Roger Stone and Senator Robert Torricelli dissect Trump’s "peace through strength" doctrine, exposing Iran’s 460mg of 60%-enriched uranium—enough for 11 nukes—and its rejection of U.S. JCPOA offers in Oman and Geneva. Torricelli links Iran’s 100,000+ executions to inevitable conflict, praising Trump’s surgical strikes over Iraq-style wars while dismissing NATO allies’ hypocrisy. In Venezuela, they credit Trump with crippling Maduro’s oil exports to China/Cuba, predicting Cuba’s collapse within two years due to lost subsidies, and warn of its Chinese-backed intelligence threat. The episode frames Trump’s strategy as a calculated end to decades of communist aggression. [Automatically generated summary]
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You got President Donald Trump practicing the peace through strength doctrine of Dwight Eisenhower and after him, Ronald Reagan, where Trump was essentially elected as an anti-war president, certainly an anti-interventionist president, but that does not mean that he won't use lethal U.S. power in a limited way to achieve his objectives.
And the way he has used a combination of military might, economic suasion, and pressure, and very wisely cutting off oil to the communist Chinese as well as the Russians, shows an extraordinarily complicated and brilliant foreign policy.
And now we get stunning new details emerging about how close Iran may have been to building nuclear weapons.
It's not clear how close they may yet be and how defiant its regime has been in negotiations with the United States.
Steve Witkoff, who's a very good guy, was with the president and Witkoff Saturday night at Mar-a-Lago.
We had dinner and the president correctly said that Witkoff is the only man in the history of Manhattan real estate who was uniformly liked.
That the Manhattan World of real estate, particularly big real estate, is a dog-eat-dog business.
President Trump once joked that dealing with all the world leaders like Putin and Chairman Xi Was child's play compared to negotiating with the big players in Manhattan real estate, but that Witkoff was a man who was universally liked and has served his country as a special envoy on assignment for the president to try to negotiate peace in some of the world's hotspots,
including in Iran.
He revealed Monday that Iranian officials openly admitted during their recent talks that they possess enough highly enriched uranium to build 11 nuclear bombs.
According to Witkoff, Iranian negotiators stated without hesitation that they control roughly 460 milligrams of uranium enriched to 60% purity.
Now, experts say that material could be refined to 90% relatively quickly, weapons-grade level in about a week to 10 days.
So Iran also holds thousands of additional kilograms enriched at lower levels, which could be weaponized within weeks.
As the regime teeters, who has control of these and where they are become central questions.
Steve Witkoff, who's a fine gentleman, and Jared Kushner, the president's highly effective son-in-law, who brought us the Abraham Accords, for which he deserves accolades, engaged in three rounds of indirect talks with Iran in Oman, in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this year.
What was a last-ditch attempt by Witkoff and Kushner to avoid a military conflict?
From the start, Iran took a hard line, insisting that it had an inalienable right to enrich uranium.
The U.S. response was clear that they had to stop and limit their nuclear development to the generation of electricity-only peaceful purposes, and that U.S. monitors had to be able to guarantee that, but that any path to nuclear weapons was off the table.
America has a right to stop them.
As Witkoff said, the U.S. even offered to supply the Iranians with civilian nuclear fuel for a decade if Tehran would agree to halt enrichment tied to weapons, which is quite an olive branch.
Iran rejected that proposal outright.
Witkoff, who is a very shrewd negotiator, said the Iranians were proud of their nuclear enrichment capability and their ability to evade the oversight to which they had previously agreed in the Charade-Iranian weapons deal.
That's the one where there were off the books $47 million on pallets being used for essentially political payoffs that the American taxpayers are never told about.
That's outside the signed agreement in which they agree to stop their nuclear weapons developments while continuing to vote ahead.
And the Obama administration, followed by Joe Biden, are kind of dumb enough to believe them.
Witkoff has pointed out that with the U.S.-Israeli conflict against Iran now intensifying, it became clear that Iran really had no intention of ever abandoning its nuclear weapons.
