Dan Caldwell warns U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites could backfire, triggering Iranian retaliation—like 2020’s Soleimani missile strikes—risking U.S. bases in Iraq and strained logistics after decades of overstretched deployments. With Patriot missiles scarce and China benefiting from Middle East distractions, Caldwell argues airstrikes alone won’t dismantle Iran’s program without occupation, risking civil war and regional chaos. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson and Caldwell critique Western hypocrisy—Britain’s imperial overreach in Ukraine mirrors past failures like the Falklands, while U.S. support for Zelensky’s authoritarian rule ignores its unsustainable costs. The episode exposes how geopolitical posturing masks domestic decline, leaving America trapped in unwinnable conflicts while adversaries exploit divisions. [Automatically generated summary]
As we sit here right now, and I hope you'll correct me if you think this impression is wrong, but I think the general view among people who are watching what's happening in Iran is that there will be some kind of U.S. strike.
I'm getting this from where I'm reading in the popular press.
There will be some kind of strike on Iran by the U.S. military against an enrichment site, the famous subterranean enrichment site.
With some kind of conventional, large conventional bunker buster weapon.
I have spoken to a few that are still in the service.
And the ones that I talk to are...
So they've been around for 15, 20, some cases 25 years at the tail end of their careers.
And honestly, a lot of those guys are tired.
And these were guys 20 years ago that the one thing they wanted was to get in the fight.
They wanted to go to Iraq.
They wanted to go to Afghanistan.
Some of them are on their 7th, 8th deployments either to the region or to Europe or somewhere else.
And they're worn out.
And they also see that the military has really continued to be overstretched despite the fact that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have wound down.
And remember, we still have thousands of troops in Iraq and Syria.
Thankfully, the Trump administration prior to this appears to have started a retrograde, a withdrawal from Syria.
Hopefully, we go to zero there.
So we still have a lot of troops there.
And a lot of them just feel like, We need to reform our army.
Secretary Dan Driscoll is starting this major army reform effort that I think is important.
And another war will distract away from that.
We'll take resources away from that.
There's a huge problem right now with standard of living within the United States military.
A lot of barracks are falling apart.
You had the Navy Secretary John Phelan, and credit to him, he went out to Guam and saw the decrepit state of the barracks for, I believe, the Marines out there, and he ordered them shut down.
And they were so bad.
Another war that not only puts more lives in danger and requires more deployments to that region after 20 years of continuous deployment, sometimes the last minute.
Again, it takes resources away from things we need to do.
And I think a lot of folks are really worried about that as well.
I mean, when I was in the Marine Corps, even though we are an amphibious branch, I never served on a ship before I flew over to Iraq.
I didn't go over on a boat float.
But, I mean, from what has been described to me, you're in a metal container.
I used to talk a lot of trash about the Navy, but understanding what it's like to live on a ship six months at a time, and especially when you get extended over and over again, I'd rather do multiple deployments to Iraq.
I'd just like to say that.
But it's very isolating.
It's very scary because you sometimes feel like you don't have control and that events are out of your hands in a way that's maybe not the same for somebody who's serving in the infantry or you're an individual pilot.
There's nowhere to run, literally.
Yes.
Yeah, it's terrifying.
And as been publicly reported, we had some very, very close calls in the recent fight against the Houthis.
There was some anti-ship missiles.
We have a very effective ballistic missile defense and anti-missile defense on these ships.
One of the reasons why one of those F-18s fell off the Harry S.S. Truman was because it had to do some aggressive maneuvers to potentially avoid a Houthi anti-ship missile.
Thankfully, it didn't hit.
But imagine being one of the 6,000 sailors and Marines on that ship and in that moment.
I was thinking that this morning, what would it be like to be one of those guys just waiting for something to happen and knowing it could be, I totally agree.
So you were saying, and I just wanted to add my voice in vehement agreement, I really hope to be wrong in every one of my predictions.
I hope to laugh at myself and apologize to everyone for being hysterical.
I really hope that I can do that.
And I know you feel this way.
So with that caveat, what do you think is likely to happen if a strike of the nature that I described happens?
And one thing to note about that basis is that And the Iraqi army is part of the same government that has another security force called the Popular Mobilization Force, which is a group of militias that are loyal to Iran.
They were funded, initially supported, and trained by Quds Force, led by Soleimani at the time.
And so we are at that base.
