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June 18, 2025 - Viva & Barnes

01:52:46

On the Brink of WW3? Trump's Apparent About-Face on Regime Change in Iran w/ The Duran!

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Time	Text
	We're going live!
	Epic!
	We were all admiring Alex's beautiful It's beautiful.
	It is.
	It literally is.
	I feel like a rat, a straggly rat with this disgusting white patchy.
	Greek.
	Okay, so we're live.
	There's no intro video today.
	We're going to have something of a special on the eve of World War III broadcast.
	We're going to laugh.
	Instead of, you know, either that or crying.
	Good afternoon, everyone.
	Alex, guys, for those who may not, I think everybody watching knows who you guys are already, but just in case they don't, give us the 30,000-foot overview.
	Alex, I'll give it.
	We're a geopolitics channel, and you can find us on all the platforms, Rumble, Locals.
	YouTube, Telegram, all over.
	And we cover geopolitics from a real politic perspective.
	Absolutely.
	And we have Robert Offen on our programs, and he's a great guest, and we're delighted to be here.
	And now it's the Duran.
	Yeah, yeah.
	For those that are maybe new or unfamiliar, you can follow them, TheDuran, on Locals, on Rumble.
	They've got a great locals community, dduran.locals.com.
	They've got great – A lot of cool shirts.
	Yeah, you got to add a Chattanooga one.
	They got like Miami, all these other cities.
	We got to get a Chattanooga one.
	We'll add that.
	It's a great idea.
	Consider it done.
	The city even made a cameo in the Fog of War documentary with Robert McNamara.
	He was comparing it to a city that got destroyed in Vietnam.
	I was like, I don't know if that's the best comparison I've ever seen.
	But today what we're going to do is try to do a geopolitical breakdown.
	So you can follow them on the Duran, Locals, YouTube, Rumble, Bitchute, Odyssey.
	You can also, they have their individual channels, Alex Christoforo, kind of like Christ for you.
	Kind of easy to remember.
	It's a nice thing about you.
	They're both Greek, so first names are both Alexander.
	No shock there.
	Speaking of the only people to ever succeed in your Western nation dealing with Iran and the Persians was a guy named Alexander.
	Other than that, no other Western powers had such success there sustained.
	But what we're going to try to do is do it.
	And Alexander McCorus also has his own individual channel on all of the relevant platforms.
	We're going to try to do a geopolitical realistic breakdown.
	This isn't a moralistic debate.
	It's not a policy debate.
	It's not a political debate.
	I'll save that for some...
	Here we're going to just try to do the geopolitical breakdown of what might happen.
	Like if you were in the situation room of any of these countries around the world impacted by the decisions that are going to be made today, tomorrow, and in the coming weeks and months.
	The Duran has been better than anybody in the last half decade at giving you accurate intel and information that is actionable information.
	Some might use it in political betting markets these days, polymarket and the rest.
	You can bet on anything.
	It's a little bit frightening what you can bet on these days.
	You can bet on the Pope's going to live or die, all these kind of things.
	But actionable intel in general.
	And the goal is to give you accurate, objective information.
	And to sort of look at it from a decision tree perspective.
	If Trump does this, what might happen?
	If Iran does that, what might happen?
	If Russia does this, what might happen?
	If China does this, what might happen?
	Because we're seeing big predictions.
	But then, of course, you see that the key decision makers, people like Senator Cruz in the Senate, sitting down with Tucker Carlson, doesn't even know the population of the country he wants us to invade and bomb.
	This is the if you watch the Fog of War documentary, Robert McNamara, one of the key things he emphasized in trying to explain how he utterly screwed up and butchered the Vietnam War in what was supposed to be a mea culpa film and end up being kind of a damnation film.
	But one of the points he made was.
	That's not sympathize with your enemy.
	That's empathize.
	Understand where they're coming from.
	Understanding what their perspective is.
	And almost every power broker during the Vietnam War, and you can find similar dynamics in the U.S., Korean War, both Iraq Wars, Afghanistan War, Libya War, Syria War, on and on and on.
	But you can find it all throughout time.
	Both the Alex's have studied.
	Both have background and experience in the diplomatic world, in the geopolitical world, and have studied history extensively.
	And you go to things like World War I, and you figure out how do we get into it?
	Actually, it was a bunch of morons that had a lot of power.
	You go through a lot of things, and that's what you discover.
	You listen to Robert McNamara describe the Vietnam War, and he had basic fundamental misunderstandings of why Vietnam was in that conflict.
	A lot of predictions that everything will be rosy and beautiful and sweet and there will be no problems, that bombing countries has no blowback, that invading Middle Eastern countries couldn't possibly lead to a disaster, and so on and so forth.
	So we're here to try to give you the alternatives as if we were in a situation room giving advice to any decision maker in the world.
	So in that capacity, the one to start off with, uh, uh, What would you highlight as the biggest risks in the near short term for the Israeli-Iran conflict?
	The biggest risk in my opinion is that this war goes on, that there is no resolution of it in Iran.
	We don't get either a move towards some kind of diplomatic solution, or alternatively, we don't see a collapse in Iran.
	The thing simply goes dragging on, and then in that case, over time, the balance of advantage will both shift towards Iran.
	And it's going to become increasingly difficult for Israel and for the United States as well.
	So this thing has to be ended quickly.
	I mean, when I say quickly, we're talking about weeks, obviously, not days.
	But it cannot be allowed to become another kind of Vietnam situation.
	You can already see that there's opposition in the United States and it's growing.
	And Henry Kissinger, not a person I have any time for, but he was clever.
	He once said that in these kind of situations, if the guy you're attacking, he was talking about the Vietnamese, don't lose, they win.
	And that's the trouble.
	That's the problem with Iran.
	If Iran can hold together, if the regime there can survive, whatever your feelings about it, then over time, the...
	It can always outlast.
	It can start to outlast Israel's capacity to keep hitting it.
	It can create problems domestically in the United States because many people in the United States are already critical about the war.
	And it will start to attract international support from the big Eurasian powers, China and Russia.
	Who are at the moment watching and waiting to see what's going to happen.
	And of course, if they become involved because they sense that Iran is able to hold out, then of course we're into a completely different situation.
	And then it really is Vietnam War II.
	So I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I'm saying that is the biggest risk for Israel and the United States going into this situation.
	They have to resolve it fast.
	Either they do it by achieving.
	Whatever objective it is that they have in Iran, and they're not very clear yet what that objective is.
	They talk about ending nuclear enrichment, but we had a negotiation which might have led to that point anyway.
	Others are saying that it's regime change.
	Regime change might not be easy to do, especially if you're not going to invade the country, and nobody's seriously suggesting that.
	Unless the United States and Israel can resolve this quickly, then, as I said, things will start to turn against them.
	And given the rhetoric, given the things that I think people in Israel certainly believe about Iran, at that point, people might start getting frightened and they might start taking really very dangerous risks, which could land us all into even bigger trouble than the trouble we're in now.
	Well, that was the question I was going to ask in terms of like, you say it can't last for too long, but that depends on what the objective is.
	And we're getting, say, mixed messages.
	One was, we cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
	I don't know who disagrees with that.
	No one here disagrees with the fact that Iran can never have nuclear weapon capabilities, correct?
	Yeah, that's absolutely right.
	Nobody does.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, I think it would be a disaster if Iran could acquire nuclear weapons.
	Alex does.
	They say to Iran and here I get to make They've made some extraordinarily bad decisions, if you believe them.
	They say, we don't want to have nuclear weapons.
	We have a fatwap, which is a religious decree that prohibits it.
	And yet, at the same time, they have been enriching uranium.
	Up to 60% levels, which is far above the level that they would need for any civil nuclear purpose.
	Now, J.D. Vance actually hoped in on that point, and he's clearly a very clever man because he's absolutely right.
	Why does Iran, if it really doesn't want nuclear weapons, enrich uranium up to 60%?
	Well, the argument that they make is that it's...
	in order to put pressure on the United States and Israel in order to get them to make some kind of deal with us that will allow us to enrich uranium.
	If that is the plan, it looks to me like an incredibly Because what it's done is it's made people in the United States and Israel say, look, they're enriching uranium to that extent.
	Regardless of what they are saying, they want a nuclear.
	And if Iran doesn't want a nuclear weapon, then they're doing something that is both incredibly provocative, but which doesn't lead to the eventual deterrent of having a nuclear weapon.
	So nobody, the Iranians say they don't want nuclear weapons, nobody in the international community, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the Arab states, not Israel obviously, not the Europeans, wants to.
	Iran says it doesn't want to have nuclear weapons.
	So in theory, there ought to be a possible deal done.
	If I may ask one question, Alex, if you can, just let me ask this and Alex answer it if you know the answer.
	60% enriched uranium.
	Are we dealing with WMD intelligence reports like back in Iraq 1 or is this something that even the regime of Iran has admitted?
	Absolutely, they've admitted it.
	In fact, they've boasted about it, which makes it all particularly extraordinary.
	Now, 60% enrichment is not yet weapons-grade, but it's apparently a very small step to get from there to actually getting weapons-grade uranium.
	Now, having weapons-grade uranium doesn't mean that you are in a position yet to create a nuclear device.
	There's a whole complex technology.
	An industrial process that you'd have to do.
	And in theory, at least you'd have to test it.
	Some people say that it would take months.
	Other people say it would take a year.
	I've heard others say that it's three years.
	What they're doing by enriching uranium to that level is not contrary, by the way, to their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
	So they're not doing anything illegal, but they're doing something that is very troubling.
	But it's not the same as saying that they're going directly for a nuclear weapon.
	And they've had the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors there.
	They've been all over their facilities.
	They say Iran is not going for a nuclear weapon.
	They've had, well, we had the US intelligence community that's been repeatedly saying that they're not going up to that step, all the way up to that step.
	It doesn't look as if for the moment they're working towards a nuclear weapon, but I think whatever it was they thought they were doing by enriching uranium to that level, it was at worst and incredibly bad.
	Negotiating strategy, if that's what they thought it was.
	Or alternatively, I mean, it may be that down the line they do have other plans and then they need to be stopped.
	But there was certainly time and space to find diplomatic ways to do that.
