John Kiriakou warns a U.S.-Iran war could fracture Trump’s base, with MAGA Republicans opposing it while neocons and Democrats like Hillary Clinton align with the MEK. Iran’s 50,000-troop strikes risk crippling the Abraham Lincoln carrier group via drones or hypersonic missiles, despite past military advice favoring hawkish factions over cautious ones. Blocking the Strait of Hormuz—key to 50% of global oil—would force Europe onto Russian gas, while Venezuela’s shift toward U.S.-friendly energy policies and China’s sodium-ion battery tech highlight deeper vulnerabilities. With Congress sidelined since 1941, Trump’s trade and energy independence strategy may falter under military pressure, leaving America exposed. [Automatically generated summary]
So I think that Donald Trump is getting bad foreign policy advice.
But politically, I think he really needs to go back to basics and listen to what his base is saying.
They don't want war with Iran.
The Democrats will celebrate him if he attacks Iran because the Democrats want war with Iran.
The Democrats are in bed with the MEK just like so many of the neocon Republicans are.
I think that the Democrats are going to be pro-war.
I think the progressive left are going to pair with MAGA Republicans to oppose the war.
But neocon Republicans, neoliberal Democrats, they're going to love this war.
Let's go domestic here for a little bit.
And I want to ask you, what will be the, you know, if Trump actually initiates this war with Iran, what's the domestic implication in terms of, you know, Trump's base, because he ran on being anti-war and bringing the troops home, but also then people more on the left side, they seem to be rediscovering their anti-war roots again, which is nice to see, right?
And then many of us who are labeled more on the conservative side, I'm more like a Ron Paul anti-war kind of philosophy, right?
Right.
So I want us to build back the roads and the hospitals and the bridges like you just mentioned.
Yes, sir.
Tired of the puzzles.
Let's bring them home.
But it seems to me like Trump's going to pay a big political price for this, especially if something goes wrong, like losing a stealth bomber.
What's your take?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that there's far, far more risk to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party here.
And it's not like there's daylight between them on Israel.
They're in lockstep on Israel.
But MAGA is a serious political movement.
And an important part of that political movement is its anti-war stance.
It's America first stance.
And that's how they were able to win over so many people who heretofore had identified themselves as Democrats.
That's why Donald Trump did so well with labor unions, for example, because labor unions are America first.
And so I was very, very hopeful that this would be the president.
This would be the new Nixon foreign policy, for example, where he's going to engage our enemies.
Part of the problem is, I'm going to take a swipe at Marco Rubio here.
Marco Rubio has always been a neocon, always has been, always will be.
He hates the Cubans.
He hated the Venezuelans.
He distrusts the Russians.
He has no love of the Chinese.
He's unable to sit across the negotiating table from them.
So I think that Donald Trump is getting bad foreign policy advice.
But politically, I think he really needs to go back to basics and listen to what his base is saying.
They don't want war with Iran.
The Democrats will celebrate him if he attacks Iran because the Democrats want war with Iran.
The Democrats are in bed with the MEK just like so many of the neocon Republicans are.
You know, it's not just Rudy Giuliani who represents the MEK.
It's also Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton who represent the MEK.
They're all taking MEK money.
It was Hillary that took the MEK off the terrorism list in 2009 just because.
So I think that the Democrats are going to be pro-war.
I think the progressive left, that's far less tied to the DNC than mainstream Democrats, are going to pair with MAGA Republicans to oppose the war.
But neocon Republicans, neoliberal Democrats, they're going to love this war.
So this, okay, let's talk about some additional domestic repercussions of this, especially, see, Iran has promised to strike U.S. military bases in the region.
As you know, there are a great many bases with, I think, over 50,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
And at times, I have even said, it looks to me like Trump keeps them there as bait to like to have them killed so that there can be a domestic outcry to go into a bigger war.
And I understand that maybe that's not a popular opinion, but I've never been one to self-censor.
So I'm like, I think they're there as bait.
But if 1,000 or 5,000 U.S. troops come home with draped flags over their coffins, and that'll probably be banned.
You won't even be able to share those photos.
