Jeffrey Sachs warns U.S. Middle East policy, orchestrated by Netanyahu’s 1996 Clean Break strategy, has triggered six of seven planned wars—dismantling Syria, Iraq, Libya, and destabilizing Iran—via covert ops like Obama’s Operation Timber Sycamore, framed as "regime change" despite no U.S. threat. He ties $7T war costs to Israel lobby influence, exposing media complicity in suppressing dissent (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard’s Assad meetings) while Biden escalates Ukraine and risks nuclear conflict. Sachs argues Trump’s second term could pivot toward peace with Russia, China, and Iran—but only if he resists neocons like Bolton—citing Iran’s ignored peace offers and Israel’s assassinations of negotiators (Haniyeh, Nasrallah) to sabotage diplomacy. The stakes? A war with Iran could spark WWIII, yet Sachs insists de-escalation is possible through NATO withdrawal and direct U.S.-Russia talks, framing the election as a choice between endless conflict or accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Netanyahu's war to remake the Middle East.
It's been a disaster.
It continues to be a disaster.
But as Netanyahu himself said after Assad left, we have remade the Middle East.
And so it has to be understood as something that didn't just happen in a week, but has been an ongoing war throughout the Middle East.
and maybe the right way to understand what's happened with Syria is to think back to a really remarkable occasion
when Wesley Clark, the general who headed NATO, went to the Pentagon just after 9-11.
And famously, he showed a piece of paper that said, we're going to have seven wars in five years.
And he was completely dumbfound.
He said, what does this have to do with anything?
And he was told that the neocons and the Israelis are going to remake the Middle East.
And the seven countries on the list are very telling.
They were Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and then in Africa, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.
And seven countries, we've been at war in six of them now.
And I mean we, the United States, on behalf of Israel, including in Syria.
And so what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.
It started with Netanyahu and his American advisors in 1996 in something called Clean Break, which was a political document that the Americans and Netanyahu made when Netanyahu became prime minister.
After 9-11, it went into full gear with the Iraq wars being the first of those wars.
Because Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years.
That's how it works.
We have an Israel lobby.
We have this clean break strategy.
We have a plan for seven wars in five years.
And what's interesting is they actually kind of carry out this madness.
They don't explain any of it to the American people.
They don't tell anybody.
But you can watch step by step.
We've had six of those seven wars.
The only one that hasn't happened is Iran.
And if you watch every day now, the MSM, the mainstream media, is pushing for U.S. war with Iran.
Netanyahu's pushing for war with Iran.
They're really trying to get this started, to make seven out of seven.
But Obama, you know, for no...
Particular reason, by the way, but he launched two of these wars on the list of seven.
He launched the war to bring down the Libyan government, Muammar Gaddafi, in the fall of, or the war started in March 2011. And he and Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, said Assad must go.
I remember scratching my head at the time saying, oh, that's interesting.
How are they going to do that?
Syria was a normal functioning country at the time.
Despite whatever you read, whatever propaganda is said, Syria was a normal functioning country.
I recently dredged out a report by the International Monetary Fund on Syria in 2009 that praised the Syrian government for its reforms and its rapid economic growth and looked forward to continued years of economic development.
In other words, it was not this wasteland or this battlefield.
But it was deemed to be by Netanyahu a threat to Israel because of a simple reason.
Which is that Netanyahu wants to control Israel.
All of Palestine wants to rule over the Palestinian people, does not want a Palestinian state, and that has led to militant opposition.
That's led to Hamas, that's led to Hezbollah, that's led to other groups.
Netanyahu's theory is, well, we're never going to allow a Palestinian state, so we have to bring down any government that supports those militant groups against us, because our core aim is greater Israel.
That's not much of a worthy cause, by the way.
Having a Palestinian state next door and having peace could have saved probably a million lives by now over the last 30 years.
But that's not Netanyahu's crazy ambition, which is...
Greater Israel means, depending on how crazy the people are, either that...
Israel controls not only its geographic territory, but that it essentially controls or annexes the West Bank, the Golan Heights, which they've just enlarged, Gaza.
Claimed by Israel and now with an expanded territory and East Jerusalem.
So everything that was captured in 1967 Netanyahu explicitly said we're never giving that back.
Now there are two motivations for that.
One, Netanyahu says not safe to give it back because he doesn't want to negotiate any kind of peace or any state of Palestine.
Then there are Religious zealots, I would use even stronger terms, who use The book of Joshua, which is 2,700 years ago, that said, well, God gave us everything from the river in Egypt, meaning the Nile, to the Euphrates.
And there are zealots in Israel and they're in the government who believe, yes, this is God's ordinance.
Well, if you take the greater view of this, it would include Lebanon, it would include Syria, it would include part of Iraq, it would include part of Egypt.
And some of these people actually quote the Bible and say, we're going to do this.
And it's...
It's a little sad and absolutely terribly frightening.
But I'd say the more narrow vision is what they call from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
That's taken as a pro-Palestinian chant, but it's exactly the opposite.
It is the greater Israel literal vision of the government of Israel.
It's the literal idea.
There happen to be 7 million Palestinians there.
That's a minor problem.
Maybe they can be ethnically cleansed.
Maybe they can be thrown out.
Maybe they can just be ruled in a military-dominant way.
Of course, probably well over 100,000 have been killed in the most recent war by Israel.
Official count, 45,000 of bodies claimed from the rubble, but we know that there are a lot more that have died since this war in Gaza began.
But all of this is to say...
This greater Israel idea says we can't make peace with the Palestinians.
So anyone that supports the Palestinians is, by definition, a mortal threat to us.
Yes, but it was the same time in 2011. But my understanding was the reason there were so many American intel assets there was because they were moving arms from Libya to Libya.
