Mike Adams warns the U.S. military’s posturing—like Trump’s 2018 threats against Iran—may mask vulnerabilities: outdated weapons, China/Russia-backed Iranian defenses (drones, anti-ship missiles), and a 12-day war with Israel exposing Iran’s growing combat prowess. If attacked, Iran could sink U.S. carriers via drone swarms, cripple global oil supply by targeting Hormuz or Saudi fields, and trigger $80+ gold/silver spikes as dollar dominance erodes. With nuclear ambitions likely fueled by regional rivals’ arsenals, Iran may deter strikes by threatening Diego Garcia or U.S. fleets, forcing a multipolar shift where military overconfidence risks economic collapse and geopolitical irrelevance. [Automatically generated summary]
It has become clear to me that the United States conventional military forces are a paper tiger, that the U.S. cannot withstand any kind of duration of kinetic conflict with any country, not Russia, not China, not even Iran.
Heck, not even Yemen for that matter.
What the U.S. is doing right now, or Trump, with threatening Iran is its posturing.
It's like a bully running around the playground with his arms all held out, puffed up, and like, I'm tough.
I'm going to kick your ass.
I'm going to kick your ass, you know.
But the bully doesn't know jiu-jitsu, let's say.
And, you know, some smaller scrawny kid can put him in an arm bar or, you know, get his head in a triangle and knock him unconscious.
The U.S. military doesn't have the advanced weapons that would be necessary to defeat Iran.
I'm not saying it can't do a lot of damage.
It can.
It can inflict quite a bit of surface damage for one salvo, one wave of missiles and bombs and cruise missiles and, you know, whatever else.
It can do that, but it can't sustain.
It doesn't have the depth of the munitions and missiles from either the submarines or the cruisers or the destroyers or whatever.
It doesn't have it.
And either Trump already knows that, and he's just hoping that he can seem threatening enough to force Iran to surrender, or Trump doesn't know the truth about how weak the U.S. military has become.
And he's overconfident in an irrational way, maybe because that's what his people are telling him.
He's overconfident, and he's going to order the attack.
And the U.S. military is going to be severely damaged.
The Navy in particular.
I mean, ships could be lost.
Stealth aircraft could be shot down.
It's very likely to happen, actually.
Because this time, China has its radar ships.
I don't know what they're called.
Don't know the exact numbers.
But they're advanced ships.
I think China's got three of them in the region right now that take away any element of surprise from the West.
So there's no way that Trump or the Pentagon can initiate a surprise attack on Iran in the middle of the night, you know, with stealth fighters, stealth bombers, and a bunch of missile launches, because Chinese ships will instantly know that that's what's happening.
And they will obviously transmit that information to Iran.
They clearly have an information sharing system set up.
So China will share that information with Iran, and then Iran won't be surprised because those missiles will take some amount of time to arrive.
I don't know if that's an hour or 30 minutes or whatever, but 30 minutes makes a huge difference in terms of readiness to handle an incoming attack.
But the element of surprise is gone now.
And on top of that, Iran has much more advanced missiles and air defense systems and anti-stealth radar that China provided, etc., compared to even six months ago.
And six months ago, Iran also couldn't be destroyed by the U.S.
And Iran managed to dish out a lot of punishment to Israel during the so-called 12-day war, which only proved that Iran could actually destroy Israel if it continues more than 12 days.
And, you know, Iran has better technology since then.
It has more drones.
It has more missiles.
It has more guidance technology.
And it has more technical know-how thanks to the help of Russia and China.
So the U.S. and Israel are actually putting themselves in a position where they can take a serious amount of damage.
And Israel may not be functional after this.
Now, I'm not saying that Iran won't take a lot of damage too.
Clearly, it will.
Again, the U.S. can dish out a lot of damage right up front in one wave.
But after that, the U.S. is gone.
Their ships, you know, they've shot all their ammo.
They don't have anything left.
They don't have anti-air left.
And at that point, Iran can swamp U.S. naval vessels with drone swarms or anti-ship missile swarms or a combination of those two.
And the naval vessels will be sitting ducks out there.
It'll be a miracle if we don't lose one or more of those ships.
They end up at the bottom of the, well, wherever they are, you know, the bottom of the Arabian Sea somewhere.
