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Feb. 6, 2026 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
47:13
Patrick Henningsen: Why U.S. War Strategy Is Pushing the World Toward Conflict
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Time Text
Risk of Regional Conflict 00:11:56
The risk of any major conflict that's breaking out between the U.S. and Iran is most certainly going to spill over even beyond the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
The Iranians said they'll regard any attack by the U.S. also as an attack by Israel and vice versa.
So both Israel and the U.S. military targets in the region are going to be hit by Iranian missiles.
And so that's where this type of behavior leads.
Welcome to today's interview here on Bration.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Bration.
And, you know, I got to say, I'm really honored to have our guest on today because he has been such an incredible voice of courage and truth.
I can't say enough good things about our guest, Patrick Henningsen, from 21st Century Wire.
I've even publicly said, this is the guy you need to listen to.
And I'm serious about that.
I've watched probably 100 of his interviews over the last few months, and he just nails it every time.
So welcome to the show.
Patrick Henningsen, it's just an honor to have you on.
I greatly appreciate your work.
Thanks, Mike.
It's great to be with you.
Likewise, I'm always been a big fan of your dogged pursuit of the truth as well.
That's a good description.
Yeah, I'm a little off the leash in my dogged pursuit sometimes.
But you, I'm so impressed with your grasp of all of the relevant facts, the backstory, the greater context of what's happening.
And I think you've got just a very insightful interpretation of so many events.
So let's start with Iran and the Middle East first.
Can you give our audience your take?
And by the way, we'll plug your website.
I'll bring up your website in a little bit.
But what's your take on what's happening with Iran and why Trump has been afraid, seemingly, to actually initiate this wild, illegal attack against a foreign nation?
Well, this is the big question that everybody wants to know.
And I think not just the direct actors, the United States, Iran, I will even throw Israel into that sentence as well, but the entire region of the Middle East and also the world, because the risk of any major conflict that's breaking out between the U.S. and Iran is most certainly going to spill over even beyond the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
That's because the Iranians have said that they'll regard any attack.
This will be the second unprovoked attack by the Trump administration against Iran.
But the Iranians said they'll regard any attack by the U.S. also as an attack by Israel and vice versa.
So both Israel and the U.S. military targets in the region are going to be hit by Iranian missiles if Trump goes through with what he's been threatening, which is he's going to bomb Iran.
And the problem with this, Mike, is that he keeps giving a different reason.
So it's not that Iran has attacked the United States.
It's that, well, first it was the peaceful protesters that were being supposedly massacred.
If you believe any of these U.S.-based NGOs that claim to be Iranian human rights organizations, first it was like 2,000, then 3,000.
An hour later, it's 5,000.
Two hours later, it's 30,000.
Suddenly, like a day later, it's 50,000.
Then next thing you know, they're saying there's a genocide happening in Tehran.
The mullahs are genociding their own people.
Of course, none of this is even remotely true.
And this was one of the biggest propaganda campaigns that was being driven by Israel, by Israeli media interests, by all these agencies that are hiring these influencers to basically shill for pretty much any issue you can imagine.
And I know of some of these agencies, and of course they're doing kind of what they call Hezbollah propaganda on behalf of Israel, but some of these same people were also pushing the vaccine, believe it or not, a couple of years ago.
And then some of them moved on to promote the war in Ukraine, the proxy war, and big up Zelensky and so forth.
So there are these influence agencies, and they kicked into high gear.
The Israeli agencies are paying huge amounts of money for people to put up videos, Iranian expats, basically people who support the royal family or the reinstallation of the US.
And Patrick, I'm sorry to interrupt, but this is exactly what we saw during the early years of the Ukraine conflict as well.
The West was just putting out the most insane propaganda possible and trying to create these justifications, saying, oh, Russia committed this heinous war crime in this town.
I think like Bucha was one of them or Bucha.
We know that that was put together by MI6, British intelligence with Ukraine intelligence.
And if his rule is we have to bomb any nation that commits genocide, then why isn't he bombing Israel?
And if his rule is we have to stop any regime that is shooting its protesters, then why doesn't he resign?
Because his ICE agents are shooting Americans in the streets of America, right?
So there's total hypocrisy.
There's no one in the Trump administration is beholden to any kind of truth when talking about Iran.
