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Dec. 30, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:41
Episode 5030: Peace Through Strength Trump Meets With Bibi Netanyahu

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Well, I hope he's going to get along with Syria because the new president of Syria is working very hard to do a good job.
He really is.
I know he's a tough cookie and he's, you know, you're not going to get a choir boy to lead Syria.
That's the one thing I would say.
So I hope they're going to get along because, you know, I dropped the sanctions on Syria because otherwise they wouldn't have had a chance.
We want to see Syria survive.
Mr. President, the Honor Paul from Channel 12 News, what are your plans regarding Gaza for the next few weeks?
Well, we're going to be dealing on Gaza.
That's why this very great prime minister is here right now.
We're talking about Gaza.
We're talking about a lot of things.
We have about five major subjects that we're discussing, and Gaza will be one of those subjects.
It's a very good group.
We've made a lot of progress already.
We had about a five-minute meeting, and we've already settled about three of the difficulties.
So thank you very much for being here.
We talked about Hamas, and we talked about disarmament.
And they're going to be given a very short period of time to disarm.
And we'll see how that works out.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will be in charge of that from our side.
But if they don't disarm, as they agreed to do, they agreed to it, and then they'll be held to pay for them.
And we don't want that.
We're not looking for that.
But they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time.
President, if you don't see Hamas disarm in that short amount of time they're giving them, can you tell us what the next steps will be?
It's going to be horrible for them.
Horrible.
It's going to be really, really bad for them.
And I don't want that to happen.
But they made an agreement that they were going to disarm.
And you couldn't blame Israel.
By the way, we have other countries that will come in and do it.
They said, let us do it for you if they don't.
Countries that were with them wanted the deal to be made, agreed that they would disarm.
And now if they say they're going to disarm, that's fine.
If they say they're not going to disarm, those same countries will go and wipe them out.
They don't even need Israel.
You know, we have many countries, 59 countries that are in agreement.
This is a real peace in the Middle East.
And Hamas is a small part of it, but it's still a part of it.
But we have 59 countries that signed on, big countries, countries that are outside of the Middle East, as you know the Middle East.
They want to go in and wipe out Hamas.
They don't want Israel.
They don't need Israel.
They want to do it because it's the right thing to do.
Because they were for the deal based on the fact that Hamas pledged, they swore that they were going to disarm.
Now, if they're not going to disarm, those same countries will wipe out Hamas.
Somebody said in the room, if you don't have Trump, you needed a proper combination of everything.
And if you didn't have that combination, which they had, you would not have an existing Israel right now.
And the people of Israel know it.
That's why they like me, and it's why they really, they actually like him.
He's got a little bit of a love-hate more than I do over there.
But you know what?
Even the haters have a lot of respect for him.
There's a lot of jealousy about him.
A lot of jealousy.
Jealousy is a bad word.
But I believe you would not have Israel right now.
So it's a big deal.
Yeah.
Too late, Powell.
Too late because he's always too late with interest rates, except before the election.
He was too early because that would have helped.
That was supposed to help get her elected.
It had no impact.
We won all seven swing states.
But no, no.
We're thinking about bringing a suit against Powell for incompetence.
Because think of it.
These are two, these aren't outstanding buildings.
These are small buildings.
He said $4 billion more.
It's going to end up costing more than $4 billion.
$4 billion.
It's the highest price of construction.
Again, Democrats, highest price of construction per square foot in the history of the world.
There's never been gorgeous monuments are built for a much smaller price.
So we're thinking about bringing a gross incompetence, what's called gross incompetence lawsuit.
It's gross incompetence against Powell.
And it was his baby.
And the guy's just incompetent.
There's nothing you can do about it.
He's just a very incompetent man.
But we're going to probably bring a lawsuit against a pressure.
That's an announcement then on Powell's replacement.
January, something.
And will you ask Jay Powell to resign president?
Well, he should.
He might not be a favorite to the nation.
He's come close.
I mean, we're getting pretty close.
I would fire him.
I'd love to fire him, but we're so close.
You know, maybe it's maybe I still might.
This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people.
Here's not got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people.
The people have had a belly full of it.
I know you don't like hearing that.
I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
It's going to happen.
And where do people like that go to share the big line?
MAGA media.
I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
War Room.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
It's Monday, 29, December, year of alert, 2025.
We had Zelensky yesterday, and of course, the morning show, a lot of it was about that, the analysis of it, and then this afternoon, although the president, we did find out, had an additional phone call with Putin this morning.
We'll get to all that.
Rabbi Willicki starts.
We got Kurt Mills going to George Dr. Thayer.
Try to break this all down.
So, Rabbi Willicki, you've been putting out these, I quite frankly think they're very helpful videos.
And you've been making the case that in Syria, you've got a Turkish proxy.
That's all Erdogan in Gaza, that there's something really wrong there, that you're not going to be ahead.