Aircraft Carrier Protection00:04:36
Will that have an impact finally?
If American blood is spilled in the Middle East at large scale, what do you think?
It did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It took 20 years, but it finally did.
You know, I fear that most Americans kind of just push it to the backs of their minds because we have an all-volunteer military.
And so if you don't want to go fight, then don't join the military.
And we have so few people who have, well, let me rephrase, we have so few people in the upper levels of the economic strata that have, you know, their sons and daughters in the military who would be in harm's way that I think that by and large, most people aren't going to care, not for a while anyway.
Getting back to the issue of the military bases.
The Israelis bombed Doha several weeks back, and they killed one of the lead Palestinian negotiators, the peace negotiators, which is a very Israeli thing to do.
Yes.
U.S. defense systems didn't detect an incoming attack.
And so there was no effort to stop this thing from coming in, whether it was a plane or a missile or whatever it was.
The Israelis were coy and didn't really tell us.
Then the Iranians reacted to an Israeli bombing by lobbing a bomb at Ar-Rashid Air Base, which is the largest American air base in the world in southern Qatar.
And we didn't see that coming.
Wow.
And the missile hit and detonated.
Nobody was killed.
One or two people were injured.
They weren't trying to kill anybody.
But the thing is, is it seems to me that we're unprepared for that level of hostilities.
Where are the Patriot missiles, right?
Where are the air-to-air missiles, for example?
And a question that I have, because I genuinely don't know the answer, is can an aircraft carrier protect itself from a hypersonic missile?
I don't know.
Well, okay.
Since you brought it up, don't forget that Iran just less than two weeks ago penetrated airspace for hundreds of kilometers with a drone that approached an aircraft carrier.
You're absolutely right.
The Lincoln, I believe, right?
The Lincoln, the Abraham Lincoln, yes.
So that right there tells you something really important, that the battle group, the carrier battle group, cannot protect its own airspace against one drone, not to mention 500 drones.
So I think the answer is very clearly no.
A U.S. aircraft carrier.
Now, it's got some capable defenses.
It can probably shoot down a number of incoming objects, tracking 20 or 50 at the same time.
What about 500?
That's right.
You know, the answer is probably no.
And another thing, Before the first Gulf War, we had never put a carrier battle group inside the Persian Gulf.
The conventional wisdom was that it was too shallow and there wasn't room for a carrier to be able to safely turn around.
It's like turning around a city, right?
That's how big it is.
Sure is.
When hostilities began in February of 1991, we had six carrier battle groups in the Gulf, but we weren't fighting Iran.
That's right.
Fighting Iran is completely different than fighting Iraq.
Iraq, which had no navy and no Air Force to speak of.
The Iraqi pilots were flying their planes to Iran and just like leaving them there and defecting.
So there was no Iraqi Air Force to speak of.
But the Iranians have both an Air Force and a Navy, and they have these drones.
It's a different time now.
It's not 1991 anymore.
They have these drones.
We only have the one carrier battle group that's in the region.
I actually looked this up on the Pentagon website a week and a half ago or so.
We've got like a dozen carriers.
Most of them are either in the process of being dismantled and sold for scrap, or they're in dry dock for repairs and maintenance.
There's one off the coast of China in the South China Sea.
There's one in the South Pacific.
There's one in the Atlantic.
Strait of Hormuz Concerns00:15:22
That's it.
If we're going to bomb Iran soon, we're going to have to do it with one aircraft carrier battle group.
That's it.
And I don't think we can do it safely.
Well, when you say safely, you mean you don't think we can do it without taking a lot of damage on our side?
Yeah, I don't think we can defend it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
And I think we could lose a naval vessel or suffer such damage that they have to go back to port for five years of $20 billion in repairs.
That's exactly right.
Which takes it out of commission, obviously, for that entire time.
So Iran doesn't have to sink an aircraft carrier.
It just has to damage the tarmac on it or whatever that, whatever, the flight, whatever it is.
Yeah, it's called flight deck.
Yeah, the flight deck.
So, all right.
Then I think that, well, I mean, it's a question to you.
You're our guest today.
But it seems, I'd love your reaction to this.