I think I counted right that the New York Times mentioned Operation Timber Sycamore, I think, three times in the 2010s.
So a war that cost billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, CIA operation, covert action, links with Libya, never explained, never discussed.
And even when the government falls last week, No background given.
We're supposed to have amnesia.
We're not supposed to understand that what happens is the result of long-term plans that have been pretty disastrous.
And, by the way, as I've said...
Israel has driven so many American wars and we say, absolutely, yes, that's our greatest ally.
These have been at huge cost to the United States.
Cost of trillions of dollars, cost geopolitically, but somehow...
We gave away our foreign policy to Israel years and years ago, and it's been absolutely devastating.
And it's interesting to go back and watch Netanyahu speak to the American people.
Go look at a video clip of 2001, 2002. In 2002, in October, he comes and testifies in the Senate, and there's a nice clip of him promising how wonderful Netanyahu The war in Iraq is going to be because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
He says 100% certain.
Complete lies, by the way, and they knew that they were lies at the time.
And it's going to be wonderful.
We're going to topple that dictator, and then dictators are going to be toppled everywhere, and the young people of Iran are going to rise up.
This is his idea, together with his U.S. political consultants, together with...
Neocons in the US government for the last 25 years, they have never apologized for dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars running up US debt.
And doing what?
Creating chaos.
So, just to go back to the seven countries, because it's worth remembering, Lebanon, it barely exists as a functioning country right now.
Syria, it's going to be picked to pieces.
Don't believe...
Well, it's obvious in what we're seeing every day, territorial integrity.
Yeah, Israel's just invaded from the southwest into a deeper Syria, Turkey from the north.
Russia has its area, the United States and the Kurds have their area.
This place is just going to be a battlefield for years to come.
Do you ever feel like you can't trust the things you hear or read, like every news source is hollowed, distorted, or clearly just propaganda lying to you?
Well, you're not imagining it.
If the last few years have proven anything, it's that legacy media exists to distort the truth and to control you, to gatekeep information from the public instead of letting you know what's actually going on.
They don't want you to know.
But there is, however, a publication that fights this that is not propaganda, one that we read every month and have for many years.
It's called Imprimus.
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That's TuckerForHillsdale.com The only way this stays a democracy is if the citizenry is informed.
You can't fight tyranny if you don't know what's going on.
We've paid probably $7 trillion if you add it up according to Brown University studies, for example.
Something like $7 trillion has gone into this.
Israel couldn't do this for one day.
Israel, you know, Netanyahu, we are lions.
Yeah, right, you are liars.
But we are the ones funding you, arming you, paying for all of this.
That's the United States.
And this is weird to me because we say yes to defend our ally.
No, no, no.
We're doing their foreign policy which makes no sense, which doesn't lead to any peace, which leads to Basically, a war zone across the Middle East, and we say this is good for us.
Why is this good for us?
What's the United States getting out of any of this?
We haven't gotten anything out of any of this, except massive geopolitical isolation.
The most recent votes in the UN, for example, put the United States alone, alone with Israel, and I shouldn't exaggerate.
We have Micronesia on our side.
We have Nauru on our side with its 12,000 people, maybe a couple of other countries.
The whole rest of the world is saying, what is going on?
Endless war in the Middle East.
Well, this is because we're defending someone with some 7th century BC vision of what they want their country to be.
Actually, let me tell you an interesting story, by the way.
The war started in 2011. It was portrayed as always, as the CIA does, as a local uprising and the freedom fighters and It was said this was Syrians protesting against Syria.
That's always how any CIA regime change operation works.
There may also be local opposition, but the CIA provides the armaments, it provides the flow of heavy weapons, it provides the financing, it provides the training, it provides the camps, it provides the political organization.
So this started in 2011. In 2012, there was already a bloodbath underway and a lot of people dying and a lot of civilians dying and a lot of ancient historic sites because this is the fertile crescent.
This is the birthplace of humanity itself, of civilization, being destroyed.
And so a very senior global diplomat that I knew very, very well was tasked with trying to Find peace.
Peace.
Nice idea.
Maybe we don't need the bloodbath.
And I met him in the spring of 2012. And he said it failed.
And said, why did it fail?
He said, well, we had a full peace agreement.
But it was blocked by one party alone.
We had the different forces in Syria, we had the regional, but it was blocked by one.
Who was it blocked by?
It was blocked by the United States government.
Why?
Well, because their condition was that Assad must go on the first day of the agreement.
political process but the united states said no no this is regime change assad must go on the first day and that was not possible so that was the end of the attempted peace so we should understand this was an american operation but i never understood what i didn't understand and still don't understand is why we're all required to hate assad i'm not speaking for myself i don't have strong feelings about assad one way or the other it
We know in the past that CIA just had reporters on the payroll.
I mean, whether they do or not now, I have no idea, so I'm not making a current claim, but we know that that's a historic fact.
We know historically that, with very rare exceptions, the New York Times has just followed the...
The unnamed official sources that this is the whole MO. This patriotic newspaper follows what it's told to do.
And it doesn't ask questions.
It has not asked any questions about any of these wars.
I'm not a recent memory, not about Ukraine, not about the wars raging throughout the Middle East.
As I said, I think there was one full page actually about Operation Timber Sycamore in 2016. You would think that something that got us into a war of 13 years where we spent billions of dollars, where hundreds of thousands of people died, Even at this stage, there would be a kind of page or a box explaining the historical background to this, but it didn't exist.
And by the way, not only do I know them, and some I like very much, by the way, and some have been classmates of mine a long time ago.
And they know things that they don't report.
And that's also important to understand that what they will say in private is the opposite of what their newspaper says.
And I mean literally the opposite.