And you were the guy that went through the whole difference between the plan and the UN resolution that we really haven't designated anybody to disarm Hamas.
And you've been making a case that, hey, you got Turkey in Syria.
You got Turkey that is supposedly going to be the security force coordinator for Gaza.
You got Qatar there.
You're also been warning about what's happening in Iran.
Put in perspective, like, given the press conference came afterwards and some of the leaks already coming out, what do you think happened?
And what is the action plan on five?
President Trump said they agreed on three of the five outstanding items they had to go through.
Your thoughts, sir?
Well, Steve, the main items on the agenda were Gaza, Iran, and Syria, as you just pointed out.
And what I heard from the press conference today was that Trump is, I guess, returning to the doctrine that dominated his first term approach to the Middle East, which is peace through strength.
And that means that if you really want peace, you need to either destroy the bad actors or have them recognize that there's a real credible threat of them losing their power.
And that's the only way that they're going to come into line.
That I think, and I don't know what changed in the meeting within with Netanyahu, or we simply hadn't heard Trump articulate it so clearly.
But, you know, the whole discussion of Gaza, let's start there.
In the press available before the meeting, someone in the press pool asked about the issue of Turkish troops in Gaza.
And Trump said that it's one of the issues they're going to talk about.
And unfortunately, no one asked about it in the press conference afterwards.
And I would have loved to hear that was that was what I was waiting for most, honestly, to see what he would say about that.
Because as you say, as I've been pointing out, the big problem facing the Middle East, the big miss, I believe, that the Trump administration, and again, I am at the front of the line saying that President Trump has been great on the Middle East.
He's been great for Israel.
We're very grateful.
At the same time, this love affair with the Turks and the Qataris is causing some missteps, let's just say.
And there's no way that Israel is going to allow Turkish.
But a lot of these videos you've been putting out is saying, hey, now we got to think about the $5 billion.
Is it worth it?
Because we got issues with the Turks, the Turks, and I've said this on the show: Erdogan, and President Trump said at the beginning, he's very close to Erdogan.
He thinks very highly Erdogan.
But Erdogan, to me, hasn't been shot at saying I'm reestablishing the caliphate.
He says the goal is to march on Jerusalem.
He's dreamed of expanding the well, also the two holy sites.
I mean, he'd like to get Mecca and Medina back in the fold as they had before World War I.
So, what he did say that I don't know if it's confusing because President Trump does a lot of this to make sure that nobody's, you know, that he can always continue to negotiate and people can't get a steady grip.
He made this comment about, and one of the things that I know you and others have been harping on is this whole issue of, at the end of the day, who is going to actually go in and disarm Hamas, right?
It's not going to be Qatar, it's not going to be Egypt.
You say, keep saying it's not going to be Turkey.
There's some ambivalence there because we know that the UN resolution that they got passed is different than the plan.
But he said today there are many nations over there.
There are many nations.
Almost like they're volunteering to go in and disarm Hamas.
Have you noticed that anywhere over there?
Or is that a misdirection play?
Misdirection play.
Well, let's just review, Steve.
At the very beginning of this, after the 20-point plan was announced, and I pointed out at the time that, hey, wait a second, it doesn't say who's supposed to disarm Hamas.
And then we had this circus act where Trump said maybe the Israelis would do it.
Kushner and Witkoff said that it'll be the International Stabilization Force.
King Abdullah said, No, we're not doing that.
And everyone was pointing fingers at each other about who's going to disarm Hamas.
At the same time, Trump was adamant in this press conference that Hamas agreed to disarm.
He says this all the time.
And Steve, I can show you half a dozen interviews with Hamas spokespeople going all the way back to the day the 20-point plan was announced, adamantly insisting that they never agreed to disarm.
Now, that either means that they're lying, which is a distinct possibility.
I don't think Trump is lying, or it means that the Qataris and the Turks, who were the go-between between Hamas and the Americans, are, you know, basically said, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're going to disarm and they're not really going to.
It's still unclear who's going to do it.
And when Trump said that there's all these other countries who said that they're willing to go in there, I do not know what he means.
I have yet to see a single country that has shown a willingness to actually militarily go into there.
Because again, disarming Hamas is not a negotiation.
It is a firefight.
It is a war.
Okay, let's make no mistake about it.
Disarming Hamas means fighting Hamas in the tunnels.
It means going in there.
And it is a military kinetic action.
When the only country that has shown a willingness to do it is the Israelis.
So that still remains an open question.
Let's just say that.
At the same time, Steve, in this press conference, when I say that I heard a return to peace through strength, I think the most important line in the entire press conference was when Trump, when they were talking about Iran, and Trump said there can be no peace in the Middle East if Iran rearms.
And what that really speaks to is, and you could say the same thing about Hamas.
There can be no peace.
The Gaza, a brighter future for Gaza, a more peaceful, more quiet southern border for Israel and the Israel-Egypt border, it can only happen if Hamas is removed.
