Ezra Levant debunks the viral claim that America fights wars for Israel, citing no U.S. troops or permanent bases in Israel—just temporary deployments like Patriot missiles during conflicts. While Israel receives $3B annually in aid, its $30B military budget and self-sufficiency prove dependence is minimal; Levant argues U.S. interventions (e.g., Gulf War, Afghanistan) stem from Cold War containment or resource protection, not Jewish interests. Cooperation with Israel, like the 1980s Iraq reactor strike or joint ops against Iran’s nuclear program, remains indirect, unlike the $200B+ spent on Middle East bases securing oil trade and countering China/Russia. Levant shifts to U.S.-Canada trade, where Trump canceled talks over Canada’s digital services tax (DST), later delayed after pressure, exposing Canada’s weak geopolitical leverage—especially in supply management (SM5), a restrictive agri-food system protecting 80% of dairy cash receipts. He warns Canada’s protected sectors may become bargaining chips under U.S. trade tactics. [Automatically generated summary]
It's one of the top messages Qatar's online influence army is promoting these days.
But is it true?
When was the last time American troops joined Israel in a war?
When was the last time Israel asked for American troops' help?
Do you know how many U.S. troops are stationed in Israel to protect it?
How many military bases the U.S. maintains in Israel?
In fact, the U.S. has never had a military base in Israel.
There are no barracks with thousands of U.S. troops there.
30 years ago, the U.S. stationed a handful of experts in Israel to help operate Patriot missiles for a few months during the First Gulf War.
And then they did that same again recently.
But those are temporary exceptions to the rule.
There are no American bases in Israel and never have been.
Now, compare that to Arab and Muslim countries in the region, including several dictatorships that are hostile to America and even sponsor terrorism.
I mean, let's start with the worst, Qatar itself.
The U.S. built the Al-Udaid air base in Qatar 30 years ago.
It now has 10,000 U.S. troops and about 100 U.S. aircraft based there.
For some reason, U.S. taxpayers spend, I don't know, $10 to $12 billion approximately every year operating that base, which defends Qatar.
I mean, I get it.
Qatar's government would likely fall within months if it weren't propped up by a foreign power.
Qatar is an authoritarian dictatorship.
It's hated by its own people.
The last emir of Qatar became dictator by staging a coup against his own father.
Qatar has 3 million people in it, but only 300,000 are citizens.
90% of the people there are temporary foreign workers or servants with no civil rights.
If they didn't have oil money there, they would just be an empty patch of sand in the desert that no one would care about, but they're staggeringly rich due to dumb luck and geology.
And they've taken that money and poured it into things like terrorist groups like Hamas, propaganda outlets like Al Jazeera, that's owned by the Qatari royal family, and influence operations in the West, becoming by far the top donors to U.S. universities.
Isn't that weird?
And they have a pretty smart strategy of hiring influencers, hiring pundits around Trump.
You've probably seen some of that lately.
250 influencers on the door.
Anyways, back to Americans going to war for Arabs.
Over the course of time, that one U.S. base in Qatar has cost U.S. taxpayers $35 billion, including construction and upgrades, not even including the cost of the men and the operations who work there.
Why are U.S. taxpayers paying to prop up a royal family of depraved billionaire layabouts who actually hate America and sponsor terrorism?
Why are American soldiers putting their lives on the line for some desert royal family?
Now, I don't know the answer.
I think there's a small chance it might have to do with Qatar sitting on top of so much oil and gas.
And maybe the U.S. government thinks it's better for American soldiers to be there to fill the void instead of Russian soldiers or Chinese soldiers or even Iranian soldiers.
And maybe the U.S. likes having a forward operating area for other wars.
CENTCOM is now on that base.
Those could all be legitimate reasons, but that's for Americans to decide.
Same thing goes for three different U.S. bases in Kuwait for their royal family, too, and two bases in Iraq.
The U.S. even has a base in Turkey where nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.
Turkey is so authoritarian.
I really have no idea why they're even in NATO, other than I guess what U.S. President Lyndon Johnson used to say: better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.
He was a character.
And you want to talk about cost and needlessly wasted American life?
Well, don't get me started on the disastrous venture into Afghanistan.
