whereas, the Nord Stream pipeline, that's gonna take a while just because it's underwater Mhmm. And flooded with saltwater.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: So LNG from from Texas, that seems to be like our strong card because LNG is like four times, depending on the distance Mhmm. Four times cheaper than pipeline gas. Yeah. But when this gets really ratcheted up, LNG tankers are gonna start to explode because they're like a bomb factory just waiting for somebody to throw a match at them.
Speaker 1: That's
Speaker 0: right. So so the countries that are saying, screw you, America Mhmm. You're benefiting from all of this chaos and famine that you've started, then that the gasification and liquefaction plants at each end are massive infrastructure that cost decades to build billions of dollars. You can blow them up in one night. But the pipeline going from Russia to China can be repaired overnight.
Yeah. So the the trends folk the trends support the Mackinder World Island becoming dominant. Yes. And the and the Caspian, the Russia to India.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: North South
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Transit line. Yeah. Because the intermodal is now so fast. There are there are super Panamaxes that can't fit through the canal, even the new canal in Panama. Yeah.
They're so it's so fast to unload a ship, put it on a train, go across the Isthmus Of Panama, put it on another ship. Much faster than going around South South America. So all of these intramodals like the Caspian route
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Or or just Russia to China by pipeline Mhmm. We're basically on the losing end of this. Where we should have done after Venezuela is just say, hell no. We're not participating in the Iran fiasco. Which is what I thought down the inward.
Just gonna lock down Americas.
Speaker 1: This is what I thought.
Speaker 0: Finland, Panama.
Speaker 1: Well, this was what the national security strategy memo in November said. And I was writing a book on Western Hemisphere defense because I thought that's where the trend was going. Yeah.
Speaker 0: It's the risk map.
Speaker 1: And it's the risk map. That's right. It's the risk map. And for whatever reason, Trump decided to crap the bed and, get us into another
Speaker 0: Because of Israeli control. Of Israeli control. Yeah. That's my master blaster meme. A little dwarf on the from the Mad Max movie.
And and what I'll on the giant.
Speaker 1: Yes. Well, I do believe we are headed toward, this gets back to one of our other great guests was a guy named Brendan O'Reilly. He wrote a book called Everybody's Wrong About China. He's an expert in China, speaks the language, lived there for many years, worked in intelligence. And he his theory is that it's too late.
China has secured the future. By 2050, it will be impossible to deny that China is now the dominant world power, and they rose to that position without ever firing a shot. So And
Speaker 0: helps to and it helps to be more or less an ethnic an ethnic civilizational state. Yes. Does. Compared to being, you know, Balkanized, you know, fratricidal.
Speaker 1: Yes. No doubt.
Speaker 0: Mess. Years. Okay. Yep. All these books.
And I wrote these books. I would love to have just written genre fiction, but I've been writing these like, you know, foretelling the future, future fiction type of books. Yeah. Because I thought I mean, I can see this train wreck coming from twenty years And when it matters, why will people have any reason to listen to me? I've only, you know, got a Russian studies degree from long ago, and I was a SEAL team officer for five minutes.
So why would anybody pay attention to me when it matters? It's because you can get them straight from me that Your your handle? Yeah. It's it's matt underscore, bracken forty eight. Wonderful.
And And anywhere you see steel cutter forty eight, that's also me.
Speaker 1: Steel cutter forty eight. Okay. Right. So this has been an episode of National Security Talk. The first fifty three minutes of this will air probably in a week or two on iHeartRadio, the National Security Hour.
Please follow Natsec Talk on Rumble. Subscribe. Also, please check me out. I am the Natsec guy at emerald.tv, and I'm also the senior editor national security editor at 1945.com, which is a phenomenal defense publication. We have everybody, different opinions, different perspectives all in one place.
It's nineteen forty five dot com. Thank you and you know, God bless America.
reSee.it AI Summary
I told @TuckerCarlson on 3/1 the US bases were desolate and destroyed; the NYT confirms it. Iranian strikes left many bases barely usable, Kuwait among the worst damage. This war was supposed to last days, but our forward posture is wrecked—never to return.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
Weichert was right again. I told @TuckerCarlson on 3/1 the US bases were desolate and destroyed. The NYT NOW CONFIRMS IT. Iranian strikes have left many U.S. bases in the Middle East barely usable. Kuwait reportedly took some of the worst damage. This war was supposed to last days. Now our forward posture is wrecked...never to return.
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 1 describes the damage: at least three bases in the Gulf have been devastated, including the fifth fleet headquarters; satellite imagery suggests the base in Bahrain looks like Gaza and has been “moonscape.” He says he doesn’t know about casualties because he isn’t sure if the base was evacuated, but the imagery indicates it has been flattened. He notes the base was expensive and long a hub for the U.S. Navy in the Middle East and has been “completely taken offline.” He mentions a Middle East expert who doubts a quick rebuild, suggesting that Arabs will be irate and not want the U.S. to build back in their countries after the war ends.
Speaker 0 adds that the Arabs “give us billions in foreign investment” and in exchange the U.S. promised to protect them, but asks why we would defend them given the current actions.
Speaker 1 states there are credible reports that whatever air defense systems were in Arab countries were sent over to Israel and left American bases and people vulnerable, implying the U.S. prioritized protecting Israeli targets over U.S. troops. He reflects that, a year or two ago, he wouldn’t have believed this, but after watching a Huckabee interview, he thinks the United States is being led by its proxy and calls it the proxy being the housekeeper while the U.S. is the homeowner. He says the U.S. is “being led around the nose… by what should be its proxy.”
Speaker 0 questions the dynamic, saying, “they’re the housekeeper. We’re the homeowner,” and asks for clarity on the situation.
Speaker 1 adds a personal note: a Gulf-based colleague sent a State Department warning to get out, with the message that people are “on your own” for evacuation—no flights provided. He contrasts this with the British government evacuating its people “no questions asked” until twenty-four hours ago. He concludes that the sole superpower is picking a fight with Iran’s missile city and not providing exfiltration for its people, and asserts that this indicates a decline of the empire. He mentions that the Chinese view is that their time is at hand due to what he calls national suicide with this insanity.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: What is the damage right now to to to Israel and to and to US bases in The Gulf, do you think?
Speaker 1: Oh, well well, the the the bases in The Gulf, you know, I I I wish I had kept the window open that I was reading, but, basically, at least three of the bases have been devastated. The fifth fleet headquarters, I I am told and if you look at the satellite imagery that you can find on open source information, it looks like actually, the base in Bahrain looks like Gaza. It's completely moonscape. So the the American fifth fleet now I don't believe I don't know if there's any because I I think we might have evacuated that base before this started. So I don't I don't wanna say there's casualties because I don't know.
But just looking at those satellite images, it looks like that it's been flattened. And that's a very expensive base that you and I paid for, and that was the sort of the hub for the US Navy in The Middle East for many years. And it has been completely taken offline, and I I have serious doubt. I was talking also to a Middle East expert not long ago, and he was saying that with these bases being obliterated, basically, use a term a term, essentially, he doesn't think because he thinks the Arabs are gonna be so irate with us for having kicked over this hornet's nest because it is not gonna end anytime soon. His belief is that once the war does end or settles down enough for us to say, hey.
We're good. We're done. The Arabs are gonna say, you're not building back in our in our countries anymore. So we Why
Speaker 0: would they? We didn't defend them. Of course. This is a reciprocal relationship. They're not doing this because they love us.
They give us I agree. Deals on and they billions hundreds of billions in foreign investment in The United States, all this. But in exchange, we promised to protect them, and
Speaker 1: we didn't. That's right. And in fact, there's there's reports, and I think they're credible. In fact, the Saudi official was complaining about this two days ago. Basically, whatever air defense systems were in these Arab countries were sent over to Israel.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they actually left our own bases and people, vulnerable. Our own government did to protect Israeli targets rather than to protect our our men and women in uniform.
Speaker 0: Do you believe that's true? Do you believe the US government prioritized Israel over our own troops?
Speaker 1: If you had asked me this a year or two ago, I would have said no way. But after seeing that Huckabee interview by the way, bravo. After seeing that Huckabee interview, I can't imagine how we didn't do that. I mean, it is very clear The United States is being led around the nose right now by its by what should be its proxy. I mean, let's get it real.
Mean, of course, it should be you know?
Speaker 0: So They're the housekeeper. We're the homeowner. Like, what is this? I don't I don't get it. No.
I'm serious. I don't understand.
Speaker 1: I agree. I agree. So so I do believe, yeah, we probably did. And the worst part here, one of the worst parts is I have a colleague who's who's in The Gulf States, and he tells me he sent me a picture of the the warning he got from the state department to get out. And to cut to cut to the chase, it basically said, you're on your own to get out.
Like, we're not doing flights. We're not That's true. And meanwhile, I I hear that in until twenty four hours ago, the British government was evacuating their people. No questions asked. So you mean to tell me that the sole superpower is picking a fight with this missile city that is Iran, and we're not even gonna provide exfiltration for our people?
That's not an empire. That's not a superpower. That's a power in decline. That's what the Chinese see, by the way. And the Chinese think their time is at hand because we are committing national suicide with this insanity.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
NCTC Director @joekent16jan19 resigned rather than go along with the Iran war. Why? Because the intel didn’t justify it. Because Israel set the timeline. Because Washington didn’t ask the only question that matters: What is in this for the United States?
Video Transcript AI Summary
Joe Kent, the recently resigned head of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), discusses the reasons behind his departure and its broader political implications. He says the resignation received more attention outside national security circles than he anticipated, and he notes the response from some former colleagues has been substantial. Kent addresses criticisms from figures like Sebastian Gorka, including a voicemail, and defends his stance and conduct during his tenure and resignation.
The central issue Kent highlights is his belief that the United States entered a war with Iran under pressure from Israel and its American lobby, rather than because Iran posed an imminent threat. He argues that the decision to go to war was made under intense influence from allied actors and that the administration’s posture was driven by demands for zero enrichment and regime change, which he views as misguided. He states his hope that President Trump will consider alternative advice and potentially change course, given concerns about the trajectory of the conflict.
Kent describes the current situation as heading toward a catastrophic direction economically and strategically. He cites the global market and energy production in the Gulf as areas already experiencing massive impacts, and he contends that the United States’ role as security guarantor in the region has deteriorated. He also expresses concern about American casualties and the possibility that the Israeli leadership might be tempted to escalate further, including the possibility of a nuclear strike by Israel if the conflict worsens. He emphasizes that restraining Israel is a fundamental prerequisite for any credible negotiation or attempted de-escalation.
Regarding intelligence and threat assessment, Kent asserts that there was no imminent Iranian threat. He explains that, in his view, the Iranian escalation ladder is understood through various data sources, and he claims Romney-style consensus within the NSC warned against aggressive strikes that would backfire by rallying Iranian hardliners. He criticizes the influence of Israeli channels and media surrogates on American policy, arguing that this contributed to the misreading of Iran’s capabilities and intentions. He links these dynamics to past errors such as the Iraq War, alleging Israeli involvement in pushing for interventions and misrepresenting the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Kent also discusses U.S. policy in Syria, arguing that the United States should have limited its engagement with the regime led by former al-Qaeda-linked figures. He contends that the U.S. became too closely involved with HTS/Jalani’s government and that these actions tied Washington to concessions and a broader Syrian outcome that is not aligned with American interests. He notes tension between Israeli and Turkish aims in Syria and predicts conflicts between those two actors as they vie for influence.
On the domestic terrorism front, Kent notes that the biggest open-source threat comes from inspired, lone actors rather than organized cells. He references data indicating tens of thousands of known or suspected terrorists and underscores uncertainty about who is currently within the United States due to porous borders. He suggests that while we can disrupt cells, lone actors driven by inspiration remain a significant concern because they are harder to detect and interdict.
Throughout the discussion, there is a recurring emphasis on the need for American leadership to consider “what is in it for The United States” in major policy decisions, rather than yielding to external lobbies or ally-driven narratives. Both Joe Kent and Dr. Mike Scheuer critique what they see as the overreliance on special operations and on partners like Israel to push objectives, arguing for a more measured, strategically coherent approach that restrains aggressive actions by allies when they threaten broader American interests or stability in global currency and energy dynamics.