What Witkoff is saying is that he and Trump finally figured out that the Iranians were just playing for time, time to re-fortify their position and try to do everything they could to expedite their danger in the nuclear space.
One of the things that is, of course, interesting to me with the decapitation of the supreme leader, Khomeini, who was reduced to a ring, I guess they found his ring.
That'd be a grisly trophy.
And 40 of his top henchmen, but we also know that Iran continues to fire both rockets and launch drone attacks on its various Arab neighbors.
So the regime is not dead.
How crippled, how wounded this incredibly brutal MALA-led regime is and the contingencies they had planned for just this moment is one thing we're going to talk to our next guest about.
That's Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a former member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also serving on the Rules Committee, the Judiciary Committee, a leader against the communist regime and narco-Marxism in this hemisphere, joins us.
He has always been an active in Middle Eastern affairs, particularly, and has a unique perspective on the situation in Iran and how wounded the regime is.
The key to this fight, of course, with Trump is, once again, limited action.
He goes into Iran, he goes into Venezuela, and he goes into Iran.
Again, again, no boots on the ground, no mass American casualties.
I think two or three Americans died, and I think five Israelis died because of an incoming drone that evaded Israeli airspace.
That's the last I had read.
So Trump is, I think, bridging a gap between the neocons in his party, like Lindsey Graham, who would really, you know, jump into any war, kind of shoot first to ask questions later.
He must have really woken up excited with the news of the war.
But Trump, I think, understands that this kind of projection of American power, which let's give Pete Hegseth and his reforms credit.
Trump has restored the lethality and the skill of the U.S. military.
The operation backing law enforcement in Venezuela was a textbook.
It was the thing of James Bond in terms of the daring nature of that.
It was not a regime change effort, but more precisely, an effort to arrest a man who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans who died of fentanyl and other drug poisoning because of drugs that he forced into the country.
So the president ultimately, I think, moved to this position once he figured out that the Muellers were just playing him for time.
But just to be clear, this is a regime that brutally murdered Americans, has a long history of doing so, all the way back to the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut and thousands more over time.
They kept and continued to threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, which would have a very, very deleterious impact on oil prices.
Oil prices would skyrocket with that kind of a blockade.
On the other hand, General Michael Flynn was with us last weekend and pointed out, given his assessment of the Iranian Navy and the fitness for combat of the U.S. Navy, said we could reopen it within hours that we have that capability.
Now, is there anyone out there who thinks that Donald Trump would fail to do that?
On day four of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump declared the United States will crush the Iranian threat and easily prevail.
Speaking at the White House, Trump projected what he thought would be a four to five week campaign, but emphasized the U.S. will do whatever it takes to neutralize Tehran's missile, navy, and proxy capabilities.
The president has always said you never telegraph to the enemy what your plan is.
You can understand why he doesn't want to be pinned down on the fact that he surely understands that even the American people don't have the patience for more endless foreign war, no boots on the ground, no mass casualties, and not millions and millions more of defense spending and other contracting connected to an endless foreign war.
That's not what Trump got elected on.
On the other hand, he's not going to announce his hand.
The Pentagon reports more than 1,250 U.S. strikes on Iranian targets, dismantling key military infrastructure, and of course eliminating the senior figures, including, of course, the supreme leader,
that is the Ayatollah Khomeini, not to be confused with the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was at the helm of the 1979 revolution in which I believe 64 Americans were arrested and kept hostages for something like 455 days until their fear of Ronald Reagan over the weak-need response of Jimmy Carter persuaded them to release those Americans.
And they continued to butcher people in their own streets.
The leading resistance group, the most public of them, the MEK, had literally thousands of their members who favor a democratic election and the overturn of this autocratic regime's thousands of them publicly executed in the streets to serve as a warning.
This is a brutal regime, which makes the uprising of the Iranian people against it at the very beginning all the more courageous because these people are capable and have done these mass executions as a part of their operating style.
