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June 25, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:59
Trump's War

Just months into his second term, "Peace President" Donald Trump has launched missiles into an Iran that has neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States. And he has done so with virtually no input from the US Congress. What comes next? Former US diplomat and senior US Senate foreign policy analyst Jim Jatras joins today's Liberty Report.

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Jim Jatris Joins The Liberty Report 00:10:53
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is away today, but I'll be handling the show on this very, very big news day.
And I'm very thankful to have an old friend join me, Jim Jatris.
Jim was a career Foreign Service officer.
He was a foreign affairs expert in the United States Senate.
He's worked around Capitol Hill for many decades and is a great friend.
Jim, welcome to the program today.
Thank you, Daniel.
Like you said, old friend, emphasis on the old.
It's always a pleasure and an honor to be with you and Dr. Paul anytime.
Well, thanks very much.
Well, Jim, as we know, over the weekend, probably about a little over 12 hours after President Trump said that he will take two weeks to think about whether or not he would bomb Iran, actually launched an operation or at least apparently launched an operation, or at least he told us he launched an operation against Iran, which I think entailed some 120 aircraft,
all sorts of whiz-bang obfuscation and foolery and amazing brilliant, if you listen to Pete Hegsteth, the most brilliant military operation in history.
We tricked him in Guam and we snuck in under the radar and took out all of their facilities.
As Trump said, completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program.
Well, within 24 hours, when the satellite photos came out, there was a little bit of speculation as to whether that was overdone.
Take us through what you see having had happened and what you think might happen.
Well, Daniel, obviously, it was the best operation ever.
Frankly, people are saying it was perfect.
And I mean, look, I mean, a couple of things here.
One is, as far as I know, the demand from President Trump for Iran's unconditional surrender is still on the table.
Obviously, that hasn't happened.
And look, I think, as I've been saying from the beginning, a lot of people, I think, are falsely focused on all this business about nuclear program, nuclear weapons, and so on and so forth.
I think those weapons or that program belongs right next to Saddam Hussein's WMDs, which don't exist.
That the real question here has always been regime change, and it remains regime change for both Netanyahu and for Trump.
I don't think that this, whatever happened in the last few days, has changed that.
Secondly, despite these claims, which as you point out, are quite extravagant.
And I think initially, look, initially, like a lot of people, when the attack occurred, I was all hair on fire.
Oh, my God, he's doing it again.
And this same old thing, it's terrible.
This is not what we voted for.
Those of us who did vote for Trump, like I did.
And then it became increasingly clear almost from the beginning, wait a minute, there's something goofy going on here.
That this was, it looked like it was a big show, some kind of a kabuki dance where we can say, damn, okay, we hit them, you know, we've destroyed that nuclear threat, et cetera, et cetera.
And that we didn't really do much of anything.
And then you say, okay, what's the purpose of that?
And I think the purpose is, is that Trump is under tremendous pressure from the Israelis who virtually own Washington, as you know, with the exception of Tom Massey, and maybe some of the goofballs on the left, like, you know, Alexandria El Casio-Cortez and a few others, you know, give credit where credit is due.
They're not on that reservation either.
But the long and the short of it is that Trump had to do something because the Israelis are clearly getting the short end of the stick in terms of their exchange with Iran, which they started, you know, what, a couple of weeks ago, I guess.
As far as I know, that was always the Israeli plan.
Think the Israelis ever expected that they could come in and decapitate the Iranian regime or destroy their nuclear program as if the nuclear program were really their concern.
That they always expected that at some point they would drag the Americans in.
And that's the position that Trump found himself in.
Again, I'm not making excuses for him.
I'm just looking at objective reality.
I think the parallels there between Netanyahu and Zelensky.
Zelensky wants to drag the Americans into his war.
So does Netanyahu.
The difference is, is that while Zelensky has some influence in Washington, it's not as great as Netanyahu's and Zelensky's influence is falling.
Netanyahu still remains something close to absolute.
Secondly, vis-a-vis Russia and Iran is the target country.