So that's very worrying to me because we operate foreign policy in secrecy.
We do not have any kind of democratic oversight of foreign policy.
There's no explanation of it.
There's no accountability for it.
It's in very few hands.
It's not in good or reliable hands.
It's not explained.
We gave over Middle East foreign policy to Israel a long time ago, not to U.S. interests, but to Israel's interests.
That is the Israel lobby.
And we don't hear questioning of this at all.
Of course, not from the government, not from the Congress, not from oversight by any democratic institutions, nor does the mainstream media, which fewer and fewer people are interested in because they don't get any facts from it, look into these issues.
Well, there'll be continued war, and now the drumbeat is for war with Iran.
Anything is possible.
Netanyahu dearly wants the U.S. to go in and bomb Iran probably Some of President Trump's advisors will feel the same.
The incoming administration is a mix of old-school hardliners and people with a very different perspective.
So there will be an internal battle for the heart and soul of the new administration.
But there will be some who say, yeah, now is time to carry on the war.
Hezbollah and Hamas have been We can, Syria has fallen, the air defenses are gone, now we can fly and do in Iran.
Of course, all of this is a profound delusion, and that's, I think, really important to understand.
We've had six wars so far.
Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
Six out of the seven that were on the list shown to Wesley Clark.
Not one of them It has led to stability, to peace even, much less to geopolitical interests being solved.
So, it's not like we're finding solutions to anything.
Yes, it has allowed at...
Unbelievable cost Israel to hold on to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza as if that's some kind of grand strategic aim of the United States or justifiable in the face of international law and nearly global opposition to such thinking.
But it doesn't lead to any answers and there's no way To, quote, defeat Iran, even if we went in and bombed Iran, Iran has strong allies.
Iran has Russia and China as allies.
Iran is part of the BRICS. Iran has a military relationship with Russia.
Of course, we have even crazier people who think we're going to defeat Russia.
But Russia has 6,000 nuclear warheads, of which 1,600 are deployed.
It has its new hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile, which travels at Mach 11. It has other hypersonic weapons.
So yes, we have people in the U.S. who in their Mental blindness.
Think about continued escalation all the way to nuclear Armageddon.
They really do.
They're very ignorant people and they're around in high positions.
And so when you ask what comes next, what comes next is whether President Trump can change course.
This is the most important question facing the United States and there are several different Factions in Washington right now that are fighting for ultimate say.
There's a piece by Mitch McConnell, our octogenarian, who is completely Living in a delusional past, who has a lead article in Foreign Affairs magazine calling for America to commit to primacy.
And he calls for a massive military buildup to get ready for every kind of eventuality with Russia and China.
That's the old school, and it remains very powerful.
And it's got very powerful interest because it's a...
The biggest business in Washington, about $1.5 trillion of annual spending for the military machine, and Mitch McConnell absolutely represents that.
Then there are groups that say, you know, we don't really have...
Any fundamental conflict with Russia, and Russia's no real threat to us, but China's the real threat, so we should end the war in Ukraine, something I completely agree with, but we should do it so that we build up and get ready for the war with China.
And this is kind of the middle ground, which is...
Everyone is talking about war with China in Washington by 2027. And it's so weird as if we just are trying to rush headlong into complete destruction.
But we have official documents, a Navy strategy saying we must prepare for war with China by 2027. We had a Major article in the New York Times, which I actually once upon a time read with interest.
But in any event, it was a story about the Pentagon preparing for war with China.
And I wrote the reporter, actually.
This is another...
I know these people for decades.
So I wrote the reporter and I said, thank you for writing that story.
I was happy to read it now because there'll be no time to read it after the war.
We'll all be dead.
So I'm glad that we have the story now.
And the reporter wrote back to me right away, said, oh, Jeff, the editor, I had put in three times that the Pentagon doesn't want this war, but the editor took it out three times, and I don't really know why, and I didn't notice that in the hurrying to finish the piece.
Do you understand that?
You're one of our world's great journalists, a person writing a front page story about war and she's written three times the Pentagon doesn't want it and the editor takes that out all the time and she didn't recognize that.
And so there are people who say, hey, why don't we make business, advance technology, actually have some attention to our economic needs, not go bankrupt in the process.
And that group is also part of the Trump incoming team.
And this is probably the most consequential thing.
Question that a country could face is which of these different voices will prevail in this new administration.
I've never felt more uneasy than I have in the last few weeks during this period between the election and the inauguration.
And it does what doesn't seem like it is a fact that the outgoing administration is trying to accelerate conflict to leave the incoming administration in charge of a bunch of different wars, especially with Russia.
I think the Biden administration has been the worst of our governments in modern history.
And that's saying a lot because I'm a complainer.
So I don't generally praise administrations.
I like to think of myself as a responsible, tough grader.
And I haven't given high marks to any administration favorably.
Clinton onward.
I think they've all been failures.
But Biden's administration has been a complete shocking disaster, which has brought us closer to nuclear war, brought us into more conflict, didn't have one iota of diplomacy. didn't have one iota of diplomacy.
I don't count diplomacy meaning you go talk to a junior ally.
I mean diplomacy meaning you talk to someone on the other side to figure out how not to escalate.
Exactly.
We know, you know very well, and you heard it recently from the Russian Foreign Minister, that our Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister have not spoken at all.
For years, this is the most mind-bogglingly stupid approach to our security and survival imaginable.
And as far as we know, and this is what Lavrov said in his interview with you, Biden and Putin have not spoken once since February 2022. It's just unbelievable.
What a...
To not even speak, to not try to understand each other's position, to not discuss, to not try to find a way out, when now the most accurate assessment is that there are at least a million Ukrainians dead or severely wounded since February 2022, when the United States hasn't lifted a finger, not even one time, to try to talk to the other side.