Losses Unlikely to Topple Regime00:15:21
It's also important to recognize that to a great extent the regime uses the specter of the return of the Shah's son, the Shah being almost as deeply unpopular as the mullahs themselves because of his human rights abuses, even though it was a more cosmopolitan society.
I agree with those like Rudy Giuliani who say that the replacement for a theocracy, this theocracy particularly should not be a new monarchy.
I'll get a lot of bots who will attack me about that and talk about the House of Pahlavi.
Look, I think what Carter did to the Shah was disgraceful.
Trump predicted this time would come.
He predicted the rise of the mullahs because of our abandonment of the Shah, and I agree with that, but the Shah was no paragon of human rights.
The viciousness of his Sabak, the secret police, was famous.
So it is time for them to move into the world of democracy as soon as that is humanly possible.
But again, we don't know how decimated the regime is.
They're still in control of many of the institutions and a lot of the land.
They continue to fire their rockets at their Arab neighbors around them, the UAE, Saudi, and so on.
So it's not over by a long shot.
That's why I'm very anxious to get Senator Torricelli, a former member of the Foreign Relations Committee, on to lay this out for us.
We'll be doing that for you shortly.
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This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
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You know, I flew back from Washington Friday.
I went to bed early.
I got in late.
I went right to bed.
The next morning I woke up.
My wife told us that we were at war.
And the U.S. forces have very quickly achieved total local air superiority.
And CENTCOM confirms that Iran's naval presence in the Gulf of Oman has been reduced to zero operational ships.
So much for their blocking the state of Hermuz, as some predicted they would try to do.
Defense Secretary Pete Heggs has trusted the campaign is not an endless war.
Again, underscoring that strikes are precise and focused really on degrading Iran's war-making capacity.
Vice President JD Vance echoed those sentiments, making it clear the president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish and he will accomplish those goals quickly, efficiently, and then get out.
See, it is not a violation of the interventionist wing of the party that Trump very much has part of his base.
Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks across the regions, targeting U.S. bases and Gulf infrastructure.
Six American services now updating that have been killed in action with additional troops wounded.
There was one friendly fire incident over Kuwait downing three U.S. F-15s, although I guess all of those aircraft, I'm told, survived.
The administration maintains that early action prevented larger American casualties.
Now arguing that intelligence shows that Iran planned to strike U.S. forces if Israel moved first.
Energy markets reacted sharply after the Iranians' threats to close the Strait of Hermuz, which sent oil prices initially higher.
President Trump has committed significant resources that assure us that the Strait will be kept open and will repel any Iranian treachery, while Treasury and energy officials are preparing measures to blunt the fuel impacts.
NATO will not join operations, but Israel continues to coordinate strikes against Hezbollah and the Iranian-linked assets.
The White House projects confidence.
I saw it myself in the president Saturday night.
He looked fit.
It was somber, but he was in a talkative mood and frankly, he never looked healthier.
Given the week he had put in particularly.
So it is without any question has to be the toughest job in the world.
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Joining me now in the Stone Zone is former U.S. Senator Robert Bob Torricelli of New Jersey, former member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as the Senate Finance Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Rules Committee, and the Government Affairs Committee.
He is of a brand of hardline anti-communist Democrats, particularly in this hemisphere.
He wrote essentially the Cuban Embargo Act as an outspoken critic of the brutal regime.
He's also an expert on Middle Eastern affairs and has long relations with many of the pro-democratic voices in that country.
And that's why I was anxious to get his views on what has transpired.
So, Senator Torricelli, welcome to the Stones.
Thank you, Roger.
Thanks for having me.
You have been a longtime critic of the regime.
You have said early on that you thought they were teetering and that they would fall over.
What is your action to these presidents' use of American strength?
Well, a conflict with Iran was inevitable, and people may disagree with whether it should have been now or next month or six months ago, but the conduct of the Iranian regime simply begged some response.