That's measured in the trillions of dollars and the thousands of lost lives.
And the shocking, hasty, demoralizing images of America being chased out, leaving behind billions in equipment really is the signature move of the Biden administration.
But seriously, there are at least a dozen U.S. bases in the Middle East, all in Muslim countries like Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia.
There's even a small base with a couple hundred Americans operating in Syria.
Rough numbers, the U.S. has spent $200 billion building up its network of military bases in Muslim countries.
The U.S. Navy alone spends about $50 billion a year patrolling the Persian Gulf sea lanes.
That's obviously to protect the oil trade.
Now, my point is, none of that has anything to do with Israel or the Jews.
Tens of thousands of brave American military servicemen are taken away from their homes and their loved ones and put in the heart of some of the worst places in the world on standing orders to fight and die for the countries that show little allegiance to America and that few Americans could find on the map.
And we don't have a cultural or ethnic or religious connection there.
None of those countries that Americans are defending on the ground are called Israel.
By the way, it's not just the Muslim countries.
Why does America still have 40 military bases in Germany, 40, with 50,000 troops there?
Why are there even more troops in Japan?
In dozens of bases there, too, 25,000 in South Korea, acting as a kind of tripwire in case Kim Jong-un tries to invade.
Americans would literally be amongst the first killed.
Unlike Qatar, Germany and Japan and Korea are real countries with some of the world's strongest economies.
Why is American blood and treasure sent over to protect them?
Why does America seem to never leave a country after a war?
I mean, have you ever wondered why the U.S. has a base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?
You know, it's because America fought a war there in 1898 and just sort of never left, right?
That's why America's in Japan, Germany, and Korea, too.
Altogether, around the world, there's around a quarter of a million U.S. troops serving overseas in some 750 bases in more than 75 countries, but none of those countries is called Israel.
Now, whether this is all a good idea is for Americans to decide.
It's their men and their money.
I'm a Canadian.
I love America and I'm grateful for the fact they protect us.
By the way, I think there are some good answers to all of those questions.
Those bases protect American force around the world.
They protect American commerce and access to resources.
They're staging areas for the U.S. to react anywhere quickly.
And like I said before, if it's not America filling the void, it would probably be China.
Just look at Africa where the U.S. doesn't have the same presence and China is filling in.
So that's military bases.
But the question was fighting in Israeli wars.
How many actual boots on the ground wars has America fought for Israel?
It's true, Trump recently deployed six B-2 bombers on a mission to blow up Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, but I don't think he could really call that a war.
That was the final mission of the so-called 12-day war, where Israel had conducted more than a thousand airstrikes against targets, clearing away the surface to air missiles, making sure the skies were safe before the U.S. came in in the final hand.
But let me take a few more minutes of your time.
I want to take you through America's recent wars.
And again, per the anti-Israel Twitter brigades, you tell me which of these was for Israel.
And I'm not defending these wars.
You can like them or oppose them.
I'm just listing them.
And you tell me which of the wars are the Jewish wars.
Okay, let's start with the Second World War.
Hitler invaded Europe in September of 1939.
And by the way, he started killing the Jews in the Holocaust right away.
But America did not join the war to stop that or Germany or the Holocaust.
America didn't join the war for more than two years.
It wasn't until December in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that the United States declared war.
And then, by the way, Germany declared war on America.
The war was not about the Jews, for the Americans.
And then came the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Nothing to do with Jews there, just America trying to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Same thing in the Grenada and Panama skirmishes.
I won't call them wars.
Have you heard of the Monroe Doctrine?
It's an American foreign policy rule to keep major powers out of the Western Hemisphere.
That was the reason behind the Cuban Missile Crisis, too.
America was not prepared to have the Soviets messing around that close to the U.S. After the Cold War was over, almost all of America's wars were about Muslims, not Jews.
The Gulf War.
Well, that was when Arabs in Iraq invaded Arabs in Kuwait.
And for some reason, America sent 700,000 troops to sort that out.
Hundreds died, by the way, for Kuwait or for oil.
I'm not sure what, but not for the Jews.
Then came the Somali Civil War.
Not sure what America was really doing there to this day, but fighting pirates is as old as America itself, I guess.