We can't destroy Russia without committing suicide, but we can destroy Iran.
And that, you know, so I think we have a situation where the Iranians, excuse me, the Israelis are losing this exchange, but the Iranians face total destruction if they don't play their cards right.
So where do we go from here?
It seems to me that the Iranians, if they're smart, will measure any response against the United States or maybe not react against the United States at all at this point, but will continue to pound the Israelis.
But the question is, how far will they go with that before the Israelis decide that they have to go to the zero option and use their nuclear weapons?
I mean, they didn't go to all trouble to acquire these things just to get destroyed by Iranian missiles.
At some point, do the Iranians also take the off-ramp, even when they've established their advantage?
But then where does that lead Bibi?
Because Bibi realizes he can't afford to lose this war.
He's going to end up out of power and in jail and possibly worse if he doesn't come out on top of this war.
And that's where I fear that this is not over yet.
That however much Trump wanted to take an off-ramp here by going through this dog and pony show, Bibi's still in a position through some false flag or some other provocation to turn the heat up on him again.
So he has to do something.
And, you know, so I'm waiting for the see what the second round is.
First, what is the Iranian response?
And thirdly, what other rabbits does Netanyahu have that he can pull out of the hat to get the Americans back in to destroy the Iranians, which is what he needs them to do?
Yeah, Jim, I think your analysis is certainly valid.
And I think you may well be very correct.
But if Trump is sort of, and I don't want to oversimplify what you're saying, but in a way, a victim of the neocons, I wonder if he understands that the neocons and the Netanyahuites, they don't have a reverse gear.
You know, they only know forward.
And so if he thinks he can do a one and done on this, well, he's absolutely mistaken.
It never works that way.
And I think he almost, I mean, within 24 hours of the strike, he started, he went from talking about how obliterated the program was in Iran to openly calling for regime change.
Why shouldn't they change their regime?
And his spokesperson, who I initially thought might be a little bit more honest than her predecessor, turns out that she's not.
She has at least several times this morning reiterated President Trump's call for regime change in Iran.
So it clearly seems to be moving in the direction that Netanyahu wants.
We don't see any evidence that President Trump is looking for an off-ramp or is looking for a way out of this.
I think that's exactly right.
Again, back to the Ukraine comparison.
Trump has the luxury, it seems, of saying bad things about Zelensky and good things about Putin.
He has a little wiggle room there.
Although, frankly, I don't think that policy has any place to go either.
But with regard to Iran and Israel, he has to stick with this completely Manichaean narrative.
And again, I'm not making excuses for him either.
He may actually believe it that way, too.
You know, that Netanyahu and Israel are the embodiment of all that's good and America's best friend in the entire world.
And Iran is the bully of the Middle East and the source of all terrorism and evil in the world, or at least in the Middle East.
And as long as he sticks with that narrative and remains in that Manichaean mindset, whether it's his or the one that's, frankly, the only one in town in Washington, there's no place for him to get out of this, it seems to me, that we were waiting now for whatever the next step is.
But it's only, as you say, it's only got one direction to go.
There is no reverse gear.
And at some point, he's going to have to deliver, it seems to me.
And I don't think it's just a question of, you know, Miriam Abelson and the $100 million and all that.
I mean, one could imagine that one could get huge campaign contributions based on promises and then break all those promises once you're in office.
I think there are constraints on him that are much more binding than those.
And again, for all I know, he actually agrees with all that.
So I think it's got to come back in some way where we press the pedal to the metal on securing regime change in Iran.
Yeah, I think that certainly is the goal.
You know, the State Department spokesperson, I know it's an agency near and dear to your heart, Jim.
The State Department spokeswoman said that America is the greatest country on earth after Israel.
And I don't know if you caught that, but that's what she said yesterday.
And I'm not sure if that was a slip of the tongue or if that really is the consensus in Washington.
We're basically just here to carry out their interests.
It certainly seems that way.
And the administration, this administration, I think, is more infiltrated with people who have that sentiment than any that I have seen.