That's the only way these things can go forward.
And let's remember, President Trump is not naive.
He does not want his peace plans and his Middle East policy to fail.
So he's not living in a world of wishful thinking.
There are people around him who might be, but he does not live in a world of wishful thinking.
And because of that, he doesn't, I think that maybe it happened in this meeting with Bibi, or maybe he already was on this thinking beforehand.
But to understand that there simply won't be peace in the Middle East if the Iranians who scream death to America and death to Israel, they spend all of their money.
Their people are in the streets right now rioting, not because they're pro-Israel.
They're rioting because their currency is collapsing.
They don't have water.
They don't have electricity.
And all these billions of dollars that Iran is getting from selling oil to the Chinese is being used to rebuild their ballistic missile program.
That's what they're spending their money on.
So there will simply be no peace in the Middle East if Iran continues to arm.
There will be no peace on Israel's southern border if Hamas is there.
And this is what peace through strength is all about.
You need to punish the bad actors or remove them or have a credible threat of their removal if you want to have peace in the Middle East.
And it is achievable.
And I think that Trump is on the right track.
I think that's what this is really about.
I think that was the most important line in the entire press conference because it was more about strategy than about a specific tactic that's on the table.
So still, the disarming of Hamas is, I think there's a little bit of a shell game going on pretending that it's actually an achievable goal without Israel going in and fighting Hamas, which would look like the resumption of the war.
Let's come back to that in a second.
We'll take a short commercial break.
Dr. Thayer is going to join us.
Kurt Mills is going to join us and try to break all this down.
President Trump said three of the top five were agreed to today.
Also, he said President Putin informed him that Kiev, the Ukrainians, tried to hit one of his residences with a drone.
Zelensky is already out, and Ukraine's already out saying they didn't do it.
We'll break it all down for you next in the war.
You don't see Hamas disarm in that short amount of time they're giving them.
Can you tell us what the next steps would be?
It would be horrible for them.
Horrible.
It's going to be really, really bad for them.
And I don't want that to happen.
But they made an agreement that they were going to disarm.
And you couldn't blame Israel.
By the way, we have other countries that will come in and do it.
They said, let us do it for you if they don't.
Countries that were with them wanted the deal to be made, agreed that they would disarm.
And now if they say they're going to disarm, that's fine.
If they say they're not going to disarm, those same countries will go and wipe them out.
They don't even need Israel.
You know, we have many countries, 59 countries that are agreeing.
This is a real peace in the Middle East.
And Hamas is a small part of it, but it's still a part of it.
But we have 59 countries that signed on big countries, countries that are outside of the Middle East, as you know the Middle East.
They want to go in and wipe out Hamas.
They don't want Israel.
They don't need Israel.
They want to do it because it's the right thing to do.
Because they were for the deal based on the fact that Hamas pledged.
They swore.
That they were going to disarm.
Now, if they're not going to disarm, those same countries will wipe out Hamas.
Rabbi Walecki, of anything that was said today, pre-post or maybe even during, that was the most declarative.
I'm just going to go back that Hamas made an agreement.
They pledge, they swore to disarm, number one.
Number two, there are many countries, including ones on their side, that are prepared to go and wipe them out.
Not just disarm, wipe them out.
Wipe them out.
He's got to be talking about Turkey and Egypt.
And I guess Qatar writing checks, but the Gulf Emirates, UAE, Egypt.
How could he be talking about Turkey?
What am I missing?
What am I missing?
Sir.
How could he be talking about Turkey?
Turkey houses the Hamas leadership and praises Hamas as freedom fighters.
Erdogan talks about Hamas in glowing terms.
That is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Let's stop calling them Hamas.
Steve, you've said this many times.
We should stop calling these organizations by these other names.
Just call them what they are.
Hamas is the, Hamas was founded as the Muslim Brotherhood branch in the Gaza Strip.
That's actually what its original name was.
It's an impossibility.
It is an impossibility that Turkey will go in, guns blazing, and actually have firefights in the tunnels, losing men of their own in the process, which Israel is willing to do, tragically.
But Israel is the only country willing to do it.
No one's going to go in and disarm Hamas.
I don't know what President Trump is talking about here.
I would love for him to give an example of a country that is willing to go in and fight Hamas and take away their weapons.
The two central things today, correct me if I'm wrong, just for our audience, was to get some clarification of this because Netanyahu and his government behind the scenes, I think this unites all Israelis, even the ones that are vehemently anti-Netanyahu, is that Hamas, the whole purpose of this war, the whole purpose of fighting it, that the military operation of Hamas has got to be disarmed, number one.
And then we'll talk about the illustrated missiles that rained.
Okay, so here's what I'm confused by.
If that was the centerpiece of the meeting, what does Netanyahu's government take away today that is the next step?
Is it going to be because it sounded like the IDF was going to be a player to be named later, as we say in baseball, right?
Not really part of this effort to disarm Hamas, which is the next step before we go to the next step.