You might know the Marine song from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
You ever heard that?
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country's battles in the air on land and sea.
One of the first American wars back in 1805 was against Muslim pirates.
They were called the Barbary Pirates in Africa.
I'll do a report one day from a small village in Ireland called Baltimore, where the entire village, 107 people, was kidnapped and taken to an Arab slave market in Algiers.
That was back in 1631.
You ever heard of that?
So, yeah, fighting against Muslim pirates goes back, what, 400 years, 200 years for America.
Okay, let me speed up here.
Next came the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the war against ISIS, the war in Libya, the war in Yemen.
Do you see a bit of a theme here?
Now, none of these wars, Israel was involved.
None of these, Israel sent troops.
This was not an Israeli war.
Israel did have its own wars, that's for sure, against the PLO terrorists in Lebanon, against the Intifada domestically, against various Arab countries in 73 and 67.
Israel has had no shortage of wars, but American troops fought in none of them.
Now it is true that Israel gets $3 billion every year in military aid from the United States.
That is very true.
That's a lot of money, $3 billion.
It is a sliver of a fraction of what Qatar and Kuwait and Iraq and the rest of them get annually just for those bases, just the spending and the manpower.
And again, no Americans are at risk for Israel's $3 billion.
Don't even get me started on the comparison to Ukraine.
But I still think Israel should say thanks, but no thanks for the $3 billion.
Israel's military budget is more than $30 billion a year, and Israel is actually an economically strong country.
That extra $3 billion is nice, but it's not necessary.
And in fact, it's, I think, a kind of trap because with money comes control.
Anyways, my purpose today was to demonstrate that despite what some know-nothings on the internet say, Americans have never fought in an Israeli war.
Americans are not stationed in Israel.
And the American military aid to Israel is a fraction of what America spends on military bases in some very rich countries across the Middle East and indeed around the world, including in the richest countries like Germany, Japan, and Korea.
By the way, I think American military relations with Israel are immensely valuable to America too.
Israel was really the only bulwark against Soviet expansionism in the Middle East during the Cold War.
Israeli wars against the Soviet-Arab alliance serve to contain the Soviets' ambitions and without any cost of American lives like in Korea and Vietnam.
Israel was a real-life proving ground for U.S. weapons such as the F-16 and F-15 fighter jets and now the F-35.
All of those planes saw their first combat in a real-life experience against Soviet weapons through Israel.
There is no doubt that Israel's surgical strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor in the 1980s was the only reason why Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear bomb when America invaded Iraq a few years later.
Same thing again last month.
In the 12-day war with Iran, Israel spent the first 11 days destroying every Iranian jet plane and anti-aircraft missile site.
And then on the 12th day, America dropped bunker busters on Iran's nukes.
I'd say America got plenty of value for the $3 billion a year it gives to Israel, at least compared to the hundreds of billions it sloshes around its other allies every year.
If you can even call places like Qatar an ally.
Of course the bunker buster attack benefited Israel.
Bunker Busters and Beyond00:02:05
It also benefited every other country in the region that Iran has terrified and attacked over the years.
I count at least 15 countries, most of them Arab, that Iran has attacked over the years, not just threatened.
They even sent missiles to Mecca.
But of course, it's in America's interest too to take out the nukes.
That's something Donald Trump has been talking about for more than a decade, long before he was even president.
Of course, Iran has murdered and kidnapped hundreds of Americans, from taking U.S. diplomats hostage in the 1970s to murdering more than 200 Marines in the 1980s.
Did you know that Iran provided most of the IEDs used against American troops in Iraq?
And then there's the recent multiple assassination plots against Trump himself.
Yeah, Israel and America both had a stake in knocking Iran down.
The U.S. helped a lot of countries by bombing those nukes.
One of them was Israel for sure.
Now, contrary to the Qatar finance Twitter Brigade, Israel did not end up dragging America into World War III or any other war.
Israel never has.
Israel and America worked together to take nukes out of the hands of a global death cult dictatorship and left not only the region, but I think the whole world safer for it, including the 15 countries Iran has attacked before.
There are already reports about a second wave of the Abraham Accords.