	And we had an ongoing negotiation and various parties like the Russians were stepping in.
	And it was likely that we would have got to a point where they wouldn't have had that stockpile anymore.
	Yeah, speaking of which, and this question for Alex, the Alex is based, Chad Alexander is in London, just for those that are watching, maybe new to both men.
	Could you describe that part of what is, like I responded to Vice President Vance, you know, he has spoken with friends of ours and others, and he's very sincerely and thoughtfully...
	And credit to him for engaging the American people.
	I mean, it's too rare that the major decision makers engage the American people in decisions as consequential as war.
	And as we'll get into, there's all kinds of consequences that can flow from this.
	The fog of war is about how unanticipated things almost always happen in war.
	They rarely go to some nice, convenient script you can craft in Hollywood.
	That's for the wag the dog version of war.
	But Alex, can you describe that part of the whole background of this is what some might call the Gaddafi problem, the Gaddafi North Korea issue, that if you're a country out there and you have significant enemies like Iran does, both amongst Arab countries and within to a degree, with Israel, with the United States, so on and so forth.
	That in Gaddafi's case, America and the West go to him, and what happens, happens.
	Same with North Korea.
	Could you describe for people why all the people watching saw that, and the conclusion they drew is the one John Mearsheimer believes that Iran will draw from this, which is not, don't have a nuclear weapon.
	It is you are completely vulnerable if you don't have a nuclear weapon.
	How the Gaddafi example that we, the United States, made Could you describe?
	Because it's amazing how many Normian Americans don't even see this being discussed.
	The Americans live in a small media bubble where they're just told the rosy version of events.
	Could you describe what the Gaddafi problem is from a geopolitical perspective?
	For dealing with countries like Iran as to why they might want a nuclear weapon but not want it to nuke the world.
	I was going to actually say the same thing.
	I was going to make the same comment that you're making right now, Robert.
	And I read your post, your reply to J.D. Vance.
	And you make that exact point.
	And the problem that I see with...
	And Iran abided by that deal.
	And that deal was agreed on by the United States.
	The Europeans were a part of it.
	Iran agreed to it.
	The IAEA and the UN, they said that Iran was abiding by that deal.
	And it was done.
	It was done and there was no thought of going to a conflict with Iran after that JCPOA deal.
	Trump came into office, whether you like Trump, whether you don't like Trump, he came into office and he foolishly tore up that deal.
	And he tore up that deal because he said it was a bad deal.
	Now, from what, from my understanding of it, Trump did not like the fact that it had a 10-year term on it and he wanted something indefinite.
	Okay, but...
	And it took a lot of time to agree to that deal.
	It took years to put that deal together, and a lot of countries were involved in putting that deal together.
	And after Iran saw this, and a lot of other countries saw the United States coming in and tearing up that deal, And then what happened?
	Hillary Clinton came in.
	We came.
	We saw he died.
	He got killed.
	He got raped.
	He got sodomized.
	It was filmed on camera.
	It was brutal.
	It was grotesque.
	And the country is now in complete chaos.
	Absolute complete chaos.
	To me, I understand where Alexander is coming from, and I agree with everything that Alexander said previously about the failed strategy of enriching to 60%.
	I think, okay, mixed messages were being put out there by Iran.
	But you can understand why they pushed it to that level when you put everything – There is no trust.
	Iran does not believe in what the US is saying, what the Europeans are saying.
	They're saying we had a deal.
	You guys came and you tore up that deal.
	Now you're telling us that we have no right to enrich any uranium?
	And this was also changed.
	Witkoff, just a couple of months ago, said that there was an agreement in place and Iran would be allowed to enrich up to a certain percentage.
	And Iran had agreed.
	I believe it was a 3.75% and Iran agreed to that.
	And Witkoff publicly said, we've agreed.
	And Iran said, great, we have a deal.
	What happened?
	Trump started to talk to some people, the usual suspects, and he says, no, now I want zero, zero percent enrichment.
	So it's already happened twice to Iran.
	They've agreed twice.
	The deal has been broken twice.
	It reminds me of the Minsk agreement as well.
	You had a deal in place.
	The United States, the West decided to not adhere to that deal.
	The trust is gone, and then you end up in a crisis.
	Speaking of which, one thing I wanted both of you guys to also address, that utter moron, Clay Loser Travis, mostly gives out losing sports bets.
	That's what he loves to do.
	I've known him.
	He's from my home state of Tennessee.
	He's always been dumb as a doorknob.
	Always didn't even qualify to ride the short bus to school.
	But he's out there on Fox News telling the world that Donald Trump did a super secret sabotage trick.
	Now, I, by the way, don't actually believe this is what happened, but this is what Clay Travis was spinning as somehow a good thing.
	You had people, you had Mark Levin, you had other prominent conservatives in the U.S. bragging about how wonderful and smart it would be for the President of the United States to set up a foreign country for a sneak attack by pretending to engage in negotiations that are utterly insincere.
	And what I try to tell people is, Clay Travis, this was brilliant, genius.
	I was like, that's a geopolitical disaster, in my opinion.
	That is inviting the entire world to never trust America, never trust Trump.
	We already got some credibility problems, folks.
	Range of behaviors over the last century.
	Can you guys comment on that is not necessarily something that benefits President Trump, to be perceived as someone who lies and sabotages people and deals.
	Well, absolutely.
	I think that made a disastrous impression.
	We were three days from a meeting in Oman.
	The Omanis had set it up.
	They were going to act as mediators.
	The messaging that had been circulating was that both Iran and the United States were making progress in the negotiations.
	The two negotiators, Araqji, the Iranian, and Whitgolf, who was...
	Trump's friend, seem to be getting on with each other.
	And then three days before that meeting, without any prior notification or announcement, without any warning given to, you know, any demand made from Iran that went beyond what was happening in the negotiations, without any sign that there was any reason to attack Iran.
	You know, it wasn't as if Iran was about to...
	Not that anybody cares about that anymore.
	But without any kind of pretext or reason given, we suddenly have an attack on Iran.
	And the President of the United States is supposed supposedly, I don't believe by the way that he was involved in any kind of cunning subterfuge or plan.
	I don't I think he said some very unfortunate things subsequently, but I don't think he was involved in trying to trick Iran in any way.
	But anyway, the point is that that story has been spread.
	People are saying that it is incredibly clever and countries around the world But countries around the world are saying, this is a man, this is a president, this is a country that appears to be negotiating with us and is actually planning to conduct attacks.
	And how can we trust them?
	How can we ever trust them again?
	And it is an absolute disaster.
	And it's a disaster for the president himself.
	It's a fact that many people don't know, but most of the world outside Europe.
	Actually likes him.
	Xi Jinping and Putin, the two most powerful leaders outside the United States, like him.
	They've trusted him up to now.
	They're not going to trust him now.
	They're going to say, well, this is how he behaves, or so his supporters in the United States say.
	How can we rely on the word of the United States in future?
	Can I very quickly because we see what happened to Gaddafi.
	There's the counter-example, which is, of course, North Korea.
	And North Korea also had a deal done in the 1990s, very complicated deal negotiated by Bill Clinton, by the way, to get civil nuclear power stations and all kinds of things.
	Then all the usual people, you know, the neocons, sabotaged that deal.
	And, of course, that incentivized the North Koreans to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
	And that is exactly what they did.
	So countries around the world are going to say, look, Gaddafi, Libya, gave up its nuclear weapons and was regime changed.
	North Korea...
	We see what's happening to Iran.
	What are we going to do?
	Which choice are we going to take if we want to protect ourselves?
	And that message, unfortunately, is going to spread around the world.
	And it is a very, very bad thing that it has because no one should want to see the spread of nuclear weapons.
	To get back to the 60% enrichment, because I'm following the chat, there's some queries about that timeline-wise.
	Under the JCPOA, which was the Joint Committee Plan of Action or something along those lines, Iran was limited to enrichment up to 3.67%.
	That was in 2015.
	Trump withdraws the U.S. from that in 2018.
	By the time Iran is enriching up to 60%, It's in violation of the terms of the JCPOA, but that's no longer in effect.
	So just so people make sense of the, call it a talking point, the detail, when they say it's in violation of the JCPOA, some people say yes, other people say no, because the JCPOA, they had withdrawn from it.
	So technically, it's in violation of the JCPOA, which the U.S. withdrew from, terminated.
	So, I mean, how do you qualify that act by Iran at the time that they do it?
	I was just going to briefly, before the Alexanders, I was going to have them also respond to this point too.
	Two points on that.
	The effect of Iran every time there's been a sabotage, there's been sanctions, has said, oh, now we're going 10 feet higher.
	We're going to enrich more uranium now.
	Because we know this is what you don't want us to do.
	And you try to sabotage us.
	You try to say, we're going to do more.
	And the reason to do it is it's a deterrent effect.
	And this is not being honestly dealt with in the West, in my opinion.
	Not really.
	That isn't why Gaddafi considered them.
	That isn't why Saddam Hussein considered them.
	Any of those other reasons.
	It's because one, it's power.
	And two, it's the most effective deterrent in the world.
	And we've proven that over and over and over again.
	And we really proved it in the Gaddafi example.
	But to the question, and also entering that one, Alexander, in my view, This conflict, particularly if it extends continuously, will lead to increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, not decrease it.
	Is that a fair conclusion?
	Absolutely.
	First of all, Iran, people will look at Iran and will say to them, well, why didn't you?
	Since you went all the way up to 60%, why didn't you go further and acquire nuclear weapons?
	There are people in Iran.
	Who are going to be saying that?
	Now, I read the Iranian media, obviously in English, because I don't speak Farsi, but I've been reading for some time now, you know, Iranian generals, including General Salome, the head of the IRGC, the man who was killed, actually, on Friday, one of the men who was killed on Friday.
	Anyway, he was essentially saying, we've got to this point, we're stuck.
	In a confrontation with Israel and the United States.
	Sooner or later, Israel is going to attack us.
	So let's go all the way.
	Let's get nuclear weapons.
	Now, he is dead, but there are other people in Iran who are going to take his place and who are going to argue that very thing.
	And of course, other countries around the world are going to argue that very thing.
	And of course, the thing to also understand is that if we're talking about Iran specifically, if the war continues, It's been bombed.