And you got a yellow line and Gaza on this side is going to be some Hamas operations and the other side is going to be non-Hamas.
But do you get down to the thing of actually disarming it?
And President Trump said again, it was a central part of the deal.
In fact, Hamas pledged they would do it and swore they would do it.
Your interpretation.
Again, I said it before.
I know that President Trump says that.
He says that all the time.
He said it to Maria Bartiromo a week after the deal was signed that Hamas pledged to disarm.
But I'm telling you, I've saved the clips, Steve.
Hamas spokespeople from day one were saying we never agreed to that.
We never agreed to disarm.
We're never going to disarm.
They keep saying it.
They've been saying it every day.
They are not going to lay down their weapons.
It's essential to who they are.
They're not going to do it.
Aren't there sponsors?
Hang on.
Aren't there sponsors, Qatar and Turkey?
So if Tatars are told, the game is up.
Hang on, the game is up, and we are underwriting.
We, Qatar, are going to put up the bulk of the money for this redevelopment.
We, Turkey, are going to be the, no matter Netanyahu and the Israelis don't like it, we are going to be the head of the security force.
You're going to have to disarm.
Do you believe that they have the stroke to tell Hamas to do that, or is it just going to fall on death?
I don't believe they do.
Here's what I think.
I'm going to say what I think happened.
And this is just my conjecture from, let's call it a well-informed conjecture from watching really closely.
Here's what I think happened.
I think that Qatar and Turkey told Trump, don't worry, we can handle these guys.
They're our guys.
We can rein them in.
We can take away their weapons.
We'll take care of it.
And that their plan all along was to insert themselves into the situation and do what they're trying to do now, which is to move forward to a phase two, which is not really a phase two.
It's really a trashing of the whole deal and get themselves in there so that they actually protect Hamas and then go through some sort of dog and pony show where Hamas kind of disarms where they're going to hand their weapons over to some other jihadist and say that they're not Hamas and it's really going to be a performative thing and they're not really going to disarm.
I think this is what Qatar and Turkey want to do and the Israelis are on to them and Netanyahu is saying no no no no it has to be a real disarming.
That's what I think actually happened.
But again, I cannot stress this enough.
And we're talking not only on Arab media, even on Western media, Sky News, BBC.
Hamas has said repeatedly that they never agreed to lay down their weapons.
Let me ask you, and notice, you know, Jared and Steve Wickoff are there.
Jared's the architect of Abraham Accords.
This is kind of the intellectual underpinnings of this.
It's more economic than political.
You have Witkoff is probably the lead negotiator here.
I noticed when I looked at that shot from the lunch that Ambassador Ron Dermer, who I think a lot of folks that are involved in this always think has been a steady pair of hands, safe pair of hands and steady on the wheel.
Why are Witkoff in, and I think everything we heard about going to the resort and signing the deal and President Trump going to the Knesset and all that, Dermer was a major player as kind of the representative of Netanyahu's government to make sure this thing was all worked out.
And you had one person in the room that knew everything was going on.
Where is Dermer?
And if he's not there, is that a big deal?
Yeah, it's a big deal.
Ron Dermer has been part of the brain trust of Bibi's foreign policy, especially with regards to the United States, Saudi Arabia, this whole all of these issues for many, many years.
Let's remember that during the first Trump term, he served as ambassador to the United States.
So he was stationed in Washington.
And he's until just a few weeks ago, he was serving as Minister of Strategic Affairs, which is a made-up office that was created just for him during this Netanyahu administration in order to handle all of these touchy issues.
And he resigned not long ago.
He stepped away.
He cited personal reasons, family, but he stepped away.
He did not come on this trip.
Personally, knowing the players involved, I am concerned that he's not there.
I wish he was there.
But look, it's, you know, Dermer's the best guy we have, and he's no longer part of that team that's there in Mar-a-Lago.
But that doesn't mean that the policies of the Netanyahu administration are not being pushed forward.
So, yeah, I would rather Dermer be there.
One of Dermer's big projects, you know, you mentioned the Amrahab Accords.
One of his big projects was trying to get normalization with Saudi Arabia, an expansion of the Abraham Accords.
But let's note, Steve, important to note that the Abraham Accords countries, which are the Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and the tacit approval of the Saudi Arabians, that's the actual moderate group in the Middle East who are mortal enemies of the Qataris and the Turks, who have become so much an important part of the Trump administration's orbit.
And it's not, these are two very different factions in the Middle East.
In fact, it was reported today, one of the members of Netanyahu's press pool, who's there in Mar-a-Lago now, said today that, and he's someone who's very reliable, that the Saudis and Emiratis have said quite clearly to President Trump that they want no part of the Gaza reconstruction if Qatar and Turkey are involved.
And that's something that's worth noting.
The Saudis and Emiratis and the other actual pro-Western moderate Muslim states are not part of the same camp in the Middle East as the Turks and the Qataris.