As the interview closes, the hosts announce that Kent will appear on Mark Levin’s show, signaling ongoing public engagement in the debate over U.S. policy toward Iran, Israel, and the broader Middle East. The conversation touches on the potential of negotiated settlements and the controversial notion of large-scale special forces operations as a path forward, with Kent reiterating the primacy of restraining Israeli actions as essential to any viable policy outcome.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Doctor Mike, why don't you introduce yourself?
Speaker 1: Yeah. My name is Mike Scheuer and I I worked at the agency at CIA for twenty two years and have written some books about Osama bin Laden and militant Islam. And I aspire to be a historian, but I'm pretty much grandfather these days.
Speaker 0: And I'm very honored. We are we are joined by by my friend, a man who was kind enough two years ago to give me a rather lovely blurb for my my recent book, a disaster of our own making, how the West lost Ukraine. And then he got pulled in to the Trump administration, and and he has now, recently resigned from his post as the head of of the National Counterterrorism Center, none other than, Joe Kent. It's nice to have you here, Joe.
Speaker 2: Great to be a both of you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 0: Absolutely. And, so we're gonna we're gonna open up with the the big news. And the big news is is that Joe Kent has resigned from the NCTC position. And, clearly, this has now become kind of a political hot potato. Joe, have you been surprised by some of the response from some of your former colleagues, or are you were you expecting some of this pushback that you're getting?
Speaker 2: You know, I I was expecting yeah. I I think that the pushback is about what I expected. I didn't think it my resignation would get as much traction as as it did as much attention outside of, like, national security circles. So that's been that's been more surprising to me.
Speaker 0: Yeah. You know, it's it's interesting. Sebastian Gorka, I saw him yesterday at the council on foreign relations. He he had he claims that he left you a rather nasty voicemail. Is there any truth to that?
Speaker 3: Wrote in his resignation letter, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. In response, you wrote on x, quote, he was a man without honor, and you disgrace. Just to be clear, was he wrong about those allegations?
Speaker 4: Well, you could ask him because three months ago, he said the exact opposite of what he said in his disgraceful resignation letter. So either he was lying then or he's lying now or most likely because he's not a principal. He's not a cabinet member. He is not in those meetings where that exquisite intelligence is provided. He said Iran has to be dealt with.
The president is correct, a scant few weeks ago. So what changed, Joe? What do you think? Personally speaking, I stand by what I said. He's an utter disgrace.
Well, I'll tell you the voice mail I left him yesterday. You are an utter disgrace to the uniform you once wore, to the republic for which it stands, and the fact that you used the name of your late wife is a political cudgel against the elected president and commander in chief is utterly inexcusable.
Speaker 2: He he did indeed. I mean, I wouldn't say it's nasty. Look at Skorka. He's kinda playing a part here. I got actually got along just fine.
I got along just fine with that when we worked together. So but now I you know, he's he's he's doing his thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He's covering his own butt, which is his main occupation in life.
Speaker 2: Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 0: And and I should I should clarify for the audience, because he is the senior director, at the National Security Council for counterterrorism. You guys worked pretty closely together.
Speaker 2: We did. We we had just a fine working relationship. I mean, some I I know there's a lot of people, like, on the Internet who would have an opinion about about Gorka. He's he's fine to work with. So Yeah.
You know? But I I kinda figured he'd he'd kinda come out like this. It's alright.
Speaker 0: Okay. Okay. Okay. So, you've you've you've left the administration. You're doing this whirlwind, media tour.
Is there it was the reason that you ultimately left, is it because you feared where things were going with the Iran war, or was this sort of just one of of many steps you were taking to leave?
Speaker 2: I'd say it's twofold. I mean, number one, I I don't believe, and I think I can prove this, that that that we got into this war because Iran posed imminent threat to us. I think the Israelis forced our hand. Members of senior members of the administration, secretary of state, and president have even basically said this themselves. And as a matter of conscience, think that's wrong and to have a foreign country tell us when and how we go to war.
But, also, you know, just being a veteran myself and and a gold star husband, a promise I made to myself many years ago was if I if I ever had the ability to attempt to stop us from getting into a needless war, I'd do everything I could even if it meant, like, resigning. And we can we can get into this more, but the the way that the the the decision to take us to war in this last iteration was made, I don't think there was any other way for me to actually have my voice heard within the administration. So my hope is truly to reach president Trump, and he doesn't have to, you know, acknowledge me or anything. But it's it's to make him think that maybe now is a good time to seek other advice and and to change course because things are heading in in a catastrophic direction.
Speaker 0: Now when you say catastrophic direction, and I I I obviously, I think you're aware of where I stand on this. What exactly do you mean? Do you mean a strategic defeat of the United States military? Do you mean nuclear weapons exchange? What what do you mean by catastrophic, outcome?
Speaker 2: I think we're already seeing a catastrophic preview, I guess. Now you could put it in terms of what's happening on the the the global market, which I think both of you are very familiar with Yeah. In terms of energy production. The our Gulf, the GCC partners, I I I think, are in a very, very bad place, and and it it can only take them quite a while to recover. So that economic impact is already massive.
But then in terms of, like, the the power and the prestige of the the US military and the the ability for us to continue to be the security guarantors of the region, I think, is probably shattered for a long time, if not for the the very foreseeable future. And I'm also I'm also very, very concerned of losing more American lives over there. The potential of of ground troops like you're hearing on the Sunday shows today, this this crazy idea of basically making a bunch of marines the hostage of Iran by putting them on this this Crag Island. But, also, because Iran is so big and we've set the bar at some kind of a total surrender, As crazy as nuclear weapons sound, the more you play out this equation, I I do fear that the the Israelis would be tempted to use a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I I actually am with you on that. And I think actually the IDF former IDF guy that I was spoke speaking with recently, the the claim is that, IDF believes The US invasion will fail, yet there's still their government is still pressing Trump to do this. And, it could very well end with an Israeli nuclear attack because they they think that we're not going to succeed when all is said and done. Why why is this happening, Joe?
What like, why why are we in this position? Because three weeks ago, things were going okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, essentially, at the very beginning of the the Trump administration, there was a push for military action inside of Iran. This time last year ish is when it kinda started in my from from my vantage point. And and president Trump rightfully said, no. I wanna try and negotiate.
And the the issue that I think the the Iran hawks and the Israeli lobby had was that Trump was probably very well postured, in my opinion, to to get a nuclear deal. Because president Trump's red line, as he stated it, was that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. The Ayatollah, the former Ayatollah, before he was killed, his he he had a prohibition, a fatwa, on actually making a nuclear weapon, which means they could get to the negotiating table. I think in the first Trump administration, the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the maximum pressure sanctions showed that president Trump was, like, very pragmatic, very tough. You had to deal with him, but that he was reasonable.
And so if your goal is to get regime change in Iran, you have to short circuit this process. You can't have Trump and the Ayatollah agreeing at a starting point for negotiations. So in a very, very slick and concerted way, from from my vantage point, I saw senior senior level leaders from the the Israeli side come in and say, zero enrichment zero enrichment over and over again. The Iranians can't have any enrichment capability. And then we we talking point laundered by all the pro Israel talking heads, Mark Levin, FDD, Washington Post, New York Post, etcetera, about how enrichment basically equals a nuclear bomb, which it doesn't.
And so then they said it enough that it started making its way into official US talking points that the American policy is no enrichment, which just wasn't the case whatsoever. And that kinda got us to Midnight Hammer. And right before Midnight Hammer kicked off, a lot of us said very you know, just from experience, we said, hey. Even if we do Midnight Hammer and it's completely successful, the Israelis are gonna come back to us in six months and demand support for the regime change, and and that's what happened. This is my my big issue is that we let the Israelis thrive the the the timeline.
We let the Israelis blow up the negotiations. So that that's kinda how we got to to this point where we are right now. And the Israelis basically back us to a corner because I I even the second round of negotiations, I think, was gonna be more challenging post Midnight Hammer, but it was making some progress. And, the Israelis just basically said, no. We're gonna do it, and then the Iranians will attack you.
And here we are.
Speaker 0: So the Israelis, it sounds like, are all over our our intelligence, collection process, our vetting process. Doctor Mike, do you have any any question on on related to the obvious intelligence manipulation and or intelligence failures for for mister Kent?
Speaker 1: I think there's there are both. Both failures are apparent, but the greatest failure is in language. The only Yeah. Immediate threat to The United States is those units, those paramilitaries who were sent into the country over the last four or five years and have not been cleaned up yet, little maybe not even identified yet. That's the immediate threat.
You know, every day an American wakes up at dawn and goes to bed at ten or twelve, he's he is under an immediate threat from Soviet Union and China. But we have a relationship with them that allows us to be somewhat secure that they're not gonna jump off the board for the sake of jumping off. And when you talk about an immediate threat from Iran, it is nowhere in the in the conception of man. The equivalent to the threat that we face day in and day out from China and Soviet Russia. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: It's okay.
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a very old man. It's the way they fool people with that is is just Yep. Typical of government. There is no possible reason to think that the Iranians were an immediate threat to The United States. They're not suicidal.
My own my own view is on what mister Flint said is that the Israelis are at the base of all of our problems Mhmm. In the Middle East. They're they are there was a movie about World War two called They Were Expendable and it fits the Israelis perfectly. They're nothing but a a a continuing flat tire on the American car and as long as they're there, we're going to be, as as mister Flint said, controlled by foreign enemies. And let there be no mistake, they are an enemy of everything that The United States stands for.
Whether it's the first amendment, the second amendment, independence, a foreign policy that that is concerned with America first. It's a disastrous situation for The United States and for whatever reason, Trump seems not to bind being the play toy of a person, a destitute person like Netanyahu. So I have no doubt that what mister Flint is saying is accurate and it's about time someone in the government in more recent years has begun to say, what goes on here? You know, why why are 525 American congressmen and senators being paid by the Israelis? And it should not take a big brain to understand is that that it that that's not in the interest of The United States.
Speaker 0: And and, Joe, just so the audience understands. I mean, because something that Gorka and a lot of the people from the administration who are attacking you or or criticizing your your recent resignation, they're saying that, well, mister Kent didn't have the same level of intelligence access that, you know, the president has. What is the level of access that you had as NCTC director? Because I would assume it's fairly high.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, there's always some, you know, special access program or or something else that, you know, select people are read into. But anything pertaining to CT at the top levels, I I was read into. So an imminent attack, I I I'm pretty sure that I would have known of or at least known the broad themes of. Yep.
And look. I'm pretty well versed in in the Iranian target set from, you know, my previous life, and this this takes up a lot of our a lot of our bandwidth at NCTC as the Iranian threat. Yep. And, look, there was no there wasn't any there was no imminent threat coming from Iran. And, look, under especially this Trump administration, we have a lot of data that's publicly available.
We have a really good idea of what the the Iranian escalation ladder looks like. Under Biden, Iran's proxies had attract attacked our troops and and killed three of them at Tower 22, but there was over, I think, close to 200 attacks after October 7 by the proxies against American forces in Iraq and Syria and Jordan. Once Trump came in back into office, those those attacks stopped. There was a moratorium on attacking Americans. And then we went and got to the negotiating table, and then we watched again when the twelve day war kicked off.
The the Iranians were pretty deliberate in not hitting our bases and not hitting Americans because they understood it was the Israelis. After midnight Hammer, the Iranians launched an equal number of missiles that we dropped bombs at, like, an empty corner of one of our bases on Qatar that they knew that we had evacuated and said, okay. We'd like to get back to the negotiating table now. So we we have a lot of data to understand exactly how Iran will escalate. So I completely reject the the idea that there was there was any kind of imminent attack.
And you know what? This isn't controversial because Marco Rubio came out right away and said, like, we had to attack because the Israelis are going to attack. So the only imminent attack was the Israeli attack.
Speaker 0: But as you can hear, doctor Mike is is still firmly with us, riding strong as we we explore what's going on in The Middle East with really one of the one of the foremost experts, I would argue, of military affairs in The Middle East and in counterterrorism, none other than the recently former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent. And Joe was just explaining to us why he doubted, and I think he's right, why he doubted the the intelligence that was that that that fell from the sky two weeks ago saying that the the Iranians were imminently going to strike us with whatever wonder weapons we think they've built in the in the in the mountains over there. Joe, now that you, now that you've you've come out and you've said this, what do you think is likely going to happen? Are are you of the mind that The US really will attack Karg Island? Because 5,000 marines or less doesn't sound like it's gonna be much of a success for us.