And I've seen a lot of pretty bad ones.
Yeah, it's interesting to compare this to, say, to the Biden administration, where, you know, Blinken, you know, for some reason, thought it was necessary to mention that he's Jewish and this is important to him.
You certainly had that kind of influence in both administrations, maybe even more so in the Democratic administration.
But so much of Trump's base are evangelical Christians, Christian Zionists, who really do think this is the divine will.
I mean, we've got those coins with, you know, Trump is the new Cyrus, and one even says temple coin on it, that he's going to rebuild that, he's going to build the third temple.
I mean, I don't know how much, given his narcissism and his egotism, I don't know how much of this stuff goes to his head.
I mean, you saw that thing from Ambassador Huckabee in Jerusalem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
American Power and Neoconservative Diplomacy 00:15:39
Basically, you know, praising his divine mission.
And he may actually believe this stuff.
He may have drunk that Kool-Aid.
And he said, you know, you are at the position that Truman was in 1945.
Listen to God.
He will tell you what to do.
The implication, of course, there is that you need to drop nuclear weapons on Iran.
Certainly what I drew from it.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I mean, I certainly don't worship a God that wants to have people incinerated by nuclear weapons, especially innocent people.
But, you know, I was going to ask you something, Jim, because you started out your career as a diplomat.
What would you say the status of U.S. diplomacy?
How credible is the U.S. as a negotiating partner?
The U.S. was intimately involved in the Minsk talks And knowingly, knowingly that it was a ruse to get Russia to pull back back in 2014 when it was on the verge of taking, if not all, a significant portion of the Donbass region, Russia agreed or listened and believed what was being said.
And obviously, now we know from Merkel and others that it was a complete ruse.
And then we have the Iran negotiations where there was a subterfuge, the pretense that Steve Wutkoff was there to negotiate in good faith to take Iran off its guard and then attack while its guard was down, give them a false impression that as long as we're talking, we won't be shooting.
And that was, of course, a false impression because Israel preempted that.
And then you have, once again, the U.S. putting its moral authority on the idea that, well, I'm going to take a couple weeks maximum, but I'm going to think about it.
And obviously, the plans were already there.
They were already signed off on when this happened.
So how can the U.S. continue to operate in an international system where literally nothing it says can be believed?
I guess you went into the wrong field, Daniel.
You're like a good lawyer who never asks a witness a question he doesn't already know the answer to.
So yeah, well, you're right.
I mean, obviously our credibility is exactly zero.
I mean, in principle, diplomacy is some kind of a process where, you know, I'm at A and you're at B, and we need to find some way to meet somewhere in the middle, maybe more to your advantage or mine, depending on the circumstances.
That's not what diplomacy is for the United States.
Diplomacy is I'm at A, you're at B.
The only proper outcome is A. How do we move you from A to B, either by suasion or by force?
And that's where we are.
I mean, there's, and of course, we'll, I think it was Mike Pompeo, what we lie, cheat, and kill whatever it is to accomplish whatever we want.
And that's where we are, and nothing has changed.
I mean, when we went from a bipolar world, I think there are a lot of bipolar people involved, but when we went from a bipolar world to a unipolar world, we had no real competition, and we thought we could just dictate to everybody.
We haven't lost that hubris, far from it.
And that's one of the sad things, Daniel, is that when Trump came in, when he early started sounding a little more reasonable, especially in the Ukraine theater, that we could somehow come to an accommodation with the Russians, I think a lot of people said, oh, well, great, Trump is going to make a deal.
We're going to have a multipolar world.
We're going to have spheres of influence.
We'll respect other powers' interests.
No, no, no.
That was never the plan.
Look, you were in Washington long enough to know that there may be four people in Washington who would even understand the concept of respecting other powers' spheres of influence.
And even the ones who would understand it wouldn't like it.
In other words, that unipolar world is still the only one that Washington would accept.
I don't see anything in Trump's mentality that diverges from that.
I mean, you know, his tweets about, well, Brickstart's the currency.