So yes, this has been a shockingly Terrible government.
Biden, we don't know really.
You may know.
I don't know whether he's compass mentis.
I don't know whether the guy thinks.
I'm told till four in the afternoon he can still function to some extent.
I don't know if it's true.
But Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, I regard as complete failures.
Sullivan's job is our security.
He's not made us any more secure.
He's made us profoundly insecure.
And we're getting closer and closer to nuclear war.
And the only way we avoid that realization is to...
Laugh away every statement, and President Putin said it again today, by the way, that we are absolutely mocking Russia's serious red lines.
Is that really for our security that we don't have a discussion about them even?
No.
And we're not.
And everything, yes, is escalating.
We see little fires being set all over the neighborhoods of these war zones.
And it's not only throughout the Middle East and the drumbeat for war with...
It's not only Biden authorizing the use of long-distance strikes into Russia, which, as President Putin has accurately said and has not been denied by the United States, are actually U.S. strikes on Russia.
Don't worry if Americans are getting a little upset about that.
But that's literally what Biden has approved.
And then we see hot spots around.
You have to be, you know, really into this to be following them, but in...
The country of Georgia in the South Caucasus region.
There's a little typical regime change maneuver that's been underway in recent weeks.
It will not succeed, but the aim was to destabilize that region.
The hand of the US is absolutely clear in that.
We see in Romania another bizarre episode where a Presidential election was in its second round, and the lead candidate was saying we should end the war with Ukraine.
And the Supreme Court of Romania annulled the election, claiming Russian interference.
And so that candidate that was calling for peace could not win election.
In South Korea, of course, we saw something that we don't understand that's also mind-boggling, which was an attempted coup by the president of Korea, President Yoon, who called out the military to surround and arrest the parliament.
And ultimately, the coup failed and the president was thrown out of office.
But why he made that coup is not absolutely clear.
And the U.S. reaction was bizarre.
The U.S. said, we're watching with concern.
That was all.
It didn't say anything about restore the constitutional order or we're against the coup or anything else.
And there was a glimmer A possible reason.
I don't want to overstate any certainty on this because this is, of course, also not analyzed properly or made public, so we don't have the information.
But the week before the military action, the coup attempt, There was a visit by the Ukrainian defense minister for armaments from South Korea, something that the United States has been pushing very hard for.
The United States has been trying to get South Korea to ship arms to Ukraine because the US inventories are depleted.
And South Korea, under its law, cannot do so because it cannot ship arms to belligerents that are engaged in war.
And the parliament opposed it.
The parliament president does not have a majority in the parliament, or the former president, and the opposition opposed the armaments.
So there's some possible relationship with this that when Yoon declared martial law, he said that the opposition was siding with the North Koreans.
That was his statement.
And some read that as a way to clear the way for South Korea to enter the Ukraine war with massive arms shipments.
I don't know whether that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case.
Maybe we'll find out.
It happens that the acting president was my first PhD student at Harvard.
I think that it was, first of all, a military choice because Russia is in the midst of a very tough war along a 1,200-kilometer front in Ukraine, and it did not want to divert any major military effort.
In that direction.
Second, the proximate reason why Assad fell was that the main military backing of Assad was Hezbollah forces and the Iranian guard.
And they had both been Especially Hezbollah had been very badly mauled by Israel in the last month and a half and had pulled its reinforcements from Syria to reinforce Lebanese positions.
And so Assad was left without the backing of Hezbollah forces, several thousand, which was the bulwark of his military.
I think a third...
The reason is that Russia doesn't think it's leaving Syria, that this isn't the end of the story.
And immediately, the supposed new force in Syria, the HTS, said that it wants Russia to stay and to keep its bases in Syria.
Russia has a naval base and a small one and an airfield, and Russia has re- And
So we've got a little over a month between now and the inauguration.
Clearly, as noted, the Biden administration is trying to make decisions that are irrevocable and deepen the war between the United States and Russia and then all these other things.
If you were the Trump people right now, before the inauguration, what would you be doing?
Well, I would first be clear, under the Constitution, Biden is president until January 20th.
I think it's right to say that Biden should not put America into further insecurity.
He's done enough damage.
And so I think it's right for every political figure to say to Biden, you're at the end of your term and the world is very dangerous.
You do not have a mandate to increase the danger.
You should never have authorized the use of ATACMS and other U.S. missiles in deep strikes into Russia.
Stop further provocations now.
So I hope that politicians of both parties, and I think President Trump can also make this clear, it's not to take over the government until January 20th, but Biden...
Absolutely, in my view, is without the legitimacy to further endanger us.
And they should prevent any actions from abroad that threaten American security, of course, but I don't see those happening.
I think the biggest risk right now is continued U.S. provocations of the kind that we've I've been discussing in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in the periphery of Russia, in the Far East.
Stop any further provocations.
The idea of somehow tying Trump's hands is completely illegitimate constitutionally and politically, and it's a disastrous approach.
We're not playing a game of two people or a game of two administrations.
We're trying to survive at a time of perhaps maximum global peril right now.
So just to say, most experts that look at this think we're closer to nuclear war than we have ever been.
And I refer often to the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is the graphic to demonstrate how close or how far we are from nuclear war.
And that doomsday clock puts the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been since the clock was first rolled out in 1947.
So I think it behooves those people who are making the decisions in the Biden administration to stop imperiling Americans at this point and to understand.
that their job right now is to keep things stable, to give power over to President Trump on January 20th, 2025. One of the promises of the new administration is massive declassification.
So one of the things that I'm interested in learning about is 9-11, because I think it's important to understand why that happened.