Do you think that this is just the president sort of posturing here, or do you really think he's gonna try to do this?
Speaker 2: I mean, I I pray and I hope and I and I hope that we can influence him from the outside. This is kinda like why I went on Tucker, and I'm going on as many many shows as I can. I I hope and I pray that he's not going to do that, that he's just having them there as a contingency to to show strength, etcetera. So I I hope that he is not listening to I I hope he stops listening to the people that got us to this point, because I believe president Trump is still a a very smart man. If he sees the way things are going right now, especially the impact it's having here on the homeland in terms of economics, the the effects of the casualties, he should he should seek other counsel at this time.
And that that's my hope because whoever right now is telling him that he should deploy forces to Carve Island. I saw again, I saw a bunch of senators and some congressmen talking about it today on the Sunday shows. He needs to kick them out of the Oval Office and and and talk to some dissenting voices right now to get other options. And I and I I've said this on Tucker, and I said it again last night. Before he does anything, if he wants to get out of this, his first first task is to restrain the Israelis.
Because if you don't restrain the Israelis, everything else is going to fail.
Speaker 0: Why do you think the Israelis are so gung ho right now about doing this? I mean, what what do you what is going on in in that part of the world that is prompting them? Is there any real security reason for this, or is this just all political internal Israeli machinations?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm no I'm no expert on the the dynamics of what's taking place. Obviously, BB was in political hot water to say the very least prior to October 7. And so the continuation of the conflict, you know, in theory I mean, in general, I think wars are good for most sitting presidents. So that seems to be the theory BB's going with. But I do think, you know, based on just talking to prominent Israelis either in or out of the government, they viewed the the Likud leaning ones, they view this time as, like, their golden opportunity to take down the the Ayatollah, the Iranian threat once and for all.
They've already gotten rid of Assad. They've they've basically decapitated Hezbollah. So getting that right now going after what they consider to be the head of the stake is in their is in their national interest. They think with Trump in office, this is a limited window. Because I think they understand here domestically in America that this might be the last truly kind of, I guess, lack of better term, baby boomer generation that's just blindly pro Israel that they're they're going to get.
And the Israelis, to me, were always very straightforward when we would deal with them. They would never they unless they were trying to influence us, they wouldn't talk about enrichment nuclear, etcetera. They would talk about we need to take down the Ayatollah and do it now, and we don't really care if it's long and protracted and bloody.
Speaker 0: Wow. Wow. Well, bloody bloody for us. You know? Definitely for them.
Speaker 2: Region. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. So doctor Mike, do you have anything you wanna you wanna Yeah.
Speaker 1: One one thing that I think what I years ago when I worked for the agency, I was astounded by the most senior officers knowing virtually nothing about The Middle East and not caring.
Speaker 0: John Brennan wasn't genius enough?
Speaker 2: No. He wasn't genius enough.
Speaker 1: But I I I would doubt that a senior American political leader, president, senator ever read a single word that Osama bin Laden said. And then yet, within those documents is what we're seeing unfold today. That these people are smart, they're good analysts and they know how far they can push and and are surprised constantly by the fact that we don't listen to them. Yeah. You know, there is an extraordinary stupidity when we talk about Iran as if they're all crazy people.
And we don't maybe we don't disagree with them, but their operations are based on what they believe their national security interests are. And we can't we we regard that as, you know, mindless terrorism or juvenile kind of behavior. In reality, they fight with what they have when they can. And it just we we we we're walking down this road and even though we've gone out we've had two or three wars in the last six months, yeah, last year rather, We seem not to have realized that the Iranians and probably many other Islamist countries Islamic countries are not no longer the Arabs who Peter O'Toole rallied against the Germans. That they may have studied a little bit about physics, about armature arms and and other kinds of modern things.
Know, this whole business looks to me like we this is a shocker for The US intelligence community in the sense of of the the, you know, very impressive ability of the Iranians to use a variety of homemade missiles to really blast the hell out of what's trying to hurt them.
Speaker 0: And and, Joe, do you think that our side has been genuinely taken aback by the level of ferocity and effectiveness of the Iranian well, first of let me just ask you. Do you think in your professional opinion, the Iranians have been effective encountering us? And if you do, do you think that our side was, not well prepared for that?
Speaker 2: I think they've been I think they've very effective. I I mean, however, there there's there's two worlds that exist. There's one that consistently reads the intelligence and studies it, and then there there was a, unfortunately, a small group of senior decision late decision makers who isolated themselves from any dissenting voices and listened to the Israelis and listened to the the the logic that wasn't backed up by any intelligence that said, hey. A month ago, there was a bunch of Iranian protesters out there, and that means the regime is really, really weak. And if you just come and you make some really, really big bold strikes, these same people who are on the streets protesting are then going to, I I guess, overthrow their their government.
And all of our strategic goals are gonna be very, very easy to accomplish, and this whole thing will be done in, I don't know, four weeks or so. Yeah. But there was no intelligence. I didn't read any intelligence that reflected that. When we were having robust debates as we are supposed to do at the deputy's level and at the NS at National Security Council level in the lead up to the the twelve day war and midnight hammer, we we widely agreed that any kind of strikes against the regime would result in a rally around the flag effect, which actually, if our goal was to take down the regime, would empower the hardliners, which is what we've seen.
I mean, I the obviously, supreme leader Khomeini's son, I believe, is even more hardline than his father, and we're also empowering members of the IRGC who are basically saying, like, the moderates got us in this mess. Don't all these guys who were saying we could sit down with the Americans, they got duped twice. They're a bunch of suckers. And the IRGC, like, I mean, most of us know, these are hardcore guys. I mean, they fought in the Iraq Iran war.
They fought us very effectively in our own Iraq war, Hezbollah, etcetera. So, unfortunately, the c our our our senior level policymakers, they they didn't listen to the actual intelligence. They listened to what the Israelis were telling them through unofficial channels, and then they listened to the Israeli surrogates on the media, and they created their own echo chamber. And that's, again, how we got to this point.
Speaker 0: And it is in your in your resignation letter, just so the in case the audience hasn't heard it, you do have a comment in there that I I really thought was excellent. When you you this was you you say this was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again. So you you have fought in Iraq. You spent, well, with your entire adult life, basically, fighting these these global wars on terror, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Do you believe that the Iraq war like this one was the byproduct of some Israeli information operation targeting the US government in 2002 and 2003?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. And think the public record really supports that. I mean, again, it was it was a it was a young Benjamin Netanyahu who had previously been the prime minister. I think he was somewhere else in the government at the time.
But he came here, and he lobbied, and he's a very convincing salesman. He came and he said, basically, you know, Saddam's on the cusp of getting the WMD, didn't have catastrophic effects on on America. I think they even helped launder the the idea that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda. Yep. And then you you also had the entire Israeli, like, media pro Israeli media apparatus here in America, FTD again, and a few other think tanks doing the same thing with with the media.
So, obviously, they partnered with the neocons. They partnered with the military industrial complex. So they they weren't the sole actor driving that train, but they had a big influence. And the Israelis do a very effective job, I think, not not just at the media game, but they do have an impressive intelligence service that can that can carry out very impressive, I would say, like, tactical operations, know, assassinations deep behind enemy lines. Mhmm.
And that really intrigues a lot of people. So then when the Israelis come and say, hey. I have a secret to tell you. You guys don't know this yet. And then they they kinda get then they then they give you their talking points.
Like, a lot of people who aren't well versed in intelligence will say, oh, wow. This has gotta be good. It's coming from the Israelis. So that's that's what appeared to happen, you know, with the lead up to Iraq war and in this war.
Speaker 0: Doctor Mike, you were an early critic of the Iraq war. How dangerous is it for the country to have political leaders who basically take in unverified claims as fact, from foreign sources? I can't imagine I can't think of another time, another country that we do that for other than Israel. Can you think of any other instant?
Speaker 1: Yeah. I can't think of one. What I you know, it's it's true enough. With the Iranians, with the Israelis, it's a combination of the tremendously effective third column or fifth column, fourth whatever column it is. They've created in The United States from from Protestants to to some weird Catholics to all of the congress.
I mean, how do you do that? You you do that, you know, by misinterpreted misinterpreting the bible, by paying off people, by threatening people, by doing what they did apparently to Charlie Kirk. I mean, we're in the grip of of as evil in our own terms as as in as evil as of a organization that there exists in the world and we we kowtow to it. And the the whole the whole business of of America being involved in Iraq or Afghanistan earlier and the quality of our generals in terms of leadership is is abysmal. We can't go aboard abroad to fight a war if we have clowns like the the the fellow that they they keep now going I think he's been sicked on mister Flint.
He lost he lost in Afghanistan. He lost in in Iraq. They made him CIA director, and then he they found out that he's playing around with a woman, and they got rid of him.
Speaker 0: You're talking about Ratcliffe?
Speaker 1: No. No. It's the general guy. Patreus.
Speaker 0: Oh, we have Patreus.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The
Speaker 1: clown of clowns Yeah. In in uniform. Yeah. And it's really astounding how Americans the American citizens put up with it. Maybe they don't realize it.
Maybe they don't wanna real admit it, But we are under the the paw of foreigners more often than not in our decisions for war.
Speaker 0: And and, Joe Joe, are you because I again, I'm seeing all the pushback from people that we mutually know, people that I would think knew you before you resigned and were probably very friendly with you. Are is there any concern among with know, that you have about, you know, possible unfair treatment that they might try to, you know, come at you legally, or has there been any indication other than just sort of these these, you know, from people like Gorka? Or do you think there might be a a campaign now coordinated against you for for daring to question the status quo?
Speaker 2: I'm sure there will be to some extent. I've I've only seen what's been leaked on the media. So, like, the the accusations that I I am a leaker that have been leaked by the FBI to the mainstream media. That's what I've seen. But most of that coincided with me going on major platforms like Tucker show.
Yeah. So I viewed that more as, like, a countermedia narrative. Mhmm. I'm confident that, like, I followed all the procedures, and I didn't you know, I know I didn't leak. And so I'm sure they're looking through all my stuff right now to to see if they've got me.
Obviously, my antenna's up because because of what happened to to a good man like general Flynn and so many others too. So it's it's a concern, but, man, I'm like, we can't let these people intimidate us anymore. No. I mean, that's why I I just tried that's why I just tried to be as clear as I could in my resignation letter and speak the truth now. And, you know, I think right now with the with social media, I think it it it helps because it does give, people who are willing to stand up.
It it gives us a platform and kind of the ability to make it public, and it makes that it makes it a little bit harder for them to come after us. Not impossible, but harder.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Do you I agree. I agree. And, you know, I told, I was chatting with with your your wife over direct messages, and I said, you know, just always have a lawyer on standby because I'm sure some of these guys are gonna defame you at some point. And they're that's a that's a you know, that's something you can use to defend yourself, because a lot of the stuff I'm hearing borders on defamation.
I'm not an attorney, but I've been around enough to know. I'm very surprised with how how some of these attacks on you are sounding. I would also ask you, do you think there is because I'm seeing Raheem Kassam is now tweeting that he's hearing from his sources in the White House that Trump is talking about doing negotiations to end the war beginning at the end of this month, so in about a week. Do you think it's even possible at this point, given all that's going on, to get some kind of negotiated settlement, with the Islamic Republic Of Iran, or are they just gonna keep piling on now?
Speaker 2: I I I'm optimistic. I think we still can. The the the more time that goes on, the harder that's gonna get. But, the fundamental factor, if he if president Trump is serious about that, he has to restrain the Israelis. And I think the only way to actually truly restrain the Israelis, it's it's not just telling them, you have to go to the Israelis.
You have to say, we are taking away features of your defense, your military aid so that all you can do is defend yourself. And and and we will defend you too if you are attacked. However, you will not we will take away enough aid that you can't go on the offense. All of our negotiations will fail regardless of how skilled the diplomats are, how good the deal is, unless Israel is restrained. That's fundamental to the equation.