	It's had missiles hurled at it.
	But one of the things that one learns from wars is that countries adapt eventually to bombing.
	And Iran has a significant technological base.
	It has lots of engineers and scientists.
	Reproduced, because as part of the JCPOA, it had to dismantle most of its centrifuges.
	It had to dismantle most of its enrichment facilities.
	But it was able to recreate them very, very fast.
	it will be able to recreate them again.
	If the war continues indefinitely, if the regime survives, then the probabilities, the possibilities of Iran going nuclear become much greater, because the hardliners in Iran have now got an argument which they're going to push and say, well, look what happened.
	We were brought to this point.
	We might as well now go to I still haven't understood.
	What is Trump trying to accomplish?
	I think Trump seems to really believe.
	I mean, Trump's always been nuclear nonproliferation.
	There's no question that Netanyahu wants regime change.
	Anybody saying otherwise lying.
	You guys pointed this out right away, that that was obvious by the nature of the attack, the timing of the attack, the sequence of the attack, who was being attacked, so forth.
	All of it's green regime change, regime change, regime change, not surgical strike on nuclear weapons facilities.
	Most of Israel's attacks have not been on the nuclear facilities.
	They've been on assassinations.
	They've been on, and I get a kick out of Israeli media, that I guess they're used to, you know, there has been a lot of Western biased coverage against Israel on Gaza.
	And so I guess they think they can just repeat anything.
	But trying to pretend that Iran is killing more civilians than Israel is, you just look at the numbers.
	It's more like a five to one ratio.
	Israel is killing more Iranian civilians than Iran is killing Israeli civilians.
	Putting that aside, to your point, if the goal is, as Vice President Vance has articulated it on behalf of President Trump, God bless President Trump, but J.D. Vance is much better at articulating President Trump's perspective at times than President Trump always with the truth and the texting.
	I've been a long time admirer of President Trump, fan of President Trump, friend of President Trump, represented President Trump.
	But I'm still not quite convinced foreign diplomacy through truths are necessarily the most effective mechanism.
	But putting that aside, if the official objective is Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, okay, can you achieve by military means that outcome?
	Because Mearsheimer's point is actually what we're doing increases the probability that Iran and other nations get nuclear weapons.
	Not decreases, it increases.
	He's like, you can't bomb Mearsheimer for a long time.
	Said you can't bomb your way into success in these campaigns.
	You guys have seen this forever.
	We just bomb.
	I mean, dear Lord, this is Vietnam.
	Nixon.
	Oh, we just bomb them, bomb them, bomb them.
	You know, Curtis bombs away LeMay.
	Oh, wow, I can fire bomb all of Tokyo and burn everybody down.
	Oh, isn't that fun?
	I mean, that was that guy's approach.
	Do you guys think it is achievable?
	It is likely to, or maybe put it this way, it's a probability assessment.
	Is it more likely that if Trump wants Iran not to have nuclear weapons?
	Is going to war with Iran the way to get it?
	Or will, in fact, that more likely or just as likely backfire and increase the probability Iran gets nuclear weapons?
	Well, I've already said I think it will increase it.
	And I think this is, I think, something that people in the United States need to understand.
	Unless, of course, nationalists...
	I'm not going to pretend I know how strong the regime is in Iran.
	My sense is it probably will hold together and will survive.
	I think it has enough support in Iran to do that.
	And I think it's organized enough to do that.
	But if it does survive, and if this does go a long time, and there is no agreement or conclusion, then the risks of Iran going nuclear have now materially and very, very greatly increased.
	If it doesn't survive, then what happens?
	92 million people, country fractures, refugees, all of that.
	All of that.
	They're going to be making statues of us.
	They can't wait for people to bomb them in order to free them.
	That Juan Guaido number four, Reza Pavli, he's going to be the new, the crown prince is going to be the new leader of Iran, that guy.
	What happens if it breaks apart?
	What happens if it doesn't hold?
	But the other thing is, if it collapses, we will have the Libyan situation.
	People will say, look...
	They didn't go all the way.
	They should have gone all the way.
	If we find ourselves in the same situation that the Iranians are in, which quite likely we will at some point, because that happens all around the world, then we need to avoid making the mistake that the Iranians did.
	We ought to do what the North Koreans did, and we ought to go full.
	Out and go nuclear.
	So one way or the other, succeed or fail, this war is increasing the risks of nuclear nonproliferation.
	That's my own clear view.
	And the disaster for Iran, if there's a collapse there, well, I mean, Alex has already spoken about it, and I don't have anything to add to it except to say I agree.
	Yeah, Alex, could you expand on, people forget the disaster that Libya was, not just within Libya, but...
	Steimer, Daily Steimer, there in the UK, finally doing grooming gang investigations and everything else.
	It turns out you unleash a bunch of refugees from totally different parts of the world.
	Totally different economic skill sets, cultural sets of values, so on and so forth.
	Disproportionately male in many cases.
	Just the way it unfolded, it's not going to be easily incorporated into the rest of the world.
	So that's one outcome.
	You have chaos.
	You have the kind of things you had in Libya, which were open, slave.
	Slave trading right out in the public.
	All kinds of terror events.
	Groups like ISIS.
	I remember someone said, it can't get worse than the Mullahs in Tehran.
	I was like, I think I was told it can't get worse than Hussein in Iraq.
	I was told it can't get worse than Gaddafi in Libya.
	I was told it can't get worse than Assad in Syria.
	In Afghanistan, we spent $8 trillion just to see the Taliban go to back...
	I mean, although he did, one Taliban, to another Taliban.
	Congratulations, 20 years, blood and treasure down the drain.
	But what are some of the other, if let's say they succeeded with the regime change, what could be the other negative consequences?
	Could there be risks with regime change?
	Aside from one side, it becomes Libya.
	Another side, somebody sees this power that is much more hostile, much more aggressive.
	Doesn't feel limited by no biological nuclear weapon fatwas of the Ayatollah.
	Let's say they succeed and they take out the Ayatollah and make him a martyr to the Iranian world.
	Which is more likely?
	That this sort of mythical version of the West, that they think Iran is 95% Persian, it's 50% Persian, if that.
	It's going to look like the Shah of 1975.
	And MI6 and CIA can't wait to hang out in Tehran again and set up their little secret police and their cocktails and all the rest.
	And the Brits can get back to getting all that oil money that they've been obsessed with since over a century.
	What's the likelihood of that outcome, of this dreamy, rosy regime change outcome, versus what's the likelihood of either a Libya or a much more hardliner groups coming into power in Iran that are actually a much greater threat to the rest of the world?
	I would have thought the most likely prospect is a much more hardline regime.
	Again, I think because a lot of people in the West, the Iranians we tend to know, tend to be rather westernized.
	I think we assume the people in Iran are.
	And of course, I don't think that's true at all.
	I don't think that's a possibility.
	There is something else to consider.
	If there's a regime change collapse in Iran, I mean, it's difficult to convey that, you know, this is a much, much bigger country than Libya.
	92 million people, a huge territory, very strategically located.
	A collapse in Iran is going to create a massive vacuum in Central Asia.
	There are great powers located all around.
	There's Russia not far away.
	China, nearby.
	There's Turkey, which is a neighbour.
	There's Pakistan.
	One can very easily see how all of these countries could be sucked in to try to control the crisis there.
	And that could also lead to all kinds of completely unpredictable conflicts.
	And if you are worried about China and you're worried about China getting to the to the So, I mean, it's not a good idea to destroy this regime.
	Whatever your feelings about it, first of all, it probably does have an internal capacity to change and evolve.
	Somebody who was there recently, a friend of mine, actually said that he was surprised at seeing how many women, for example, no longer wear headscarves.
	In Iran, and how this is starting to be accepted, even by the regime.
	So it's got, perhaps, probably, some capacity for evolution.
	If you destroy it, then, of course, you forfeit whatever stability there is.
	And I think there's quite a lot of stability in Iran.
	You create a humanitarian catastrophe.
	You risk a far more hardline regime.
	Replacing the regime that we have now.
	And you also risk creating a vacuum into which, as I said, other neighbouring powers get drawn in with all the enormous unpredictability and danger that that causes.
	It is an incredibly bad idea.
	And for us in Europe, who will be at the receiving end of massive refugee flows, it would be an absolute disaster.
	So, some of the arguments floating online in support of regime change or whatever the plan is, is that the Iranian people will welcome the invading forces or whatever with open arms.
	I was skeptical of it.
	I'm still skeptical of it, but I've had private discussions with people I know who are, I'm surprised how many of them privately say, yes, the Iranian people are in fact sort of cheering on Israel right now because this is not propaganda.
	This is anecdotal.
	And I think it's probably worth what it's worth because the only Iranians that I would know have fled the oppressive regime of Iran and therefore want it to be taken down.
	And from the outside is different from the inside.
	Much like the Iraqi diaspora, that the Iraqi diaspora was out there saying...
	Remember that fake president we had running around everywhere?
	Now we got the, you know, a relative of the Shah is our new fake president.
	It's like Guido, you know, fake president down in Venezuela.
	Trump's got to quit embracing these fake presidents.
	But, you know, it's like the movie High Plains Drifter, where Clint Eastwood's character makes the midget the mayor and the sheriff.
	And he stands up on the bar and says, I'm the mayor!
	on the share.
	That's what some of these people look like, pretending to have Sort of the two different dynamics.
	One is, there are definitely problems the regime has.
	If the regime had complete confidence, it wouldn't behave the way it behaves.
	But that does not mean that there's this massive inbuilt domestic demand to be bombed into freedom.
	But the second part is, can you guys explain how this has happened in many different contexts?
	Balkan conflict, so on and so forth.
	Generally speaking, when I try to explain to Americans, let's say you don't like Joe Biden, for example, or you're on the left, you don't like Donald Trump.
	Would you welcome people bombing your city?
	Probably not.
	Can you explain that when people are bombed, that tends to lead to a rally around the flag effect, not a, thank God you're bombing us, we want to join the bombers effect.
	Well, exactly.
	I mean, this is the fundamental error about this, because I've no doubt that there are a lot of people in Iran who don't like the regime and the government and many of the things that the government is doing and feel very frustrated by it and would like to see it changed.