We're going to put a 100% tariffs on everybody and defend our almighty dollar and all.
I mean, he's still trying to, I don't think he's trying to step back or retrench from global empire.
He's simply trying to consolidate in a way that would extend American power, really not American, but global American empire power in a more effective way.
And that involved trying to put Ukraine and the Russia conflict on hold the best we can, as I outlined and actually on the Ron Paul Institute's site back in December.
And then switch very quickly to demanding a ceasefire because I think he knew very well that this was brewing in the Middle East.
And we needed to find some way to shift our focus from Russia to Iran.
And I think that's where things remain for the time being.
And as you say, nothing we say to anybody is worth the breath that was expended in saying it.
And if the rest of the world hasn't figured that out by now, certainly the Iranians, however much they may have been in on the little fix on this little show, you know, show and tell game here, that certainly the Russians, I hate to say it, Daniel, but I think the Russians still harbor some illusions that they can come to some agreement with this administration.
It's hard to imagine, you know, 20-some years after the fact, after the run-up to the Iraq war, I mean, to me, it seemed like that's when the neocons were at their apex.
You know, they were at the height of their power.
They were lying willy-nilly.
They knew it.
Everyone knew it.
And they seemed to be almost omnipotent.
And then, of course, we had the fiasco that was Iraq.
We had thousands of American soldiers dead.
We had maybe a million dead Iraqis.
And it is now, it has been a failed state ever since.
We've not certainly not planted democracy in there.
Yet it seems to me now with this operation, the same neocons, or at least very similar neocons, using extremely similar arguments.
You probably had, like I have had, this feeling of deja vu.
You know, this will be a cakewalk.
How is it that the neocons have been able to reconstitute or re-emerge at least as powerful as they were 20-some years ago when they pushed another discredited war?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think part of it has to do with the internal politics of the United States that if you switch, and by the way, you know, just between us girls here, I mean, I think Trump was allowed to win in 2020 because there's a faction of the establishment that saw that Team Blue was messing everything up.
We better let Team Red in for a while and see how that works out for us.
And that's where you get a little bit of a shuffle with more of the Christian Zionist element in there, and so on and so forth.
But what you end up with is still this kind of untrammeled power by not just the neocons.
I think a lot of people sling those terms around rather, as you know, neocons are a very specific ideological outlook, originally from Social Democrats, USA, and the Communist Party and all that sort of thing.
But you have a lot of other people, the influence of the military industries, the so-called Vulcans, the descendants of Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, those people who are not really neocons ideologically.
They have a somewhat different pedigree.
And then people like John Bolton is now praising Trump, who is more of a great power chauvinist.
He's more of a John Cecil Rhodes type figure than a Leon Trotsky figure, I think.
But so you have all these cast of characters and a different, slightly different lay of the land in each administration, but all with the same bottom line.
It's all forward to crushing all of our enemies and a global American empire.
And that's where we are.
In the case of this administration, you have this kind of weird kind of Israel supremacy kind of thing, where it's maybe less of a Jewish pedigree than a Christian Zionist pedigree, but the bottom line is still the same.
Israel can do no wrong.
We must do everything for them.
In fact, even the divine mandate is more blatant than it would have been under the Democrats, because after all, they don't believe in God anyway.
And so you have that.
And also, it's then coupled with this internal crackdown, Palantir and all this other sort of stuff that anybody who disagrees is an anti-Semite, he's anti-American, he's an Islamic terrorist.
I mean, you and I are now pro-Islam, you know, jihad caliphate advocates, I guess, because we're critical of American policy in the Middle East.
I mean, it's really kind of bizarre.
Yeah, it is.
You know, I don't know if you caught this piece, but Bruno Massey, I mean, I'm probably mispronouncing his last name.
He's a Portuguese diplomat, former diplomat, who's now a journalist.
He had a great piece that we published an excerpt from called The Dangerous New Neoconservatism.
And I'm just going to read a sentence from it, Jim, because I always like articles that are sort of deep thinking, but explain things that I'm confused about.
And I think this gentleman does a good job.