Speaker 0: I I think that's probably correct. And I will just say it looks like contrary to what Western media sources are reporting, what they're not reporting it. I I'm seeing on foreign sources, it looks like Israel is getting pummeled right now. So there might be some wiggle room now diplomatically, hopefully, because they're so weakened. They might not have a choice but to listen to us finally rather than trying to dictate to us.
We're gonna take a our final commercial break. I am Brandon Weichert. I'm the Wednesday night host of the National Security Hour. You can also check me out on National Security Talk on Rumble, and I am cohosting the Monday show with, none other than the great doctor Mike. We will be right back with Joe Kent for our final segment.
Don't touch that dial. Okay and then Doctor. Mike is this one also eighteen minutes?
Speaker 1: Yes sir.
Speaker 0: Alright. Alright. This is great. I wish we had video but this is great. This is great.
Alright. I'm gonna count us down five, four, three, two, and one. We are back for our final segment with Joe Kent, who's a friend of mine, and he's he's filling us in about what's going on with The Middle East, Iran, the political fallout from his, I think, quite honorable resignation letter. Something that I do wanna ask him about, it's sort of really in his bailiwick as the former National Counterterrorism Center director. We keep hearing from the administration, Joe, that the there is a wave of terrorism that could soon be hitting the, you know, the fruited plains of America conducted by Iranian proxies.
Do you think that that that is a real threat at this moment, or do you think that, like the the prewar intelligence, might be overhyped?
Speaker 2: Well, I I think because of the open borders in the past four years, we we frankly don't know who's in our country. I I testified publicly that we had identified 18,000 known suspected terrorists who had access to America. And the more we dug through the data, we we kept coming up with these different datasets. The conclusion I came to was, like, we we just don't know, which is makes us incredibly vulnerable. But I think the the biggest threat comes from people being inspired to conduct terrorist attacks, not necessarily like a cell of clandestine terrorists infiltrating America like we saw pre nine eleven.
Because, like, in general, with cells, they have to communicate. And I think right now, knock on wood, we're we're pretty proficient at breaking those cells up when they do that. But what we're not very good at because it's it's almost impossible is the lone actors that are inspired to conduct attacks. And we've already seen several attacks since the operations kicked off in Iran, and they all appear to be basically lone actors minus one who's got some tangential ties, I think, back home to individuals who are associated with with Hezbollah. But our our assessment going into the war was that the the lone actors and then also, like, anti Iran, just like the way the the Gaza conflict grew legs of its own and inspiring people, that that was the biggest threat.
So really the blowback terrorism or the inspirational terrorism.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, I talked with, I think, someone you know, Sam Faddis, about a week or two ago, and, you know, he reminded me that the largest Iranian consulate in the world is in Mexico City. And as he said, it's not because of all the Shiites living in Mexico City. So Right. So
Speaker 2: Well well known. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Go ahead.
Speaker 2: Oh, I was gonna be sarcastic so you know, well known birthplace of one of your moms. Right?
Speaker 0: That's right. That's right. So doctor Mike, do you have any comment on the potential Go ahead.
Speaker 1: No. I was just gonna say Brandon that the one thing that it doesn't get talked about very much of course is how the enemy is thinking and what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And it seems to me that the Iranians and much of the Muslim world must be thinking this is it. This is the one time we are close to solving this this sickness, this absence that's tied to the body of the Muslim world and the Israelis. Why would they give up now? I I I don't know the answer to that, but I don't know the Israeli mind very well or the Iranian mind very well. I but I think that they've all been, whether it's Shia or Sunni, they've been around the block enough times to realize that if they don't, at some point, eliminate this this debt threat to their their faith, to their countries, to their control of their countries, that it's just gonna happen over and over again.
They've never come this close. And I don't know how their minds work, but I wonder if they're not thinking, my god. We should have never got this close to what's going on at the moment. Maybe we should finish it.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I I I am concerned about the home front, but I I also worry that this is a ripe moment for a false flag. Joe, do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2: I don't. I haven't seen any indications of that, but, you know, I mean, yeah, war war is chaotic and crazy.
Speaker 0: So Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's just kinda anything.
Speaker 0: So okay. So we're let me ask you this, Joe. Do you think this is the beginnings or that we are already in potentially a third world war, or do you still think this is a regional war that we could contain and and and end without this thing escalating into something like 1914?
Speaker 2: Seems very much like we're in the middle of a regional war the early phases of World War three. I mean, the the biggest benefactor so far has been China. They're still getting a good flow of oil. They're settling transactions in Yuan as opposed to petrodollar attacking the stability of the dollar. Russia, I think we're having to either unsanction or just look the other way.
Yep. A lot of their oil that we had sanctioned during the the Ukraine conflict. Right? So in theory, if if we care about great power competition, this was, again, much like the Ukraine war, one of the biggest blunders that that we could make. And I know the Israelis are seeking to, like, remake the Middle East, But I I I think at at end of this, however it ends, at least the GCC countries, they're gonna be very skeptical, number one, of our our our ability to actually provide them with security.
But number two, again, and this is catastrophic, I think, for the entire for our entire nation, the the security and stability of the dollar as the prime reserve currency holder Mhmm. And and the petrodollar. So even if we'd say that we don't really need Middle Eastern oil because we're gonna drill baby drill here, our system is still built on this this money printing and and a large part of that is reserve currency hold and the petro dollar. And so, like, again, if you wanted to destroy that, this is a great course of action for it. So I I'm I'm very concerned about all that.
Speaker 0: It is a little confusing as to why we would have done this given all of the second and third order effects, and I think I think you might be right that maybe they just weren't thinking about them. I mean, did you hear any talk from people in the administration about, you know, if we do this, there's gonna be second and third order effects, or was this all just supposed to be wrapped up within ninety six hours?
Speaker 2: So going into the twelve day war, that entire period, we had really robust discussions before midnight hammer, really robust discussions, heated discussions. And I thought they were healthy and they were productive even though I didn't necessarily agree that we needed to to do midnight hammer. I we thought could have restrained the twelve day war from happening. I I I felt like it was a a process where, like, all courses of action were discussed. In this last iteration, I I didn't I didn't see that.
And I know the White House will say, well, that's because we kicked you out of the room and it was, you know, only for people with whatever whatever clearance. Didn't like any meetings. But I I still would have at least heard of the meetings. So, like, the the deputy's committee process, the enency process, it just didn't happen. And I I think had they had a a bigger audience or at least brought in some some other voices as opposed to the hawks, all all of this would have been discussed because I I don't think anything that we're saying here is, you know, obviously not exquisite intelligence.
Mhmm. And it I don't think it takes a genius to figure out.
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: I You know what it takes a genius to figure out these days is why an American president or secretary of state doesn't ask himself or ask his associates, his his minions, what is in this for The United States? And then For example, does it really matter to The United States if Israel exists or not? Is it it like, it's it's like Ukraine. You know, what in the world are we doing in Ukraine? And what's our interest there?
I guess it's what do they call it? Adrenachrome and the rest of that kind of stuff. I guess that's what it is. I mean, the simple it seems to me that that the simplest thing is for the president to sit with his advisers and say, why in the world do we wanna spend blood and money on on whether it's Ukraine or or or Israel or anybody else. You know, you could say we have our two greatest allies and they won't go away, Atlantic and Pacific.
And it it it has amazed me since since I went to work at the agency and I and it still amazes me now. I don't know I don't understand it. And they always say, oh, Scheuer, you don't understand the the complicated nature of world affairs. And when I hear the word complication, all I can all I can hear is we're going and we don't know what's gonna happen, but we're going.
Speaker 0: Well and, Joe, actually, because you you were one of the leading voices for the, you know, America first ideology within the administration. You and VP Vance and and Tulsi Gabbert, the the the director of national intelligence, were sort of the three most prominent America firsters other than president Trump, in the administration. What what what was the input level of your colleagues like the vice president or DNI Gabbert on the sort of run up to this this in this attack on Iran two weeks ago? What would did did did they have sizable influence, or were they sort of kind of ignored, pushed aside?
Speaker 2: I mean, the the pictures that that that were released publicly on the night of the first night of the war where you had a small group all the way down in Mar A Lago Yep. And then you had the rest of the the national security effort has up in the situation room, that honestly tells a pretty accurate Yeah. Sale. And that that was basically my my take too from the inside. So I don't even have to give you any any kind of inside baseball.
When they published those pictures, I said, you know what? Pictures worth a thousand words. That's it right there. That's how this war was planned, unfortunately.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And it it looked like and I say this as a supporter of the vice presidents. It looked like the vice president was put at the kiddie table. That's what it looked like to me, And it was very upsetting to me, to see that, personally. So I can only imagine how you and and Tulsi must have felt being on the inside watching that happen.
My my next question here, and maybe you I don't know. Maybe you wouldn't know this, but, you know, I've been making the rounds talking about the depletion rates. You know, our arsenals, there's about 14 key weapon systems, notably interceptors, but also some of our standoff munitions. Now you're a former military guy. You've been on the ground.
You've been in the thick of it. We know that general Cain, who's the joint chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, on the day before the war began, he told the president that if this war goes on beyond eight to fourteen days, we're gonna start depleting those systems. What is what do you think is going on right now? Do you think that we are okay with the systems we have in place, or are we really, really in a crisis now? Because it's been going on for three weeks as of today, almost three weeks, I guess, twenty twenty two days.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, from my approach looking at CT and my background is soft, but that that's I I don't know a ton about, like, the the major weapon systems probably in the in the detail that you do. But I I think, again, just kinda going back to basic common sense, how how for how long can we send these major weapon systems, like, to Israel, to Ukraine, and now to fight in this war? Like, I I feel like we're we're doing our best to figure out, like, what that equation is. Yeah.
Like, how fast we go towards empty, and what peril does that put us in in in other places. Yeah. Again, it I believe the president was was told that, hey. This is only gonna last, like, I don't know, maybe two weeks, but we're gonna knock down their air defenses really quick when we drop in dumb bombs on them and, hey. We're it's fine.
Again, without kinda getting that that more contradictory or like, hey, sir. This could go really bad. And then in which case, like, here's what will happen. Again, I I I just didn't see a process like that playing out.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we're we're talking the larger strategic picture, and it isn't just the Trump administration. You know, we saw this like like doctor Mike was mentioning with Ukraine, with Biden. We've saw we saw this throughout the Obama years during the Arab Spring.
We saw it during the Iraq war and the global war on terror during George w Bush, where basically we we don't we substitute this sort of ideology and, you know, vibes for real strategy. And that gets us to Syria because did
Speaker 1: you wanna
Speaker 0: say something to that? No.
Speaker 2: That that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone just feels confident as we go.
I mean
Speaker 0: That's right. That's right. And and this gets us to Syria because I I have for two years now been raging against what's going on what what The US policy has become in or is in Syria. We've elevated basically an ISIS battlefield commander, a man who killed US troops in Iraq. He calls himself president Sharra now.
I'll always know him as al Jelani. And, you know, we know that that your your first wife was killed fighting the, you know, terrorists in Syria. As somebody who has been affected by what's going on in Syria, what do you think of the current policy toward Syria from The US side?
Speaker 2: I I I advocated really early on for us not to engage directly and overtly with, with Jelani and his new government. I said, hey. If we're gonna engage with them, they should be very, very quiet. I think we shouldn't have senior ranking officials over there. Yeah.
Keep our relationship, obviously, with the Kurds. Get our troops the heck out of there because they they don't belong. I think we have gone all in, and it takes away our ability to actually I I would say which so now that we're all in with with this this HTS government, the the the Jelani government, we have to support these guys and we are now wed to them. We brought them, you know, to the White House. Like, now we kinda own everything, and we didn't
Speaker 0: He was playing basketball with CENTCOM commanders when he came to DC.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And and Trump always had a pretty pretty pretty pragmatic approach to Syria. He wanted us to get out of there. Right when Jelani took over the country, he said, hey.
Syria's not our problem. And I and I said, hey. That's that's actually the right answer.
Speaker 0: That's right.
Speaker 2: But through influence from from the Turks, we decided that we're gonna go in there and cosplay like this was a a real government. And, again, back to doctor Mike's question, I don't see what was I I still don't see what's in it for The US right now other than us cozying up to the former, you know, head of Al Qaeda, hand selected by Imel Zawahiri.