That's Donald Trump's peace treaty that he's brokering between Israel and its Muslim neighbors.
That's what Hamas's terror attack in October 2023 was designed to stop.
And it did.
But now peace is back.
So the next time someone complains about U.S.-Israel cooperation, ask the obvious question.
Why are they only talking about the Jews and not the 12 Muslim Middle Eastern countries where the U.S. spends far more militarily and gets much less in return?
Trade Talks and Dairy Marketing00:14:57
You might have to wait for their answer while they check with their Qatari funders first.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
It was a very newsy weekend, including in the tense negotiations between the United States and Canada over trade deals.
Donald Trump announced that he was canceling those negotiations because Canada was proposing to invoke a digital services tax, an internet tax.
Not just that, but it was scheduled to start today with a massive multi-billion dollar retroactive tax payable now.
Well, this is what Trump and the White House had to say about that.
Take a look.
Prime Minister Carney in Canada caved to President Trump and the United States of America.
And President Trump knows how to negotiate, and he knows that he is governing the best country and the best economy in this world on this planet.
And every country on the planet needs to have good trade relationships with the United States.
And it was a mistake for Canada to vow to implement that tax.
That would have hurt our tech companies here in the United States.
The president made his position quite clear to the prime minister.
And the prime minister called the president last night to let the president know that he would be dropping that tax, which is a big victory for our tech companies and our American workers here at home.
I think that's probably true, but speaking as a Canadian taxpayer who likes the internet, whether it's Twitter or Netflix, it's a victory for me too.
I don't have to pay that tax.
Look at that.
Donald Trump saving Canadian taxes.
The public acknowledgement was done by François-Philippe Champagne.
It seems that Mark Carney talks tough, and Minister Champagne is the one who eats crow.
But about 20 minutes ago, I'm recording this in the mid-afternoon, Mark Carney did speak to reporters about it.
How could he not?
It was such an about-face.
Here's what he said earlier today.
Last night I had a good conversation with President Trump, and we agreed to recommence our negotiations with a view to the 21st of July deadline that we had agreed in.
Cananascus, Ministers Champagne and LeBlanc had conversations with their counterparts as well.
We've restarted the discussions this morning.
Could you get anything in exchange for a bigger negotiation?
It's something that we expected in the broader sense that would be part of a final deal.
We're making progress towards a final deal.
There's more to be done, to be clear.
And as I just said, which answers the translation question, as I just said, is a question of timing in terms of the date for the final negotiations and when the tax was coming into effect.
And it doesn't make sense to collect tax from people and then remit them, remit them back.
So it provides some certainty.
And as I just said, negotiations have restarted.
We're going to focus on getting the best deal for Canadians.
We're making progress.
There's more to do, and we'll keep going.
The White House says UK.
Is that how it went down?
I paid very close attention to what he said there, and I really didn't learn much.
I think Mark Carney is the master of saying very little, very slowly, and with a big fog machine there.
I wonder if that'll continue.
It's very interesting to me because, of course, the G7 was Mark Carney's time to shine in Canada.
Donald Trump attended at least for one day, and there seemed to be a collegiality.
Carney was quite, I would even say, obsequious whenever he is in Trump's company.
He calls him a great leader, a transformative leader.
But then maybe when Trump's out of the room, Carney has a different tact.
He went to Europe and recently said we're the most European of the countries.
And he practically applied to join the European Union.
I think that the European Union has a very different approach to many of these things, whether it's their own agricultural supply management or their approach to regulation of the internet.
Right now, the European Union is on a major push to bring in regulation, including for content.
The United States has a very different approach.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Joining me now is an expert who's been following these things, and I really enjoy following him on Twitter or X, where he is called the food professor.
He is indeed that.
His name is Professor Sylvain Charlebois.
He's at Dalhousie University and a professor of things agricultural and food, which are some of my favorite topics.
Joining us now is Professor Charlebois.
Thank you very much for taking the time.
I think a lot of people saw that as a slow-motion train wreck, Professor.
We knew the showdown was coming.
We knew it was a risk.
Maybe Mark Carney thought Donald Trump didn't mean it when he had sent signals against it.
What do you make of what happened this weekend over the digital services tax?