It's just another desire to turn Iran into Libya or Syria.
And that's it.
It's so obvious at this point.
And Iraq, you know, Iraq for that matter.
Right.
But this is just the biggest propaganda free-for-all, pretty much I've ever seen in my life.
And what they're trying to do is manufacture consent, public consent, for a bombing raid or a major attack on Iran.
And the U.S. intelligence heads, operatives, Israeli intelligence operatives, Israeli major military opponents are on record as saying that these were Mossad-directed infiltrators brought in, be it the MEK, which are basically run by the CIA and Israeli intelligence.
That's an Iranian terrorist organization, which works out of a camp in Albania.
Then there's Kurdish factions that were mobilized and paid to go in there, as well as just agent provocateurs, probably from a few different sources.
And so that's on record.
They burned down 250 mosques or set arsonists.
I mean, that's an Islamic country.
People who live there do not burn mosques.
Right.
I can just tell you that right there.
And 700 banks were attacked.
Now, that is a coordinated attack to take down the infrastructure to destabilize society and business and commerce.
And what they thought is they'd have momentum and then airstrikes could go on, ride the wave of that momentum of instability.
And then the U.S. would do targeted airstrikes.
And then by that time, Mike, it's global.
The narrative would be set.
The regime is falling.
And they'd be piling in at that point.
And it didn't happen.
They've done this to other countries over and over over the years.
And also, what you just said, I just want to point out that Treasury Secretary Besant publicly confirmed what you just said.
And he called it statecraft.
He said, basically, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, yeah, we work together to crash their currency and crash their banks.
And that's called statecraft.
And nobody had to die.
But he's admitting the whole thing.
I mean, these are acts of financial terrorism against a foreign state.
As Rand Paul was asking in a recent Senate hearing, you know, if someone did these kinds of things to America, like kidnapping our president, wouldn't that be considered an act of war?
By any standard, these are acts of war.
It's irrefutable.
Marco Rubio struggled with that question, by the way.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I think that was extraordinary.
So this is a formula the United States have done to multiple countries.
And it's only now, and you sort of have to thank Scott Bessett for letting this trade secret, tradecraft secret out of the bag.
And he's basically saying, laying bare what the U.S. policy of economic warfare has been to take down Syria.
They attacked the currency in Syria.
Then they followed up with the jihadists.
Then they sanctioned them.
And so that sort of three, that three-prong attack on the country, then airstrikes by Israel and Syria, they just tortured that country for 15 years until it collapsed.
And then they declared this is some sort of a wonderful victory.
Meanwhile, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of Syrians died or had to flee the country.
Millions fled the country because of this proxy war that was waged.
The U.S. did the same thing with Venezuela.
They attacked their currency multiple times over the last 10 years.
They sanctioned them.
They embargoed them.
The same with Iran.
And then our leaders and our media and our punditry turn around and say, these people are mismanaging.
Maduro's mismanaging the economy.
Maduro must go.
The Ayatollah is mismanaging the economy.
The Ayatollah must go.
Bashar al-Sad is mismanaging the economy.
He must go.
They tried it with Putin.
They failed miserably.
It didn't work.
But this is the formula.
Libya, the same.
And then they use that as a justification.
And Trump's doing it as well.
This tired old dish rag of a propaganda line that while you're strangling this country, literally strangling it economically and hitting it military, and you're blaming the quote regime.
Same thing we've done to Cuba for decades.
What are we now?
75 years of trying to destroy Cuba?
I mean, what has Cuba ever done to the United States?
Nothing.
I mean, the reality is this, Mike.
If you lift these countries alone and you didn't sanction them, they'd probably be very successful and prosperous.
And they would probably gradually liberalize a lot of aspects of their society and economy over time.
It's just natural that would happen.
But when you put the pressure on and you put them like you boil them over time, and then you try to assassinate their leadership and you punish them collectively, all you're going to do is embolden the hardliners in all these countries.
And whatever you think ideologically you want to destroy, you'll make it stronger.
So what the U.S. and the Israelis have done is really increase the resilience and the resolve of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Now, I've been to Iran, okay, and it's nothing like it's being characterized in the West.
And they talk about the Ayatollah like he's some terrorist leader.