Speaker 0: Yep. Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1: You know, the one thing you can't underestimate is the the the potential for fooling an American official by by an Arab putting putting a suit on.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1: They suddenly be they or Islamist, if you will. He said they suddenly become rational guys. And it look how well it worked in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: That's
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1: Put a suit on them, and now they're gonna be just like us.
Speaker 0: The blood washes out differently, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 0: So so the and then then this gets to another issue because, you know, the Israelis are now raging against Erdogan's Turkey, which just blows my mind because it seems like lately, they've been working quite cozily together. What is the role, Joe, of Turkey on I mean, we've talked a lot about Israeli influence on US foreign policy in The Middle East. What is the the role of the Turkish poll of Turkey rather on US policy? Because it seems like Trump and Erdogan have a very, you know, cozy relationship most of the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This one, I'm confused by. I I'm used to the Israeli influence just from being around the Middle East. The Turks, in in all my previous experiences, we we were very skeptical of them, especially their relationship with ISIS, with Al Qaeda in in Syria. You know, we've always been very close with the Kurds because they've always been pretty good tactical partners.
Kurds don't tend to, you know, kill you in in, you know, so called blue green on blue attacks. Mhmm. So, honestly, I I don't know what that is. I do think, though, that the Israelis and the Turks, they're they're going to come to a head inside Syria because they're both jockeying to basically be the the the dominant power in Syria. So at some point, there's gonna be a conflict there, which is all the more reason why I I I just I would always say that Syria is like it's the equation that we always end up losing in.
We either get stuck in a conflict between Assad and, you know, the head choppers, or we get stuck in a conflict between the Kurds and the Turks, or now we're stuck in we're we're already stuck refereeing between the Israelis and the Turks. And and again, back to the fundamental question, like, what American citizens benefits from this?
Speaker 0: Yes. Yes. Any thoughts, doctor Mike?
Speaker 1: No. I I entirely agree with that, obviously. Yeah. Brandon, it's it's a it's this it should be the first question you ask if you were in if you were a freshman in college study studying foreign policy, what's in it for our country? Yep.
No one asks it. And when they do answer it, it comes up with, oh, they killed some Iranians or some protesters. Well, that's a sad thing, but it's not war material. I agree. And, you know, a few Israelis get bumped off because they've been bumping off Arabs for 40 for fifty years, sixty years, whatever it is.
You know, that's too bad. But, you know, what goes around comes around.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So in our last question I agree, of course, doctor Mike. In our last question for Joe, where do you think this is all headed, Joe? I mean, where where given how I don't wanna I guess blase is the right word. How blase or flippant, the the current administration has been in leading us into what could be World War three.
What do you think is the likeliest end state here? Because I don't even know what we're trying to achieve with the military forces we've arrayed. It doesn't seem like we have what it takes to really do a regime change, and I wouldn't wanna do a regime change because of the cost. But where do you think this is going, Joe?
Speaker 2: I mean, I kinda think we're still in the abyss of either continued more continued escalation, boots on the ground, us trying to take over a portion of, like, the coastline, the Straits Of Hormuz, and then things get exponentially worse from there. Mhmm. But I am optimistic, and I and I do think at some point and I and I am I'm banking on president Trump being what I think is still still an intelligent person who cares about the future of our country, I I think he's got time to turn this around. I don't know how much time. I don't think it's a lot of time.
But, again, if he doesn't restrain the Israelis, it's all gonna be for naught. So I think until we address that fundamental question, we're gonna keep getting stuck in these different quagmires. If he if he does, like, a random not a random, but if he does a temporary peace, a temporary ceasefire, and the Israelis aren't restrained, it all goes out the window. But, I mean, everything between sucked into a to a ground war all the way to the Israelis potentially using a nuclear weapon and all the ramifications that could have, I just think that's the abyss. Every minute this conflict goes on longer, we just we slip in towards an abyss that, you know, there's there's no good outcome for for really, honestly, anybody at the end of the day.
Speaker 0: What about this this is my last question. I'm sorry to to keep but but you just brought something up that made me think. What about this other plan that I keep hearing floated that they're gonna deploy large numbers of special forces, your former colleagues, to go hunt down these nuclear materials in the heart of of war torn Iran. Is this even a practical thing? I know the special forces are highly trained, highly effective, you know, warfighters, but, I mean, this to me sounds like a pretty crazy, mission set they're gonna be asked to do.
What do you think about that?
Speaker 2: I think considering the proficiency proficiency the Iranians have showed to to defend their airspace and to use, you know, the the one way attack drones, I think any kind of, like, soft operation that has any, you know, any duration of boots on the ground strategic strike like we would normally do, it's gonna be highly risky, you're probably gonna take casualties and, you know, potentially, you're gonna lose aircraft. So I I I would caution against that heavily. I think, unfortunately, the the how spectacular our operation in Venezuela was gave a lot of false confidence out there. And I even had friends that are still in the business say to me after Venezuela, as I was congratulating them, they said, you know, please tell the guys you don't know how this whole thing works, this whole boots on the ground thing works, this whole special operations thing. Please tell them that we can't do this everywhere.
This is a very unique set of circumstances, and they were like, and for some reason, we we flushed out Murphy, and he didn't get out of the bag. But he usually gets out of the bag. So we we can't be thinking that we we can't think that this is an option in every single country. But then again too, even if we did do some spectacular raid and we cashed on nuclear material and, you know, it it it's great. Our our men and women in uniform are fantastic.
The Israelis aren't gonna stop. Like, we take all that out there, we can be like, yes. We met our objective. We did it, guys. The Israelis are gonna keep going, and that's gonna keep getting us to suck back in.
So, again, for me, all these different, like, little solutions and off ramps that people come up with, they're great, but step one has to be restraining the Israelis.
Speaker 0: And with that, doctor Mike, do you have any final closing thoughts?
Speaker 1: I I I think that's that's exactly correct. And I also think that because the use of special forces can be dazzling and in most cases, casualties are limited that perhaps we have gone away from a military that doesn't realize that in a war with a country the size of Iran, if you're really serious about it, it's the draft. It's it's a huge Yeah. On the ground force. It's not just the the special forces.
And I don't mean any criticism at all to the special forces.
Speaker 0: Mhmm. Yeah. Well, we're gonna go ahead.
Speaker 2: No. No. I was gonna say that's that's spot on. Absolutely right.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I do think that we do over rely on special forces, and I think we get a a very convoluted idea about what is possible and what is not possible. And I think that you're seeing that play out now. And, on that happy note, we will continue to pray for peace, Hope that the president's better angels get through the Mark Levin.
Oh, and speaking of Mark Levin, you are, Joe, I believe, set to go on tomorrow, Monday night with with Mark Levin. Is that still on?
Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah. As far as I know, we're tomorrow night at eight. Me and me and Mark having a chat. For the whole hour?
No. I believe so for the whole hour. It should be it should be a good time.
Speaker 1: Why why envy that opportunity, Joe?
Speaker 2: I couldn't he he got me. I couldn't turn it down.
Speaker 1: No. It's it's a it's it'd be a lovely thing to do.
Speaker 0: It's gonna be great television. I I can tell you that much regardless of, you know, what what goes on. It's, I'm really looking forward to it, but I I hope you are prepared. He he is going to be frothing at the mouth probably literally, Joe. So, you know
Speaker 1: Just offer him a sedative.
Speaker 0: Just offer him a yeah. Well, this was great, Joe. Thanks for doing this short notice. Hopefully, next time we do this, hopefully, there will be a next time and we can get video because that always goes viral when we have video. But good luck with your endeavors on Mark Levin, and hopefully, you'll pop up on Sean Ryan's show soon.
Speaker 1: You can even get a chance to drive Hannity crazy.
Speaker 0: To drive Hannity crazy.
Speaker 2: I would I would love to. Fox does not want me on there because
Speaker 1: Oh, I bet they don't.
Speaker 0: Yep. Yeah. Yep. Well, I I thank you so
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
I repost this from last January so that you all I know I've been talking about this a lot longer than the MAGA Slop Masters on this site.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
I joined the great Col. Douglas MacGregor on Emerald Robinson's ABSOLUTE TRUTH show on @RealLindellTV CHECK IT OUT ⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/jaak63N2zF
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0: Decision on whether to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine or sell them to NATO and let them sell them to Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've sort of made a decision pretty much if if if you consider. Yeah. I I think I wanna find out what they're doing with them. Yes.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's recent statement to the press about mulling over sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine has elicited a response from the Kremlin today. Putin announced that the peace process with the Trump administration to end the Ukraine war is officially, quote, unquote, exhausted. Trump and Putin have had a very, you know, strange relationship, a little touch and go since Trump returned to the presidency. At first, to end the Ukraine war on his very first day in office, Trump has meandered a bit on the issue and is now apparently settling on the Biden administration's policy of arming Ukraine and NATO to the hilt. But can Tomahawk cruise missiles even make much of a difference given that the Russian military has achieved supremacy on the battlefield and maintained that dominance for at least the last year and a half, maybe even longer, if you will.
We're now joined by, and we're so pleased he's with us, retired US Army colonel Douglas MacGregor. He's the author of I'm sorry. We also have Brandon Weichert with us, the author of Ukraine. Go cross wires there, a disaster of their own making, how the West lost to Ukraine. Thank you both for being with us.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Colonel McGregor, welcome to the show. We're so glad to especially have your perspective on this. And what we're gonna kinda do is a tour, if you will, around the globe because there's several, ongoing and pending conflicts. Right? So let's start with this breaking news out of Russia where Putin says that these talks, these negotiations are exhausted. Are they, as a matter of fact, exhausted, colonel?
Speaker 3: Well, I think he was referring specifically to what happened in Alaska. And I think president Trump showed up, you know, in grandiose fashion with the goal of overwhelming, president Putin and his team with his charm and grace and power, and it all failed miserably. President Trump never really listened carefully to anything the Russians said to him. He didn't read any of the material that was pertinent to the discussion. He came completely unprepared, and that was the the message that came out after the meeting.
So the Russians were very disappointed. If you don't read their proposals, you don't read what they're doing and what they're trying to accomplish, then you're not gonna get very far. So now, president Trump has completed his transformation into Joe Biden. He's become another version of Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: What it is so unexpected. And, you know, it's hard for a lot of a lot of Trump voters to hear because specifically part of voting for him and the mandate that he had going into this term was in these conflicts. Right? Specifically, the one in Ukraine. He didn't start any new conflicts while in office in the first term. Why this version of Trump this term? I know you, like I, look into the hiring, the administration, the pressures from the outside on the president. What is influencing where he is now on Ukraine, colonel MacGregor?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a that's a difficult question. I mean, first of all, he grossly underestimated the complexity of the of the war. If you don't understand the foundations for the conflict, how this conflict came about, I mean, I I was standing around listening to someone like Brzezinski in the nineteen nineties trying to tell president Clinton that it was critical to address Ukraine's borders because Eastern Ukraine was, quote, unquote, Russified and effectively not Ukrainian. Nobody would listen to Brzezinski, and so we walked away from that very problem. And in the run up to this thing back in 2014, I was on several different programs, and I pointed to the electoral map, And it showed you who voted for what where. It was very obvious that the East and the Northeast voted to stay with the Russian pro Russian candidate, and everybody else voted against the pro Russian candidate. So none of this should come as a surprise, but I don't think president Trump is aware of any of that. I don't think he studied any of that. And so he's got a lot of people around him pushing him in the direction of the status quo. He went through this during his first term, disappointed all of us because he could never quite escape from the Washington status quo.
So he simply returned to it, and I don't see anything positive occurring in the near future.
Speaker 2: That's sort of the same as well, with other agencies like the the DOJ, which I wanna get into a little bit later. Brandon, you've been writing about this as a national interest. So what what do you make of it?
Speaker 4: Well, I think that right now, this is a lot of vamping from Trump. I think the colonel is a 100% correct when he says Trump really didn't come prepared to the Alaska meeting. I think ultimately Trump's default is to still try to get a deal with Putin on things like rare earth mineral development and trade. I think it's very important to note, I believe it was Friday or Thursday of last week, Putin was on a stage at an event and he reiterated his desire to reopen trade relations with The United States and he wants to do a deal with Trump on multiple other fronts. So that's a positive thing.