	Iranians are very proud.
	I mean, they might want to shape their own history and decide it for themselves.
	And especially a country with Iran, like Iran, which has a storied history, which goes back not just to Alexander the Great, but a long, long, long before then.
	So I think this is a huge mistake.
	By the way, it was the same in Iraq.
	I think that most people in Iraq...
	But that doesn't mean that they supported or wanted the invasion of their country.
	They wanted to resolve their own problems domestically, and they wanted time and space in order to do that.
	In Iran, where the regime is not I think they deserve the space to decide these things for themselves.
	Oh, go for it.
	Yeah, the diaspora thing, you get that in Russia as well.
	You get all the Russians who are not living in Russia say the same thing.
	If you get rid of Putin, all the Russians will be happy and then they'll be cheering you on.
	No.
	Not even remotely close to the truth.
	And as far as regime changes go, I run into Syrians who have recently fled Syria here in Cyprus all the freaking time.
	We're talking about people who grew up in Syria, who lived in Syria and had to flee Syria because they are scared to death of al-Jolani.
	They are absolutely scared to death of him.
	And they stop me on the streets.
	They watch the programs.
	And they tell me, we wish we had Assad back.
	I'm not cheerleading for Assad.
	I'm not saying Assad is a good guy.
	I'm not saying Assad is a bad guy.
	I'm telling you what a good 50 to 60 people from Syria have told me as I'm in Cyprus.
	It's a small island.
	You run into people all the time and they are crying at the fact that their country has been torn apart and that an al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, The head chopper who had a $10 million bounty on his head by the United States of America is now in charge of the country with Erdogan propping him up.
	Not the United States propping him up, not Israel propping him up, but mostly Erdogan of Turkey now propping him up.
	The country's been divided in three.
	We're talking about Syria, which is a much smaller country than than Iran.
	There is no the problem that Trump has.
	And I don't think anyone in his administration has thought about it.
	They're not talking about it.
	There is no plan.
	There is no plan.
	Iran must not get nuclear weapons is not a plan.
	It's a slogan.
	It's a slogan.
	Make America great again.
	Peace through strength.
	Whatever.
	It sounds really good on a bumper sticker.
	It's not a plan.
	What are you going to do when the government falls?
	If it falls, what do you do?
	Yeah.
	Well, speaking of which- You walk away?
	Exactly.
	That's a perfect transition because I was going to ask you guys, start asking about how other countries may play a role in this.
	We'll talk about Russia.
	We'll talk about China.
	How this might impact China-Taiwan.
	John Mearsheimer is very concerned that U.S. pulling U.S. assets may increase the risk of China invading Taiwan.
	What do you do if that happens?
	The EU is all shaking because they're figuring out, hold on a second, this might help Russia and their oil price caps and all the rest.
	And we'll get into how that impacts it.
	I'll talk about Saudi Arabia and MBS.
	I think there's some misinders.
	Before we get into that, because one last question before we get into how the other countries might benefit.
	One of my arguments is that, say, messaging and maybe the plan has not been clear.
	But set aside liberating the Iranian people from their oppressive regime.
	Set aside the nuclear question.
	The mere fact that Iran is a state sponsor of terror, it's objective that they fund Hezbollah.
	I mean, it's a known thing.
	They fund and finance terrorism, say, throughout the world, but specifically in certain areas.
	That alone, in the minds of many, is sufficient to warrant regime change.
	So what is the response to they are a known sponsor of international terrorism, but we're not going to do anything about it because fill in the blank.
	What's the response to that?
	Well, I...
	I was going to say briefly, does the risk of terrorism increase or decrease if there is a regime change in Iraq?
	This is exactly my point, because can I say every single Middle Eastern country that is a power, Saudi Arabia, Iraq in the past, all of them have been playing this game at some level, because this is the Middle East.
	The fact is, I would say that Iran has done it far less than some of the other countries.
	If the regime collapses, that will almost certainly increase to an exponential level.
	At least the Iranians, what they're doing, they have it under control.
	If they go, then it's going to multiply and nobody will be able to control it.
	The better thing to do, Is to create a situation, a condition in the Middle East, which makes terrorism less attractive, not just to the populations there, but to the governments also.
	And if the regime in Iran, the government in Iran, has good reasons to think that it's in a stable political situation, where it's finally achieving proper economic growth and as a measure of stability, then the attractions involving itself in this kind of thing will reduce.
	Yeah, and speaking of which, Alex, because you experienced it there in Cyprus, the first other country I wanted to talk about, what you think the impact could be, what their role will be, etc., is the country who's named after a group of people who has the longest history, actually, of dominating Persia.
	More so than the Persians, it's the Turks.
	The Mr. I-would-love-to-recreate-an-Ottoman-Empire now and then.
	As we also discovered, when you overthrow governments, even with the Arab Springs, what do you get?
	You get Muslim Brotherhood rising to power in places like Egypt, etc.
	How did that work out for us, everybody in the West?
	Now, it's purely coincidental.
	I'm talking about Muslim Brotherhood and going to Turkey, I promise.
	But what might Turkey's role in this?
	You have major Kurd populations in Iran that would love to create a greater Kurdistan.
	He's been at war with them for forever.
	You've got longstanding historical.
	Connections between the Turks and the Persians.
	Usually the Turks dominating the Persians, so they might not be welcoming exactly.
	But what might Turkey's role, Alex and Alexander's, be in this?
	And how might it inflame things or improve things?
	These are the games.
	I mean, Alexander, we talk about this all the time.
	These are the games, the geopolitical games that Erdogan thrives in.
	He loves this stuff.
	And he always manages to...
	It looks like he's in trouble, but he always manages to come through and get what he wants.
	In Syria, he joined forces with the United States.
	He joined forces with Israel.
	They overthrew Assad.
	It was a coup d 'etat.
	This wasn't no military victory or any nonsense like that.
	They overthrew Assad.
	Assad, for various reasons, didn't have the strength or desire to fight on as well.
	He bolted for Russia.
	They got HTS Al Jalani in place.
	Now Turkey is fighting nonstop with Israel.
	I mean, they're at the point where they're going to be heading towards a war.
	Actually, I was listening to an Israeli official say, after Iran, Turkey is next.
	So they were working together in Syria.
	And now that they see that Erdogan wants to create what you said, Robert, this greater Ottoman Empire, wants to recreate this thing.
	They're saying, oh crap, now we've got an expansionist, Erdogan, to worry about.
	You know, Erdogan's going to look on and he's going to say, what can I grab?
	What can I put into my empire?
	Where is the opportunity?
	And he is going to do everything he can to take advantage of the chaos that is happening in Iran.
	Keep in mind that it is Erdogan who is holding three to four million refugees in Turkey, and he is extorting.
	A billion plus euros from the European Union every single year.
	Every year.
	Ursula flies to Ankara.
	She delivers a briefcase full of 1 billion euros.
	And she says, please, Sultan Erdogan, keep the refugees in place.
	Do not unleash them into Europe.
	And Erdogan says, great, I will keep them in place.
	Every time they try to play with Erdogan, the European Union, you know what Erdogan does?
	He says, "Really?
	European Union says, here's another billion dollars, Erdogan.
	Please don't do that.
	Erdogan plays everybody off of each other and he plays them to his advantage.
	This is how the guy works.
	This is what he's good at.
	Me and Alexander have been saying for the past five years, Erdogan's run out of luck.
	He's run out of luck.
	He's coming to the end.
	Never happens.
	I don't know if you want to add anything, Alexander?
	No, I would agree.
	I mean, if you want to talk about an expansionist force It is Turkey that has troops in Iraq.
	It is Turkey that has troops in Syria.
	It is Turkey that is now looking to take on Israel in Syria.
	It is Turkey that is probably, has been assisting, and we were talking about terrorists and people of that kind, assisting people to launch missiles into Israel from Syria.
	That happened a couple, about a week ago.
	Completely underreported, by the way, but it happened.
	So he is, exactly as Alex said, a master at this sort of thing.
	And he will move.
	If Iran collapses, he will absolutely move to fill whatever vacuum he sees.
	And by the way, he's also very ambitious in terms of building up his military-industrial complex.
	And he might quite plausibly.
	If he sees a collapse in Iran, decide, you know, this is the moment for me to actually think about going nuclear myself.
	Just to say.
	It's about 20% Turkish population, 20 to 25 in Iran?
	Absolutely.
	They're Turkish speakers.
	There's a difference.
	In Turkey, they are strongly Sunni.
	in Iran, it's a Shia country, and Turkish speakers in Iran.
	So there is a religious difference.
	But of course, if we have a crisis, if we have a vacuum, then what Erdogan will do is he will say, right, the Turkish speakers in Iran need protection.
	Who's going to protect them?
	I am the person who's going to protect them.
	I've got the best army in the Middle East.
	And it is only the biggest army in the Middle East.
	And the Turkish army will move probably into northern Azerbaijan, which will create all kinds of problems.
	The Russians won't like it.
	Other countries won't like it either.
	It will create a whole series of further problems.
	And it's something that, as I said, nobody's thinking about or worrying about.
	But, you know, it will come.
	The other thing is, of course, there's a very large Kurdish community in Iran.
	Iran has historically been the supporter of the Kurds in the Middle East.
	Kurdish is a language that is not completely unrelated to Farsi, if I can say.
	So, of course, Erdogan is concerned about Kurds in Syria, in Iraq.
	He will probably want to be concerned with the Kurds in Iran as well.
	So, all kinds of things will start to happen.
	Before we go over to Russia and China, the other big actor there in the Middle Eastern world, in the Arab world, the Arab Peninsula, is MBS at Saudi Arabia.
	President Trump has gone to great lengths to work, get better relations with them, get them to invest in the U.S., get oil and gas prices down.
	You'll get to that in just a bit about one of the most devastating consequences of this conflict if it escalates or gets drawn out for President Trump is gas and oil prices spiking, doubling, tripling.
	All of a sudden, the cost of living gets way out of control and the economy sinks and he's done for no matter what else happens geopolitically.
	I see a couple of things.
	One is, I see a lot of people in the West who still appear to believe What was the case seven years ago that the royals, especially the Saudis, ever since 1979, the Saudis and Iran were at each other.