It seems to me like Trump is walking into a very dangerous political trap where Netanyahu is forcing him and pushing him into doing something, and his own DOD is giving him over enthusiastic estimates of how effective the U.S. military is and not taking into account Iran's technical advances and China's assistance.
Therefore, the U.S. will initiate this attack and we will lose assets and we will be shocked and surprised.
And then there will be political fallout in the U.S. What do you think of my prediction there?
I think you're right on.
I really do.
You know, one of the things that I learned when I was at the CIA was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are almost always opposed to a military conflict.
Really?
And I remember being a note-taker.
I was the deputy director of the CIA's executive assistant.
So I used to sit in a lot of these principals committees, deputy committees meetings, and act as the note-taker.
And one of the things that I remember was Secretary of State Albright shouting at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, why don't you ever want to use any of those soldiers that you're so proud of?
Wow.
And I remember thinking, wow.
Well, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff obviously knows something that Madeleine Albright doesn't.
And then we saw the same thing with the invasion of Iraq.
The day that I was read into the compartment, it was about eight months before we attacked Iraq.
So I signed all my secrecy agreements and I said to the security officer, I said, so what's up?
What's the big secret?
What are we doing?
And he takes a deep breath.
He goes, next year, we're going to attack Iraq.
We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And we're going to open the world's largest military base in southern Iraq so that we can deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques, Saudi Arabia.
And I said, what if they lost their minds?
We haven't found bin Laden yet.
I thought everybody, it was all hands on deck to find bin Laden.
And then he said, the decision's already been made and the battle lines have already been drawn.
He said the pro, the pro-war groups are OVP, the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney at the time, OSD, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and NSC, the National Security Council.
He said the anti-war faction is CIA, State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we've lost.
Really?
And today, the State Department is not anti-war.
At all.
Yeah.
Colin Powell's not the secretary anymore.
No, exactly.
I actually wouldn't mind having him back right now.
I agree with you.
Okay.
So then, in your view, what's the percent chance, if you don't mind estimating, that Trump actually orders an attack within the next 30 days or so?
Yeah, I don't think it's coming in the next week or two, but 30 days, I'm going to have to say it's better than 50-50.
I saw a report just this morning that we, for the past four or five days, we've been flying tanks to the Arabian Peninsula on these big cargo planes that we have stationed in Germany.
That frightens me because this is not a war that you can win with just air power.
Remember, General Schwartzkopf, Norman Schwarzkopf, said that we had bombed Iraq back to the Stone Age.
We hadn't.
We had softened them up a little bit through four, five, six weeks of continuous bombing.
But you can't win a war with just air power.
No.
You need troops on the ground, and that is exceedingly dangerous.
Well, and also, I mean, geez, the terrain is completely different in Iran.
Oh, my gosh, yes.
I mean, the mountainous barrier that protects the inner part.
Tanks and narrow mountain passes don't get along that well, it turns out.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
I don't know.
It just seems to me like a suicide mission if the U.S. military goes in there and we're going to be dragging bodies out.
I think it would be a grave mistake.
Yeah.
I really do.
Okay.
Is there anything that you think that our listeners should know or do?
Is there a way to oppose this?
Well, isn't it a shame that Congress has simply abdicated its authorities on foreign policy and defense?
You know, Congress is supposed to declare war.
Only Congress can declare war.
And they haven't done that since December 8th, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Every once in a while, we'll do a resolution.
It's an authorization for use of force, but that's unnecessary.
It's just window dressing.
And then, you know, we've got the we've got a couple of different laws that govern how long you can station troops overseas.
But even calling your congressman is probably not going to do anything.
I think that, you know, it couldn't hurt.
But probably you call my congressman.
You know, he's probably on a trip to Israel right now.
You know what?
There you go.
That's the way it's been going.
Yes, indeed.
Talk to us about your assessment of the global energy dynamic impact of the Strait of Hormuz if Iran decides to unleash selective mining, allowing some ships to pass, but not others, obviously.
I mean, look at what Yemen did in the Red Sea.
That was devastating.
And that's a tiny fraction.
The Yemenis can't even afford shoes for their children.