Well, I don't know much about the digital sales tax per se.
I only strictly follow the food industry and food policy.
But one has to recognize how timing, the timing of rescinding the DST was certainly not ideal.
It made Canada probably weaker and not stronger, unfortunately.
And I've always been of the mind that when it comes to geopolitics, Canada is not really a good country to deal with its own geopolitical reality.
I mean, we don't necessarily understand the orders of things.
And let's face it, we are north of the only superpower in the world.
And we are really prisoners of our own geography.
We can't move Canada geographically.
So we have to deal with Americans, whether we like it or not.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And I understand Mark Carney.
I understand what he says he's trying to do when he wants to diversify away from that dominant market.
I get it, but it's just so dominant.
It doesn't, there is no way to offset a loss in America through Europe or even through China.
I think the Trump administration is emphasizing its social media platforms.
I feel like Trump has sort of done a deal with them to get those companies to become more free speech oriented.
And there's a lot of law.
I mean, Trump's a deal maker.
And I saw a very senior officer for Meta, that's the company that owns Instagram and Facebook, tweet his thanks to Donald Trump.
So this is very much a team effort, this huge social media industry, which is dominated by America, having America's backing against trade restrictions.
I think that's going to be a pretty powerful force.
I don't think Canada had a chance.
The EU might, because they're big and mighty, but Canada never had a chance on that, did we?
No, absolutely.
I think you're right.
I mean, basically, we needed an American to liberate Canadians when it comes to communications and dealing with some of these platforms.
But I do see a parallel between what happened over the weekend and the agri-food sector, to be honest.
We've been talking for many years now about supply management, which is essentially a system that restricts production as much as possible.
We have quotas.
If you want to produce milk, poultry, or eggs commercially in Canada, you need to own very expensive quotas.
It's a very restrictive market, and we have high tariffs on imports.
So it's basically we produce what we need, which is actually supply management comes from the Canadians' school of thought, which is very Marxist to a certain extent.
And so I do believe that in Canada, we don't have one single politician willing to do anything with supply management, but there's probably one person who has the willingness and power to change anything when it comes to supply management.
That would be a non-Canadian, and that would be Donald Trump.
Yeah, it wouldn't be amazing.
And I think he's mentioned it probably more than anything else other than the auto industry.
Trump has repeatedly said he would like to rationalize the auto industry and the steel industry, which I think is related.
I mean, that's a very big industry.
That's, I think, the second largest in terms of its economic value in our two-way trade, oil and gas being the first.
But he does talk about dairy.
I haven't heard him talk so much about poultry, but he sure talks about dairy.
And, you know, I know that it's a very intense lobby.
I know both the Liberals and, to be very fair, the Conservative Party of Canada are very deferential to supply management.
This might be a showdown.
And I don't know if I don't know how.
I mean, Trump, when he gets into these dramatic flourishes, sometimes people say, oh, he's just being a showboat or that's just his personality.
I think he really means it on this trade stuff.
And even if he doesn't, other countries are operating like he means it.
What is the likelihood that supply management for dairy at least gets out unscathed from these trade talks?
Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is as follows.
I mean, unlike the DST, I do think that supply management is a non-issue from an economic perspective for both countries, to be honest.
They have a lot of dairy on their side.
And Mr. Trump is not stupid.
He understands that dairy of the SM5, and I would include poultry, broilers, turkey, and eggs.
Of the SM5, dairy is probably the one target.
Why?
Because dairy in Canada is highly uncompetitive, unlike eggs and poultry.
I'd say if tomorrow we end the quota system in Canada, they probably would be able to compete, but not dairy.
There we would collapse entirely.
And that's why I think that Mr. Trump focuses mainly on dairy, which is 80% of cash receipts within the system itself.
But I do believe that it's really a non-issue economically because Americans have a lot of dairy in the United States.
In Canada, I don't think Canadians would want to exclusively eat and consume American dairy products either.
And so, but I do think in principle, it is a really big issue because, I mean, I just came back from Brazil last week.
And, you know, just talking about supply management in Canada, a lot of people, when they roll their eyes and trying to understand why would an industrialized country have a system like that, which is very, very bizarre.