	One is Sunni, one is Shia.
	Implicitly, the Ayatollah was saying all the royal regimes were illegitimate, both politically, from a theological perspective, a wide range of perspectives.
	And there was a long-time conflict.
	The CIA decided, hey, let's unleash Wahhabis because that will be a counterbalance to the Shias.
	That didn't blow back at all, right?
	If you don't understand anything about terrorism in the last 35 years, for those people to say, hey, go, you know, we're placing Iran.
	We'll lead to less terrorism.
	Good luck with that.
	But how do you think?
	But in fact, there's been a change.
	There's been negotiated deals and recognition between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
	The royals actually appear to be very nervous.
	Like here in the West, they're portraying it as, oh, the UAE, Dubai, Qatar, the Saudis, they're all excited.
	They're secretly cheering for him, you know, like that Mitt Mitt.
	Say, oh, thank God they're doing our dirty business for us.
	That guy can't keep his mouth shut to save his life.
	Oh, hey, we already got the missiles in Ukraine ready to go.
	Trump's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	I already let that guy out of the back.
	How might MBS respond?
	Because it looks to me like, contrary to conventional wisdom, they're not excited about the idea of an extended conflict with Iran.
	They're not excited about regime change in Iran.
	That's no longer the case with the royals, in that this might make the royals very nervous.
	How might they react and handle all of this?
	Particularly MBS and Saudi Arabia, but the others as well.
	What MBS and the Saudis want is stability.
	Stability in Saudi Arabia so that they can retain control of the country.
	And MBS has very, very ambitious plans to develop Saudi Arabia.
	He absolutely does not want a chaotic, unstable environment surrounded by war.
	Now, it is absolutely true that for a certain period of time,
	That was a product of the fact that Iran, after the 1979 revolution, was a revolutionary state seeking to expand a conception of revolutionary reorganisation of Islamic countries in a way that the Saudis, quite rightly, by the way, Very understandably, saw as very, very threatening to themselves.
	Now, as I said, Iran's state system has gradually been evolving.
	It is no longer that revolutionary state that it was 20, 30 years ago.
	It's changed.
	It's become established.
	It's become much more conservative.
	It's become much more predictable.
	So for that reason, the Saudis and the Iranians did a deal.
	They basically said, let's leave each other alone.
	Let's cooperate on oil issues and let's agree to keep the Middle East.
	At least our part of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf stable, so that Saudi Arabia can concentrate on its economic development and Iran can concentrate on getting on with membership of the BRICS group and all of that sort of thing.
	And that is an arrangement that I think suits MBS and the Saudis very well.
	A prolonged war which could expand to their region.
	which might result in attacks on the Saudi oil industry, which could result in attacks on the desalination plants, upon which Saudi Arabia depends to keep its population supplied with fresh water.
	A situation where Iran might again decide to start trying to cause problems,
	With all of the things that we were talking about before, massive refugee flows, power vacuums, all of those things, for the Saudis, all of that is a nightmare.
	So they absolutely do not want a prolonged war.
	They absolutely do not want to see a collapse in Iran.
	They absolutely do not want to see Iran acquire nuclear weapons either.
	Undoubtedly worried that this situation might lead Iran to decide it should acquire nuclear weapons.
	What they are trying to do at the moment, all of the reports say the same thing, is that they are trying to arrange for this conflict to end and for a return to the negotiation track, which was happening before the conflict began and which was interrupted by the Israeli attack on Iran.
	I'll ask you this.
	I'll just bring this one up because I saw it.
	Trump said Iran wants to come to the White House and he's considering it.
	I'm Googling to see if that's true.
	All three of you, I think it's safe to say are anti-intervention right now, or at least the current form of intervention.
	Taking it from where we are as of today, you've described the worst case scenario in your views if it continues or escalates.
	If you leave Iran alone, so to speak, or don't do anything militarily, What might you think is the worst case scenario if things continue as is going forward now, if you leave Iran to its own devices?
	Well, if things just stop, then it is going to be very bad because, as I said, it would be seen in Iran not as a resolution of the conflict.
	But simply as a ceasefire in preparation for a further attack from Israel, which sooner or later is going to come, and the Iranians are going to start taking their own measures, and we could almost certainly see a resumption of the fighting.
	things are not as bad as that because there are many many other stakeholders there are the Russians there are the Gulf states there are people with There are people in Iran who also want to try to achieve some kind of rapprochement with, if not the West, at least with the wider world.
	The president, Pesishkan, being probably one of those people.
	So the right thing to do.
	Now, I think if that happens, everybody's interests ultimately, including the Iranians, aligns.
	And we will eventually reach a deal.
	It may take a little time.
	It may require some degree of negotiation.
	But I think it can be done.
	And I think, by the way, J.D. Vance's, I thought, rather extremely intelligent comment the other day, which I thought was helpful to the president.
	In effect, we're steering everybody back to this question of addressing the question of Iran's nuclear enrichment program.
	I think, you know, that is the way to go.
	to go back to that and to see a way forward.
	And to hope that not too much damage has been done by the events of the last week.
	Basically, we talked about Risk of terrorism goes up, not down, with the continuation of this conflict, especially if it results in regime change in Iran.
	All the other collateral risks related to the Middle East in terms of instability, in terms of refugees, in terms of other aspects, all goes up.
	But let's talk about the last one before we get to...
	This is kind of, you could argue, the first potential BRICS war.
	In other words, that BRICS has really developed as a geopolitical entity in response to Biden, Biden administration.
	And putting aside the currency issues, I see it as a geopolitical coalition that might play a much, I think there's a lot of conversation discussion out there that, China won't have any role.
	Hmm.
	Wonder what those big planes are coming from China that turned off their responders.
	Maybe they're helping them out.
	Maybe they're not just willing to roll over.
	Maybe Putin is tired of all the replacement regimes in the Middle East and isn't super eager on that happening in Iran on his doorsteps geographically and physically.
	But before we get to those countries, to me, the biggest imminent risk to President Trump here in the United States, and to a certain degree all of Western Europe, is that the number one way that these conflicts backfire traditionally on the West is oil prices, oil and gas prices.
	That OPEC, the first one and the second one, arguably Jimmy Carter lost because the Iranian revolution led in part to an oil price shock that gave stagnation going into the 1980 election he was done for.
	That arguably Nixon was able to be impeached, and not only because he extended the Vietnam War in ways that was counterproductive with the way we left Saigon, but also because he was more vulnerable because of stagflation, because of the OPEC shock, also related to what?
	In an Israeli-Middle Eastern war.
	So to me, right now the number one thing Trump got elected on was the cost of living.
	He has substantially reduced.
	We're almost in a deflationary state the first six months here in the United States.
	Number one reason, 10% to 15% reduction in oil and gas costs as the number one input cost for the cost of living throughout the United States.
	In the way that Russia was never going to experience huge out-of-control price shocks because they controlled their own energy, and so that cost they could control all the way through.
	We don't in the United States to a substantial degree.
	Due to the nature of what oil we produce, we still depend on imports for certain kinds of oil and gas.
	Can you describe what's the risk of oil and gas prices going up if the conflict extends?
	Just due, in some cases, to the fear of chaos.
	Other cases, Israel is trying to sabotage Iranian oil production capacity.
	What do you think the likelihood is if Iran gets desperate or what will time it to close the Straits of Hormuz, whereby 20% plus of the world's oil and energy goes through?
	Nobody better to talk to about shipping than Greeks, just in general.
	Also, by the way, the Greek shipping magnate, still the greatest tax evaders in the world.
	Just a little side point.
	Nobody knows how to avoid those Greek shipping magnates.
	But what's the risk of oil and gas pricing shocking the Western economies if this conflict continues?
	They're the greatest tax evaders and the greatest sanctions busters, just to say.
	They're very good at all of these things.
	But already there are reports that insurance costs to send ships in the Gulf are growing.
	And that, if it continues for too long, is going to start working through to higher oil prices, inevitably.
	And apparently there's already been disruptions in signals.
	You know, the shifts need They need to know where everything is.
	Apparently, there's one tanker that was relocated in rural Russia because the transponders were all scrambled because all of this is going on.
	So, already there is an effect.
	Now, it's a minimal effect at the moment.
	And at the moment, there is there is a certain degree of oversupply in the market.
	But if we have a prolonged war in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, Then, of course, all bets are off.
	Because in a war, things start to happen, which, in peace, people do not want to do.
	So Iran doesn't want to close the Straits of Hormuz.
	When it's in peacetime, because it exports oil through the Straits of Hormuz to China and places of that kind.
	But if it can't export oil, if it starts to feel that it's desperate, then it can mine the Straits of Hormuz, because that expands the war.
	It puts pressure and gives leverage to Iran.
	To force other parties to stop.
	And that's just one possibility.
	And of course, if there's a collapse in Iran, well, anything can happen, because then you can have any number of different players in the Gulf who might be doing all kinds of things.
	Again, they might have interests in disrupting the oil market, or they might be trying to get shares control of parts of the oil market.
	For themselves by preventing other people and seizing oil fields and doing all those kind of things.
	So you do not want a war in this area, a prolonged war in this area.
	American policy, for as long as I can remember, has been to try to keep a stable situation in the Gulf.
	And that ought to be its policy today.
	That absolutely argues against a long war, and it absolutely argues against seeking a regime collapse in Iran with all of the enormous risks that go with it.
	Alex, I got my Mossad check over here, and I got my Mullah check over here.
	I got to make sure I get my Putin check in.
	Now, let's turn outside of the Middle Eastern region of the other two, in my view, biggest actors that could play a role in this, could benefit from it, could suffer from it, depends on how it all works out.
	But I don't think they're just going to sit by completely idly the way I'm hearing in the Western press, like has happened maybe in the past in some Mid-Eastern conflicts.
	And so we'll start with Russia.
	Or as Trump likes to say, Russia, Russia, Russia.
	He was over at the G7.
	He's like, why is it the G7?
	It should be the G8.
	Instead, I got this midget Macron.
	I got this nitwit mirth.
	I got all these losers.
	I got a hitter hanging around with him in a bad mood anyway because Netanyahu lied to me about what would happen if they bombed him.