But ultimately, I think that people need to realize that Trump says a lot of stuff in the moment. The follow through is the question. I am very skeptical that he's actually going to follow through on the Tomahawk transfer if only because logistically, it's not practical. Ukraine lacks the launchers. They lack the training. The the targeting data has to come exclusively and be approved exclusively by the Pentagon, which means that Trump will be on the hook even more for Joe Biden's war, which runs against what he says he wants to get done, which is peace. Regardless of whether it's been exhausted or not that process, Trump I think default wants peace. So I think this is a lot of bluster and I think ultimately it will not lead to the Tomahawk transfer. Last of all because we don't have enough of these Tomahawks. Right?
I mean, that that is a a finite amount. I think we have about 3,500 left in our arsenal. We have 400 we're sending to the Japanese Navy, and we're gonna need these systems for any other potential contingency in South America or God forbid another Middle East contingency or certainly in the Indo Pacific. So I think that at some point, the reality will hit, you know, hit the cameras and Trump will not actually follow through on this.
Speaker 2: So speaking of South America, let's head that way. Colonel McGregor, I I don't know if you know. I've been covering this pretty extensively what's been going on with the Trump administration's actions on Venezuela. So a bit of breaking news. Today, the US State Department claims that Venezuela is planning to attack their embassy, which has a small maintenance and security board other than, you know, diplomatic staff.
Meanwhile, Maduro's regime argues they're just foiled a right wing terrorist plot that's that was planning to stage a false flag against the US embassy to give the US Navy fleet. There's a lot off in Venezuela's coast the impetus to attack Maduro. I've been getting some pushback, you know, on this reporting related to Venezuela, because, you know, Trump's base largely doesn't want any new conflicts. They're afraid this is sort of foreign influence wanting wanting him to go there. Are we justified in what Trump is doing as far as the buildup and what we are hearing is an impending invasion? Is it is the Trump administration justified in this action, colonel MacGregor, in Venezuela?
Speaker 3: No. I I don't think there's any, pressing pressing need for us to invade or attack Venezuela at all. But we have to go back and look at his actions to this point. He's just suspended diplomatic relations with Venezuela, which is usually a signal of some sort of impending military action. I don't know what he's being told.
I don't know what sort of briefing he's received, what sort of planning has been discussed, but we need to keep a few things in mind. First of all, the Venezuelan people, whether they love or do not love Maduro, are very proud of their country, and they have a long history of rebelling against foreign influence, particularly against Spain. And they're not likely to take, an invasion or an intervention of any kind from The United States lately. Secondly, they've got about 400,000 people in the militias, but they can expect, at least a 100,000 or more paramilitaries to come in from Brazil and Colombia and other Latin American states. It's why the whole thing could result in a Latin American crusade against The United States.
And finally, we ought to keep in mind that the coastline is 1,700 miles long. That's almost as long as the border between The United States and Mexico. The border with Brazil and with Colombia is each of them are about 1,380 kilometers long. You start running the math and you're dealing with an area the size of Germany and and France combined. This is not something that one should sink one's teeth in without carefully considering the consequences.
So I don't know what the underlying assumptions are, but my own experience is that they're usually a series of what we call rosy scenarios and assume things that just aren't true. So I I'm very concerned we'll get into it. We'll waste a lot of time and money. We'll poison the well down there. If we really want access to the oil and and gas, I think we can get it without invading the place.
And they also have emerald mines and gold mines. So I think they'd be happy to do business with us. But this obsession with regime change is very dangerous, and I think it's unnecessary.
Speaker 2: That is definitely what it seems they're going for. When I talk to my sources, ChromaGregor, and then I'll get your take on it, Brandon, they say it's a four pronged issue. Right? That it's the drug that, of course, the drugs that come through Venezuela into The United States, Trend Aragua, which we know the ODNI and Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, Tulsi Gabbard was briefed on specifically, that the right of trend in Aragua and how they were flooded into the country, counterintelligence issues, a Venezuelan influence in, you know, in some of our intelligence operations, and, just the narco terrorist state that it is.
But you feel that given even if all of that is true and the Venezuela oh, excuse me, in the election fraud. Right? The election interference via the Smartmatic software. Given all that, you still feel it's not best to invade, colonel. You how do we handle it? How do we counter these threats coming from Venezuela?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you secure your borders. You secure your coastal waters. You get control of the people who are inside The United States. We have an estimated 50,000,000 illegals. Somewhere between twenty five and thirty million of them poured into the country, thanks to president Biden's betrayal of the American people and his decision to open the borders with the help of mister Mayorkas that facilitated this massive invasion.
I would start at home. The drug problem is not down in Venezuela. The drug problem is here in The United States. If you're serious, anybody who deals in drugs or is involved in human trafficking, particularly child trafficking, should face, the death penalty. Unless you do those kinds of things, you're not gonna fundamentally change the problem here.
Now as the narco state title, I think, is a lot of nonsense. The drugs overwhelmingly come out of Colombia. They don't come out of Venezuela. A very small amount goes through Venezuela. I'm sure there are generals in the Venezuelan army that are skimming off the top and putting extra cash in their banks, but it's not a big it's not a big source from our standpoint.
We have a much more serious problem in Mexico right now. Mexico is effectively an organized crime state, and I don't think, what Maduro is doing is is really, in that same category. On the other hand, I think Maduro is courting the Chinese and the Russians. And I think he's doing that because he feels threatened by us, and he's looking for whatever assistance or support he can get. And right now, given our behavior towards the Russians in Ukraine, it makes infinite sense for the Russians to cultivate a proxy against us in Central And South America.
This is the way things are done, unfortunately. We there are consequences for our actions. I don't think we've thought any of them through.
Speaker 2: Well, in in in talking about turning this into a broader conflict or a bigger problem, I I I I know, Brandon, you had heard that that Russia basically told Maduro, don't look to us. Don't come to us. But now this was a couple weeks ago. Yep. Yep.
Like you just said, colonel MacGregor, things have changed a little bit. Right? Especially looking at what Putin said today. So will Russia now come to Venezuela's aid, to Maduro's aid?
Speaker 3: I think it's distinctly possible, but it's not going to be overt. It'll be clandestine. It'll be behind the scenes. The Chinese are also gonna do business with Maduro. They have an interest in the largest known vindicated oil reserves in the world.
The bottom line is and this you go back to this tomahawk thing, which I think Brandon talked about. It's very, very important. The tomahawk is a devastating weapon. Can they be shot down? Absolutely.
The Serbs shot them down back in 1999 during this Kosovo air campaign. However, it carries a pretty substantial warhead, roughly a thousand pounds. It has a range of roughly a thousand miles. And I think president Trump has finally been briefed on that, and he has said, yeah. I I wanna know where they're going to fire them, whom they're going to target.
Well, the Ukrainians have targeted almost exclusively whatever they could in terms of Russian civilian infrastructure and Russian civilians. They've killed them as often and as much as they could. So the notion if you're gonna give these things to these people or you're gonna shoot for them, you can expect the worst, and that would precipitate a terrible response from the Russians. I don't think we understand how seriously attacks on Russian cities is gonna be taken by the Russians. So I would say, they will provide the Venezuelans with enough to do damage to us if if it's required, but I don't think they expect the Venezuelans to overwhelm us or march into America.
That's Mexico's job right now with organized crime. That's where I think we have a much more serious problem.
Speaker 4: I I agree with the colonel on that. I think also there's an issue. Now I happen to think we we because of the election fraud that you talk a lot about, Emerald, I think there is a threat in Maduro, and I I do think that that there is a more serious threat than we realize coming out of that sort of left wing miasma in Latin America. And I I think the colonel's correct though in saying that we're we're making it worse with some of our actions. I will point out on the technical side.
I broke this story last week. The Venezuelan government, the military Padrino, the the defense minister there, claimed that his radar systems actually detected a tranche of US Marine Corps f 35 b's using these Russian made radars that they have. This is not the first time, by the way, a Russian made radar system using these really and I'm not going get into the technical details here, but using really innovative ways of detecting American stealth planes. It's not the first time a Russian system has been able to do this. And so we are now deploying large relatively large number of f 35 b's into the region.
Obviously, it's a build up for some kind of strike package. And there are other countermeasures that the f 35 b has in the event it's detected. But I will point out that this plane is supposed to be basically invisible, and we think the Venezuelans are so technologically inferior, we do need to be preparing our forces for the fact that the Venezuelans will be using innovative tactics, in order to stymie our advances over their territory. It's not to say we can't defeat them, but we are not prepared, I don't think, for for having these systems, seen on radar by the Venezuelans, and that is something the Russians have helped the Venezuelans do.
Speaker 2: Very complex. Before we run out of time, do wanna get your thoughts, colonel MacGregor, on, the expectation that Israel will strike Iran again. Will we again come to their aid? And do you think we should?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, stealth can delay detection but cannot resist it. Yeah. I think the stealth is grossly exaggerated in terms of its value. It causes an enormous price tag Yeah. When you buy the damn plane.
And the f 35, from a readiness standpoint, is a disaster anyway.
So, you know, I I think we have to understand that, yes, mister Netanyahu has to fight Iran. Iran has to be balkanized and reduced to rubble the way the Israelis with help from us and the British have reduced Syria to chaos, broken up into different parts. This is an Israeli strategy for the region. It's always been there. If you can balkanize your neighbors, your neighbors don't threaten you.
Now I don't subscribe to the Israeli view that Iran is this permanent existential threat that has to be destroyed, but it doesn't matter what I think. What matters is what they think. They think Iran is a permanent existential threat and therefore must be destroyed. Your question is, will they find a way to attack Iran? The answer is yes.
Sooner rather than later. The longer they wait, the more robust and capable Iran becomes. And, I think that's in the near term that we'll see we'll see some trigger. Somehow, there'll be a trigger and Iran will strike. And will we support them?
Absolutely. We're already moving assets into the region along with large quantities of missiles and ammunition, but our inventories, as I'm sure you're aware, are limited. We fired a lot of missiles. We don't have a surge capacity in the industrial base. We need one.
Our factories are not operating twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The Russian factories are. Their manufacturing base can keep up. And by the way, the Chinese are right there with them. They have the largest manufacturing base in the world.
So if it comes down to who could produce and fire the most missiles, well, we're gonna lose that game, and Israel is gonna lose with us. But right now, I don't see any evidence that anyone's worried about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know what? Colonel McGregor, I I I don't know if I feel any safer after you joined us today. It is very concerning. It's it's a concerning situation we find ourselves in, and I feel like so many people because they feel the election turned out the way they wanted to wanted it to, are not concerned anymore. Right?
But we are in
Speaker 1: a finite amount of time and there's still great pressures upon the president. There are many voices whispering in his ear. And so we constantly have to be calling out what we
Speaker 2: see and explaining to people why it matters.
Speaker 3: Remember, this president has said this. Everybody dealing with the administration has said this. It's a very transactional administration. Yep. Follow the money.
Who has poured billions into his campaign and bought the White House and Congress for him? When you understand those facts in, you can explain the policy positions.
Speaker 1: And I think that's also why we're, the leading conversation we're seeing on acts and social media. Right now, Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for joining us today. We hope you'll come back soon.
Speaker 3: Sure. Thank you.
Speaker 2: And, Brandon, as always, good to see you, my friend. Thank you.
Speaker 4: See you again. Nice to meet you, colonel.
Speaker 3: Very nice to see you. Bye bye.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Decision on whether to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine or sell them to NATO and let them sell them to Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've sort of made a decision pretty much if if if you consider. Yeah. I I think I wanna find out what they're doing with
Speaker 0: them. Yes.
Speaker 1: You know, where are they sending them, I guess. I'd have to ask that question. That war should never have started. President
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's recent statement to the press about mulling over sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine has elicited a response from the Kremlin today. According to multiple media sources this morning, president Vladimir Putin has announced that the peace process with the Trump administration to end the Ukraine war is officially, quote, unquote, exhausted. Trump and Putin have had a very, you know, strange relationship, a little touch and go since Trump returned to the presidency. At first, to end the Ukraine war on his very first day in office, Trump has meandered a bit on the issue and is now apparently settling on the Biden administration's policy of arming Ukraine and NATO to the hilt. But can Tomahawk cruise missiles even make much of a difference given that the Russian military has achieved supremacy on the battlefield and maintained that dominance for at least the last year and a half, maybe even longer, if you will.