Remembering, as President Trump said just the other day, this goes back 47 years, from the seizing of our hostages to the killing of the 300 Marines in Lebanon to the attack on the USS Coal Cobar Towers.
There's a list as long as your arm.
What has stunned me more than anything is just how long the United States has been tolerant of this aggressive behavior and the loss of American life.
I think, Roger, we all grew up in a time where if you attacked an American ship, you were attacked.
If you shot down an American plane, you were attacked.
We have tolerated a great deal from the Iranian regime for a long time, and it was time to bring it to an end.
Well, and the ongoing mass brutality of the regimes, like they didn't even hide it, the oppression of their people, the mass executions of those in the MEK, the dangerousness of it, and the collapse of the economy.
I mean, when people are hungry, they get angry.
The courage of the Iranian people cannot be understated given the brutality of this regime when it comes to the US.
I think it's probably going to take a long time before we fully understand the scale of what has happened in Iran.
I have an unfortunate belief about the United States that if the New York Times doesn't have a reporter there, it didn't happen.
That's just not the way.
That's not the reality of the world.
Events have been unfolding for decades of a mass brutality that we simply don't know the dimensions.
We do know in the late 80s, perhaps 100,000 political dissidents were murdered by the regime.
Many of them, as you suggested, members of the MEK, the organized Democratic opposition.
In these last few weeks, the number could well be 10,000 protesters were killed on the streets.
And this is the fourth wave of protest in the last 15 years.
The scale of the repression has been enormous.
And imagine life in a country where your currency may have been devalued by 70 or 80 percent, where prices may have gone up 80 or 90 percent, where you can't afford basic necessities, where two generations have lacked any kind of basic freedom.
The oppression of the Iranian people is actually unique in our time.
It is a blessing if it's going to come to an end.
But the question, of course, is having decapitated the Supreme Leader and 40 of his henchmen, although he doesn't really tell us who they are, how crippled, how wounded, how crippled, or how decimated is the regime?
They continue to shoot drones and rockets outside at their Arab neighbors.
They boasted about having enriched nuclear material.
Where is that material?
I'd certainly like to know that.
Steve Witkoff reported that today.
I mean, I understand that they're celebrating in the streets over the Supreme Leader's incarceration.
He's one of the evil figures of all time.
But how hurt is the regime in your view?
I think, Roger, it's important not to fool ourselves into believing that this regime will fall like Qaddafi and Libya or be militarily destroyed like ISIS or Hamas.
This is a real country.
92 million people with massive natural resources of oil and strong institutions and a very educated elite in the country.
It will not be easily toppled.
The plainclothes police, the Bazi, who support the IRGC, may have a million members.
So decapitating the regime is the right thing to do.
Now apparently we have struck the next level.
That's the right thing to do.
But we can't fool ourselves into thinking the regime will then easily collapse.
It has a real reservoir of people.
Nevertheless, it's the imponderable of human history.
How much punishment can a population take?
We talked about the loss of freedom, the economic deprivation, now the loss of life in the streets at the regime's own hands.
At what point do people have nothing to lose and simply take the regime?
I think that's obviously what President Trump is trying to tempt, saying to them, all right, we took out your leadership.
We've isolated them.
Now it's up to you.
And that's just a fact.
It's now up to them.
Do they rise?
There's no one alive who can answer that question.
Yeah, it is continued.
You have Pete Hegset seeing a four or five week cleanup period.
I don't really know what that means.
I'm not sure.
Only because they continue, of course, to launch these attacks.
At least now the death toll of six.
This is a different type of foreign policy, though.
This is not endless foreign war, boosts on the ground, mass casualties, giant increases in very lucrative defense contracts for connected special interests.
It's a different, but it is the very focused and limited use of American power, which is what I think Trump is.
His decisiveness is impressive.
Yeah, and I think it's important that the administration have the discipline to keep it that way.
It is, for those of us who are older, the Vietnam mission creep.