	Thought Iran would come rushing and sign the deal so eager and that it wasn't happening so you could tell he's in a bad mood.
	And he clearly doesn't really pretend he likes Macron, but he's like, you could just see he was in a bad, bad mood.
	He's like, where's Putin?
	If Putin was here, this would all be better.
	He goes, wait, why'd you kick Putin out?
	This is so stupid.
	He's the only useful guy to talk to here.
	Now I got no friends.
	I got all losers.
	Rejects I got to deal with.
	I got this little midget Grizzolinsky coming up asking, 40 billion, 40 billion, please.
	What will Russia's role in all of this be?
	Iran, as you guys have pointed out, Iran had sat on their Russian-Iranian strategic defense agreement for years.
	I mean, kind of oddly in a lot of external viewpoints.
	Like you're pointing out, a lot of external viewpoints are like, how is this great negotiating leverage to keep announcing you're enriching uranium higher and higher and higher?
	Won't this maybe backfire more than help?
	The other strange one to observers, aside from the utter lack of security for a country known for its intelligence operations, at least used to be.
	I mean, they're still using WhatsApp.
	Many Iranians have sent out a message.
	Probably quit using WhatsApp and other Israeli technology that's following them around for where they can go.
	But what might Putin do?
	Putin has already offered President Trump one role, which could be a mediator role because Iran trusts him.
	To a degree, Israel trusts him.
	Other Middle Eastern actors trust him in ways that, quite frankly, they don't trust the United States of America.
	There could be other roles.
	But now Iran has signed.
	That strategic military agreement, in my understanding, the parliament approved that agreement with Russia, which involves certain aspects.
	If Russia got involved in the conflict in some meaningful way, there's probably an argument that they could stop the conflict, that there's different roles Russia can have.
	What role do you think?
	What are some of those opportunities Russia could take?
	How could it work in their benefit?
	How could it work in their detriment?
	I think that Russia right now is going to be Playing more of a consulting role, to be honest.
	I also think China is going to take the same position, even though there are the cargo planes that are flying back and forth.
	I mean, we don't really know what exactly is being transported in those cargo planes.
	But I think that Russia, at least for Russia, there's only so much they can do.
	Their number one priority is Ukraine and finishing the war in Ukraine.
	So they're going to remain focused on that.
	And if the Iranian government can hold, then I think that Russia and China will step up their support.
	What does that mean?
	It could mean weapons deliveries, maybe more so from China than Russia.
	Definitely it could be intel, satellite intel, things like this.
	Very much what the U.S. has been providing Ukraine.
	Russia could be providing the same thing to Iran.
	But everything hinges.
	On the Iranian regime surviving.
	I mean, that's the most important for Iran, for the Iranian regime.
	It has to survive if it's going to expect any type of support from Russia or China.
	Does Russia even have anything to offer by way of support now that they haven't already bogged down with the war in Ukraine?
	Like some people I can imagine saying Russia's got nothing to offer.
	They've got their own issues to deal with now.
	There's intelligence.
	Obviously, they could move nukes in if they wanted, which was I was going to ask.
	What are some of the risks to Putin if this gets out of hand in Iran?
	Because he seemed sincerely angry about this going the way it went.
	I mean, I think your initial interpretation was correct about that call between Putin and Trump, where Putin called Trump.
	And I infer that not only because I get there's different ways to interpret the readouts and all that.
	We have very unique readouts here in America now.
	It's Trump's Truth Post.
	So, you know, good luck figuring that one out.
	That's its own lexicon.
	You could just become an expert in interpreting Trump's Truth Post about what it means geopolitically and diplomatic.
	But just Trump's tenor.
	Like, Trump all of a sudden felt like he was under attack.
	He started putting out, look at all these peace things I've done in these other places.
	And I get nowhere to spend, I was like, hmm, what?
	So it seemed like Russia is concerned about how this conflict might progress.
	What are some of the risks to Russia and how they might counterbalance it?
	And is there any chance?
	Because I hadn't seen this discussed, but when I was debating or discussing with Vice President Vance the issues related to his post.
	One of my points that I try to highlight in terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Russia's role in trying to prevent that, but historically, both the U.S. and Russia kind of violated at least the spirit of the agreement during the Cold War, where we would place nuclear weapons in other countries, including notably Turkey that led in part to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
	And we said it was still not nuclear proliferation because we were still in control of those weapons.
	One of the issues, you know, people pretend that Ukraine had nuclear weapons they gave up in exchange for the Budapest memorandum, which meant somehow we're permanently obligated.
	It's not what that was all about.
	But is there any chance at all that Russia moves nuclear weapons into a place like Iran or threatens the world on that behalf if they choose?
	That's their ultimate power, in my view, other than oil prices and their ground troops and their intelligence.
	They are the biggest nuclear weapon power in the world.
	So what are the risks to Putin of everything that could happen with Iran?
	What leverage, what tools does he have in his toolbox?
	Yeah, I think that the Russians have many, many concerns here.
	Firstly, I think at a very fundamental level, Putin is absolutely furious about the fact that an attack was launched on the eve of negotiation, and Russia was involved in that negotiation.
	We know that because Trump has talked about this, and the Russians have discussed it too.
	They were not directly a part of the negotiation between Iran and Russia and the United States.
	But they were they were there.
	And the idea was this, that as part of the deal, Iran hands over its entire empire.
	so the russians were keen to do that and they were offering to deal with it and of course they had this security agreement with iran and then economic agreements with iran and they would have been in
	They were going to supply fighter jets to Iran and modernize its military system over time, and that was all supposed to be part of a structure to stabilize the situation.
	So Putin is furious that this attack happened.
	At a time when these negotiations were underway, he was supposed to travel to Iran to discuss all of this with the Iranians.
	You don't do things like that to Vladimir Putin, and he doesn't notice, then he doesn't care.
	I mean, he feels very angry if he's treated in that way.
	But beyond these specific things, the Russians do have other bigger concerns.
	Firstly, they are worried about nuclear.
	They do not want Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
	They do not want an example to be provided to other countries like Turkey, like Saudi Arabia, whereby they start acquiring nuclear weapons as well and other countries as well.
	So they don't want to see that happen.
	So they want a deal done with Iran.
	And the US to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
	And this crisis, as we've already discussed, makes it more likely that Iran will want to acquire nuclear weapons.
	So that is a major concern for the Russians.
	Beyond that, if there is a collapse in Iran, then, of course, in Russia, which is not far away, and of course the Central Asian states, which are close allies of Russia, border on Iran.
	A collapse in Iran creates insecurities in Central Asia, in Southern Russia.
	The Russians have had a long-standing history of having to fight Islamist terrorist groups on their own territory.
	They will not want to see an Iran used and become a sort of, you know, launched platform for that sort of thing.
	And of course, the Russians also and the head of the Chinese, too, will not want to see a pro-American government established in Iran, because if that is indeed a possible outcome of all of this, because they don't want American bases in Iran again, again in the southern countries.
	So for all of these reasons, the Russians are very, very upset and very unhappy about this.
	And they can do quite a lot, actually.
	They can provide Iran with a certain measure of economic assistance.
	They're already providing, they were already providing before the war, natural gas to Iran.
	It's a fact that people don't know.
	Iran has this enormous gas resources, but they're very underdeveloped.
	The gas industry in Iran is chaotic.
	So Russia started to export natural gas to Iran.
	They also were thinking of providing other things to Iran.
	One of the things that they could provide to Iran is food.
	For example.
	and um again if there's a major crisis in iran they can do that and of course here the russians and the chinese together can provide lots of things like they can help the iranians sort out their communication systems no longer relying on whatsapp doing all of these things that we've seen happen which made The Russians are very good at that kind of thing.
	The Chinese, of course, are even better.
	So there's a lot that the Russians can provide to Iran.
	But at the moment, what they're focused on, and Alex is absolutely right, is that they're trying to get this thing stopped.
	They want the fighting to stop so that the negotiations can resume, so that there is no possibility of Iran going nuclear or of a collapse in Iran with all of the problems that we spoke about.
	What about the idea that, say, China and Russia wouldn't mind the war, the conflict going on, America getting bogged down into it because then Russia can have its way in Ukraine and China can potentially exploit the situation to take over Taiwan?
	And is there any truth?
	I'm trying to verify this as we're live.
	Any truth to the rumors that military force has been diverted from supporting or being near Taiwan to get closer to Iran?
	I'm hearing conflicting reports on that.
	Well, American forces being transferred.
	Yes.
	Right.
	So on this, can I just say, by the way, going back to an earlier question of Roberts, I mean, there is no possibility whatsoever, in my opinion, of the Russians deploying nuclear weapons on Iranian territory.
	I think that would be completely uncharacteristic of Putin.
	He never seeks to escalate conflicts in that kind of way.
	Nikita Khrushchev.
	Might have done that in 1962.
	Vladimir Putin is a very, very different person.
	He wouldn't do that, and nor would the Russian leadership at this time.
	I mean, that's a risk of World War III that no Russian leader at the present time is going to take.
	Now, about bogging down the United States.
	Here I think Russia and China are in different positions.
	I think that for them, the risks of a prolonged war in the Middle East, in Iran, are far too great.
	Of chaos in Central Asia, it's far too dangerous for them.
	Yes, it's true that for the moment, the Americans are having to divert arms from Ukraine and are taking less of an interest in Ukraine because they're focused on the war with Iran.
	But the Russians will say long term, well, you know, we get a momentary benefit from all of this.
	But over the long term.
	Over the longer term, and not the very long term, this is much more dangerous for us.
	And if oil prices rise, yes, we make more money in the short term.
	But again, we can't really afford the instability so close to our own borders and our own territory.
	China is different because it's further away.
	And here I think that the Chinese have consistently succeeded in capitalizing on the United States getting bogged down in conflicts and China has taken advantage of that.
	And I think the Chinese, again, I don't think that they are specifically saying to themselves, let's prolong this war in some way because it will play out to their advantage.
	But if it does get prolonged, I could definitely.
	Now, what are the risks to China?
	Because the main risk I see is that they depend a lot on Iranian oil and the cheapness of Iranian oil, how that might impact things, versus the reward potential.
	To Viva's question, it's been confirmed.
	We're removing U.S. assets.