And I think my guess is that one of the reasons so many documents from 9-11 are still classified 23 years later, it's hard to imagine why, is because they tell a more detailed story about why al-Qaeda struck the United States.
We hear stupidity from the New York Times, complete imbecility, childishness, that they don't want to ask any single question.
What about the Maidan?
What was the U.S. government doing there?
Well, it's easy enough to find out.
What were the decisions taken in overthrowing various regimes?
What about A number of assassinations that we have every forensic reason to know were conspiracies that the U.S. never allowed to be understood.
Whether any of this is ever found, I don't know.
But if it is, it would change the course of America back to a true republic.
Because what happened in this country is that we were overtaken by the security state.
And we became a system of confidentiality and unaccountability.
And it's a big, massive machine.
And a lot of people are paid to keep quiet or to salute whatever the military-industrial complex or the intelligence agencies are doing without asking questions.
One and a half trillion dollars a year spent on that.
You're a pretty big business.
And it has affected the universities, the think tanks, of course, the Congress, which asks no questions of any serious kind.
And so major, major events of fundamental significance for our insecurity take place without any truth-telling at all.
So all of this is to say, It may be the most important thing that President Trump could do would be to open up the historical record so that we understand what has really happened because we are 90 seconds to midnight.
We are closer to nuclear war than ever.
We have a military machine.
In the service of the Israel lobby, or in the service of the military contractors, or in the service of the deep state on its own, or for whatever other crazy idea.
And we just don't have democratic deliberation or accountability about this.
But we could.
If we did, we would change the direction of this country.
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Well, the system is designed with accountability at the heart of it.
And we have oversight committees in the House and the Senate that are supposed to be making certain that the intelligence community, the IC, is operating in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.
They obviously don't do their job, but what they do is very interesting.
Our system of government is actually rather ingenious.
It's ingenious because you can buy a piece of government at very low cost.
If the military industrial contractors just buy off a couple of committees, Yes.
If the health insurers just buy off the health committees in the House and the Senate, that's enough.
If the Israel lobby just gets its hold on a couple of committees, they run American foreign policy in the Middle East.
So what I have found to be ingenious about our completely corrupted political system is how inexpensive it is to buy your corner of the story.
You don't control everything.
No one controls everything.
But if you want to control health care, it's a couple of committees.
If you want to control the military, industrial machinery, that's just a couple of committees.
And so there is no oversight and there won't be oversight until there is public oversight.
Nobody oversees themselves and the idea that a few congressmen, and I know some of them, that they're really constraining anything that the CIA or the intelligence community does...
There are almost no independent members of our Congress.
Almost everyone is on the take.
Rand Paul is my one exception.
I think he's the most principled member of our Congress in both houses.
He really believes in honesty and small government and wants to know the truth.
And I'll give an example of the complete...
Lack of oversight and something we may know and something we talked about.
Okay, where did that pandemic come from?
The evidence is now overwhelming, though still not definitive, that it was made in a U.S. lab.
This is overwhelming.
Even the report of the House committee.
That issued a report a couple of weeks ago says yes, there was obviously a lot of cover-up and a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of engagement of U.S. scientists in this.
And we know that the U.S. government lied up the wazoo on all of the...
Question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that made the pandemic and has lied until today.
We know that the intelligence agencies know a lot that they haven't said.
So this is another area.
Could we actually have some...
Some honesty.
Could we actually have some transparency?
Could we actually look at something where a pandemic took perhaps 20 million lives worldwide?
Where'd that come from?
Especially since the evidence is now overwhelming that it was a laboratory creation with US scientists and US funding playing a huge role in this.
And yes, he is a hero because he told us what the government was actually doing towards us.
And of course, the security state, which really runs America, therefore, immediately branded him as the worst villain.
But we found out more from Snowden about the risk to our freedom than from just about anybody else.
And Julian Assange, you know, almost every day I invoke a memorandum that he enabled me to see and you to see and all of us to see that explains how The Ukraine war, better than anything else, and Julian Assange deserves all of the credit for this.
William Burns' Memo Reveals Ukraine Insights00:06:28
And it's also an interesting story, if I may just say in one minute.
Our current CIA director, William Burns, in 2008 was the US ambassador to Russia.
And when he was US Ambassador to Russia, he understood completely, perfectly, that the US push to expand NATO to Ukraine was disastrous.
Pure provocation, crossing Russia's red lines, likely to create a civil war inside Ukraine, and a possible war between the United States and Russia.
And he wrote a memo back to Condoleezza Rice, our Secretary of State, and the memo said that the entire Russian political class opposes NATO enlargement and for real reasons.
And that memo famously became known as, Nyet means nyet.
No means no.
Don't play games with this.
This is real.
This is a red line.
Okay, something like this should be understood by the American people.
We've just spent around $200 billion.
We've just caused deaths of perhaps 600,000 or 700,000 Ukrainians.
On completely false pretenses.
On false pretenses that, as the New York Times has wrongly stated unendingly, that the war in Ukraine was, quote, unprovoked.
Not only was it provoked, the U.S. provoked it.
And not only that, our senior diplomats knew that.
Knew that at the time and wrote about it.
Now, this memo makes this perfectly clear.
Anyone can go online and type William Burns, nyet means nyet, cable, and you will come up with this cable, and then you can read why in 2008 we knew that the deep state push for NATO enlargement was mind-bendingly stupid, dangerous, provocative, and likely to get us into disaster, which it did.
How do we even see that memo?
Do you think that a congressional committee called Condoleezza Rice and said, could we have the documentary evidence to understand the choices you're making?
Of course not!
There's no oversight!
When it comes to security issues, we are already in a security state that has no resemblance to democracy whatsoever.
But Julian Assange enabled us to see it.