For those of more recent times, what happened in Iraq, which unfortunately I was witness to in the Senate, this is a different foreign policy.
It is decapitation.
It is isolation.
It is the narrow protection of American interests.
But many Americans tend to paint all those with the same brush.
They are not.
There was not a reason to invade Iraq, spend a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives.
Here it can be said that the killing of American personnel, the economic dislocations of Iran, the threat of nuclear weapons was real enough to decapitate the regime.
But even here, our enthusiasm for change and for dealing with these despotic people cannot lead us into creeping the mission forward to invading Iran, trying to occupy a country of 90 million people.
If the mission ended today, and unfortunately we didn't change the regime, we didn't remove the remaining clerics and we did not remove the IRGC and we did not get a democratic government, that would all be a shame.
I'd be disappointed.
But that doesn't mean what we've done to date was not worth doing.
Their nuclear program now must be set back years.
Their ballistic missile production capability has at least for the moment been destroyed.
We have certainly kept them off balance in their political leadership.
So we have lost six lives.
It has obviously cost us considerable amount of resources.
But at the moment, we'd have to conclude it was the right thing to do.
What do you say to those, I'm not one of them, by the way, what do you say to those who say that know that really this action in Iran is at the behest of Israel is because of disproportionate influence on U.S. foreign policy by Israel.
Venezuela's Decline And Its Implications00:09:55
How do you answer that?
I think even with the closest of allies, interests are not always the same.
We are close to the British for a long time.
We didn't go to war at the same time in World War I or II.
They did go to Korea.
They did not go to Vietnam.
We separated on Suez.
The closest of nations can see their interests differently.
I think with Israel at the moment, there was a synergy.
They were immediately threatened with nuclear weapons, their existence.
We were not threatened as severely, but we have paid a very high price for Iranian aggression.
So at the moment, our interests were the same.
They may not remain that way, and Israel undoubtedly has a stronger interest in pursuing this further to the complete removal of the regime and changing the society.
We would like that too, but we're not willing to pay the same price.
I think it's enough that at the moment, Israel and the United States saw it the same way, acted in concert, and seized the moment.
That's enough.
And for two allies, it gave us a moment that was special, and I think we maximized the opportunity.
What is amazing to me is that Trump really seems to have a very coordinated foreign policy in which he uses America's military strength, but he also uses the country's economic leverage to get Iwan.
Just not through tariffs, but I think that has been particularly effective as well.
I think it has.
You know, I watched him this afternoon his frustration, for example, with Spain.
Spain is a member of NATO.
It has benefited from its economic and political and military relationship with the United States and now is quick to condemn our actions.
Norway did the same.
The British hesitating at first to allow American military to use bases and not cooperating on Diego Garcia.
Were I the president, having used military power, I would take that in consideration with future economic and trade relations.
We have a right to expect better of our allies.
And I know he will keep it in mind and he should.
I'm thinking specifically that Trump's very deft and incredible actions in Venezuela, including the precision military operation, as you yourself have said, flawless.
But essentially getting control of Venezuela and AL, being able to deny it to the Chinese, who were getting about 80% of it, as well as the brutal Cuban regime, who were getting about 20% of the rest of it, will not be able to do that.
And no, he understands the soft points economically, without a doubt, and knows where to apply pressure.
History will go down that the Venezuelan movement action was of historic proportions.
It's not just a matter of Trump, it's the incredible skill of the United States military in executing that move.
And listen, I understand people who will argue that international law and whether it was properly consulted, international bodies were probably done.
The fact of the matter is, the United States had tolerated the Maduro and then Chavez regime before it, contradicting American policy, transportation of drugs and terrorism, and then exporting citizens to the United States more than we ever should have tolerated it.
It was time to bring it to an end.
But you were right.
The public focused on the military aspects to it, but the economic were just as important and now continuing.