Training allies of the people that are likely going to be trying to kill us in this war.
So that's important to remember.
And that, I think, can lead you to understand how they're going to be.
Absolutely.
That's our main mission in Iraq right now is to support the Iraqi security forces, which includes the Popular Mobilization Forces, which consists of Iran.
So without divulging anything, I mean, I know that you won't during the course of this conversation say anything that is privileged or, you know, legally confidential secret.
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Man, can I just say something really cynical?
It'd be pretty easy to draw us in to a ground war against or a full-scale regime change effort against Iran by attacking those troops, no matter who you are.
You know, prior to being a DOD, in a lot of ways, those troops in Iraq and Syria were a tripwire to a larger war.
And especially after the defeat of the ISIS caliphate, and you can argue whether or not they should have been put back into Iraq and Syria to begin with, but especially after the ISIS caliphate, they should not have been there.
And one of the – there were many crimes in the first Trump administration, but –
And let's not forget, you had the president's special representative, I believe, for Syria, this guy Jim Jeffrey, who, after he left the administration, ran around Washington, D.C. Bragging about lying to the president about the number of troops in Syria so that he would be less likely to withdraw them.
And as a result, I think there's a direct line between that.
And last year, when you had three army reservists killed at Tower 22 in Jordan by a drone, Tower 22 in Jordan is directly in support of, it exists to support a base in Syria.
And had Jim Jeffrey and others not undermine President Trump, those three reservists would likely still be alive today.
But it is a U.S. military installation of some kind in Jordan whose purpose is to support the U.S. military installation that is in Syria but shouldn't be.
And again, none of this has all been reported public info.
That was originally established to train anti-Assad fighters to basically effectively retrain them to fight ISIS.
And so then that mission morphed into a counter-Iran mission where they wanted to keep American troops there and the proxies there so Iran wouldn't have a line of communication or basically an ability to move forces from Iran through Iraq to Syria.
So that was justification.
But then things changed in northern Syria.
The Syrian army started collaborating more with the Kurds.
So they got a line of communication.
And so then it ran out another mission, and then it became airspace control.
And by the time it was, you got to January 2020, I believe it was January, February 2024, when this incident happened, the Biden administration, it was reported, you know, when people asked about the Syria policy, Biden admin officials would just laugh because we had none.
So they were sitting there for no reason other than Well, and the irony is, of course, that elements of ISIS now run Syria, and we're cool with that for some reason.
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, Jelani was created in an American prison.
I guess the one thing they have in common is you both begin with A. The one thing they don't have in common is only one of them is responsible for 9-11.
We know Joe Kent, his wife, absolute heroic woman.
Other soldiers, Marines, were wounded.
We came close at several points to getting into combat with the actual Russian military.
We had a major battle with Russian mercenaries, the Wagner Group.
A lot of people focus on the risk of escalation in Ukraine and an incident where American and Russian forces that are operating the area could come into conflict and where that could go.
That almost happened in Syria on a weekly basis for several years because you had Russian and American aircraft operating the same place.
You had American troops and Russian troops operating the same area.
One misunderstanding.
Could have kicked off a cycle where we're in a major conflict with Russia.
And the focus has been on Ukraine, but the place for the longest time where Russian and American forces were brushing up against each other was in Syria.
So especially after the destruction of ISIS caliphate, that mission should have ended.
And it is, again, an absolute crime that it was undermined not once but twice in President Trump's first term.
I would say both Iraq and Syria and probably more Syria is that kind of gets to ultimately why I think some people wanted to keep our troops there is that if there was a mass casualty incident where an Iranian aligned militia.
That would have been justification to escalate either against Iran or to get more involved fighting other groups like, you know, al-Qaeda, ISIS.
And so just their mere presence was, again, they weren't effectively deterring Iran or other actors because they're just too small.
But their presence in himself was a risk that we could be sucked into a major war.
It's easier just to say, let's keep doing the status quo as opposed to actually changing something because there's less risk in a lot of people's minds.
Now, again, I just lead out the risk of keeping troops there.
But in some people's minds, there's less risk to their career by preserving the status quo.
As opposed to changing something that's not working.
Well, that's where there's really it all depends on The impact of the counter-strike on U.S. troops and on American facilities and how the United States responds.
If we continue...
At that point, you're on the escalation ladder.
So if our troops are attacked and we attack...