He's more akin to, obviously they're under attack, but he is more like a spiritual leader, more kind of in the line of a pope than anything.
But these are also very smart, well-skilled people who served in the military, as well as being kind of religious leaders.
And the way that politics is designed in Iran is they have so many layers of parliamentary government.
There's so much political debate.
It is so vibrant politically, that country.
They just have a different system.
And they are fighting ISIS.
They've spilled blood on the ground in Iraq.
They defeated ISIS.
The Iraqi Shiite militias, the Iranians led by Qasim Suleimani, they defeated ISIS on the ground.
The United States did not engage ISIS on the ground, period.
The Iraqis and the Irani did all the heavy lifting, and Syria did as well, and the Russians in Syria.
Stealth Bombers at Risk 00:15:09
But we've characterized as calling them a terrorist, the world's number one state sponsor of terror.
That is a made-up Israeli propaganda line.
The biggest terrorists, sponsors of terrorism in the world, I'm afraid, is the United States of America.
That's factually true.
That's a documented fact.
Yeah, that's facts.
And Israel, I'll throw Israel in there and the Gulf states who bankrolled a lot of these terrorist bands marauding around Syria and Iraq as well.
So let me give out your website here.
It's 21stcenturywire.com.
And I want to encourage our audience to check out the site.
Check out, you do many interviews, many videos.
You've got articles there.
We're also spidering and indexing your site on our brightnews.ai, by the way.
So your news helps influence our trends analysis.
And hopefully we're bringing you some traffic there.
I want to mention this, too.
This is the next question.
So I did an article today, well, last night on Natural News.
Said, it's over, how China's anti-stealth radar and missiles have ended U.S. military dominance.
And I'd like to get your analysis of what I'm about to share here.
I think you're already aware of this, but let me share it with the audience.
Of China doing a deal with Iran to transfer these, the JY-27A and LYLC-8B.
These are anti-stealth radar systems that operate in the VHF and UHF bands, which is very unusual for radar.
They can detect stealth aircraft up to 500 kilometers away.
And then on top of that, they gave them, what is it, the HQ-9B, yeah, the HQ-9 surface-to-air missile system, which each missile has its own radar and its own infrared, basically an optical sensor of heat signatures.
So once the missile launches, it can find the target and bring it down.
Now, my question to you, Patrick, is, do you think that this is a factor in the calculation of the DOD or Trump thinking that if they attack Iran now, they might lose a stealth bomber or two or stealth fighters, and that would be, or maybe even some naval vessels because of Iran's anti-ship missile capabilities, in addition to the damage that would happen to Israel on top of all that, and the U.S. military bases.
But is this part of the calculation going on right now in your view?
Yes, yeah.
This is a very complicated calculation to, you know, to attack Iran.
And what you're talking about, this anti-stealth radar system, likely Chinese.
So we got the first clue of this.
There was Operation True Promise 1 and Operation True Promise 2.
That's when Iran fired missiles at Israel.
Number two was the 12-day war last June.
But prior to that, and when Israel came to mount attacks initially against Iran, Iran's air defense is done in concentric perimeters.
Well, the Israeli Air Force, the IDF, had to call off one of their first wave of strikes because they got pinged.
And they had no idea.
They got pinged, and it was beyond 400 miles or 400 kilometers or whatever the expected standard parameter was.
And they had no idea what it was.
So it's more likely it was from a system that they were unaware of or hadn't encountered before, which fits your story, which you've just showed us there.
Okay, that's something.
And the other thing is Iran has developed its own proprietary air defense systems.
And, you know, if you know anything about engineering and technology, the Iranians are world leaders in a number of fields.
So they produce more engineering graduates probably than the entire Middle East combined in a single year.
And half of those are probably women, by the way.
So, you know, this is a very advanced, you know, science and technology sector in Iran.
So that said, then you have the other issue, which is the United States, which you mentioned correctly, Mike, is that you said, is this going to.
are these issues in terms of like what kind of attack could the U.S. or Israel deploy?
Now, immediately they run into two problems.
One is Saudi Arabia announced that they're going to close their airspace to any U.S. attacks.
That includes not using the U.S. base, which is based in Saudi.
U.S. have bases in Saudi, UAE, Qatar, also Kuwait, and also Iraq.