This is something that Westerners need to understand.
The Turks and the Qataris are not part of the pro-Western bloc.
I want to go to the Persians in Iran.
As we adamantly said here over and over and over again, the Israelis were taking it on the chin in the 12-day war.
The ballistic missiles were not all caught by David Sling and all these different, the dome and all that.
You were getting pounded, particularly in Tel Aviv.
We had rushed Aegis-class cruisers to the Eastern Med.
You had Patriot missile stats, all of it, but it wasn't enough given the ballistic missile campaign.
And I thought that that was pretty hidden, trying to be hidden from the mainstream media because the Netanyahu government would never talk about it.
We also said sanctions, economic sanctions can work here, particularly if you cut off the oil to the Chinese Communist Party and don't let the cash there.
There are riots in the streets right now.
The economic conditions couldn't be worse in Tehran.
Plus, now you're having a discussion about maybe a second bombing run or a second kinetic activity around the ballistic missile program.
Give me 30 seconds.
I'm going to hold you through the break.
We got Thayer and Kurt Mills.
Your thoughts?
Yeah.
Well, the 30 seconds is that there have been flare-ups of riots in the streets in Iran happening for a long time.
If you think back over the last decade and a half, there's something different going on there now.
The regime is struggling to push back, almost not pushing back.
There are reports coming out of the Iranian street that a lot of the police are just kind of giving up and not really doing much.
It's really signaling weakness by the regime that we haven't seen in a long time.
And again, it's all around the fact that their economy is collapsing while they're spending the billions of dollars they make selling their oil to the CCP on a ballistic missile program to try to destroy Israel.
That's what's going on there.
So I think there's some heavy sanctions.
Hang on one second.
Yeah.
Hang on a second.
We're going to hold you through the break.
Rabbi will look at you on the other side.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Mack.
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President Trump said he was going to knock the hell, quote, knock the hell out of the Persians, Iran, if they were going to rebuild their ballistic missile program.
Is the way to see this, and I don't want to have too much of a jaundice eye here when we're talking about which I think is a sideshow, which is the Middle East and Israel sideshow to a sideshow.
Was this just a kickoff to Netanyahu 2026, his campaign, sir?
Well, I don't know if this is the kickoff.
Things have been happening for a while.
You know, these diplomatic deals and the gas deal with Egypt.
Israel signed a $35 billion gas deal with Egypt that was announced a couple weeks ago and all sorts of big weapons deals.
There's been a lot going on, a lot of PR, and it certainly is the beginning of campaign season here in Israel.
Look, when it comes to elections, and Bibi has, you know, there's a lot of problems with Bibi Netanyahu, but the way the coalition politics works in Israel, and it's far beyond the scope of this discussion to get into the weeds on this.
Maybe at some later point, when it gets closer to the election, we can talk about it.
But there's kind of no, he will be the next prime minister.
I mean, it's just going to happen again because of the way things are and his Likud party being so popular.
And he still laps the field.
It's kind of similar to the Republican primary in 2024, where there's no real challenger when it comes to who people prefer as prime minister.
The left in Israel has been decimated and destroyed.
And Bibi's the large, he heads up the largest right-wing party.
So, yeah, it's kind of the campaign, but the truth is in the current makeup of the way our coalition politics works, he kind of doesn't need the help.
And I'm not saying that as an endorsement.
Yeah, I got it.
Well, President Trump, I think, endorsed him.
I mean, he couldn't have spoken higher.
He said it wouldn't even be an Israel.
It wouldn't even be in Israel if you didn't have Netanyahu.
Before I let you go, you've been an advocate of, hey, these meetings, we shouldn't even have to have them as often.
We should have our own independence.
We shouldn't take the $5 billion.
You're cutting all these deals with everybody else.
You're building, you know, with Greece, everybody.
You're building your own alliances or your own network.
Where does that stand?
Because there's other people saying the Times of Israel reports today, there's some factions in Bibi's coalition saying, you've got to get the MOU.
We need a new MOU, et cetera.
How serious is this effort for people to really say, hey, look, we shouldn't have to go begging the United States every time we want to take on a move in Syria against ISIS.
Or if we see ballistic missile capabilities, we want to take them out.
We shouldn't have to call Washington and get permission, sir.
Yeah, look, and it goes beyond that.
Look at what the, you know, Trump won't be in power forever.
And under the Biden administration, there was, you know, there were weapons that were being withheld from Israel.
And it all has to do with this asymmetrical relationship.
More and more Israelis are waking up to the fact that the aid from the United States is bad for Israel.
It limits us strategically.
The way that Israel got the aid to begin with was always as a way of pressuring Israel or selling Israel on making security concessions.
It all started when we gave up the Sinai Desert and the Camp David Accords with Jimmy Carter.
So the aid to Israel has always been a strategic problem for Israel.
And right now, in Bibi's inner circle, there are different factions.