When we come back, I want to ask Senator Bob Torriselli, who is an expert on Latin American affairs, particularly on Cuba, essentially the father of the Cuban embargo legislatively, outspoken critic of that brutal regime.
How he sees the impact of Venezuela's fall on Cuba and what may be next for Cuba, just a mere 90 miles from their shores.
We are, you're listening to the Stone Zone.
I'm here with former New Jersey senator, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Latin American expert, anti-communist Democrat Bob Torricelli, and will be right back.
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Very few in the history of the U.S. Congress have been a more effective opponent of the brutal communist regime in Cuba than Senator Bob Torricelli, essentially, as I say, the author of the Cuban embargo, which helped weaken them.
Of course, once their Russian subsidies fell away, they started being essentially paid by the Chinese, and therefore, I think, still pose a greater danger to us.
But the fall of Venezuela cuts off their oil, puts them in a very deleterious position.
So, Senator, what do you think the situation is today in Cuba?
Where do you think America is going or should go in terms of the-Roger?
If you were to go back, if you were to go back 25, 30 years ago when we modernized the American embargo on Cuba, we believed Castro would not last more than a few years.
He had lost the Soviet military and economic aid and was isolated in the world.
Under his communist regime, the economy is basically non-functioning.
At one point, the average income of a Cuban was $400 a year.
It didn't happen, and it didn't happen for a simple reason.
Hugo Chavez and then Maduro gave oil to Cuba.
Of course, they didn't use all that oil to help their economy or their people.
They resold much of it on the world market for cash.
It kept them afloat these 25 years.
It's now gone.
No more Venezuelans.
And they were getting it extraordinarily cheaply.
They were getting it cheaply or for nothing.
There is a, I'm told, a Russian tanker en route to Cuba with 200,000 barrels on board.
Whether the Russians follow that with another one or not, I don't know.
Russia's got its own issues to be donating oil to Cuba, its own economic issues.
But I think it is fair to say, at long last, the Cuban regime may have run out of options.
Now, this isn't vengeance for vengeance's sake.
This isn't for my generation remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cuban Revolution and finally wanting to win some outsized game.
This is a regime that I will remind you has allowed drugs to be transported through the United States, sent hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees into the Florida Straits, to our shores, and fomented revolution from Salvador to Nicaragua to Peru and Ecuador through the last 40 years.
Thousands have died at the hands of Cuban arms and advisors destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.
There is a reason to celebrate the decline and collapse of this regime.
I think it's imminent.
I would be surprised if it lasts more than another year or two.
And it's only good news for the United States, and more importantly, frankly, for the Cuban people, who have suffered under this communist yoke for so many decades.
Generations of Cubans lost any chance at a productive and happy life.
They've lived in economic desperation under the boot of the Castro regime.
It is a blessing if they can finally find some happiness and prosperity.
Well, you would deserve much of the credit to foreseeing that the regime would founder once they lost their subsidies from the Russians.
They are still in danger because of the very sophisticated spying apparatus that exists is, I think, funded by the Chinese.
We don't know what the Chinese actually remarkably, they have one of the best intelligence operations in the world.
It's one of the remarkable things about the U.S. Special Forces killing the 23 Cuban guards who were guarding Maduro.
The Cubans have well-trained security forces.
It's notable at the end of the Cold War, when the Russian files were opened up on surveillance, the United States believed we had 23 spies operating inside the Cuban government.
Every one of them was a double agent.
Behind Every Patient00:01:42
Every single one.
They may be evil.
They may be barbaric in the treatment of their people, but they have been effective.
Yeah, you know, there is no question.
I don't know what to make of these stories about the fact that Marco Rubio may be in back-channel conversations with Rao Castro's grandson.
I don't know if that's disinformation or government purposely putting that out there.
I don't know.
I haven't seen those reports confirm.
The president says they may just surrender.
I'd love to see that, but I don't think this brutal regime will do that quite yet.
All right, Senator Bob Torcello, you have to leave it there.
Thanks for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
Tomorrow, God bless you.
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