But they've withdrawn their heavy assets from Iraq because the Iraqis are basically getting pressured from internally in Iraq not to allow overflights over Iraq.
So if you take away some of these countries that are bordering Iran, the calculus gets much more complicated.
But that gives an advantage to the Iranians.
So what the Americans would do is rather than send aircraft, they would do what many people believe the last attack was, which are standoff missiles.
So these would be fired from submarines or naval vessels quite a ways off the coast.
These would be tomahawk and cruise missiles, massive barrages of those, because going over Iranian airspace is risky.
You've got to be very high altitude.
You know, Trump claims he sent the B-2 bombers in, but it's debatable exactly who dropped what munitions.
Certainly from a public relations splash point of view with Trump, it's the bombers.
That would be the great.
It's not a great story for Trump to say, well, we held back the subs at a safe distance, fired and then submerged and took off.
That's not a good Trump story.
But that's probably the most practical way if you're going to engage the Iranians because you remember, Mike, back in the Iran-Iraq war, the last year was 1987, 88, when the tanker wars were happening.
That was during, I think, the end of Ronald Reagan's second term.
And a U.S. boat, U.S. battleship was taken down.
The USS Stark was hit by an Exocet missile accidentally by U.S. ally Iraq.
The U.S. shot down a passenger airline and killed everybody in Iranian air passenger airline.
I mean, it was a disaster.
So because it's such a bottleneck, the Persian Gulf, it's the last place where you want to be putting heavy naval assets.
And Iran has anti-ship missiles, surface two-ship missiles from their coast, as well as anti-ship missiles that can be deployed from aircraft at low altitude, as well as submarines, which Iran has, as well as potentially mining the Straits of Hormuz, which they could do as well.
So it's not a great place for the U.S.
I mean, it's not 1987 anymore.
This is 2026.
And also recently, the Shahad drone from Iran, I think that's how you pronounce it.
You know, the U.S. claims, well, we destroyed it because it was aggressively approaching our aircraft carrier.
Well, that drone had flown for hundreds of kilometers without being destroyed.
And clearly that drone was gathering intel and transmitting it back to Iran.
And clearly that was a successful intel gathering mission.
So for the cost of one $20,000 drone, Iran got to see the entire battle profile of a carrier fleet or group, as it's called, right?
And that's invaluable information for Iran on how to defend itself or even to attack those ships.
So, you know, wasn't that a failure by the U.S. Navy?
Not a success.
Like, we shot down a drone.
My question is, how did you let it get that close?
I think it was a huge mistake, Mike, because, you know, Iran, Shahid drones, they can deploy those hundreds at a time.
Right.
All they have to do is swarm a few of the naval battleships or major frigates, and they can empty out all of their anti-aircraft and empty out their anti-missile.
I mean, it would just take a few swarms of Iranian drones, and there's nothing left.
And so they won't have even the munitions to protect Israel from an Iranian counter-strike, missile strikes coming from Iran to Israel or even to U.S. bases like Al-Adin base in Qatar or whatever.
Iran could, because the U.S., the problem is in the age of drones, these naval assets become kind of obsolete in a certain way because to protect themselves, they would need to expend their arsenal.
And that gives an advantage to the second and third wave attacks by Iranians, which would be more significant.
Absolutely.
So in the loitering drones as well, which Iran has, those are deadly.
I mean, they could take out the surface of an aircraft carry and kind of make the deck obsolete at some point, you know, with a few loitering munitions.
So it's not a good place to be like pushing an armada around, as Trump likes to call it.
But, you know, for posturing, sure.
But practically, when things start to kick off, but maybe that's the plan, Mike, is that image of the smoking U.S. boat sinking in the Persian Gulf and Fox News would be revving it up.
They would be basically drooling for Lindsey Graham would be out calling to nuke Tehran at that point.
Of course he would.
You know he would.
And because people are so irrational right now in the U.S. on the on that kind of warmongering end of the Republican Party, and the Democrats have a few of those as well.
And these people are just not thinking straight.
And I really, I'm scared because, you know, all those U.S. assets in such a shallow waters of the Persian Gulf, it's also kind of who benefits from dragging the U.S. further into escalation of the USA.
Israel benefits.
Yeah.