Also, with maybe a few thousand souls on board, depending on what ship goes down.
Like if it's an aircraft carrier, you know, there's almost 5,000 sailors.
And did you know that there's not even enough life rafts on an aircraft carrier?
If it goes down, that the people on board are pretty much screwed?
I mean, many of them.
Do you know that?
So this is a very precarious situation that Trump is lining up for us.
And I hope he's just bluffing, but I suspect he's not.
I suspect he thinks, because this is the way he does think.
He thinks the U.S. can beat anybody, that the U.S. is undefeatable, etc.
And that is just flat out not true.
It may have been true in 1991, Operation Desert Storm, but it's not true today in 2026, not even close to being true.
U.S. Dominance at Risk00:11:07
So we need to talk about what's going to happen if Trump initiates this attack on Iran.
This will unleash a domino effect of catastrophic events affecting the U.S. economy, affecting world peace or geopolitics.
It will affect the U.S. dollar and more.
So let's go through a little bit of that.
Number one, Iran is likely to close the Strait of Hormuz, or at least selectively close it to Western ships.
That would mean that oil prices would skyrocket.
It's also possible that some of the oil fields in Saudi Arabia could be destroyed by Iran, and that would send oil prices through the roof as well.
So energy is going to become more expensive, which means transportation gets more expensive, which also means food gets more expensive, etc.
So get ready for that fun phase of history.
Geez, it's a good time to grow your own food, that's for sure.
Then on top of that, you're going to see gold and silver skyrocket if this war breaks out, which you might celebrate that if you have a lot of gold and silver, but I don't celebrate it because I don't want war.
I'd rather metals stay low and have peace.
The rise of gold and silver will be an indicator of the decline of the dollar because this war, this will encourage yet more countries around the world to ditch the dollar as quickly as possible, especially if a U.S. naval vessel is sunk by Iran.
That alone, like the sinking of a cruiser or something, I don't know what all the ships are, but let's say some major ship out there gets sunk.
You know what that's going to do to the dollar?
The dollar is going to suffer a total collapse of faith.
Because remember, the dollar, the only reason it was the World Reserve currency was because the U.S. could legitimately threaten military force to any country that did not use the dollar.
Okay?
And that's what Saddam Hussein, you know, the attack on Iraq, that whole war was about the dollar.
More than anything else, it was about the fact that Saddam Hussein was willing to sell oil in currencies other than the dollar.
So if the U.S. starts to lose ships, the world's going to see that the U.S. is a paper tiger.
And then the dollar's done.
And if the dollar is done, do you have any idea how expensive consumer goods are going to become in America?
Because the collapsing currency will make everything that's imported even more expensive.
You know, dollar devaluation.
And I'm not talking about the U.S. dollar currency versus other international currencies.
I understand that Trump might want a weaker dollar compared to other currencies in order to encourage U.S. exports.
What I'm saying is a collapse in the total valuation of the dollar, meaning that you're going to have to use a lot more of them to purchase consumer goods that are imported.
And why would that happen?
Well, because so many countries around the world would just start dumping dollars and dumping treasuries and saying, well, clearly the era of U.S. dominance is over.
And that's the biggest risk of what Trump might be doing right now is he might be putting the U.S. in a situation that if it goes badly, it will prove to the world that the U.S. is no longer the dominant power of the world, which it isn't.
I mean, we are living in the last chapter of the U.S. Empire as we know it.
That's for sure.
But Trump could be accelerating the demise of the U.S. Empire by thrusting us into a situation that could end up being catastrophic for the U.S. Navy.
And that's my greatest fear in all of this.
You know, the strength of the U.S. is now a mirage.
And those ships are out there floating around as part of that mirage.
I'm not saying they don't have actual missiles.
They do.
They can do some amount of damage.
But they can't win a war, not with any power that is even close to equal.
You know, the U.S. forces can't win a ground war against really anybody, certainly not Iran and not Russia, obviously.
I mean, for one thing, U.S. soldiers are mostly fat.
I mean, are they going to waddle around and look for cover?
You know, yeah, this isn't the United States Marine Corps of 1945.
This is something completely different.
These people today in the military, although there are exceptions, but by and large, these people are not that fit, not that mobile, not very capable.
They're going to have a very hard time.