So we have to express gratitude for that.
This is the truth.
If you don't want leaks, don't have a world run where every consequential fact is hidden from the American people.
And it enables one disaster after another.
And just to make clear how disastrous this is, Bill Clinton, who was, in my view, a completely ineffectual president in a long list of ineffectual presidents, came to office in 1993 when the doomsday clock was at 17 came to office in 1993 when the doomsday clock was at 17 minutes meaning that it was the farthest away from nuclear war in the whole history of the nuclear age.
Every single president, starting with Clinton, brought the doomsday clock closer to Armageddon.
So we went from 17 minutes to midnight to 90 seconds to midnight with no accountability or explanation at all.
Do you think it's fair to say that anyone who opposes pardons for Ed Snowden and Julian Assange should be looked at with suspicion or is actually an enemy of the country?
You could know back in 2014, don't overthrow the Ukrainian government.
You could know in 2015, honor the Minsk agreement that would end the war.
You could know in 2021, negotiate with Russia because actually Ukraine, I won't even say Ukraine, the United States cannot win a war in Ukraine against Russia.
We knew that.
But these are not clever people.
Jake Sullivan's not a clever person.
They don't understand.
They're like terrible poker players that somehow are sitting at the Grand Slam of poker.
They don't know what they're doing.
And they're bluffing and they're betting and they're doubling down with our money, by the way.
And so...
Yes, you could know this primacy thing.
Come on.
What does it even mean in a world of multiple nuclear superpowers?
She is incredibly intelligent, incredibly honest, incredibly committed to U.S. security, and would do a superb job.
So, that's why she's being opposed.
Because...
The forces that are worse than mediocre, that are right now on top of a $1.5 trillion a year machine, that have been running disastrous wars, that have been bringing us closer and closer to doom, don't want any accountability.
And what Tulsi Gabbard would...
Represent is competence, honesty, forthrightness, and not having been a party to all these failures.
But the most important question facing us is, is a country that potentially is more secure than any country in the history of the world going to do itself in by a self-provoked World War III? And we're on that course.
And five presidents have been on that course through their Incompetence and their obedience to an unaccountable deep state and President Trump is coming in saying that he's going to change direction.
He says every day that he wants to be president of peace.
By the way, I think the greatest thing that could happen is four Nobel Peace Prizes for President Trump.
He could end the war in Ukraine.
He could end the war in the Middle East, not by bombing Iran, that would do the opposite, but by enabling a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the wars would all end.
He could end the talk of the war in East Asia, which would be the utter disaster and folly by recognizing that we shouldn't be meddling in China's internal affairs.
And Taiwan is an internal affair of China.
And he should be restoring a framework of nuclear arms control.
I give him four Nobel Peace Prizes for that.
If he chooses that direction, he'll be the most consequential president in our modern history, perhaps in our history, because he will reestablish security for the American people.
If he follows the hardliners, he's just going to add yet another years of bringing us closer to doom.
The Ukraine war is settled literally in one call, just as he says, because all he has to do...
Really, all he has to do is pick up the phone and call President Putin and say, you know, that 30 year effort to expand NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia was ridiculous, unacceptable, unnecessary provocation.
And it's led us to this juncture.
I'm against it.
I'm going to say it publicly.
We're going to end this adventurism.
And you stop fighting today.
And the fighting will stop that moment, actually.
Then there will be details.
And the details are where the borders will be drawn exactly.
But the war will end.
The war will not end, by the way, by saying, let's have a ceasefire.
That's a meaningless statement, as you heard repeatedly from Foreign Minister Lavrov.
And as I know, and as anyone thinking about this knows, this isn't about a ceasefire.
This is about a cause of this war.
And the cause of this war is that Russia does not want the U.S. and its missile systems on its 1,200-kilometer border with Ukraine right now.
And Biden was so stupid, and I'm using the term, of course it sounds, I don't know how it sounds, but it's true, that he couldn't say that and avoid the war.
That was obvious how to avoid this war.
Obvious how to avoid this war.
But Biden couldn't do it.
He was...
That's why I say he's been such a terrible president.
And I think that President Trump wants to do it this way.
Now, again, he's got people around him of many different views.
Some say, promise him, just ask for a ceasefire.
Freeze the conflict.
Armistice.
Korean solution, 1953. This is completely beside the point.
Russia isn't going to freeze the conflict.
It's actually winning on the ground.
But why is it fighting?
It's fighting because it does not want this regime, which was installed by the United States in 2014, to have U.S. Bases, NATO, U.S. weapons and missile systems on its border.
And the fact that Biden just proved the point by saying, yeah, we'll fire the missiles into Russia, make it all the more clear why they're concerned about this.
This isn't an idle threat.
This isn't some dumb thing.
They're being hit right now by U.S. missile systems, by U.S. personnel firing these missile systems.
So it's not an idle threat.
So people who say freeze the conflict, they don't get it.
People who say, and there was an initial statement, NATO will not enlarge for at least X years.
Somebody said 10 years.
Somebody said 20 years.
This is also completely ridiculous.
Then another idea was...
Well, we'll give Russia this territory, Donetsk and Lugansk and maybe Kherson and Zaporizhia and Crimea, but all the rest of Ukraine will be part of NATO. Of course not.
It's the same deal.
This is ridiculous.
So if you understand what this is about, where it came from, why it continues to this moment, there is one phone call that ends it, which is get to the underlying cause of the war.
The underlying cause of the war, going back to a decision that Bill Clinton made in 1994, Is the decision to expand NATO to Ukraine?
And by the way, they want to expand it to the South Caucasus, to Georgia, which is also in turmoil right now.
It's very interesting, Tucker, that Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled this out to the letter in 1997. And it's fascinating to read his account.