And have they ever done a false flag against a U.S. naval vessel before?
Did the Protestant Liberty come to mind, right?
Yeah, they have.
Yeah.
9-11.
I mean, go down the list.
It's theoretical.
Yeah, it's real.
It's a legitimate concern.
There's another factor here in all of this.
I'd like your reaction to this, which is that I believe because of China's export restrictions on rare earth that go into the F-35s and submarines and radar systems and so much more, that at this point, losing a B-2 stealth bomber, that aircraft is irreplaceable.
I did another story on this.
I'm not here to just plug my stories, but this is relevant.
It's called Unobtanium and Hopium, How China's Rare Earth Siege Has Neutered U.S. Military Might.
Then in this story, I go through the calendar of restrictions on all these minerals, including the rare earths, the antimony, the terbium, the dysprosium, neodymium, all the magnets and everything, the radiation shielding and the graphite, like the graphite that goes into our stealth fighters.
Did you know that China controls literally 100% of the graphite market for the world?
And for other minerals, it's 99% for many of them.
So the U.S. is, I believe, is in a position, but I'd love your reaction, where even if it is forced to fire hundreds of air defense interceptors or hundreds of missiles against Iran, it can't replace them.
It just literally can't replace them and it doesn't have stockpiles because they sent all the missiles to either Israel or Ukraine over the last five years.
So where are we?
You know, it's like a floating parade to display weapons, but never use them.
Yeah, Maxima, where we are is that to sustain any kind of military operation, regime change operation, or just destroy the infrastructure of Iran just to show that you can do it.
You're talking two weeks maximum, two weeks of a sustained military operation of that sort, remotely, standoff, firing in.
And that's not even to talk about what retaliation might look like just if it was a one-way attack, like with the like with Iraq, 7,000 cruise missiles in three weeks in the initial 2003 Iraq war.
So, I mean, but this isn't Iraq.
Iran has ICBMs, hypersonics, very accurate.
They took out Israel's MOD in the middle of Tel Aviv and their main military research facility between two apartment blocks and didn't hit the apartment blocks on either side.
I remember that.
So you're not dealing with a slouch sort of military.
The Iranians are serious, but they're also very careful because they know that they can only really fire if they're attacked first, because that's the rules of the game if you're dealing with more powerful nuclear-armed countries like the U.S. and Israel.
So they have to kind of play by the rules in that sense, which makes them vulnerable.
They would love to probably do a preemptive strike, but that might invite hellfire from the U.S. and Israel.
And it could even invite a nuclear, tactical, or strategic nuclear strike.
I can't believe we're having this conversation in 2026, but here we are.
So, I mean, there's a lot of different possibilities there.
The bottom line is this, Mike, is that this would not be isolated to the U.S. versus Iran.
This would be a three-way affair with Israel getting hit and also being involved, as well as multiple Gulf countries, as well as anywhere where there's a U.S. facility from Bahrain, right around the horn of the Persian Gulf.
Maybe Diego Garcia is within range of the Iranians.
They could absolutely hit Diego Garcia, U.S. military base.
And Trump could lose a good percentage of the U.S. Navy.
I mean, that can happen in this case.
So, they've been pounding Gaza for two years, and they haven't destroyed Hamas.
What makes you think that they're going to wipe out the Iranian IRGC and their national defense in two weeks?
That's not going to happen.
Yeah, exactly.
These China radar systems that I mentioned earlier, they're mobile.
Iran's Strategic Position 00:05:21
They're mobile, you know, so they're not fixed installations.
And even though it's like a 100-square-foot radar array, it all folds up and the truck drives away or they store it in the cave in the mountain, and then they bring it out when they need it.
But my next question to you, Patrick, is about let's talk about Russia and China, because Russia has said many things before.
You know, various speakers, representatives of Russia have said that we can't let Iran be destroyed by America.
And China has seemingly said very much the same thing.
And clearly, China is giving weapons assistance, trading weapons for oil.
And Russia appears to be giving technical assistance, especially on anti-air defense systems.
I would imagine there are Russian military personnel probably on the ground in Iran running those systems because they are most familiar with them.
In your view, because you have such a great big picture worldview understanding of geopolitics and routes and resources, what are the key reasons why Russia and China cannot let Iran fall?