We counterattack with a larger strike and a larger force, and if we use certain bases in the region...
So there's not, it's not a guarantee that they would allow us to use these bases in their country to attack Iran.
But if the Iranians, And that could quickly lead to more casualties.
They can also attack ships in the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf.
And they could also, if we continue to get pushed up the escalation ladder, attack U.S. diplomatic facilities.
Now, those are all worst-case scenarios, but they're risks that should be considered and can't be ignored.
So it gets back to this whole idea that I just, and again, I hope I'm wrong.
I fundamentally don't buy that you can just do one or two strikes and that's it.
And the Iranians, you know, aren't going to respond.
It's going to have to be, Obviously, without divulging the details of any kind of classified planning document, we know that the Pentagon has been thinking about how Iran would respond to a strike against its enrichment facilities for like a long time.
A long, long time.
This has been, I mean, people have, and I know that you're one of them.
Does anybody think that they just wouldn't respond?
I'm sure there are people right now who are trying to say they won't respond.
It's like they're weak, they're on their back foot, they want to just save the regime, so therefore they're just going to back off, that they're not actually going to respond.
And if you look at the hours immediately after the initial Israeli set of airstrikes, there are some people saying, Watch, like, Iran's not going to really respond, or it's going to be weak.
And, you know, over the next few days, they launched between 400 and 500 ballistic missiles.
Again, thankfully, they weren't as effective as originally advertised.
But still, they've, as we sit here today, I believe, killed around 25 Israelis, wounded nearly 600.
My understanding, and again, I'm not an expert on this, is that the way Israelis work is that they allow the information to come out at just a later point.
But look, I mean, in some ways I don't blame them because somebody filming something from a balcony and how a missile hits, that is intelligence for their people.
I actually think there's an amendment, and I could be wrong about this, put in one of the National Defense Authorization Acts or an attempt to force the disclosure of the two true casualty numbers, and I think it was defeated, or it was added in and just it's being ignored by DOD.
The point of walking all through that is Iran is really adjusting and changing their tactics as the war grinds on.
And that's in part because Israelis have been successful in destroying some of their mobile missile launchers and their missile stocks.
So the barrages aren't as intense, but you're seeing them introduce new systems.
And here's the most important thing.
That, you know, absent an American intervention, which, as we've discussed, could be imminent, right now the war is essentially a race between Iran and Israel.
For the Israelis, they are trying to destroy as many Iranian ballistic missile launchers and ballistic missiles David's sling systems and then our THAAD systems and our SM-3, SM-6s that were launching off the ships.
Likewise, Iranians are trying to preserve as many of their missile systems and survive as many Israeli airstrikes as possible while Israelis wear down their store of precision munitions and missile interceptors.
So, East Side is trying to get to a point where...
And there's smart people that say right now in that race, Israel has a slight advantage.
Other smart people say Iran has a slight advantage because of the number of missiles they've stockpiled.
And that really right now is the game.
So there's a time pressure here on both sides.
And absent, you know, American military intervention, which will change the whole dynamic, is that's really what it's going to come down to.
What side can outlast the other with certain types of weapons and weapons systems?
Well, again, a lot of it goes back to the conversation we were just having.
If Iran doesn't respond to just one or two strikes, they decide to take that blow, and most of the evidence shows they probably wouldn't, then that would probably contain the size of the American offensive operation.
But if we were to go in, I think it is likely that we wouldn't just hit a nuclear site.
For the sake of our own troops, so it would not just be a one-off strike or we'd coordinate with Israelis.
And again, if there is an attack on American bases in response to this, that would pull the United States more into the war and push us into a spiral where we're constantly escalating against the other side.
And then that brings us to a point where even though it's pretty clear the Trump administration Even if they do decide to do the strike, doesn't want a regime-change war, is ultimately get pulled into a regime-change war, whether or not we want it.
So none of this was even on the table, you know, 10 days ago, until the Prime Minister of Israel called the President of the United States and said, I'm going and I'm doing it, I don't care what you say.
It's all been reported in the New York Times, given three days' notice.
It's just a little bit crazy that all of a sudden we're talking about, like, how are we going to deal with this war against Iran, which wasn't even a thing, two weeks ago.
So, I just want to say that.
How, if this were a war that the United States chose, this was, it wasn't, this was a war that was chosen for us.
We were going along with it.