Netanyahu himself, finally, finally, over the course of the last six months or so and ramping it up in the last couple of months, has been talking about the need to end the aid completely when this MOU ends.
I pray to God that we actually do so.
More and more Israelis, as I said, are waking up to the fact that we need to do so.
But there is that faction, that hardcore faction, those old-fashioned guys, the deep staters here who want the MOU renewed.
They might even want an increase.
They're going to be lobbying for it.
I've been pretty vocal in my Jerusalem Post columns and elsewhere advocating that the aid is bad for Israel.
So it is a bit of a knife fight going on over this issue.
But thankfully, Netanyahu has come out openly on our side on the side of drawing down the aid.
Israel is becoming more and more independent.
Steve, think about this one detail.
Israel in the last month has sold over $10 billion worth of air defense systems to Germany and Greece alone.
The annual payout of aid to Israel, the military aid to Israel, is $3.8 billion.
And at the same time, we just signed a gas supply deal where we're supplying natural gas to Egypt.
$35 billion deal was signed over the last two weeks.
This $3.8 billion in the United States is less and less of our annual budget.
It's less and less.
It's a tiny fraction of a percentage of our GDP.
It's not even that big a percentage of our defense budget anymore.
It's less than 10% of our defense budget at this point.
So we need to get rid of this aid, and hopefully it's moving in that direction.
I was informed, and it was spoken about here in Israel over the last few weeks, that this was going to be on the agenda of the meetings with Trump.
They didn't talk about it in the press conference.
But if Netanyahu stays in the prime minister's office, we will move in the direction of the aid being drawn down.
If he's not prime minister, we might get someone who thinks more traditionally who wants to keep the aid going.
Yeah.
Where do people get these videos you're putting out in your columns?
Where do they go for all your content?
Thank you.
The videos are three times a week at the Israel365 YouTube channel.
And thank you for the endorsement, Steve.
These are not just videos of me yapping.
These are videos explaining things that are going on in the Middle East that you simply are not getting through the mainstream media.
You can also find my columns on the Jerusalem Post, jpost.com.
I have a piece tomorrow about Israel's recognition of Somaliland and why that's so important geostrategically.
And you could also follow me on exit at rabbi PW and at Israel365Action.com.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate you staying up late to do this live.
Thank you, sir.
Dr. Bradley Thayer, you were great this morning.
You were great.
Thank you, sir.
You were great this morning on Ukraine.
Of course, since then, President Trump's actually had a conversation with Putin about he's saying that Ukrainians coming after his personal lodge, his personal residence.
But what was your assessment of Netanyahu's visit?
Give me a couple of minutes on that, particularly the press conference after.
Well, I thought it was very impressive.
Trump's performance was very impressive, of course, in the conference and in the press conference.
And I think, as the rabbi identified, that Netanyahu there has his demands, and Trump is working out, obviously, a way to massage him and move him on to his re-election, which Trump sees, of course, is very important for the relationship with Israel.
So never a dull moment, of course, on that front.
On Ukraine, or, of course, on Taiwan.
Taiwan, you know, President Trump was kind of not flippant, but he says she's not going to move on Taiwan while I'm here.
I know this guy very well.
They may be exercising, but he didn't seem like he was that worried about it.
He was much more upset about this situation, which he said, I don't know the facts.
I'm just hearing one side.
If it is true that Kiev went after Putin's private residence, how big a deal is that in this very delicate negotiation that we're trying to get to least somewhere on this Ukraine situation?
Well, it's huge.
I mean, the facts are yet to come out, but it does seem like Kiev tried to decapitate Russia, right?
It was a counter-leadership strike against Putin in an effort to kill him.
And there's a logic there, and that is that Kiev wants the war to keep going, right?
Zelensky wants the war to keep going, as Xi Jinping wants the war to keep going.
So decapitating Putin would, of course, throw a spanner in the works.
That's really going to gum things up.
Hold on.
Hold it.
Hang on.
While you bring it up, why you bring it up?
President Trump is like Prometheus trying to do this.
Actually, Putin has no problem with the war going on.
They think they're winning.
Zelensky wants the war, needs the war to go on because you realize he's getting turfed out immediately.
He understands that Netanyahu needs the war to go on.
That's how he continues to win and get endorsements from President Trump.
Plus, he'll face charges when it doesn't happen.
The Mullahs want the war to go on because the people in the street riding right now, because they don't have any bread and food, so they need the war to go on.
Xi particularly wants to keep the pressure on Taiwan.
He keeps the military off him by having the war continue to go on.
And let me throw Maduro in there.
All the actors in this drama, except for President Trump, want these wars to go on.
Therefore, how can one man try to solve these things with the opportunity costs it has to focus on it, right?
When you've got so many other concerns here, when all the, am I wrong?
Every major participant that's a decision maker, and let me throw Erdogan in there too, all want these wars to continue because it's in their benefit for them to continue, is it not?