Well, firstly, the future of Eurasia and the future of Russia's economy, China's economy.
I would even go so far as probably, I could name a half a dozen other countries, including Arab countries and Central Asia, even India.
India will benefit massively from the middle corridor is what it's known as.
And this would be the overland trade route, which would connect Russia via Iran, via the Caucasus, via Iran, down to the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to connect to Mumbai, the port of Mumbai.
That's called the Middle Corridor.
Iran would be obviously hosting that.
And that would be the hinge, if you will, of China's Belt and Road initiative.
And look at how much China has invested in networking up Asia, not just overland routes, of course, sea routes as well.
But, you know, so who's building right now?
You know, China's building.
These Asian countries are building.
Singapore is building and investing.
And what's the U.S. doing?
What are the Europeans doing?
They're sabotaging things.
They're blowing things up.
They're threatening.
They're destroying.
And piracy, stealing people's oil tankers.
I mean, that's kind of where we're at right now in the early 21st century.
And so this has been the geopolitical game, Mike, for 300 years, which is always to separate Europe, well, Germany and Russia to keep them apart.
Two world wars were fought doing that, by the way, at the behest of the British and the Americans.
But it's to separate Europe and Asia.
It's always been a priority for the British Empire.
And as the British Empire subsided and the United States took over the reins of the global maritime trade and mercantile trade and commerce globally, then the United States, it's in their interest.
It's their priority to control and dominate global trade and commerce along those waterways, canals, and so forth.
That's why all these flashpoints are still active.
Israel plays a role, obviously, traditionally for the British Empire in providing that beachhead for Anglo and now Anglo-American and Western interests in the Middle East.
But that beachhead has kind of morphed into something like the tail on steroids is now wagging the dog in Washington to a degree that nobody could probably have envisioned 50 or 60 years ago.
But here we are.
So Iran poses a problem for Israel and for the United States and for the West, because when you have goods going directly from Europe through Russia into Iran and to India, that changes the entire world order.
And so that's the great game that Britain's been fighting for 300 years.
And wars in Afghanistan and Crimea have been repeatedly fought over this very issue.
And now before we had the Ottoman Empire, and now we have a collection of other states there, many of them U.S. and Western puppets, of course.
But the difference is the state of Israel was established in 1948 and has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the region.
And they've bombed and attacked, I don't know, seven countries in the last year.
And if we just want to extrapolate that record, it's a horror show, really.
And the United States is giving them unconditional support financially and militarily at the expense of pretty much everybody else.
And Iran is not a monarchy.
It is a republic.
It's an Islamic republic, but it's a republic.
And all of the Arab republics have also been targeted traditionally.
The U.S. government was never so concerned during the Cold War with communism as they were with Arab nationalism.
History Of Global Dominance 00:14:30
Why?
Because these secular governments that were multi-religious and multi-factional, but were secular and had some state-owned, you know, like energy and some of the main infrastructures they wanted state-owned.
Egypt and the Suez Canal crisis was over that very issue, as is the Mohamed Mossadegh being overthrown by the CIA and MI6 in 1953 in Iran and installing the Shah was really about whether those assets, those resources were going to be part of the national portfolio or privatized by BP or Shell or whoever.
Venezuela, same exact story.
So this has always been the battleground.
And it's because these independent governments pose a huge problem because unfortunately, the U.S. doesn't like negotiating for resources.
They like to dictate the terms.
And if you read John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I mean, that's one of the great books that kind of outlines this whole process of opening up countries for U.S. goods and markets.
I had Perkins on the show not that long ago, by the way.
And he's still doing a lot of activism in these areas.
You're exactly right.
But he was part of that system.
He saw how it worked.
But I want to upgrade that to 2026 here because his book was written, I don't know, 15 years ago or more, maybe 20 years ago.
But I want to ask you to contrast the global sort of business model of the U.S. versus, let's say, China.
And let me set it up.
So the U.S. is no longer, obviously, the manufacturing or industrial base of the world.
The primary export of the U.S. is debt and you could argue inflation.
So the U.S. has to enforce the rest of the world at gunpoint to keep using dollars in order to keep the U.S. regime alive.
China, on the other hand, is kind of where we were back at the end of World War II.
China has the factories.
China has the people, the engineers.