But if we had chosen this, if we decided, like, depending on HQ, we're going to take out those enrichment facilities, how, like, you wouldn't do it three days later, right?
And so I don't know what was in the region or not, but to successfully accomplish something like this, there needs to be a lot of things that happen leading up into that.
I think that is fair to say, and the United States military can move quickly.
When it needs to, I'll say it can move quickly when you don't have a large number of ground troops, when you're primarily relying on air and naval assets.
So you can move stuff in quickly, but leading up into that, there normally would be a lot of planning.
But again, I'm sorry if I'm going back and forth here, this has been a scenario that has been planned for for a long time.
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In thinking about this, non-classified, of course, So, this is where it gets interesting.
One, A lot of the things that Iran would need from Russia are actually things that Russians really need in Ukraine.
So, air defense assets, fighter jets, and things like that is Russia's military and industrial base is much more developed than the United States and NATO.
Interesting fact, and the NATO Secretary General says all the time, is Russia produces more weapons and munitions in three months than all of NATO.
Combine, produces in a year.
But the Russian way of war in Ukraine relies on overwhelming firepower, so it's very difficult for them to divert weapons to other partners.
I'm not saying that couldn't happen.
Maybe there's some intelligence sharing, but I don't think that my gut would be is they would not support Iran in a very big way.
I think China is different.
I don't think that they would overtly support the Iranians, but I think if there's one party that, over the medium term at least, and they may face some short-term challenges because of disruption and energy surprise, but over the medium term that would benefit from another major war in the Middle East where the United States is heavily involved in, it is China.
Because the weapons that we would be using to fight Iran are What we would need in a Pacific contingency, and God forbid we fight a war with China.
It's not even fighting war either.
It's weapons that we want to supply to some of our partners, whether it's Japan or the Philippines or South Korea or Taiwan.
Those are all systems that would be heavily used, whether it's air defense, standoff munitions.
Other types of air-to-surface munitions, surface-to-surface munitions, those are the things that are going to lead the Iran fight because of just the size of Iran.
Iran is a huge country both in terms of population but geography.
It's not as small in terms of geography as Iraq, and it's as much longer distances to, say, get from the Persian Gulf up to Tehran.
So you have to rely on certain types of weapons and certain types of aircraft.
Again, all of which would be at the tip of a spear in a fight against China.
So it is in their interest to see us expend more and more munitions and wear down more and more weapon systems in the Persian Gulf.
So...
I think that they would be more willing to do things economically to help Iran and maybe provide some non-lethal systems like they have for Russia that could be beneficial for Iran in this fight.
So, for example, China, there's debate over this, but there's not really clear evidence that China has provided lethal weapons systems like Iran and North Korea have to Russia.
However, they have provided non-lethal weapons systems like counter-drone technology to Russia.
They have provided, they've helped them get around some of the Western sanctions.
They've helped provide them certain types of electronics that are maybe harder to get from the West.
Do you think there's any chance that China become, if this does become a direct conflict between the United States and Iran, that China enters it in a way that we can't ignore, that's just so provocative that we're at war with them too?
Yeah, I think there have been people that have thought about that, and I think there's a lot of people.
Honestly, I think one of the biggest issues the Pentagon is dealing with right now is since that has been identified as the main theater, the main threat, the pacing, to use a military term, the pacing threat or pacing challenge, whatever term you want to use, that everything.
What happens in the South China Sea is fundamentally more important than what happens in the Middle East.
Middle East, I think, is 5% of the world's population, 5% of the GDP.
East Asia is something like 60%.
40% or 60% of the world's GDP.
So just from a trade and the conditions of our economic prosperity standpoint, it is much more important to us.
And China is an actual real existential threat to the United States, where Iran is a threat in so as much that we have 40,000 troops spread across the Middle East, many of them who are in exposed positions, as we've talked about, that are vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
They have been a major sponsor of terrorism, indisputably.
But I believe their economy is the size of Pennsylvania.
Saudi Arabia alone spends four times what they do on defense.
They're bordered by Pakistan that has a nuclear weapon, and they have a pretty decent relationship right now.
But over the years, there's been tension because Pakistan, Sunni, Iran, Shia.
You have Israel with a very capable nuclear triad and a very capable army.
So they're surrounded by countries in the region that have historical antagonisms with them.
And they simply right now do not possess the capability to hit the United States with conventional weapons.