He's talking about the push toward war with Iran.
He said, in 2003, we would have called this neoconservatism.
But neoconservatism has evolved.
It lost the thin veneer of idealism it once had and has turned into a thoroughly nihilistic ideology, openly advocating brute force.
Why be so coy as to carry out covert assassinations?
If two decades ago, neoconservatives envisioned a world made safe by the spread of Western democracy, today they opt for the multiplication of failed states and collapsed regimes.
It's a great article that I highly recommend, but I think he makes a great point there that neoconservatism itself has changed.
It's no longer about spreading democracy.
It's about destroying countries and making them uninhabitable.
Yeah, and I think that's a very good point because there's a certain kind of a brittleness to their power, it seems to me.
The stronger they get, the more it seems that people are catching on.
In other words, for example, look how much of Trump's base really got very, very upset.
I mean, you had obviously the Trump Tard crowd that, you know, were happy with anything and everything he does because Orange Man can do no wrong, just like for his opponents, you know, the Orange Man is really Hitler and he can do nothing right.
But you also had an awful lot of people in the America-first mega base who were saying, this is not what I voted for.
I'm seeing through all this stuff now.
And I think that accounts for some of the kind of the almost, you know, you might say Bolshevik brutality when it comes to we will crush our enemies.
We will not make any pre, we will assassinate.
We will kill.
We will send you to jail, you know?
And I think that indicates that on the one hand, they're writing very, very high.
They control all the levers of power, but they realize that more and more the emperor has no clothes.
A lot of people are seeing it.
And that the only way to intimidate them is through just a brutal use of force and show this is what can happen to you if you get out of line.
And so I think there's a, you know, I think that loss of idealism is partly a dropping of the pretense when it comes to people who are critical of them, because it's not enough for us now to try to fool you.
We now have to scare you.
Yeah, that's a great point.
You know, Caitlin Johnstone, who comes from the left, but is always consistently anti-war, she had a great little post on X that I think perfectly describes what you're talking about.
She said, trying to get an important business deal done, firebombed the guy's house to make him more likely to negotiate with me.
I just want peace.
And that's the U.S. That's the U.S. We're trying to negotiate a deal.
We're going to bomb the holy you-know-what out of you.
But hey, we just want peace.
We just want peace.
Yeah, I think that's what it really has come to, Daniel.
And And again, the other paradox there is we're becoming more naked and unapologetic about the use of violence.
You know, we can go back even to Obama droning people and so forth.
But that's in a context when they're weaker.
I mean, for example, in Iraq, we still had the power to go in and invade Iraq with ground troops.
We can't do that now.
There's no way we're going to invade Iran with troops on the ground.
I don't even know where they're going to come from geographically.
We don't have the army to do it.
And of course, Iran is a much bigger country.
So we can't really conquer Iran in the same way that we did Iraq.
And of course, even Iraq after conquest, that didn't work out very well.
So what can we do?
Well, we can use nuclear weapons against them.
I guess we could activate the MEK and other terrorist groups inside Iran, maybe try to stir dissent among the Azeris and the Baluchis and other minorities.
Although, of course, you know, the supreme leader himself is a Zeri.
So maybe that's not as potent a card to play as we think it is.
We can wreck Iran.
We can destroy Iran.
I don't think we can necessarily conquer it or put in a puppet regime, you know, fly the, you know, Shah Jr. in the way we dropped Ahmed Chalabi into Baghdad.
So, you know, I think the options are limited, but they do come down to destroy, destroy, destroy, kill, kill, kill.
That we can still do.
Yeah.
Well, if you could make one prediction, and of course it is a prediction.
We don't know what will happen.
What do you think the next move will make will be made and who will make it?
Let me be the optimist first, which is very uncharacteristic for me.
Let's suppose that this little show was to the purpose of getting an off-ramp, and the Iranians are inclined to take it as well.
So they don't strike back against American assets directly, and that they make their point by pounding Israelis a bit.