All wrong.
He got it completely wrong, but he spelled it out.
And what he said was, in his book, The Grand Chessboard in 1997, We should expand NATO eastward.
We should expand Europe eastward.
And we should ask the question, what will Russia do?
Russia won't like it.
So Brzezinski spends a whole chapter, what will Russia do?
And he asks the question, well, could Russia ever align with China?
Nope, that's not going to happen.
Could Russia ever align with Iran?
Nope, that's not going to happen.
Russia's only choice is to accede to the U.S. action.
So in 1997, it was perfectly clearly understood.
What is the strategy?
What are we going to do?
And what will happen?
The only problem is it was wrong.
This is the only problem.
He got it completely wrong.
And you can go back to his credit.
He wrote his prediction.
It's wrong.
But why are we still playing that game until today?
Why did Biden exactly continue on that failed course?
So what would happen if they succeeded in killing Putin?
I mean, what...
I don't understand why that would be in America's interest, to have 6,000 nuclear warheads, unsecured, floating around in a country that's 20% Muslim and very complicated.
That seems like the last thing that you would ever want to do.
Well, this is the modus operandi of the CIA, and it's the modus operandi of Mossad, and it's the modus operandi of this deep state, which is, you're not aiming for peace.
You're aiming for primacy.
You're aiming for dominance.
You're aiming to remake the region in your image.
You're resisting any call for compromise.
Yitzhak Rabin, when he wanted to make peace, he was assassinated, killed the peacemakers.
But what we know is that this is state action.
We know this in the United States.
Kill the peacemakers.
We know it of Mossad.
Rise and kill.
And they've done it repeatedly in front of our eyes.
So it's not the harshest enemy you try to kill.
It's the one that...
It threatens you not with war, but with diplomacy.
I've talked to many diplomats in most recent months.
By the way, there's an astoundingly, oh my God, an astoundingly insightful, Episode that was reposted of PBS NewsHour with Robert McNeil interviewing Henry Kissinger and Jack Matlock in 1994. So this is the 30th anniversary of this show.
And the show was on NATO enlargement.
And Matlock, who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union and a wonderful diplomat and a very, very smart, fine man, was saying in 1994, don't provoke.
We have peace now.
Don't expand NATO. We've said we won't.
We shouldn't.
And if Russia ever becomes belligerent again, of course, we would reconsider and take action.
But right now, there's no belligerency.
There's no reason to provoke.
Kissinger is incoherent, actually, which is unusual.
But Robert McNeil kind of can't even fathom what Kissinger is saying until Kissinger finally stumbles out with the statement, and I won't get it exactly right, but he says something to the effect, if you can't provoke Russia when they're weak, how are if you can't provoke Russia when they're weak, how are we going to provoke them when they're strong?
And it's just such a weird idea that there's no moment when you could actually try to make peace because if they're weak, definitely don't make peace because if you try not to provoke them then, well, then you won't be credible when they're strong.
And so the idea is you always must be aggressive.
So Kissinger was saying in 1994, of course we need to expand NATO. And yes, Russia won't like it, but they're weak now, so they can't resist.
Later on, by the way, he came to understand that expanding NATO to Ukraine was just too far.
He actually did reach that understanding in 2015.
But watching him in 2004 is very interesting because 2004 was the year that the decision was made.
And this is also something very important to understand about our foreign policy.
It's not that a president comes in and then we have a new foreign policy and then another president, we have a new foreign policy.
These things are very deeply set courses.
These wars in the Middle East go back 30 years.
This war against Russia actually goes back to 1945 at the end of World War II, but in the current version goes back to 1991 and by plan to 1994.
when Clinton laid out the NATO enlargement.
And then Brzezinski spelled it out for the public in 1997, but it was decisions already taken.
So we can watch Kissinger...
In 1994 explaining, yeah, Russia's weak.
Take advantage of them.
This is the time to take advantage of them.
This is what gets us into such unbelievable insecurity.
We could be the safest people in the world in history.
Now, in his first term, he hired a lot of very irresponsible people.
That like war or that like duplicity or that like the deep state or that like accountability, unaccountability, like John Bolton, one of my least favorites among all of these.
So the question now is probably not his deep sense whatsoever.
Which I think is absolutely right.
But now his tactical sense inside the U.S. government, please don't let the deep state continue on a path that it's been on.
And don't let the normal hardliners, because Washington is filled with people who have been on the payroll of the military-industrial complex their whole careers.
Don't let them dominate policy.
And the incoming administration is such a mix right now.
And we see that the clarity of those who want to control this, how hard they're being, you know, how harshly they're being opposed, like Tulsi Gabbard.
Or, let me say, Bobby Kennedy, though his department is health, but...
He understands this peace side as well very clearly.
These are the ones that they're fighting because we have been for years.
I'd say, again, 30 years at least and arguably basically 80 years since the end of World War II on a particular jag, which at least Mitch McConnell does us the service of naming by its name, which is primacy.
And if we continue on that course...
Trump will fail and the United States will be gravely endangered.
And if he reverses that course, he stands to be a great and historic president.
I think there's no doubt that they've used assassinations at home.
I'm of the view that JFK was the first clear case of that at home.
This is a long, long story.
Some people roll their eyes at it, but I've spent a...
I've spent much of my life reading, studying, examining this.
I think it's quite arguable for Bobby Kennedy the same way, and I don't think that there have been scruples inside about keeping prerogatives.
At the same time, the situation is better now in one regard.
30 years of failure.
So it's not as if the course that we're on is giving us these great benefits.
The United States needs to change course for our own security.
We need to change course for our own finances.
We're not in good shape in this country.
Yes.
75% or so of Americans repeatedly say America's on the wrong track.