It is, I think, for most of those actors, but it is in the interest clearly of Russia at some point to end this war and to take the not the olive branch or to at least take the entreaty that Trump is offering him of moving beyond this conflict and improving relations between Moscow and Washington,
which is a very important step and helps us enormously in the relationship with dealing with, of course, the Chinese Communist Party.
So, yeah, a lot of actors want the war to keep going.
Zelensky and Xi Jinping, I think they're our most important.
But every war ends.
And this is going to end.
Yeah.
Hang on for a second.
Just stick right there.
I'm going to come back to you.
Curtin Mills.
My thesis is that they all want the wars to continue.
You saw President Trump.
What was your assessment of the BB meeting?
We talked beforehand.
You saw the press conference afterwards.
What do you think happened?
I think it took quite a temerity for Netanyahu to come in here before the year closes and ask for a bill of goods and ask the president to expend more political capital on wars that he promised to end.
And I think so far, you know, talk is cheap, and maybe Trump is just trying to throw him a bone rhetorically by saying the relationship is as close as ever.
And meanwhile, they'll usher Netanyahu out.
Certainly, that's what happened in the spring when he looked tight as a knot with Netanyahu and then initiated negotiations with the Iranians.
But so far, today's meeting was not positive for those who want to see the U.S. diversify from the Israeli relationship and extricate the country from these wars in the Middle East.
Why do you say that?
I mean, Trump unfortunately committed to the United States.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
But let's take Hamas, which has always been a burning topic.
How do you go for it?
He said there are many countries.
He essentially, I think, maybe I misinterpreted.
The IDF wasn't on his top 10 list to disarm Hamas.
He says there's many countries, including some of their former allies, who will want to go in and destroy them.
Right there, that's a totally different.
Now, you think that was just rhetoric?
That's just President Trump talking?
Or you actually think that that's a move that he's telling Netanyahu we're not going to have, because the centerpiece of this meeting, I'm sure, was about who's going to disarm Hamas.
That's the one that that and the and hitting the Iranians again with another attack, hopefully leading to regime change for Jerusalem, right?
That's the two centerpieces of this meeting.
Well, the most concerning part was the commitment, and I'm not sure he knew what he was doing there, the commitment, and unfortunately people construe it as a red line to bomb Iran for the ICBMs.
Iran has ICBMs already.
So if that's the criterion, you could see bombing raids tonight.
And I think that would be very concerning.
I think, though, Trump threw a lot of rhetoric that was potentially intentionally self-contradictory.
The previous guest, Rabbi Waliki, kind of caught onto it, I think, in my opinion.
He had a lot of positive words to say about Erdogan.
Erdogan's interests and Turkey's interests, Turkey's interests in the Middle East are not the same as the rabbis or the Netanyahu faction or Israel.
And so he's going to have to pick or these chairs are going to keep spinning.
This dynamic will continue to be unsolved.
Hang on for a second.
We're going to get into more of it.
My thesis is that all the nine actors President Trump is dealing with all want these wars to continue.
Short break.
Kurt Mills, Dr. Thayer.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
We're going to get into all the Federal Reserve things President Trump talked about tomorrow.
We're going to also get into, he said there's actually a hit inside of Venezuela.
We'll do that tomorrow.
But Kurt Mills, given opportunity costs, given all this revelations of what's happening in Minneapolis, you've seen the fight in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles about not allowing ICE or not allowing federalized National Guard to come in and support ICE on mass deportations.
The energy and focus and time it just takes for these endless wars.
And particularly when it was the seven or nine guys you're across the table from, none of them want them to end.
They're incentivized to keep them going because they stay in power this way and the money keeps flowing from the arms industry.
So is President Trump?
I mean, you saw Ukraine yesterday was three or five hours, but you know, hours in preparation, hours afterwards for decision making.
Same thing today.
Is the candle worth the game here, sir?
I mean, clearly not.
The question is about how to bring this home and how to score a touchdown on it.
I think the Israelis really don't want the wars to end.
So I think it's important to tear this.
And I think among the Israelis, Netanyahu really doesn't want them to end.
And I think you see this rhetorically, or perhaps I should say in Israeli propaganda, that they'll effectively operate and co-opt any talking point if they need to.
So they've seen the writing on the wall on defense spending.
The U.S. does not want to continue funding defense expenditures for the Israelis.
It makes no sense.
It's not vogued on the right to advocate for it.
And so they'll move the goalposts and say, oh, that's okay.
We don't actually support defense spending.
But then they'll lobby for all other types of military support and back channels.
And I think that's what you saw today.
I mean, if Israel really didn't need the United States, what is Netanyahu doing here days before the new year?
What is Netanyahu in private briefings with the Secretary of War and the President of the United States demanding potential U.S. strikes on Iranian ICBM missiles, not nuclear weapons?
The goalposts have already moved from that.
That was the Israeli talking point since the 90s.