But then they pull back from that as well, with the understanding that maybe the Israelis will pull on their horns too, because they're getting the worst end of this conflict right now.
And the thing could de-escalate for the time being.
I think that could be just, you know, a Zitzkrieg.
It could be a lull for a while till the next round, whatever that looks like.
It could happen that way if the Israelis are smart.
And if Bibi decides this is not really the time for me to go to Broke, go for Broke.
The problem with that for him is that it's risky.
At that point, he's got a devastated country that he brought on upon himself with the attack on Iran.
He's still fighting wars in Gaza, or if you want to call it a war, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, and so forth, in Syria.
I mean, he's got multiple fronts, a devastated country.
And at that point, he may be politically vulnerable.
So I think he has to come back again with some initiative or lose power and probably his freedom, maybe his life.
So I think there could be another round there.
Opportunity for Young Minds 00:04:25
The other possibility is that the Iranians do come back and strike us hard, which I don't think they'll do.
But if they do do that, then the escalation might not be contained at that point.
And I think that probably that ends in the destruction of Iran, either by us or by the Israelis.
So I don't think the Iranians are going to want to go down that road.
The other thing is, even if the Iranians do pull back, BB may decide, I can't afford to step down on my side.
I will keep stirring the pot.
I will launch a false flag.
I will do whatever I need to do to get the Americans back in there to give me the final solution for the Iranian problem, which probably has to be nuclear informed because I don't see any other way the Iranians can be defeated by the Americans and the Israelis.
Yeah, if you look at the polls, Jim, I mean, I think Netanyahu must understand that the younger generation of Americans, whether they be on the left or the right, especially the 18 to 40-year-olds, do not support Israel like the boomers did.
So he's seeing an opportunity, not just in President Trump and the people around him, but also in the future of him just not having the kind of support that he's had in the past.
Yeah, you better make hay while the sun shines because us boomers aren't going to live forever.
And look, having got himself this far in now and gotting this close to have something he's been wanting for decades to have the Americans destroy Iran for him.
Can he really allow that to slip out of his hand now?
I think, again, I really think that he realizes that his moment has come one way or the other, and he has to press it to the limit.
And he has a lot of levers on Trump, some of which I probably don't want to mention in a public context that he can make Trump do what he wants him to do.
Yeah.
Well, before we go, Jim, I just want to take a second to talk a little bit about the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, because you've been very closely associated with our program, I think from the beginning or very near the beginning.
And you've been so wonderfully generous with your time.
You've helped us on the evenings, dinner before the seminar.
We're still, we are looking for scholars to apply.
We have a link on our website at ronpaulinstitute.org for upper division undergrads and grad students to apply to this program.
We do have scholarships available that you don't really have to have any out-of-pocket money spent to participate.
But if you were going to make a pitch to some young person or not so young person who's a student who's looking at this program, what would be your best pitch to them to apply and try to come out here?
Well, first off, thank you for your generosity and inviting me to participate.
Of course, the challenge for me is not to terribly black pill these impressionable young minds who are just starting off in life and think the world is their oyster.
But I can't praise the program enough in terms of trying to acquaint these young people with a balanced sense of the reality in not only in Washington, but our country and the world in general about where they can best apply their time and talents in a way that is realistic in moving forward their own lives, you know, marriage, family, profession,
all of those things that make them constructive citizens and make a positive contribution to our country and the world, but also not to do it in a naive or for that matter, cynical way, where they basically are just, you know, money-grubbing.
I'm trying to think of the nice word, money grubber, you know, basically just looking out for number one and scaling the career heights and all that kind of thing.
That they do have a balanced view toward life in terms of what they can accomplish for themselves and for their fellow human beings.
So I can't praise the program enough.
So, you know, I'll certainly do my part because I think probably a lot, there are a lot of people out there who would be perfect for this and maybe just don't know about it as not as much as they should.
And let's try to get the word out there because I would encourage any young person in that education category to apply for this.
Great.
Thank you so much, Jim, for not only for that wonderful plug, but for being with us today and joining us today.
And I definitely want to thank our audience for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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