They're correct at that.
And they say that now.
That's the latest Gallup statement.
And they're completely right.
So this is not the exuberance and I would say the hubris of 1991. And I was there then as an economic specialist and an advisor, unpaid and informal, but an advisor to President Gorbachev and an advisor to President Yeltsin and an advisor to Ukraine's President Kuchma.
On how to stabilize their desperately destabilized economies and how to move to market systems and the United States was not interested in peace.
We had this hubris that history had ended, we had won and now America would run the show.
The difference today is that We're 33 years after the end of the Soviet Union.
We tried the neocon approach for 30 years now.
We have engaged in all of Netanyahu's wars.
We went to war in Ukraine.
Everything that was predicted has been proved wrong.
The neocons failed time and again.
They didn't remake Afghanistan.
They didn't remake Iraq.
They did not remake the Middle East.
They did not call Putin's bluff and enter Ukraine with NATO.
They did not enter Georgia with NATO.
They completely misjudged how we would push the rest of the world into unity, as I mentioned with Spig Brzezinski saying Russia will never side with China on this.
Well, of course, he got wrong the most fundamental diplomatic change of our age.
The rise of China and the creation of a group that does not want U.S. hegemony and a group that is increasingly integrated in production and military and security and diplomacy.
So...
We are at a time where the failures are self-evident if people open their eyes, and the American people know it, in fact.
So it's not even convincing the American people, oh, it's worse than you think.
No, they know.
They want their own problems solved.
How about jobs, some housing, reduce crime in my neighborhood, keep the inflation down?
Could you keep the debt from destroying American public finances?
They're not interested in Mitch McConnell's primacy continuing.
He's an octogenarian.
Go.
Done.
You're done.
It's time for something different.
So in this sense, it's really possible for this administration, this incoming administration, to change course because it doesn't require a massive public education.
It requires honesty.
It requires seeing down the deep state internally.
It requires making sure that the key appointments that want competence, honesty, and security for America actually get the job.
And of course, it requires President Trump following through on his profound main insight, which is that there is no reason for war with Russia.
There's no reason for war with China.
And I want him really to know, really to know, there's no reason for war with Iran.
I am able to ask Questions, to check facts, to understand circumstances.
I speak to lots of people engaged all over the Middle East on these questions, and it's simply not true.
So the first thing one should do, period, in this world is talk to the other side.
And if If Donald Trump has that, this would be the farthest reach, but if he has that impulse with Iran too, he will be perhaps amazed, perhaps gratified, but he would do a huge service for the American people.
No, I think that they're following a plan, clean break, 1996, and a plan, 1991, seven wars in five years, that has been deep-set and that has been Netanyahu's baby all the time.
Netanyahu, I regard as one of the most delusional and dangerous people on the planet.
And he has engaged the United States so far in six disastrous wars, and he's aiming to engage us in yet one more.
But Netanyahu's track record is just about the worst of any person on the planet right now in terms of damage done, and we should be able to understand that.
And we have a lot of rhetoric in this country standing up for Israel.
We're not standing up for Israel.
We are engaging in war on Israel's behalf all over the Middle East.
That's a completely different thing.
I believe in Israel's security alongside a state of Palestine, which I know completely to be possible and achievable and peaceful.
And ending this risk of World War III and could have prevented the million or so deaths that have come from Netanyahu's wars up until now.
And the Arab states have been saying this repeatedly since 2002.
It's called the Arab Peace Initiative.
Anybody can look it up.
They repeat it basically nonstop in the last two years.
The Iranians want peace.
I know that as well.
And so the whole game is to make claims about the other side and to say if you talk to the other side, oh, you're a traitor.
Whenever we do an interview with you, it gets millions of views, and people love it, and we make revenue off it, and it's like it's good business to have you on.
I happen to agree with you and think you're wise, but it's not like people don't want to hear what you're saying.
The phrasing, the official lines, kind of the stupidities and sillinesses on almost any story of the kind that we're talking about get repeated across the mainstream space very, very quickly.
And not only on the U.S. side, but generally in the British media as well.
There's an official narrative, of course.
So this is part of the story that senior White House briefing Jake or somebody else briefs, and that becomes the meme.
That becomes what you have to defend.
You have to defend your continued access.
You have to be a good, loyal citizen of this.
By the way, there are lots of contracts that go out with the military-industrial complex.
This is a trillion and a half dollar a year contract.
Business, not a small business, by the way.
It's real business.
It's lots of think tanks.
It's lots of academic centers.
It's lots of people on hire.
It's lots of contracts.
It's lots of, that all, you don't get any, I mean, I don't want any of that, but you don't get any of that if you're Standing outside that, none of it.
So, people make decisions.
I think one of the best lines of modern history is the line of Sinclair Lewis that you can't convince a person to believe something when their salary depends on believing the opposite.
And that's a real thing.
People have jobs.
They just don't want to get out of line.
They don't necessarily believe, but they don't want to get out of line.
And it's very worrisome.
And we thought that checks and balances of the U.S. government would be a stabilizer.
And especially that we would have voices in Congress that would be able to ask real questions.
And we have in the past.
We had Frank Church.
We had J. William Fulbright, who was not only brilliant and a critic of American foreign policy, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Who do we have now?
Well, we have Rand Paul.
And we had Tulsi in Congress.
But basically almost nobody now.
They're scared, or they don't want to talk, or they're paid for by, who knows, RSX or Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics or Boeing or somebody.
great to be with you thank you so it turns out that youtube is suppressing our show I know.
Shocking.
That in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
I'm not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it.
A way that you could actually get information that's true.
It's not intentionally deceptive.
And the way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
Subscribe!
And you'll have a much higher chance of hearing what we say.