It's the only country in the world with a system like this.
So I do think as what Trump just did with DST, liberating Canada, we could potentially see an American president liberating Canadians when it comes to dairy marketing, dairy product marketing in general.
So I could see Donald Trump seeing himself as the liberator for Canadian consumers, if you will.
You know, I reread the art of the deal recently.
I read it a very long time ago, and then I reread it in 2016.
And then I read it again when he was re-elected because I think he really explains his personality.
And some people who think he's just being dopey or goofy, I think they misunderstand that it's quite planned, and he's got a style, and he's been practicing living this way for 50 years.
So there are ways to decode what he's doing.
And so, Professor, I don't think he would care if he's viewed as a liberator of Canadian dairy consumers.
Here's an idea I'm going to throw at you.
Perhaps he realizes that the dairy cartel is extremely protected by the Canadian establishment, which it is, both the government and the opposition.
So perhaps if he makes a lot of noise about dairy and threatens dairy, which he might not care about as much as Canadians do, I think that's what you're suggesting, Professor.
That maybe he can, at the last moment, do a deal with Canada if he comes out really tough on dairy and then said, fine, I'll give you your dairy, but in return, I want a large concession about something that I care about.
So maybe he's making a fuss about dairy precisely because he knows it's so dear to Mark Carney's heart and Pierre Polyap's heart and the Blocky Baqua, of course, and the NDP.
So I don't know.
Maybe if you're saying it's not that big of a deal from the American side, maybe he's out for bigger fish to fry.
I don't know.
I can only imagine how those negotiations are going.
No, I think your instinct serves you well.
When you look at Bill C-202, which just got passed by both the House of Commons and Senate, if you look at the vote in the House of Commons, all MPs, all MPs voted in favor of 202, which really grants immunity to the SM5 from any concessions during future trade talks, including with the United States.
So Donald Trump can see this as a lightning rod, a political lightning rod in Canada, and will see that as a way to rattle things in Canada domestically.
And he would enjoy having that as a tool to get what he really wants.
It's not necessarily access to our dairy market, but there are other things he's after, like our minerals, water, and things like that.
But I do see supply management as being weaponized against us as a result of adopting Bill C-202.
Very interesting.
Well, we'll keep watching this carefully.
Obviously, a bit of an embarrassment for the Carney government.
I'm sort of surprised that they were contemplating doing something that would have been seen as provocative right in the middle of the negotiations when they're just about a few weeks away from it to pull that move.
Trump likes to say, you don't have any cards.
That was a phrase he used with Zelensky when he came to visit.
I feel like that's true with Canada because although we think we like I remember during the leaders' debates, they were all asked by the moderator, what American products are you personally boycotting?
And they said, you know, alcohol or whatever.
Like, that's not going to bring America to its knees.
The fact that people are not buying bourbon is not going to cause Donald Trump to switch course.
Feel like, you know, it's a blessing to be next to such a giant because we have access to their economy, but it's also a danger.
And I think that maybe Mark Carney's elbows up comment is better for a campaign than in actual negotiation rooms.
I don't think we have a lot of cards to play.
Trump's Predictable Unpredictability00:01:23
And I say that as a Canadian.
No, I absolutely.
I think it's regardless of the outcome here, I think it's important to recognize that America will remain our number one partner, regardless.
And despite Donald Trump's style, I do think that most of the mill has actually focused on style and not necessarily on the message, on content in general.
When you look at the facts, when you look at strategy, Donald Trump has been pretty consistent and predictable as well, because I hear the word unpredictable a lot these days.
And I don't think that Trump is unpredictable at all.
I think he's very predictable.
And we need to understand that geopolitics are not simple.
And when it comes to the United States, we need to remain allies and work with the United States despite Donald Trump's style in general.
Well, I sure hope that our Canadian government negotiating team has reread Art of the Deal because Trump really goes through some of his greatest deals and explains why he said certain outrageous things and the purpose of making outrageous offers.
Like it really is a trip through his mind as a negotiator.
So I hope our team at least understands it.
It seems like you have a good understanding of it too, Professor.
It's really great to connect with you.
I'm grateful for your time.
And I'll keep following you online at the food professor.