And they were able to restrict international shipping.
Yes.
Stunning.
So, oh my God.
I've been to Yemen five times.
Every time I go, it's worse than the previous time.
But that's a conversation for another day.
Fully 50% of the world's oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz or the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait of Hormuz separates Iran from Oman.
And it's one of the most strategic locations on the planet.
Clearly.
In the 1980s, the Iranian government, in response to the Reagan administration's work to collapse that government, threatened to mine the Straits of Hormuz.
They ended up not mining it, but the threat caused President Reagan to offer an escort service, forgive the pun, which everybody took him up on.
So every time an oil tanker was departing from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, wherever it happened to be departing from, they would get a U.S. Navy frigate or destroyer to escort them through the straits.
Now, at the narrowest point, the straits are like 16 miles, I think.
The Red Sea is even a smaller gap.
But I understand that the actual lanes that are safe for the ships are only a couple of kilometers wide.
That's it.
That's it, because it's so doggone shallow.
That's right.
Just a couple of kilometers.
So if the Iranians wanted to block it and completely destroy the global economy, all they'd have to do is just sink a ship there.
Right.
Just take some old, you know, some old rotting tanker and just sink it in the shipping lanes.
Or fire on a ship and then immediately all the world's shipping insurance companies yank coverage.
And then it's done.
Yes, exactly.
It's done.
Nobody will insure a ship, so no ships move.
Exactly.
And then what happens to Western Europe if they can't get liquid natural gas out through the Strait of Hormuz, right?
They're going to have to talk to the Russians.
Yeah, eventually they're going to have to talk to the Russians.
That's right.
The Russians are swimming in natural gas.
That's right.
And the gutteries, the gutteries have 500 years worth of natural gas left if they continue to lift it at today's rates.
But if the straits are closed, you can't get that gas out of Qatar.
Right.
And given that Western Europe lost the Nord Stream pipelines, which already cut them off from Russia, that was back in, what, 2023, I think it was.
Yes.
And that most of Western Europe is trying to wage war with, or at least the leaders seem to want to do that.
It seems like Western Europe is on an energy suicide mission at the moment.
I go to Europe quite often.
I went, I don't know, two, three times last year, and I went in the wintertime.
And I remember complaining to a guy at the hotel reception desk.
I was like, why is it so cold in here?
I was freezing all night long.
He's like, there's no gas.
We have to ration, like self-ration the gas.
We just don't have it.
Can't buy it.
And this is what he said.
He said, the Americans will let us buy it from Russia.
And so we just don't have enough.
Same in Greece.
I go to Greece all the time.
And it was a cold winter because people just didn't dare overuse the gas that they had because they weren't sure they could replace it.
So then the dynamic here really seems insane where you have the UK leadership, Kirst Armer, whose days are probably numbered, helping Netanyahu, Netanyahu twisting Trump's arm to attack Iran, which would shut the strait, which would deprive the UK of energy.
It's like it's like stabbing yourself in the face over and over again.
I don't know.
And that's another reason why all of a sudden, like magic, the Israelis, the Greeks, and the Cypriots are all such close friends because just a couple of years ago, Cyprus realized that it is sitting on an ocean of natural gas.
Right.
And so they're using Israeli companies, Israeli technology to lift that gas.
The Turks are very upset about it because they're being cut out because none of this gas is in Turkish waters.
So the Turks sent a frigate.
Well, the Israelis sent a frigate and so did the French, telling the Turks to back off.
So the Greeks now and the Cypriots realize, oh, we have this new friend in Israel.
They're protecting us from the Turks and they're going to help us lift this gas.
Well, they're not lifting the gas out of the goodness of their hearts.
No.
They're lifting the gas because they need the gas.
If the gas isn't coming from Qatar, it's not coming from Russia.
And you risk having your actions close the Strait of Hormuz, the gas has to come from somewhere else.
Yeah, and they decide they want to take Cyprus, too.
Well, they're certainly buying enough of the property right now.
Okay.
All right.
In the few minutes we have left here, what else is among the most important things that our audience needs to be paying attention to?
I think we need to be paying attention to what happens in Venezuela in the aftermath of the snatching of President Maduro.