	Particularly the aircraft carriers and other from, in fact, Mearsheimer was complaining about this yesterday.
	I know people in the Trump administration, it's been publicly reported, people in the Trump administration have been very unhappy about this problem.
	That they see Ukraine as a distraction.
	they see the Middle East as a distraction.
	Their perspective is...
	I'm not for war with China or anything else, but putting that aside for the moment, if you are of the side that believes that there needs to be presence in China to deter China from further involvement in the South China seas, and especially with Taiwan, then supporting this war undermines your objective.
	No question about that.
	And that part of the China hawk part of the administration is losing by trying to have war everywhere.
	Unless you're, you know, Lindsey Graham.
	And you've been promised a lifetime supply of Zelensky lookalike prostitutes in exchange for being a deep state chill for the next decade.
	You are not eager to have war all around the entire world.
	But how might China handle it?
	Will China seize it as an opportunity for those that are skeptical of China's intentions, questions about where Xi's power status is currently in China?
	Might that lead to the trade conflict between the US and China?
	Might China seize an opportunity to grab Taiwan?
	On the one hand.
	On the other hand, might this deepen the bricks in the sense that China provide tactical support, China provide weapons support, China provide other kinds of support with Iran because of the access to remaining oil?
	So yeah, basically the same question.
	What are the risks and potential rewards of China's decision tree of decisions as it impacts the Israel-Iran-US conflict?
	I think the immediate reaction of the Chinese.
	We'll also be to try to bring this conflict to an end because Iran is now a member of the BRICS.
	China has invested a great deal in building up the BRICS.
	They've just built a railway, by the way.
	People are not aware of this, but they've just built a railway from China across Pakistan to Iran.
	The first train arrived from China in Iran just a few days ago, just before the conquest.
	So the Chinese have invested an awful lot in Iran.
	And of course, practical people as they are, they won't want to lose that investment.
	But over time, if the conflict continues, then the calculus changes.
	And the Chinese quite plausibly will say, yes.
	We are taking a hit in higher oil prices.
	Yes, we're not getting the same cheap oil that we were getting from Iran, but we can still get our oil at a higher price from other people.
	The Saudis will sell us oil.
	And, of course, our Russian friends will.
	So we're going to start working much harder to forge an even closer relationship with the Russians because...
	That's ultimately our reliable long-term supplier.
	And yes, if the war is prolonged for very long, then we'll keep the Americans bogged down and we're building up our naval forces all the time in the Pacific.
	And we are exerting our power We've managed to persuade Malaysia to join the BRICS.
	It looks like Indonesia might be persuaded as well.
	So this is something that we absolutely will capitalize on.
	Vietnam, I believe, has also joined the BRICS or is indicating that it will want to do so.
	So you can see how the Chinese, just as they used the Vietnam War and the War on Terror, In the early 2000s, both of those played out to their advantage.
	Because of their relative remoteness geographically from these conflicts, are in a much better position to capitalize on them and to benefit from American over-focus on these conflicts than, and say Russia is.
	Russia is for the Russians, the costs, For China, the benefits might outweigh the risks and the costs.
	So, you know, they will look at this in different ways.
	They're not identical.
	The one blowback, just real quick, the one blowback from all of this is that BRICS has avoided any type of military component.
	And I think looking at all of this, BRICS may start to say to themselves, you know what?
	Maybe we should start incorporating some sort of military aspect to all of this.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, I was going to read some of the questions from locals and Rumble because some of them are on point.
	Dred Robert asks, would Pakistan or another country sell them a nuclear weapon?
	Or if not, the technology they lack to enrich the uranium to weapons grade?
	I mean, what I'm understanding from this is nobody in the region wants Iran to be nuclear capable, period, full stop.
	Okay.
	Yeah, correct.
	And there's no amount of money that a country is going to take to give a nation that supports terrorism the technology.
	It's the power of politics in general.
	The advantage of having nuclear weapons is that no one else has the nuclear weapon, right?
	And this has been part of the debate surrounding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was when it was pushed through in 1968, the quid pro quo offer to the world was, you join this.
	And we'll make it, and you have now a guaranteed legal internationally recognized right to develop peaceful nuclear energy.
	And in fact, we will help, or the nuclear country, we'll help facilitate that.
	In exchange, you agree to certain inspection regimes with the IEA and the others, and you agree not to develop them for non-peaceful purposes.
	What's interesting is the use, I pointed out with J.D. Mance, that they're using the civilian versus defense, and it's like...
	The reason why Vance is doing that is because the United States of America has decided that developing biological weapons isn't really weapons.
	It doesn't violate the Biological Weapons Proliferation Treaty because they're a defense.
	It's called gain-of-function, but don't worry, it's all for defense.
	And hence, still peaceful, according to the U.S. government.
	This is why there's some nomenclature, gamesmanship going on there.
	Reaching into part of that question, follow up on Viva's question, there has been discussion, I've been shocked at this for the last five years, but you now see it in legitimate opinion, so to speak, of the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict.
	What if Israel uses nuclear weapons on Iran?
	Now we've had Pakistan come out and say, if Israel uses nuclear weapons, Pakistan will now have a nuclear war.
	With Pakistan, we'll use nuclear weapons against Israel.
	What do you think the risk is that Israel uses nuclear weapons, the risk that Pakistan then nukes Israel in response, and that we're in, honest to God, nuclear conflict?
	I don't even want to think.
	Yeah, I mean, that would be horrific.
	Yeah, that would be horrific.
	But I mean, it's all possible.
	It's all possible.
	But I think we would be entering a very different world.
	Strategically, what's, I mean, like I say, with the capabilities that regular missiles have or even hypersonic, what is any conceivable strategic reason to use a nuclear weapon in the first place?
	Other than symbolic, like this is nuclear war, you get, I would imagine, not more accuracy, but you get exactly what you need from conventional or even the current high-tech levels of weaponry.
	Oh, we just lost somebody.
	There is no good reason that Israel or anyone would use nuclear weapons other than to make a point, in which case it wouldn't be Israel, it might be the retaliatory response to Israel.
	The trouble is that in war, people stop thinking in rational terms.
	And if one side or another starts to feel very desperate, they would...
	And if we start using nuclear weapons, that will create a crisis and that will play out to advantage some way because otherwise we're going to lose.
	So I don't want to speculate too deeply about these things, but I'm afraid I agree with Alex.
	I think that these scenarios are possible even though one doesn't want to think about them too closely.
	What we ought to do, Is do everything possible that we can so that they never happen.
	And yes, if one side starts using nuclear weapons, other players, and Pakistan is a possibility, might feel that they also have to react in some ways.
	And if Pakistan starts using nuclear weapons, the question is, what will India do?
	And India starts using nuclear weapons.
	What will China do?
	And I mean, the whole thing becomes too terrifying.
	Really, even to think about.
	Every single dystopian film starts out with some sort of, you know, the TV series silo or etc.
	Where somebody comes up with some inspired notion that nuclear weapons could solve their problem.
	And that once you get on the escalatory ladder, it's real hard to get off that escalatory ladder.
	But I have two final questions before we turn to any of the tip questions that Viva has in the chat.
	The one is – but the first – But before we get to that question, the last country is sort of the first country in all of this.
	What might be the ramifications on Israel?
	I've been trying to tell to my Israeli friends here in the States when not getting into inflammatory arguments with them online.
	I only partially apologize for calling Gad a honey bitch rather than a honey badger.
	Is that this could be devastating for Israel.
	I see a lot.
	I see Barry Weiss and other people that are on the Israeli side saying this is going to be great.
	We'll get our final achievement over the ultimate enemy in Iran that has sworn death to us since 1979.
	This will bring permanent peace to Israel.
	We took out Hezbollah.
	We took out Hamas.
	We now own and effectively annex large parts of Gaza.
	We now took out Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya, Hussein in Iraq.
	Now we've taken out the Iranian regime and there's no nuclear threat left.
	That's their perception of where they're advocating they think the outcomes could be.
	But there's a lot of other possible outcomes for Israel.
	I think in terms of its geopolitical security, I think it could be a lot worse rather than better.
	The other aspect of that, there could be a harder line government in Iran rather than one that exists or chaos with civil war, with terror groups, with all kinds of weapons, et cetera, like Libya, like Syria.
	But the other potential risk, I think, also is the global.
	But we've often talked about whatever you think good, bad or otherwise about Israel.
	The court of global public opinion matters greatly for a country so small.
	So right now, on Monday, I was on with Richard Barris.
	People's Pundit daily you can find on Locals, Rumble, YouTube, etc.
	One of the great data posters in the world.
	But we talked about it around the world since the Gaza-Hamas conflict of October 7th.
	What shifted from a very sympathetic Israeli reaction is now where Israel is literally underwater in public opinion in every single country in the world.
	They have negative opinion.
	Including the United States of America.
	The only portion of the U.S. population that both likes, has a favorable view of Israel, and trusts Netanyahu to do the right thing are the Huckabees of the world.
	White evangelical Protestants over the age of 50 who love Fox News.
	I call them boomer cons.
	And even they have the lowest approval rate of Netanyahu and Israel that they have ever had of Israel.
	And that's it.
	Every other group doesn't trust Israel or doesn't trust Netanyahu.
	Every other group in America.
	Israel has a net negative rating right now in the United States.
	I believe that net negative rating will skyrocket if the U.S. gets involved on this war and anything goes AWOL, anything goes sideways, anything goes wrong for Trump or for the United States or for the West.
	But what do you think in terms of assessing what might happen with Israel, how might this play out for Israel depending on the different paths that could be taken?
	Just to say, I think the worst outcome for Israel was one in which they found themselves in a very long, prolonged war with Iran, a country of 92 million people with a huge territory and big industrial resources.
	Israel is itself a small country, and I don't think that Israel really is a society and a country that can afford that kind of prolonged war.
	against a country much bigger than itself.
	So Israel should try and work hard to achieve an outcome to this, which will make its own position Now, here I'm going to say something.
	I think Israel has worked itself up into a very, very bad obsession about Iran.
	He thinks that Iran is the absolute tremendous danger to Israel.
	I think that overstates the reality very greatly.
	I think what Israel should support is some kind of a negotiated resolution of this uranium enrichment crisis, this issue.