China has the people willing to work and make stuff.
But in order for that to function, the trade routes have to exist so they can export stuff all over the world, which is where we were in the 1950s and 60s.
But so today, and again, correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it seems like the U.S. wants to toss grenades into the birthday party and just blow up all the trade routes, blow up tariffs, sanctions, bombs, regime change.
And China is trying to say, no, we just want to do business with the world.
We just want to export, export, export, because that's their advantage right now.
Does that make sense?
Or where would you add or agree or disagree with that assessment?
That's generally absolutely what's happening.
I would even go down to a little bit deeper than that, Mike, in that how Donald Trump is behaving right now is very similar.
And where China is is also very similar to when William McKinley was president in the United States and Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
And, you know, the U.S. did not have a muscular foreign policy until the end of the 19th century because something happened after the Civil War and once reconstruction of the South was underway.
And suddenly, and also mass migration flows from the South to the Northern states, cheap labor coming from the South.
The United States very quickly becoming a manufacturing superpower at the end of the 19th century.
And so what that did was they had this problem in the U.S.
They started having an oversupply of goods.
So they had a deflation issue.
And so this set off alarm bells for industry and the oligarch class of that period, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Mellons, et cetera, the interests of capital at that time, they were like, we need new markets.
And so suddenly, as if by magic, the United States started engaging in expansionist foreign policy and interventions overseas, wars, things that the U.S. really wasn't that involved in before.
Suddenly it became a major priority for the United States in order for its industries to grow.
And soon after that, the dollar became effectively the world reserve currency after the First World War.
I know with Bretton Woods and then the end of Bretton Woods and the petrodollar, but before that, by the end of the Second World War, after the Federal Reserve was established in 1913, in terms of total trade and volume of transactions globally, the dollar had practically become a de facto global reserve currency, even though British sterling was the dominant reserve currency at the time.
And the U.S. played a blinder with the First World War.
They did the same in the Second World War as they bankrupted Europe.
They let Europe, you know, our geniuses in Wall Street at the time were absolutely pro-war and were funding both sides of the war both times.
But the U.S. realized if they just kept feeding this, then these countries were all going into debt.
They emptied their gold reserves in Europe.
And then the U.S. just basically said, how much do you need?
But they demanded payment in gold.
And so in the Second World War as well, and created all these debt cycles for these European countries and then used that as leverage to basically direct and direct the economies of Europe post-war, reconstruction, financial, political, everything.
And the same in the Pacific to a degree as well with Japan.
And all of these countries in this system became part of the U.S. global reserve currency system.
The euro dollar and then the dollar markets in Japan are absolutely essential, all around the world, in fact, are essential for maintaining the U.S. dollar, the artificial demand for dollars around the world, either because of commodities bought and sold in dollars or because of these giant dollar sinks, the Euro dollar market being the biggest right now.
But even in the Gulf before, it was also a bigger thing when we were purchasing more Gulf oil.
But without that, with the amount of money the U.S. government prints in deficit spending, we would have hyperinflationary cycles immediately.
But because of this world reserve system, this genius system, we're getting the rest of the world to pay for our, to subsidize our empire and allow us to have a $1.5 trillion defense budget because we're spending $2.5 trillion a year over budget.
I mean, imagine if every country was allowed to do what the U.S. does.
I mean, there probably wouldn't be a planet left.
Well, you know, exactly.
Right.
The ability that the ability to export your inflation and spread your, you know, your debt around the world, that's a special privilege that the U.S. has enjoyed, but that's ending, as we're seeing now.
And it seems to me that when Trump specifically attacks our allies with punitive tariffs, countries such as Japan, Taiwan, India, South Korea, making absurd demands like, oh, India, you can't buy energy from Russia.
Why not?
Why?
And then to say, oh, we're going to steal all this oil on this ship coming out of Venezuela because it's internationally sanctioned oil.
No, it isn't.
You in the U.S., you came up with a piece of paper that just said your oil is our oil.
There's no international law that it's, you know, it's all smoke and mirrors, but the U.S. is now engaged in piracy on the high seas, just stealing ships and stealing oil and punishing our allies to the point where, isn't it true that almost every rational nation is looking for alternatives to using the SWIFT system and using the dollar system?