What they do, and this is something we've talked about and need to be concerned about, is they do have...
That is something we need to take into account, but it's not existential, like the threat posed by China with what is quickly emerging as the biggest navy in the world with hundreds of nuclear weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles against the United States.
China that could shut off a significant amount of trade and economic activity to the United States and harm us.
In significant ways, Iran is simply not an existential threat in the same way that China is and even Russia is with 6,000 nuclear weapons.
Well, you know, as Brett Stevens told my friend Saurabh Amari, you know, he wants to ultimately see the 82nd Airborne in the streets of Tehran, you know, escorting a gay pride parade.
The University of Maryland, there was one joke of a poll that was clearly manipulated that's being circulated by neocons, but there's poll after poll from both liberal, nonpartisan, conservative institutions show there's not broad support for this.
In addition, you now have within the administration a lot of people that don't look like the types of people that used to staff Republican administrations, mainly George W. Bush administration, but also you could argue the first Trump term in terms of foreign policy.
These are people like Bridge Colby, people like Joe Kent, people like Michael Anton, who have different ideas about American foreign policy and are much different.
than, say, the types of people that a Paul Wolfowitz or a John Bolton would hire into administration.
So they don't have a lot of people within the power structure right now, at least on the political side.
Within the career side in the military, absolutely.
And then in addition, you have to acknowledge that there's now an institutional structure that didn't exist in 2016 of organizations that are able to get A message out around foreign policy that challenges what Ben Rhodes called the blob, even though he's a card-carrying member of the blob.
These traditional organizations that push for American primacy and intervention.
So you have a lot of pieces coming together that show that neoconservatism on the right is in retreat.
But that's in a lot of cases when movements can be most dangerous is that I really sense Is they see, particularly on the right, the younger cohort coming up.
And we talked about this.
A lot of these people make you and me look like Paul Wolfowitz in terms of their foreign policy beliefs.
But look, I'll use an argument that the advocates of the Iraq war made is that you can't.
Truly shut down a weapons of mass destruction campaign with certain people in charge of the country.
You can't truly shut it down because you can't trust inspectors.
You can't truly trust intelligence.
They were doing that in a very manipulative way, but there's a sliver of truth in that.
So if you truly want to get rid of an Iranian nuclear weapon program and make sure it's totally dismantled, it's likely going to require A regime change or some type of occupation or, you know, invasion.
That may sound extreme, but if you stop and think about it, that's the truth.
You need to verify that all the knowledge, both scientists, other engineers that they are accounted for, in some cases killed, that there's no files remaining, and that all the centrifuges, all the different pieces, all the nuclear material, the triggers, anything that could be part of this are destroyed.
And then any development of the delivery systems.
It is incredibly difficult to do that.
It's impossible to do that purely through air.
You're going to need inspections.
You're going to need people on the ground verifying this.
And again, what we've seen before is the argument that the inspectors aren't going to find everything.
So I think you can kind of see where this is going.
And so the argument likely that you're going to see, and it's not totally incorrect, is that to truly get rid of the threat of a nuclear Iran.
An Islamic Republic with a nuclear bomb is you're going to need regime change.
And so, as I said previously, that's why in my mind this really isn't about a nuclear bomb.
And I want to be clear, for President Trump it is.
And for a lot of good people who rightly are concerned about nuclear array, it is about that.
But for a lot of others, it's about regime change.
And I think that the consequences of that for the United States, for the Middle East, even for Israel...
Because a lot of people, just like in Iraq, they aren't thinking about what comes next if we get rid of Iran as an Islamic Republic.
I don't know what you're talking about, but joking aside is there's still a lot of people who think we can do this, that we can actually change a regime and instill liberalism through The point of the barrel of a gun.
There is still that thinking in Washington, D.C. They have learned nothing from Iraq, from Syria, from Libya, from Afghanistan, from Yemen, from other places.
And there, again, there's a lot of people, I think, in China that would love us to see bogged down in the Middle East.
You and I, we don't believe that we should be involved in the Ukrainian war, but If you're somebody that thinks that Ukraine is the most important thing for a liberal democracy, this war is going to make it harder, if not impossible, to support Ukraine.
So, after the October 7th attacks, you had Joe Biden go on 60 Minutes and say, After he was asked by the host, I forget what host it was, but he was asked, are we going to be able to support both Israel and Ukraine?