	Of Iran having a nuclear weapon and all of that.
	It should want the Russians to go into Iran to actually, you know, develop a closer and tighter relationship with Iran.
	Russia, by the way, is quite friendly to Israel.
	I mean, very different from the old Soviet Union, which was hostile.
	Russia today as a country and a society.
	Is relatively friendly and sympathetic to Israel overall.
	So I think the Russians would not want to see the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons or become a threat to Israel.
	They wanted a stable place that they can rely upon to keep their soft underbelly, if you like, under some sort of control.
	And I think, as I said, one of the problems that the Israelis have is that they've developed this fear of Iran, which has a historical explanation with events going back to the 1979 revolution.
	But they should put that aside and allow events in Iran to take their course and Iran to get integrated into the BRICS.
	And Iran will gradually evolve and change in that way, and it will become...
	And I think that's a much, much better way forward than a war which could become prolonged and which carries all the enormous risks that we said and which could leave Israel isolated in the way that, Robert, you've just been talking about.
	Go ahead, Alex.
	Go back to the JCPOA, go back to the negotiations, or the JCPOA negotiations that Wyckoff was working on.
	He was on the sixth meeting.
	They were engaging in technical talks.
	That's how far along they were.
	Get back to that, because I think either outcome, whether it's a long war or a short regime change, is going to turn out bad for Israel, for every country in the region.
	I don't see a good way out of this if it's either a short or a long war.
	The only way out of it, as you pointed out, Robert, in your post to J.D. Vance, to the vice president, is get back to the negotiations.
	They had a deal in place, and Witkoff and the Iranian foreign minister were getting along just fine.
	They were both very positive with the progress.
	People are going to say go back to the negotiating table, but Iran was found to have been concealing uranium or not allowing visitation or inspection facilities.
	So how do you trust them?
	Alexander can explain this better, but I've heard that a lot as well.
	But that's an argument that Alexander explained the other day during a live stream.
	What I get to say is, to some extent, my own opinion.
	But what basically happened was this.
	began its nuclear enrichment back in the 1990s when they discovered that Saddam Hussein had been working towards achieving a nuclear bomb and in 1991 after They discovered how close he'd got to acquiring a nuclear bomb.
	Iran had fought an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein, and I think they were absolutely shocked by that.
	And they said, if Saddam has that kind of capability, we need to be ready ourselves.
	And that's, I think, why they launched their enrichment program.
	Stupidly, they concealed that from the world.
	Not just at the time, but afterwards.
	And it's constantly coming back to haunt them because traces of this earlier enrichment program constantly get discovered.
	But it's, I think, universally accessible.
	Unfortunately, what happens is every so often, as I said, traces of this earlier program come to light, which the Iranians have never fully been open about.
	This is exactly...
	They found about other things that the Iranians had been doing more than 20 years ago with this previous program.
	They said that Iran was not in conformity with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
	But this relates, as I said, to historic events of more than 20 years ago.
	It is completely irrelevant.
	Yep, and for my Israeli friends out there, just a reminder that if the IEA is our source of authority for going in for military conflict, well, there's one country in the world that has never signed it and has been consistently found to be in breach of the international customs and principles by this same agency, and that nation would be Israel.
	But to the last question, if you had 60 seconds, if you will, to sit in the room with President Trump and said, here's why geopolitically it makes much more sense to try to pursue a diplomatic solution than to pursue a military solution, what would be that explanation in this conflict?
	That this is incredibly high risk, extremely dangerous, and it is politically very dangerous for President Trump in the United States as well.
	The people of the United States do not want this war.
	They've made that absolutely clear.
	I think the opinion polls are showing this.
	Clearly, he is going against many of the promises that they felt he made to them during the election.
	If this becomes prolonged, then that is going to have political consequences for him.
	If for no other, but I don't believe the president only thinks about his own political position, but for all of the reasons that we've set out over the course of this program, a war in the Middle East against Iran is very, very high risk for the United States, and for that reason should be avoided, especially when a diplomatic solution is there on the table.
	Your version, Alex?
	An easy diplomatic solution is there.
	It's already been worked through.
	And there's no plan that he has otherwise.
	I mean, he has no plan.
	It's obvious.
	There is no plan outside of the Whitcoff-Iranian foreign minister negotiations.
	That's a plan.
	That's a good plan.
	But everything else, there is no plan.
	A great president, before he was president, saying that the dumbest thing you can do is get involved in a war with Iran.
	He said that you have good negotiation.
	He said a war with Iran would be a sign of a bad negotiator.
	So, President Trump, don't be a bad negotiator.
	Don't get in a war with Iran.
	If you want nuclear nonproliferation, don't escalate.
	If you want less terrorism, don't escalate.
	If you want global stability, don't escalate.
	If you want to preserve the U.S. economy and your gains in it, don't escalate.
	If you want controls over immigration and not for it to get out of hand with 90 million-plus refugees flooding the world, Don't escalate.
	Operate on your instincts.
	Get a deal.
	Get us out of there.
	Let me see if there's any questions that would be on point.
	I will not belabor this, and I'll get to anything I don't read now later on.
	ClownPillPapa says, the only player that would use a nuke is BB.
	If he signals that he would do it, would he be cooed out?
	I don't think Israel would, personally.
	I think nobody would, and Israel would not stand to benefit from it whatsoever.
	But would he get cooed out?
	I think if this doesn't go successfully, Netanyahu has barely survived three times in the last three years.
	I think he's politically DOA.
	Oh, sorry, gentlemen, what were you going to say?
	No, I mean, I absolutely hope so, and I would agree.
	I would say something else, that they're very, very intelligent people in Israel as well, in the government, in the political and military system, and I'm sure that they will say if any suggestion to do such a thing is made by anybody there, well, for heaven's sake, let's not do this.
	This would be mad.
	It would be disastrous for Israel for us to do something as stupid and as crazy as this.
	We got, trust Trump.
	That is the only bottom line.
	He cannot come out until you and the whole world know exactly what his move is.
	And reliance on trust is not, I mean, it's faith, but it's not an argument.
	Yeah, as Barris and I pointed out, as with the Duran, we pointed out multiple times, the Duran was absolutely right about what was happening in Ukraine.
	Trump was taking the advice of General Kellogg.
	And what has that resulted in?
	No resolution at all.
	Something he campaigned on for four years.
	Get it completely undermined because he trusts somebody selling him an ad.
	Which, God bless President Trump, but his virtue and his vice is he's a great salesman.
	And a great salesman tends to love to buy an own ad.
	And the pitch of, the seductive pitch, the siren song pitch of this will be easy.
	This will be simple.
	This will be no problem.
	This will lead to wonderful things all around the world.
	If you hear anybody pitch a war on those terms, run!
	Because it has never worked out that way.
	Unfortunately, President Trump bought into that misrepresentation by the Mark Levins, the B.B. Netanyahu's, and the rest.
	But his instincts are good.
	Vice President Vance's instincts are exceptional.
	Tulsi Gabbard's instincts are exceptional.
	And their advice, I believe, will be, and I think President's instincts are, don't get involved in another dumb war in the Middle East.
	As he said in the 2016 debate in South Carolina, they lied and people died.
	Don't be the one to be on the other end of that eight years later.
	So that'd be my advice.
	Thanks for everybody.
	If you want to follow the Duran, great geopolitical analysis, great objective analysis.
	Go to the Duran.
	The local community is a very vibrant community.
	You'll get all kinds of perspectives from all around the world, literally all around the world.
	I get people who hate me for conflicting reasons because that's how diverse the opinion is of people that watch the Duran.
	There's some folks in key positions of influence and power who watch them and watch them for good reason.
	Robert Kennedy described the Duran as the best geopolitical analysis out there anywhere because they are.
	I've watched them for half a decade and can vouch for them.
	Alexander, one of the few things I do daily and weekly is watch the Duran, watch Alexander McCorus, watch Alex Christoforu.
	Again, he's a member.
	Christ for you, basically.
	Great name.
	But great objective political analysis in a very difficult world where it is to give objective political analysis.
	I told people if we had to have a trial and we had to pick a jury and Israel was one of the parties, we'd have to go find some aliens because they're about the only people in the world that would be able to give us an assessment.
	So thanks to both of them.
	I encourage you to Go with the Duran.
	And our collective advice to the president, which, I'll be honest, hasn't been wrong yet in any strategic tactical advice going on eight years, is don't get trapped in another war in the Middle East.
	Use the exit ramp, whether it's the Putin exit ramp.
	The Vance exit ramp, the exit ramp for diplomacy and peace is what President Trump was built to do.
	It's what great negotiators, like he himself has said, are trained to do.
	Don't take the bait.
	Don't get further involved.
	Keep your promises.
	Keep the world safe.
	Get a deal done.
	That's who you are.
	It's the art of the deal, not art of war.
	So let's hope President Trump achieves that.
	And now everybody, the gentleman, I'll share the link out there.
	I'm going to be on with Lord Buckley in a little over an hour.
	Here's the link to that.
	Duran, I'm going to share your channel again here so that everybody has it.
	Thank you for this.
	It's amazing.
	Thank you very much for this.
	I mean, I'm not fence-sitting.
	I'm sincerely undecided on what the best course of action is.
	And what Trump is doing, whether or not it's a big, fat mistake that's going to cost the Republicans the midterms and maybe the Republicans the 2028 election.
	We'll see how it plays out.
	We're all in on this rollercoaster together.
	So, Alexanders, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everybody out there, we'll read the chats later.
	I'll send them to Barnes.
	He might do them on a bourbon with Barnes.
	And we'll see everybody tomorrow.
	Peace out, peeps.
	Booyah.
	Now, gentlemen, just bear in mind there's a 20-second delay where we're not totally off air, so no nose-picking.
	Did I end the stream?
	I'm not even sure that I ended the stream.
	Hold on a second.
	Here.
	End stream.
	Hit the button again.
	Oh, the end stream failed.
	It's still active.
	Give me a second.
	I got to refresh.
	I don't know if he's back in.
	I think we're still live.
	Are we still live?
	Yeah, we're still live.
	We're still live.
	Well, that's it.
	I see that the art has changed on the background.
	Are you traveling, Alex?
	We're still alive.

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