There wasn't even really a change in government.
The vice president, Dulcie Rodriguez, has taken over.
She has not shown international independent leadership.
She has essentially caved U.S. demands.
And the U.S. demands were that the Venezuelans allow American oil companies to go and drill for oil, that the Venezuelans not allow the Chinese and the Indians to refine the oil.
The oil historically was always refined in Texas.
So now it's going to be refined again in Texas.
It hasn't been in, I don't know, eight or 10 years since we imposed sanctions.
The thing is that Venezuela's oil is very, very heavy.
It's the dirtiest oil on earth.
It has the highest sulfur content, which means that it needs to be injected during the refining process, injected with chemicals to try to take some of that sulfur out.
As a result, it's no good for gasoline.
It's used almost exclusively for home heating oil.
So where's that oil going to go?
It's been going to China and India.
They buy it all.
Now is it going to come to the United States?
And if it does, what's the Chinese government going to do about all of a sudden the abrupt cutoff of their home heating oil?
Well, and that underscores also the importance of China's ties to Iran to continue to acquire energy there, as well as the deal they've done with Russia for the pipeline to cross over Mongolia, deliver cheap gas into the industrial centers of northern China, right?
That's right.
And it's a very long-term plan.
They've thought it through.
Absolutely.
And one last question on this about AI and data centers.
And the U.S. power grid is so scarce.
Power is so scarce, especially on the Eastern Grid.
But as I just mentioned, China is going to be getting tremendously cheap gas from Russia.
They've got access to the gas turbines from Russia, which we don't because of sanctions.
China can produce electricity at a fraction of the cost that we can.
And electricity is the primary input into the AI data centers for the race to superintelligence.
It's like, again, we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot on this.
I think so.
I don't understand the administration's position on offshore wind farms, as one example.
I don't understand their position on solar and improvements in technology to better harvest solar.
I don't understand what this knee-jerk opposition to windmills is on land, especially in areas of the country that are uninhabited.
You know, every square inch of the Arizona desert that's not inhabited should be covered with a solar panel, for heaven's sake.
We have brownouts in Texas all the time.
Man, We Covered A Lot00:02:43
We have, you know, my ex-wife and I, when we were married, we had an au pair living in our house.
She was from Thailand, and she said, you know, we lose power here in Northern Virginia more often than we lost power in Chiang Mai.
Not surprised.
There's something to be said for that.
We are energy insecure, and we refuse to admit it.
Well, you know, you know what's absolutely going to change that dramatically is Chinese battery technology because that allows grid shifting for wind and solar to shift the time to nighttime or clouds or whatever.
That's right.
Until that battery technology has come into existence, which is really just now with the sodium ion chemistry, before then, it was not economically feasible to grid shift power using lithium-ion.
That's right.
And they needed active cooling systems, so they didn't work well in the deserts.
The sand, wind would grind up the fans and things like that.
All that's changing now.
So if the U.S. maintains its sanctions against Chinese technology, then the U.S. will never be energy independent domestically with its power grid.
So you better learn.
This is me talking to Trump.
You better learn how to be a more friendly person in the world and engage in trade rather than just threatening everybody.
That's my take.
I couldn't agree more.
Okay.
Well, we'll wrap it up there because we're about at the hour.
And man, we've covered a lot, John.
I want to watch so much.
I feel exhausted now.
Well, I feel intrigued.
I want to have you back because there's so much more we could cover.
Let me give out your podcast again.
It's on Spotify.
It's called Deep Focus with John Kiriaku.
And also, don't forget about the Apple podcast here, John Kiriaku's Dead Drop.
That's a great title, too, by the way.
Good job on that.
Thank you.
So follow his work.
Follow his podcasts and feel free to share this interview on other channels.
And thank you so much, John.
It's been an honor.
Thank you.
The pleasure is all mine.
Thanks so much for the invitation.
All right, you too.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
And thank all of you for watching.
I hope you learned some interesting things here.
And if you have any questions about anything, use our free AI engine, brightanswers.ai, because it's trained on all my interviews and all the guests and all the expertise that we've ever had contact with.
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