We're now joined by, and we're so pleased he's with us, retired US army colonel Douglas MacGregor. He's the author of I'm sorry. We also have Brandon Weichert with us, the author of Ukraine. Go cross wires there, a disaster of their own making, how the West lost to Ukraine. Thank you both for being with us.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Colonel McGregor, welcome to the show. We're so glad to to especially have your perspective on this. And what we're gonna kinda do is a tour, if you will, around the globe because there's several, ongoing and pending conflicts. Right? So let's start with this breaking news out of Russia where Putin says that these talks, these negotiations are exhausted.
Are they, as a matter of fact, exhausted, colonel?
Speaker 3: Well, I think he was referring specifically to what happened in Alaska. And I think president Trump showed up, you know, in grandiose fashion with the goal of overwhelming, president Putin and his team with his charm and grace and power, and it all failed miserably. President Trump never really listened carefully to anything the Russians said to him. He didn't read any of the material that was pertinent to the discussion. He came completely unprepared, and that was the the message that came out after the meeting.
So the Russians were very disappointed. If you don't read their proposals, you don't read what they're doing and what they're trying to accomplish, then you're not gonna get very far. So now, president Trump has completed his transformation into Joe Biden. He's become another version of Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: What it it is so unexpected. And, you know, it's hard for a lot of a lot of Trump voters to hear because specifically part of voting for him and the mandate that he had going into this term was in these conflicts. Right? Specifically, the one in Ukraine. He didn't start any new conflicts while in office in the first term.
Why why this version of Trump this term? I know you, like I, look into the hiring, the administration, the pressures from the outside on the president. What is influencing where he is now on Ukraine, colonel MacGregor?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a that's a difficult question. I mean, first of all, he grossly underestimated the complexity of the of the war. If you don't understand the foundations for the conflict, how this conflict came about, I mean, I I was standing around listening to someone like Brzezinski in the nineteen nineties trying to tell president Clinton that it was critical to address Ukraine's borders because Eastern Ukraine was, quote, unquote, Russified and effectively not Ukrainian. Nobody would listen to Brzezinski, and so we walked away from that very problem. And in the run up to this thing back in 2014, I was on several different programs, and I pointed to the electoral map, And it showed you who voted for what where.
It was very obvious that the East and the Northeast voted to stay with the Russian pro Russian candidate, and everybody else voted against the pro Russian candidate. So none of this should come as a surprise, but I don't think president Trump is aware of any of that. I don't think he studied any of that. And so he's got a lot of people around him pushing him in the direction of the status quo. He went through this during his first term, disappointed all of us because he could never quite escape from the Washington status quo.
So he simply returned to it, and I don't see anything positive occurring in the near future.
Speaker 2: That's sort of the same as well, with other agencies like the the DOJ, which I wanna get into a little bit later. Brandon, you've been writing about this as a national interest. So what what do you make of it?
Speaker 4: Well, I think that right now, this is a lot of vamping from Trump. I think the colonel is a 100% correct when he says Trump really didn't come prepared to the Alaska meeting. I think ultimately Trump's default is to still try to get a deal with Putin on things like rare earth mineral development and trade. I think it's very important to note, I believe it was Friday or Thursday of last week, Putin was on a stage at an event and he reiterated his desire to reopen trade relations with The United States and he wants to do a deal with Trump on multiple other fronts. So that's a positive thing.
But ultimately, I think that people need to realize that Trump says a lot of stuff in the moment. The follow through is the question. I am very skeptical that he's actually going to follow through on the Tomahawk transfer if only because logistically, it's not practical. Ukraine lacks the launchers. They lack the training.
The the targeting data has to come exclusively and be approved exclusively by the Pentagon, which means that Trump will be on the hook even more for Joe Biden's war, which runs against what he says he wants to get done, which is peace. Regardless of whether it's been exhausted or not that process, Trump I think default wants peace. So I think this is a lot of bluster and I think ultimately it will not lead to the Tomahawk transfer. Last of all because we don't have enough of these Tomahawks. Right?
I mean, that that is a a finite amount. I think we have about 3,500 left in our arsenal. We have 400 we're sending to the Japanese Navy, and we're gonna need these systems for any other potential contingency in South America or God forbid another Middle East contingency or certainly in the Indo Pacific. So I think that at some point, the reality will hit, you know, hit the cameras and Trump will not actually follow through on this.
Speaker 2: So speaking of South America, let's head that way. Colonel McGregor, I I don't know if you know. I've been covering this pretty extensively what's been going on with the Trump administration's actions on Venezuela. So a bit of breaking news. Today, the US State Department claims that Venezuela is planning to attack their embassy, which has a small maintenance and security board other than, you know, diplomatic staff.
Meanwhile, Maduro's regime argues they're just foiled a right wing terrorist plot that's that was planning to stage a false flag against the US embassy to give the US Navy fleet. There's a lot off in Venezuela's coast the impetus to attack Maduro. I've been getting some pushback, you know, on this reporting related to Venezuela because, you know, Trump's base largely doesn't want any new conflicts. They're afraid this is sort of foreign influence wanting wanting him to go there. Are we justified in what Trump is doing as far as the buildup and what we are hearing is an impending invasion?
Is it is the Trump administration justified in this action, colonel MacGregor, in Venezuela?
Speaker 3: No. I I don't think there's any, pressing pressing need for us to invade or attack Venezuela at all. But we have to go back and look at his actions to this point. He's just suspended diplomatic relations with Venezuela, which is usually a signal of some sort of impending military action. I don't know what he's being told.
I don't know what sort of briefing he's received, what sort of planning has been discussed, but we need to keep a few things in mind. First of all, the Venezuelan people, whether they love or do not love Maduro, are very proud of their country, and they have a long history of rebelling against foreign influence, particularly against Spain. And they're not likely to take, an invasion or an intervention of any kind from The United States lately. Secondly, they've got about 400,000 people in the militias, but they can expect, at least a 100,000 or more paramilitaries to come in from Brazil and Colombia and other Latin American states. It's why the whole thing could result in a Latin American crusade against The United States.
And finally, we ought to keep in mind that the coastline is 1,700 miles long. That's almost as long as the border between The United States and Mexico. And the border with Brazil and with Colombia is each of them are about 1,380 kilometers long. You start running the math and you're dealing with an area the size of Germany and and France combined. This is not something that one should sink one's teeth in without carefully considering the consequences.
So I don't know what the underlying assumptions are, but my own experience is that they're usually a series of what we call rosy scenarios and assume things that just aren't true. So I I'm very concerned we'll get into it. We'll waste a lot of time and money. We'll poison the well down there. If we really want access to the oil and and gas, I think we can get it without invading the place.
And they also have emerald mines and gold mines. So I think they'd be happy to do business with us. But this obsession with regime change is very dangerous, and I think it's unnecessary.
Speaker 2: That is definitely what it seems they're going for. When I talk to my sources, ChromaGregor, and then I'll get your take on it, Brandon, they Yep. They say it's a four pronged issue. Right? That it's the drug that, of course, the drugs that come through Venezuela into The United States, Trend Aragua, which we know the ODNI and Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, Tulsi Gabbard was briefed on specifically, that the right of trend in Aragua and how they were flooded into the country, counterintelligence issues, a Venezuelan influence in, you know, in some of our intelligence operations, and, just the narco terrorist state that it is.
But you feel that given even if all of that is true and the Venezuela oh, excuse me, in the election fraud. Right? The election interference via the Smartmatic software. Given all that, you still feel it's not best to invade, colonel. You how do we handle it?
How do we counter these threats coming from Venezuela?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you secure your borders. You secure your coastal waters. You get control of the people who are inside The United States. We have an estimated 50,000,000 illegals. Somewhere between twenty five and thirty million of them poured into the country, thanks to president Biden's betrayal of the American people and his decision to open the borders with the help of mister Mayorkas that facilitated this massive invasion.
I would start at home. The drug problem is not down in Venezuela. The drug problem is here in The United States. If you're serious, anybody who deals in drugs or is involved in human trafficking, particularly child trafficking, should face, the death penalty. Unless you do those kinds of things, you're not gonna fundamentally change the problem here.
Now as the narco state title, I think, is a lot of nonsense. The drugs overwhelmingly come out of Colombia. They don't come out of Venezuela. A very small amount goes through Venezuela. I'm sure there are generals in the Venezuelan army that are skimming off the top and putting extra cash in their banks, but it's not a big it's not a big source from our standpoint.
We have a much more serious problem in Mexico right now. Mexico is effectively an organized crime state, and I don't think, what Maduro is doing is is really, in that same category. On the other hand, I think Maduro is courting the Chinese and the Russians. And I think he's doing that because he feels threatened by us, and he's looking for whatever assistance or support he can get. And right now, given our behavior towards the Russians in Ukraine, it makes infinite sense for the Russians to cultivate a proxy against us in Central And South America.
This is the way things are done, unfortunately. We there are consequences for our actions. I don't think we've thought any of them through.
Speaker 2: Well, in in in talking about turning this into a broader conflict or a bigger problem, I I I I know, Brandon, you had heard that that Russia basically told Maduro, don't look to us. Don't come to us. But now this was a couple weeks ago. Yep. Yep.
Like you just said, colonel MacGregor, things have changed a little bit. Right? Especially looking at what Putin said today. So will Russia now come to Venezuela's aid, to Maduro's aid?
Speaker 3: I think it's distinctly possible, but it's not going to be overt. It'll be clandestine. It'll be behind the scenes. The Chinese are also gonna do business with Maduro. They have an interest in the largest known vindicated oil reserves in the world.
The bottom line is and this you go back to this tomahawk thing, which I think Brandon talked about. It's very, very important. The tomahawk is a devastating weapon. Can they be shot down? Absolutely.
The Serbs shot them down back in 1999 during this Kosovo air campaign. However, it carries a pretty substantial warhead, roughly a thousand pounds. It has a range of roughly a thousand miles. And I think president Trump has finally been briefed on that, and he has said, yeah. I I wanna know where they're going to fire them, whom they're going to target.
Well, the Ukrainians have targeted almost exclusively whatever they could in terms of Russian civilian infrastructure and Russian civilians. They've killed them as often and as much as they could. So the notion if you're gonna give these things to these people or you're gonna shoot for them, you can expect the worst, and that would precipitate a terrible response from the Russians. I don't think we understand how seriously attacks on Russian cities is gonna be taken by the Russians. So I would say, they will provide the Venezuelans with enough to do damage to us if if it's required, but I don't think they expect the Venezuelans to overwhelm us or march into America.
That's Mexico's job right now with organized crime. That's where I think we have a much more serious problem.
Speaker 4: I I agree with the colonel on that. I think also there's an issue. Now I happen to think we we because of the election fraud that you talk a lot about, Emerald, I think there is a threat in Maduro, and I I do think that that there is a more serious threat than we realize coming out of that sort of left wing miasma in Latin America. And I I think the colonel's correct though in saying that we're we're making it worse with some of our actions. I will point out on the technical side.
I broke this story last week. The Venezuelan government, the military Padrino, the the the the defense minister there, claimed that his radar systems actually detected a tranche of US Marine Corps f 35 b's using these Russian made radars that they have. This is not the first time, by the way, a Russian made radar system using these really and I'm not going get into the technical details here, but using really innovative ways of detecting American stealth planes. It's not the first time a Russian system has been able to do this. And so we are now deploying large relatively large number of f 35 b's into the region.
Obviously, it's a build up for some kind of strike package. And there are other countermeasures that the f 35 b has in the event it's detected. But I will point out that this plane is supposed to be basically invisible, and we think the Venezuelans are so technologically inferior, we do need to be preparing our forces for the fact that the Venezuelans will be using innovative tactics, in order to stymie our advances over their territory. It's not to say we can't defeat them, but we are not prepared, I don't think, for for having these systems, seen on radar by the Venezuelans, and that is something the Russians have helped the Venezuelans do.
