June 14, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:50
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So there are some estimates. | |
| The odds of the Israel around conflict spreading into a broader regional or global war involving multiple states or sustained multi-front fighting are low to moderate with a rough probability range of 15 to 30 percent. | |
| So low likelihood. | |
| 15-20%, the conflict remains limited to Israel and Iran, with missiles-slash-drone exchanges fizzling out due to depleted stocks, diplomatic pressure, or Iran's weakened capacity. | |
| Regional and global powers stay out, and proxies play a minimal role. | |
| Moderate likelihood, 20-30%, escalation occurs due to a miscalculation, a significant Iranian attack on U.S. bases, Israeli strikes causing mass civilian casualties, or covert Russian-slash-Chinese arms support. | |
| This could draw in limited proxy or regional involvement, but stops short of a full-scale war. | |
| High likelihood is less than 10% of full-blown regional war involving major powers, U.S., Russia, China, or multiple states. | |
| It's highly unlikely due to strange strategic constraints, economic stakes, and historical restraint. | |
| Iran, in its sort of current Mueller-ruled form, is largely isolated from allies as a whole, and is viewed as a rogue state or a dangerous nation, even by the sort of the local. | |
| Powers that be. | |
| And please understand, I'm far from an expert in the Middle East, so I just wanted to sort of mention that as a whole. | |
| Let me just get to your comments here. | |
| Now, with regards to Israel and Iran, I mean, I obviously don't have any back channels, but, of course, Israel has struck because, according to Israeli intelligence, however much you accept or don't accept that, I can't tell you. | |
| I don't have any answers that way. | |
| But they said that Iran was within weeks of getting a nuclear weapon. | |
| And now, I mean, I've been hearing about this since the early 90s. | |
| It seems like every year or two, it's like they're going to have a nuclear weapon within five years, three years, six years, six months, whatever. | |
| But the story from Israel is that Iran was imminently about to get a nuclear weapon. | |
| Given the hostility of the Iranian regime, who funds Hezbollah quite a bit, towards the Israeli state, a preemptive strike, it's something that they would justify according to that. | |
| Again, whether you believe it or not, I couldn't possibly tell you, but that is the official story. | |
| Now, as far as I understand it, Trump was... | |
| And he did not want the strike to occur. | |
| And the strike did occur. | |
| What that's going to do to American-Israeli relations remains to be seen. | |
| But it is pretty wild to see the change from when I was younger about the general components of the Middle East. | |
| Of course, when I was younger, there was the first Gulf War and then, of course, the invasion of Iraq and so on. | |
| And people were pretty gung-ho for that kind of stuff in America. | |
| Of course, after 9-11, people were pretty gung-ho because they had basically been led to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had somehow been involved in 9-11, which I don't particularly think he was. | |
| 9-11 came out of... | |
| And so there was that. | |
| So... | |
| Yeah, so, I mean, gold is up, Bitcoin is down, but Bitcoin bounced back after the last sort of threat. | |
| And so, where does this go? | |
| I mean, Russia's probably not going to do much. | |
| They're parked down in Ukraine. | |
| China has never had a history of directly engaging militarily in the Middle East. | |
| So they may offer Iran... | |
| you know, covert support by arming them or some sort of diplomatic support. | |
| But the idea that they would go in directly is quite unlikely. | |
| So I think that they got some advance warning in America and have decided to work as best as they can, or at least this is what they say, they've decided to work as best as they can to... | |
| Whether that means indirect support, probably. | |
| Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan have never really wanted Iran to get nukes, and they've cooperated with Israel. | |
| They intercepted Iranian drones in April 2024 to prevent this. | |
| Turkey and Pakistan, I mean, they support the Muslim causes, but neither of them have signaled any intent to intervene militarily. | |
| And of course, Pakistan's got its own internal challenges, and Turkey has NATO ties, so that makes the involvement kind of improbable. | |
| Now, of course, there was a, again, we don't know for sure, but according to Israel, they decapitated the I think I'm going to go. | |
| for purposes that are civilian-based and power-based, and they were going 50% to 90%, which means that it was aiming towards the idea of getting nuclear weapons rather than just having nuclear power. | |
| And then, of course, as... | |
| Is the case in war? | |
| The enemy gets a vote. | |
| There was some strike back. | |
| I think about 100 rockets were sent towards Israel, and apparently only five to seven got through because of the Iron Dome and so on, or other ways that they have to counter these kinds of things. | |
| So, of course, the hope is that it is illimited, that they have gotten their wish or their way, which is to prevent Iran from having these nuclear weapons and things go and quiet down and so on. | |
| But yeah, it is pretty wild to see how different the reaction is now as opposed to the past. | |
| There does seem, I mean, the weariness in the U.S. regarding Iraq and regarding Afghanistan is something that is very new and It's fairly unprecedented, really. | |
| It's fairly unprecedented for the American population to be this weary of Middle Eastern entanglements, but the humbling, I won't say the humiliation, because, I mean, America achieved its military objectives. | |
| It's just that the relative freedoms that were hoped for were unable to be sustained for a variety of religious and population reasons that the Middle East is not exactly the most fertile. | |
| Ukrainian-style black soil ground for the emergence of a Jeffersonian-style republic. | |
| But given the failures, and you've probably seen this bitter meme that, you know, if you ever feel useless in your job, just remember it took the American military, you know, 20 years and trillions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. | |
| And so this idea that it's like... | |
| You run at them, they scatter, and then when you run past, they just come back, right? | |
| So there's this idea that it looks like you're doing something, everyone's gone. | |
| And then for reasons that we've talked about before, they generally tend to coalesce back into their previous shape. | |
| And it is of course, my massive hope and goal that any thoughts towards something like colonialism is, This white man's burden has just been an absolute, complete and total fracking catastrophe for the West as a whole. | |
| And of course, if the seagulls scatter, so to speak, and I'm sorry to be talking about human beings as seagulls, it's just an analogy, but if the seagulls scatter when you're there, and then the moment you leave, they just come back, then really, what's the point? |
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