I mean, this is really classic, what we say in America, San Tzu, art of war.
In Chinese, it's pronounced ⁇ and ⁇ means that you, From Iran's point of view, you appear weak in order to entice your opponent into a trap.
And you take advantage of your opponent's arrogance.
You entice them into a situation where you actually have the dominant forces and you can destroy them.
But you rely on their arrogance and the psychology of your opponent.
And it seems like the world can definitely rely on Trump's arrogance.
and Trump's lack of technical accuracy about the U.S. military.
So we could be getting walked right into a trap.
We could lose thousands of U.S. sailors and U.S. soldiers at the military bases around the region.
And we could have ships sinking to the bottom of the sea.
And then we could have the world abandon the dollar.
And we could end up in America in a horrific situation facing basically the collapse of global hegemony and a recalibration of the world into a multipolar organization where China and Russia are really equals with the United States and Iran may be a near equal in many ways.
And BRICS nations would surge forward and their settlement currency systems would also surge forward and the dollar would be abandoned everywhere.
That's especially true given all the dollar sanctions that Trump and Biden put in place to punish countries that didn't do what we demanded they do.
So this could be the beginning of the end actually of the U.S. empire as we know it and also the end of Trump's political career because, I mean, imagine the political pressure if we start to lose stealth bombers and naval vessels.
You know, Trump's going to go down in history as the president that got the U.S. Navy destroyed or partially destroyed, that walked us into a trap by a technologically superior Iran aided by China and Russia.
That's what this looks like to me.
So I guess we'll see.
But Trump wants Iran to, quote, do a deal, which means he wants Iran to surrender to the demands of the United States.
But Iran can't do that because those demands are incompatible with the existence of Iran.
You can't give up all your missiles.
You need them for self-defense.
You can't give up your domestic nuclear energy program.
You have a right to have that.
You can't give up your nuclear enrichment program.
You're going to need to build a nuke.
Otherwise, you're really not a sovereign nation if you don't have nuclear weapons.
Sooner or later, Iran is going to have to have a nuclear weapon or multiple nukes in order to prevent Israel and the United States from constantly attacking it.
I mean, if you were the leader of Iran, wouldn't you be working on nuclear weapons as quickly as possible?
Of course.
It's your best defense against Western aggression.
So that's probably where this is headed.
And maybe if Iran announced right now, if they announce, hey, we have nuclear weapons right now, maybe that could stabilize the region for a while and stop the threatening posture by Israel and the United States.
You know, why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons?
Pakistan has them.
India has them.
And Israel has them.
And Israel illegally acquired them.
So if Iran had nuclear weapons, and again, they could have been handed nukes by Russia or China.
Maybe that's already in play.
Then Iran could just announce it and say, okay, look, we have nuclear weapons now.
And if you attack us, we're going to nuke your freaking navy.
And what do you suppose a nuke would do to naval vessels on the surface of the ocean?
We already know the answer to that.
It destroys them.
And it kills everybody on board without causing damage on land, although, of course, there's a radiation cloud, etc.
But I wouldn't be surprised if that's where this escalates to, although I pray it doesn't.
But it could certainly end up there.
Nuclear weapons being detonated above U.S. naval vessels in the Arabian Sea.
Or a nuke hitting Diego Garcia, the U.S. military base there that's housing B-2 bombers.
You know, it just completely obliterates the bombers, the base, and the people that are stationed there.
It'd be a total loss.
And that's a sitting duck target.
You know, it's just, it's not mobile.
Everybody knows where it is.
It's pretty easy to hit.
So Trump had better be extremely cautious about what he is initiating.
He's no longer up against countries that can't defend themselves.
He's not fighting a bunch of backwoods goat herders.
He's fighting or threatening to attack an advanced nation with advanced technology, with missile tech, with anti-ship and anti-stealth radar systems, and so on.
This is not a walk in the park.
And Trump is being misled, I believe, by his own advisors.
Because everybody in the military, the top brass anyway, they're telling him, yeah, we can win, we can win when they can't.
So this probably is not going to go well.
Advanced Threats Ahead00:00:25
So stay tuned.
You can follow my articles on this at naturalnews.com.
And you can also follow my podcast and my interviews at brightvideos.com.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for listening.
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