And his dying brain said, oh, come on, man, of course we can.
We're the most powerful country ever.
We won World War II.
Of course we can do both.
And a week later, the United States was forced to redirect a shipment of artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel to support them in their fight against Hamas.
And that right there just shattered the illusion that we can do both.
And we had about, I believe, six, seven months prior to October 7th, when Netanyahu was out of power for a bit, I think it was Holly Bennett was in charge.
He allowed the, not allowed, but signed off on the United States to pull the,
So when October 7th kicked off and they needed certain types of ammunition, the stockpile that we had staged to support Israel in times of crisis was drained and we could not refill it because we were giving the Ukrainians more artillery shells per month than we could.
Produced.
So we were drawing down our stockpiles to very low levels.
Now that's just artillery.
I don't, at least right now, think there's going to be a lot of artillery battles.
At least I hope not.
If that happens, it's gotten really bad.
But the most precious munition and military asset in the world right now is air defense.
And there's been a lot of discussion in the press.
That's Zelensky's number one demand when he talks to the United States.
You want Patriot missiles?
Well, the United States is going to need a lot of Patriot missiles to defend our troops in a war with Iran.
So if a war with Iran kicks off and we're firing through our supply of Patriot missiles, we just simply aren't going to be able to give the Ukrainians anymore.
If you look at a system like the Iron Dome in Israel, now, everybody kind of talks about, they call Israel's entire system, the Iron Dome.
It's really, Iron Dome is designed to shoot down cheap rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah.
The systems that are being used now are David's Sling and the Arrow system and then our Thad system and some of our naval ships.
But the Iron Dome is designed to be a little more cheap and to shoot more in mass.
We don't have enough systems similar to that where we can produce a lot of things in mass and in quantity.
We focus on building these expensive systems with a lot of bells and whistles because we still haven't adapted to the fact that these wars that are quick and cheap and easy...
So our defense industrial base still hasn't adapted to the fact that we just need to produce more really cheaper and in some cases less advanced weapons in larger scale instead of building these highly advanced weapons with all these bells and whistles.
In smaller numbers.
Like, right now, again, this public knowledge, we only produce about, I'd say, 100, 150, and it could actually be lower, interceptors, so ammunition for the THAAD system, which is our most advanced anti-ballistic missile system.
We have only produced around 900 to 1,000 THAAD interceptors.
We spend it on those hard-to-produce, expensive systems.
And some of them, we have to admit, are very capable.
F-35 has gotten a lot of criticism over the years, but I think we've adapted and turned it into a fairly capable system.
Some people may disagree with me on that, but I think it is a capable system.
But we haven't been able to build, and that has a lot to do with how we funded it, enough of those or enough of certain types of ammunition.
To really fight a long, extended war against an enemy that has either a lot of people or can produce a lot of things like cheap drones or cheap rockets or cheap indirect fire weapons.
We just are not quite set up for that type of fight yet.
If we throw these, and again, I don't know if this is going to happen, but the president's stated goal is to make sure that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons.
I just want to restate, you don't believe as a practical matter that's achievable with a couple bunker buster strikes?
And that's where deterrence comes into effect here, is that there are different levers, and I've said this before, is yes, you do need a credible military option for diplomacy to work.
But I think everyone agrees, even, well, not everyone, but I think everyone who's approaching this in a sane manner.
Understands, just like with the Ukraine war, is that this is the least worst way for this to end, is with a robust diplomatic agreement.
Again, maybe it's not so robust, it's less imperfect, that does restrain Iranian nuclear ambitions.
You can't, you know, when you're in the middle of a, you know, when you're about to drop bombs on Fordo and you're a B-2 pilot, you can't in your head be wondering about, you know, the nature of American foreign policy and how we got here.
I'm somebody who does believe the United States should have a partnership and support Israel.
I think that an ideal world is that we would have a security architecture where you would have Gulf Arabs cooperating with Israel.
That would help prevent the rise of a regional hegemon and a global hegemon coming in.
Dominating the region.
I see benefits to that.
But I am concerned that if this is perceived as a war for Israel, what impact is that going to have on support for us doing some of those things?
And I've tried to communicate to people who are strong supporters of the state of Israel.
That that's one of these second and third order implications that you need to be aware of is what is going to happen to popular support for the state of Israel.
I think you and Steve Bannon talked about this.
And there's another aspect here, too.