Speaker 2: Very complex. Before we run out of time, do wanna get your thoughts, colonel MacGregor, on, the expectation that Israel will strike Iran again. Will we again come to their aid? And do you think we should?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, stealth can delay detection but cannot resist it. Yeah. I think the stealth is grossly exaggerated in terms of its value. It causes an enormous price tag Yeah. When you buy the damn plane.
And the f 35, from a readiness standpoint, is a disaster anyway.
Speaker 4: Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3: So, you know, I I think we have to understand that, yes, mister Netanyahu has to fight Iran. Iran has to be balkanized and reduced to rubble the way the Israelis with help from us and the British have reduced Syria to chaos, broken up into different parts. This is an Israeli strategy for the region. It's always been there. If you can balkanize your neighbors, your neighbors don't threaten you.
Now I don't subscribe to the Israeli view that Iran is this permanent existential threat that has to be destroyed, but it doesn't matter what I think. What matters is what they think. They think Iran is a permanent existential threat and therefore must be destroyed. Your question is, will they find a way to attack Iran? The answer is yes.
Sooner rather than later. The longer they wait, the more robust and capable Iran becomes. And, I think that's in the near term that we'll see we'll see some trigger. Somehow, there'll be a trigger and Iran will strike. And will we support them?
Absolutely. We're already moving assets into the region along with large quantities of missiles and ammunition, but our inventories, as I'm sure you're aware, are limited. We fired a lot of missiles. We don't have a surge capacity in the industrial base. We need one.
Our factories are not operating twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The Russian factories are. Their manufacturing base can keep up. And by the way, the Chinese are right there with them. They have the largest manufacturing base in the world.
So if it comes down to who could produce and fire the most missiles, well, we're gonna lose that game, and Israel is gonna lose with us. But right now, I don't see any evidence that anyone's worried about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know what? Colonel McGregor, I I I don't know if I feel any safer after you joined us today. It is very concerning. It's it's a concerning situation we find ourselves in, and I feel like so many people because they feel the election turned out the way they wanted to wanted it to, are not concerned anymore. Right?
But we are in
Speaker 1: a finite amount of time and there's still great pressures upon the president. There are many voices whispering in his ear. And so we constantly have to be calling out what we
Speaker 2: see and explaining to people why it matters.
Speaker 3: Remember, this president has said this. Everybody dealing with the administration has said this. It's a very transactional administration. Yep. Follow the money.
Who has poured billions into his campaign and bought the White House and Congress for him? When you understand those facts in, you can explain the policy positions.
Speaker 1: And I think that's also why we're, the leading conversation we're seeing on acts and social media. Right now, Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for joining us today. We hope you'll come back soon.
Speaker 3: Sure. Thank you.
Speaker 2: And, Brandon, as always, good to see you, my friend. Thank you.
Speaker 4: See you again. Nice to meet you, colonel.
Speaker 3: Very nice to see you. Bye bye.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
🚨🚨NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERT WARNS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS NOT IN CONTROL OF HIS OWN INTEL SERVICES. FIRST THEY TRIED A**A**INATE PUTIN WITHOUT TELLING TRUMP. NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO START WWIII. THIS IS A CONSTITUTIONAL & NATIONAL SECURITY CRISIS! @RealLindellTV https://t.co/tYNeIAtcsZ
Video Transcript AI Summary
According to an official statement, Ukraine denies attempting to assassinate Vladimir Putin, viewing it as a pretext for escalating the conflict. An analyst speculates that U.S. intelligence services, not Ukraine, were behind the attempt, potentially aiming to disrupt peace negotiations. The analyst claims U.S. intelligence agencies know Putin's location at all times and are acting without briefing the President.
Despite the assassination attempt, discussions about Russian-Ukrainian negotiations are ongoing, with Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio reportedly having a telephone call to discuss Russia's proposals. The analyst suggests Putin wants a deal with Trump but had to respond militarily to maintain his position domestically.
The analyst also alleges rogue elements within U.S. intelligence agencies are undermining leadership, citing issues with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The State Department is reportedly tightening visa vetting for Chinese students due to national security concerns, but the analyst believes the problem is broader, involving the recruitment of American students by China. Monica Crowley will be sworn in as Chief of Protocol.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Did you all indeed attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin?
Speaker 1: Well, according to the official statement made by our special services, it's, it's not true. Ukraine didn't try to assassinate, Putin, who is war criminal, by the way. There is arrest warrant and who is a terrorist. Yeah. But, from, this official statement, it flows that we didn't try to assassinate Putin.
And it seems like, Putin and his propaganda are trying to use it as an excuse, as a pretext to escalate the conflict and to kill continue to kill Ukrainian civilian population.
Speaker 0: So you you contend that this was not an action by Ukraine. So who made this attempt on Putin's life?
Speaker 1: Well, there is no confirmation and no. I don't know.
Speaker 0: Official statement is we didn't do it from Ukraine, but is our resident geopolitical analyst, Brandon Weicker, buying that? Let's ring him in right now for a reaction to my earlier segment. That was the deputy, people's been he he while he's the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he holds a couple titles in Ukraine. Alexander Musgrave, Musgrave, in Ukraine saying that Ukraine did not telling me Ukraine's official stance is that they not did not attempt to kill
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: But if you note, he's very clear to say the official statement.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes.
Speaker 0: And with hedging, you know
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 0: With my follow-up, he hedges. So your thoughts, Brandon.
Speaker 2: Well, he's doing his best colonel clink routine. I know nothing. I see nothing. I I hear nothing. This is, this is this is what to expect.
Listen. He you know, he's not necessarily wrong in the sense that I don't actually think even if Ukraine pulled the trigger on this thing, that this was actually Ukraine's doing. I think that this was our own intelligence services. To be clear, I think it was CIA. I think that, there was a window of opportunity.
We know for a fact that our intelligence agencies, since 2023 at least, have been helping the Ukrainians range targets, in Russia with the long range missiles we've been giving them. And we also know from consultants in the DOD, people like the, Peter Zion, who went on to Joe Joe Rogan show about a year and a half ago and let it slip that he has sources at the DOD and CIA who have told him repeatedly, our intelligence agencies know at all times where, Putin is, when he is leaving, and where he is going. So if any of that is to be believed, the likely culprit behind this attempted assassination was an element of our own intelligence agencies. And I would remind your audience that Donald Trump yesterday gave a second statement, short statement about the breakdown in the negotiations between himself and Putin, and he admitted he did not know, about the attempted assassination on Putin when they tried to take out his helicopter, which indicates to me that not only is our intelligence agency going rogue, they're not even briefing the president. They're not telling the president until well after the fact.
This was clearly an attempt to stop the peace process, which has been moving ahead contrary to what the headlines were saying.
Speaker 0: Which brings up the latest, which was a topic one of the topics in the state department briefing just moments ago that might still be ongoing. I just had to step away. They the and also the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia announced that yesterday or earlier today, sorry, that Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio, obviously, counterparts. Right? Yes.
Foreign minister of Russia and then our secretary of state, Marco Rubio, actually had a telephone call where they talked about Russia's proposals for the next round of Russian Ukrainian negotiation. Tammy Proust was asked about that a little bit earlier in the the briefing room, and she and she was asked if the secretary secretary Rubio believes that Russia is acting in good faith, so there's good faith negotiations. She didn't really answer that. But do I mean, so it it counter to what we thought we saw from Trump and the kind of media narrative over the last couple days after the attempt on Putin's life, it appears that these talks are going on anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, listen. The president Trump himself wants a deal. Vladimir Putin, I think, wants a deal. The fact is after the assassination attempt, Putin had no choice but to respond militarily, and he did with that missile fuselage and the drone attacks. And, of course, the Ukrainians were running, you know, screaming they're the victims.
Well, ultimately, Putin had no choice. If he doesn't respond to a flagrant attempt on his life, he will then his life will be forfeit because he is surrounded by people like his right hand man, Patrushev, who are actually more militaristic and more anti Western than he is, and therefore, Putin to keep his place and not be overthrown, he had to respond. It's very key to understand, though. Putin wants a deal. He thinks he can get a deal with Trump, but he also understands that he's gotta keep Trump in the good graces of his own people Trump's own people by helping Trump along with these negotiations.
Because let's face it, if there's a rogue element in our own intelligence agencies that attempted to stop a presidential negotiation going forward, there's there's nothing stopping that group, frankly, from pivoting and trying to knock out Trump if they think he's not gonna do what they want. So it's in Putin and Trump's interest, obviously, to try to keep these negotiations going as long as possible.
Speaker 0: I mean, fathom that. Right. Second Trump administration, few months in, you still potentially have rogue elements that would act without the commander in chief's direction and being world leader. Right. You didn't ribbing.
Speaker 2: Right. And and then that's a And, look, it it's not a potential. I think we have the evident plenty of evidence going back to the first term of the rogue intelligence agencies. And I think what they're doing to Radcliffe, the CIA director, I think they're doing to him what they did to Porter Goss in 02/2005. Porter Goss came in.
He was a politician. They basically at the CIA bureaucracy level, they basically hermetically sealed Porter Goss in at the Seventh Floor and didn't share any information with him, and his agenda was completely stymied on day one. Same thing with John Ratcliffe. And the added problem is I think Ratcliffe is, a, not intellectually curious enough to actually find out what's really going on on the floors below me. And, also, they might have compromising material on Ratcliffe.
I don't know. But the bottom line is Ratcliffe is not doing his job. You know? And the the when the cat's away, the mice are playing.
Speaker 0: Not only so we have that issue in the state department briefing, but I also I don't know if you heard my segment with Kara at the White House. She was reporting on the state department's move, secretary's move, Rubio's move against Chinese students with their visas. Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce was asked about that as well. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: Yesterday aggressively wrote visas for Chinese students, including those with connections. It's not specific he's not saying specifically those with connections. So, I mean, if there are 277,000 Chinese students in The United States, I mean, should all of them feel that they're at some risk of having their visas revoked?
Speaker 4: I think I think everyone who's here on a visa has to recognize, certainly, is what they've seen over the last few months, that America takes their visa seriously, that vetting is not a one time process, it's continuing. And that when things if things happen, if you get arrested, if there's some kind of an issue, it you're it it's probably going to be seen at some point. But I do think that with this particular dynamic, it's clear that there's an interest in making sure that those who are here from China on a visa understand that we are taking our national security seriously, and we are looking, at their visas. And, if everything's fine, terrific. But, that will be a vetting that certainly continues and is important clearly to the administration.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is this needs to happen. Of course, my problem is it it needs to be done across the board. We it's not just even about the Chinese students. What we're finding is that the Chinese have become very proficient at recruiting actual American students to do their bidding for them.
You know, one of the things that they tried on my wife when she was when she was at Yale is that they would tell her and her cohort, you know, if you come work in China, we'll pay off your student debt as a signing bonus sort of. So this is this is a wider problem, but this is the right step in the right direction. And, ultimately, let's face it. They talk about brain drain. I was I taught for a little bit, and I saw firsthand the brain drain's already here since the nineteen seventies since the in implementation of the Department of Education.
So, really, the threat to our kids having brain drain is not removing Chinese students who might be national security risk. It's actually the Department of Education, which needs to be destroyed.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It does. That's a great point. Great point, Brandon Weichert, as you often make. Thank you so much for joining us right now.
Good to see you. Oh, speaking of the state department, the chief of protocol, the official chief of protocol, Monica Crowley, will officially be sworn in in the Oval Office at 5PM today. We wanna say congratulations because Monica Crowley has been a great friend through the years. When I got canceled, she was one of those people who reached out. She's been such a doll, and she will be wonderful in this role.
I won't be around at that time, but I did wanna say congratulations today. And I'm sure I'm sure Steve Bannon, who's also a friend of hers and is on the network at 5PM today, will probably show some of that. So good congratulations. Too, so congratulations. Department's news today.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. It's all good. It's all good. So
Speaker 0: Good news.
Speaker 2: Congrats. Yeah.
Speaker 0: That's not what I expected from the state department. We'll we'll take it. Speaking of good news, that's it for me for this half hour, but you've got Vanessa Broussard coming up, and that's great news with the spin room after the break.
@WeTheBrandon - Brandon Weichert
The reason Crazy Bernie hates Russia today is because it's not communist anymore. It's just that simple.