And gold is really becoming the World Reserve backstop currency at this point.
Yep, it is.
It is.
And the U.S. has only itself to blame.
And the Trump administration has accelerated this trend by, and this is whenever you see empires that are declining or collapsing, one of the things that always happens in history, and I know this because I did my master's dissertation on U.S. financial warfare.
Oh, really?
And one of the Plymouth University in the UK, where I'm at right now.
But it's not attacking your enemies or sanctioning your enemies.
It's sanctioning and threatening your allies.
This is the telltale sign of an empire that's just about to snuff itself out.
And this has always happened in history.
And it's either that the Trump administration or the geniuses that he has orbiting him, like Sebastian Gorca and all these fanatics, Stephen Miller, I mean, either they're ignorant or illiterate when it comes to history and geopolitics, or they know exactly what they're doing and they're trying to crash the system in order to somehow get ahead of the markets and then basically be holding dominion over everybody for the next 100 years or how many generations of their families.
They want to create a new golden age, which is, you know, the golden age in America was basically probably the biggest wealth gap in U.S. history, but we're sort of fast approaching that now.
It might have been golden for the Rockefellers, but it wasn't golden for everybody else.
It was hugely difficult.
And out of that, you got a lot of boondoggle fake industries like Big Pharma that came right out of the back of that as well.
And so when we talk about the golden age, I just, I don't know what to say.
It's ridiculous.
But they're fetishizing constantly the history, but doing it in a very inaccurate way to the point where it's almost cartoonish.
I see this with the Trump administration.
And you've nailed it right there, Mike, is that gold has quietly, or maybe not so quietly, surpassed U.S. treasuries as the number one backstop right across the globe right now.
And which countries have been accumulating gold reserves steadily for the last decade?
Quietly, China and Russia.
So the Chinese are not stupid.
They have some of the best economists in the world.
The Russians are very savvy.
Christina Lagarde, who's the head of the ECB, former head of the IMF, I saw her a couple of years ago at St. Petersburg when Putin and his chief economist were up there on stage at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, and she was just blown away.
You could see her just oogling at them, like how they managed to deal with all these sanctions and get growth in their economy and balance their books and their balance of payments.
They absolutely defeated the West in a very high-level multi-level chess match economically.
And they've done it in ways that we couldn't comprehend.
By the same token, the Chinese government has such steering power over its economy, and they don't allow the raiders of Wall Street the equivalent to basically sabotage.
We've got people in Wall Street that are shorting the U.S. economy as we speak.
I mean, imagine.
These guys are causing absolute mayhem unemployment, fuel poverty, hyperinflation.
And why?
Because they can.
And that's how our system works.
It's not the greatest system in the world for everybody else.
It might be good for the people who are in Wall Street and who are in the financialized economy in London as well and also in Europe, but especially in America.
I mean, I've never seen so many people sabotage who it's almost like I think it's the Gordon Gecko kind of era, Mike, where it almost became romanticized that, you know, completely ruthless, even to the fact that like, you know, the George Soros is the world and so forth, that they just take pride in shorting whole economies.
Scott Besson admitted that's a U.S. government policy when it comes to taking down a target country.
I mean, how can the world exist like this without having war?
Because that's how World War II started.
It was because of the joint pincer movement to strangle Japan that led to Pearl Harbor.
Japan had no choice.
They felt their only option was a preemptive strike against America because this exact same thing, economic warfare, was being waged by the British and the Americans and their allies against Japan.
And so that's where this type of behavior leads.
Yeah, we cut off Japanese.
It's not cost-free.
It's very dangerous.
Okay, this is Mike Adams jumping in here.
That's the first half of the interview with Patrick Henningsen.
I'm saving the second half for Monday.
I'll include the second half in my broadcast for Monday.
And in the second half, we talk about the subject of MAGA brain rot, as I call it, which is how did MAGA just abandon all its principles?
And what's the future of MAGA?
What's the future of Trump?
What's the future of the GOP?
What's going to happen in the midterms?
All those kinds of questions and discussions we cover in the second half of this really amazing interview with Patrick Henningsen.
So be sure to tune in at brighttown.com or we're on Rumble also, Brighttown Broadcast News.
Search for that on Monday for the second half of the Patrick Henningsen interview.
And thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams.
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