You know, right now in the region, the Gulf Arab states are wanting to pursue better relations with Israel for a lot of reasons.
business opportunities, other things.
But one of the biggest things pushing them together...
So, if Iran collapses, it's a failed state.
If they're not there, I think in a lot of ways, again, there's still going to be Iran.
And it's not clear.
A lot of the regime change advocates can't articulate really what comes next.
The Shah's failed son probably isn't going to go back to Tehran and take over.
These nuts and the MEK aren't going to come and take over.
But, you know...
But what's the unintended consequence of that?
Just like the unintended consequence of removing Saddam Hussein was empowering Iran, if you don't have that threat posed by Iran anymore, that in some ways balances against the Gulf Arabs, they're going to look at Israel.
And they may have concerns, and they may go back to where they were before and be hostile to Israel.
It's important to remember that for most of the Cold War, Israel pursued a foreign policy that was rooted in something called the Periphery Doctrine.
And it was very smart.
It was driven by Ben-Gurion, where they dealt with a hostile Arab world, particularly the states that were supported by the Soviets.
So they prioritized building relations with non-Arab countries on the periphery of the Middle East.
So primarily Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia.
And that was to balance against the Arabs.
And that's why Israel, even after the Islamic Revolution, even though Khomeini was screaming death to Israel, that's why initially after Iraq invaded Iran, Israel was their main arms supplier.
And other countries started selling them stuff.
That's why Israel was such an integral part of Iran-Contra.
And that's why up until the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq and the Gulf War, that Israel viewed Iraq as a bigger threat.
As opposed to Iran.
And they were quietly supporting Iran, in some cases openly, even though you had this very anti-Semitic, anti-Israel regime.
And honestly, I believe that was a smart thing to do.
But after the end of the Cold War, after Saddam, the country they viewed as more threatening, was degraded.
Iran became the bigger threat.
So I tell that story to say is, what happens after you don't have Iran?
Does Turkey become more powerful?
Do other countries start to band together out of fear of what Israel's done in Iran?
And so I'm really concerned that people aren't thinking through.
What could happen here then?
Not to mention what could happen in Iran.
I've only listened to a small part of your interview with Ted Cruz, but he was saying something about how it would be good if the Islamic regime was gone and through a popular uprising.
Yeah, in an ideal world, you'd have a bunch of Iranian liberals rise up and overthrow the Islamic regime, and you'd have a popular democracy in Iran.
It's more likely you could have something worse, replace the Mullahs.
You could have Iran break into a civil war.
You have a lot of ethnic minorities that are looking for independence.
If Iraq hadn't invaded Iran in 1980, there's a chance, there's a world where Iran could have devolved into major civil war because of all these ethnic minorities that were trying to break away.
Well, for them, they perceive Russia as a threat and that if Russia stops fighting in Ukraine, then they'll reorient against them, even though there's really not.
Putin has not.
express the intent as clearly as some people like to say.
They've convinced themselves that Russia's their greatest enemy.
It's bizarre.
But, you know, if I were Putin, I would offer free first-class trips to Moscow so they could see that, like, Moscow was so much nicer than any place in Great Britain.
It's, like, not even close.
There's no part of Great Britain that's as nice as Moscow.
I think part of it is for them, and I'm not by no means an expert on British politics, I enjoyed working with some people.
The British defense establishment was in the Pentagon.
I have a lot of respect for them.
But there's still kind of this grasping at trying to be a global imperial power when they're, you know, they don't have the resources or the power to do that.
It's like you're in a country where people are just dropping dead at 25 of fentanyl ODs and like no one can get a job after graduating college and you can't afford a house and can't get married or have kids and you're like, I'm mad at Putin.
I'm mad at the Ayatollahs.
It's like, you know what I mean?
It's like this weird kind of like unwillingness to face the truth, which is no, you've been betrayed by your own leaders.
And it's again, for me, I've been to Ukraine and went to Ukraine last year during the war and I came away with a lot of sympathy and respect for a lot of Ukrainians.
I came away with a lot of immense, I'll just use the word hatred.
Shouldn't, you know, let it linger, but it was angry at some of the Western supporters Why?
Because at the end of the day, a lot of these people's strategy is to continue to send young Ukrainians in pursuit of a victory.
That they know they can't win.
And they're doing it just so they can feel good about themselves.
Just so they can say, we're standing up to Putin.