And because they know they'll enrage President Trump by claiming that the Iranians maybe still have nukes, I think they probably do, then they're moving to these missiles, which is just, you know, if that's the criterion, as I said in the earlier segment, we're going to war tonight.
And so I'm not sure if President Trump quite realized what he committed to there, but it's very dangerous stuff if the president wants to keep his pledge to keep us out of endless wars.
That's what the man on the street understands.
This is all well and good.
And if this pageantry, if this deal making results in accordance, then I will be the first to celebrate it.
And I think that the madman theory of diplomacy will have borne fruit.
But if it results in the wars continue and that the average voter, the average MAGA voter is either motivated for 2026 or outright hostile to the legacy of this administration on foreign policy, that's bad news for Trump's legacy.
That's bad news for potential successors.
That's bad for the country.
Okay, where do they go to American Conservative?
Look, I say POX on all their houses.
Let them go fight it out.
They've been fighting for thousands of years in the Middle East.
It's a sideshow to a sideshow right now.
In Ukraine, I could care less.
The Russian-speaking eastern border of Ukraine is not in the vital.
Whatever happens between those two Slavic entities has nothing to do with the vital national security interests of the United States.
Maybe in Paris it does.
Maybe in Brussels it does.
Maybe in Davos, Rome, and London.
And those people are to step up to the plate and stop lying to their own people and the president of the United States.
Kurt, where do people go and get you over at the American Conservative?
Look, Detroit is more important than Adonbas.
Texas is more important than Tel Aviv.
TheAmericanConservative.com, the magazine was founded in 2002 by conservatives, including Patrick J. Buchanan, against the Iraq War.
You can find my own work at C-U-R-T, M-I-L-L-S on X. We're doing activist journalism here to try to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Thank you, Steve.
And I know you're a skeptic on this, and particularly, and Wulecki says it, the deep state in Israel wants to continue on.
But I think I see a glimmer of hope in this fact of no more money, no more support.
Go do what you want.
You want to take the Turks on?
Have at it.
You want to take ISIS up in Syria?
Go on, have at it.
You want to take the Persians on?
Have at it.
Just deal us out.
We're not.
The Middle East is a sideshow.
Israel and the whole situation there is a sideshow to a sideshow.
And it's now time to cut bait and let them go.
Give them a blessing and boom.
If they want to go hammer, and they know how to hammer, hammer away, particularly with the situation in Hamas and who's going to take the weapons away, et cetera.
It shouldn't be our concern.
We've got more than enough to do here.
Kurt, thank you so much, sir.
Appreciate you.
We'll have you back on.
This is the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
Dr. Thayer, where do folks go to?
You had a brilliant assessment today of the Ukraine situation.
I want to make sure everybody gets it.
I know you're working on a new book.
Where do people get your writings?
Where do they get you on social media?
Brad Therodex and Barrel Theron Getter and Truth.
And Steve, the CCP is the center of gravity here.
And it's not Ukraine, and it's not the Middle East.
And they are turning up to me on Taiwan.
I actually had a chance over the weekend to meet with some Taiwanese folks.
And I don't think people appreciate the sensitivity with the high-chip production manufacturing and what's going on.
This naval exercise, and we're going to have Captain Fenelon tomorrow.
This naval exercise in the last 24, 40 hours is nothing to joke around about.
I mean, this is a whole envelopment, LIFIRE exercise.
She could not be, I think, singly more that, and he says this, they want us to back off, that anybody that supports Taiwan independence is a problem and therefore an enemy, according to the CCP.
Give me a minute on that.
Do you agree that this thing is this is the most of everything that's happening?
This is 10 times the most serious thing that's out there, correct?
It is.
It's not getting any attention, and it is the most serious thing.
They've surrounded Taiwan with the exercises, with the eight zones that they have.
One of the zones overlaps with Japan's EEZ.
So that's involving Japan, which Xi Jinping's quite clear about that.
It's a very difficult relationship with the Japanese.
And it Directly negatively impacts our relations, our national security interests in the Indo-Pacific.
Taiwan matters because it's because of CHIPS, no doubt about it, but also because it's geostrategic real estate really matters for that reason.
And it matters because it shows what the CCP killed in China.
Taiwan shows what China might have been if the communists hadn't come to power.
So they're targeting it.
They're turning up the heat, and we need to act.
Yeah.
Thanks to you.
Dr. Lee, thank you.
Look forward to having you back on the next couple of days.
Very, very serious.
President Trump, like Prometheus, remember, all nine of them, everybody across the table, none of them are interested in any of these wars.
They're not.
In fact, they're incentivized to keep these wars going.
All of them.
Only President Trump.
And President Trump starts everything by saying how many people killed 26,000 a month Ukrainians.
Again, today, President Trump lays it out there.
26,000 a month.
And that weighs on President Trump, just the reality.
So not sure we got a lot of clarity in the last 48 hours, but we'll be on top of it.
Stick around.
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