And, you know, I gotta say, like, you know, we haven't talked about the Ukrainian drone, you know, issue, but last month, the ambassador to Ukraine resigned.
This woman named Bridget Brink.
And she made a big show of it.
She wrote an...
She's probably going to run for Congress in Michigan.
And it was a bunch of pablum.
It was about how America needs to lead the free world, how she was essentially ashamed that President Trump's administration has recognized that the only way Ukraine is going to survive as a nation is through a diplomatic settlement.
And she's saying that we're betraying our values and all this other nonsense.
I met her, actually, when I went to Odessa the first time and I interacted.
I was never really directly but on a lot of calls with her when I was in administration.
And she could not articulate how do you achieve some semblance of victory for the Ukrainians considering the fact that they don't have enough people and we don't have enough weapons to give them.
Most of the Ukrainian government, obviously, no government's a unitary entity, but there's an increasing number of people in the Ukrainian government, including some folks that I think a lot of, I'm not going to say who they are, including some folks that I think would be surprising to people here, who recognize the reality.
And those people, in some ways, are becoming the enemies themselves.
And that's why you see more and more crackdowns on dissent in Ukraine, why a lot of people are afraid to speak out, and why, honestly...
I think they're 100% correct because they would have been incredibly uncomfortable with this happening the day before peace talks.
And I do have to say, I think the same applies to CIA leadership.
However, I do believe that there were elements of...
Because they had started this plan under the previous administration, and they knew the previous administration likely would have been comfortable with it, but ours wouldn't.
So they probably suppress that information from getting up the chain.
And I want to be clear, I'm not casting aspersions on everybody in European command.
There's a lot of great officers, great soldiers, and marine sailors, airmen serving European command.
There's actually some really smart, realistic members of the intelligence community that are serving on the Russia-Ukraine portfolio.
But there's others that are still bought in, like Bridget Brink, to this idea.
That Ukraine can achieve a victory.
And one way to do it is by these spectacular attacks that, you know, while may risk a little thing called nuclear war because we're attacking Russian strategic assets, not just, you know, missile launchers and stuff.
And yeah, they have a role in the war in Ukraine.
But remember, they also attacked a Russian nuclear submarine base in north of the country.
So that was done, first and foremost, to undermine the peace talks, I think, going into Istanbul the next day, and also to invite some type of escalation.
And that leads to one of my last questions, second to last question, which is why do we put up with that?
I mean, if our job is to run the world or at least the West, and I think most people in the U.S. government think that is our job, maintain the peace, act in our interests, et cetera, et cetera, Zelensky says, He's not elected.
He rules by force.
Ukraine is less free than Russia, from what I can tell.
I can't tell you how much the aid pause that we did really freaked out the establishment and sent an important message to Ukrainians, but also Europeans.
But there's still a ways to go.
And I think we need to really change that mental model about how partners and allies, we work with partners and allies.
It doesn't mean that we are telling them what to do.
We're We're always trying to throw them under the bus.
That doesn't work either.
But this idea that we let certain clients do things constantly that are against our interest, it doesn't benefit us.
In the long term, it doesn't benefit these clients.
Do you think the U.S. government is capable of closing out this war in Iran?
Like, saying to Israel, you know, we've done enough, like, stop.
And if Donald Trump decides, you know, he wanted to go back to the negotiating table, send Steve Wyckoff to Oman again to meet with the Iranians and try and hammer something out, do we have the power to do that?
But there were times where the feeling was that Israel was not doing things in our interest, and we made that clear, and we used our leverage to make sure that they were not harming American interests.
And I think we perfectly have the capability to do that.
Again, I, I, We don't know how the next few days are going to play out, but it's definitely there.
We have a tremendous amount of leverage over many parties in the Middle East, over many countries around the world.
We do have to say one thing though about There's a lot of good staff right now in the administration that are doing the Lord's work.
And I have to say, some of the things that are being said about them and how they're being undermined in the press and being accused of awful things is absolutely disgusting.
There, candidly, is an effort to run somewhat of the same playbook against them they did me.
It's like you're seeing these accusations of leaking and they're on the outs.
Let's be honest.
That's a trick that people who want a bigger war are playing to stifle dissent.
Can I say one thing, and you're definitely in this category, but it's the people who've been targeted in general are the most patriotic, the most pro-American, the most...
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
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It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
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