Viva & Barnes - Live with Brandon Weichert! The War in Iran, Trump's Offramp, & What Does MAGA Now Represent?
Aired: 2026-03-12
Duration: 01:14:40


=== Breaking News from Tucker (02:37) ===

[00:00:00]  And we've waited the three seconds for it to catch up.
[00:00:02]  There's going to be no golf voice today.
[00:00:04]  And ordinarily, I would just, you know, go right into the show, but I want to play this clip from Brendan on Breaking Points, which from my understanding, it's a very leftist organization, maybe.
[00:00:17]  Sagar is on the right.
[00:00:18]  She's on the left.
[00:00:19]  They're populist.
[00:00:20]  I think it's fair to say they're populists.
[00:00:22]  Okay, I want to play this because it's a little bit less.
[00:00:25]  a little less consistently, but she's coming back more these days.
[00:00:30]  But Sagar is Brandon.
[00:00:31]  You've been a longtime expert really here looking at munitions, U.S. defense readiness.
[00:00:36]  And we have a lot of things to talk to you about.
[00:00:38]  First is some major breaking news, guys.
[00:00:40]  We can go ahead and put it up here on the screen.
[00:00:42]  We are getting reports now from the United States is going to be moving parts of FAAD anti-missile systems from South Korea to the Middle East, in addition to multiple Patriot interceptors from across the Indo-Pacific.
[00:00:55]  So Brandon, this is something you and I had predicted at the very outbreak of the war.
[00:01:00]  We're only about 10 days or so into this, already cannibalizing stockpiles for a much more geopolitically important part of the U.S. interest.
[00:01:07]  But more importantly, what does this say about U.S. defense stockpiles, readiness, and how the war is going with Iran right now?
[00:01:15]  I'm going to pause it and I'm going to leave everyone in dire suspense and we're going to hear the question answered real time because it's going to lead into some other things.
[00:01:22]  I'm going to take this out of the backdrop.
[00:01:24]  And Brendan, because of the nature of studio, one of us is going to have to be bigger than the other.
[00:01:29]  And it's going to be you.
[00:01:31]  Well, thank you.
[00:01:32]  I finally made it.
[00:01:33]  Thank you.
[00:01:35]  And this is, you know, except for Barnes being six feet tall.
[00:01:38]  This is about the proportion of how big I would be in respect of both of you in real life.
[00:01:42]  Brendan, I had to make sure we're live across all platforms.
[00:01:44]  Tell the world who you are.
[00:01:46]  I've been, we were messaging before this show, and I said, I've been catching up on a lot of your interviews, some of them going back many months.
[00:01:52]  And I said, if I didn't wake up blackpilled, which I did, you haven't helped.
[00:01:56]  But some of your stuff has aged extremely presciently compared to other people's predictions without naming names.
[00:02:02]  But tell everybody who you are before we get into some incredible discussions.
[00:02:05]  Well, my name is, thank you for having me, by the way.
[00:02:07]  It's an honor.
[00:02:08]  My name is Brandon Weickert.
[00:02:10]  I am a professionally, I'm a geopolitical analyst and a writer.
[00:02:14]  I have been involved with many different publications.
[00:02:17]  Right now, I'm at a defense publication called 1945.com, which is, I'm a senior national security editor there.
[00:02:23]  I'm also recently the NATSEC guy at emerald.tv.
[00:02:29]  And you've probably seen me on Bannon's show if anybody watches that on this audience.
[00:02:34]  And you've probably seen me on Tucker's interview.

=== My Time at Defense Publications (04:19) ===

[00:02:37]  But basically, I'm a professional geopolitical and military analyst.
[00:02:41]  Over the years, I started my career working on the Hill.
[00:02:46]  And then I went into consulting and sort of academia.
[00:02:50]  And I was on again, off-again consultant for the United States Department of the Air Force over the pretty much since 2016, 2017.
[00:03:00]  They don't ask me around anymore.
[00:03:03]  But they used to.
[00:03:04]  And I had very, I was very popular.
[00:03:06]  I've been to multiple very prominent military facilities and briefed some of our top military leaders and gotten into it with them on certain things as well.
[00:03:16]  But yeah, so I'm basically a foreign policy and national security expert.
[00:03:20]  And you can follow me at We the Brandon on Twitter.
[00:03:23]  In a sort of general context, that you're recovering the OCON unless you're current secretary of short excursions, a new name for the security.
[00:03:33]  Well, I don't think he's recovering at all.
[00:03:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:36]  He relapsed.
[00:03:37]  He's off the wagon and back.
[00:03:40]  I remember him promising me in person and by phone years ago that this would never happen.
[00:03:46]  And here we are.
[00:03:48]  Well, he fired Dan Caldwell and a couple of the other guys, I think, that were keeping the restraints on.
[00:03:53]  And so, yeah.
[00:03:55]  And speaking of which, and the, you know, a Trump ally for many years and someone that comes from the sort of the geopolitical right and a deep skeptic of and critic in many ways of the Iranian regime.
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:09]  And so I think all of that is critical context for the for the realistic critique that you have been making of this short excursion.
[00:04:20]  I guess that's the new definition for war.
[00:04:22]  I call him Pollyanna Pete, by the way.
[00:04:24]  That's what I call him now, Polly.
[00:04:26]  Yeah, well, because of the kids bombing, I'm calling him Pete Hague's death.
[00:04:31]  He missed the D in the middle of the last name.
[00:04:33]  But one of the things is you're one of the people that was considered for the Trump administration this time around.
[00:04:38]  And what's been happening is that anybody, Jeremy Carl, our mutual friend, just recently had his nomination canceled because of very slight, slight criticism of Israel.
[00:04:50]  It's ironic people calling him anti-Semitic.
[00:04:52]  He's Jewish FYI.
[00:04:56]  Can you describe for people that in that, like the that general background of where you come from and why it is that you were able to look through more objective filters as to this conflict rather than the subjective preferential filters that are filling Pete Hague's death and even President Trump at the moment?
[00:05:17]  Well, I think the biggest thing is, you know, when I started my time, you know, I'm on the older side of the millennials.
[00:05:25]  So it's not like I'm this old person.
[00:05:27]  So, you know, I started out from a default position of, well, I'm a Republican.
[00:05:31]  That was what I aligned with.
[00:05:33]  And so at the time of my burgeoning, Bushism and neoconservatism was sort of the default.
[00:05:40]  You didn't want to be a lefty.
[00:05:42]  So the only alternative to you, you know, was that ideology.
[00:05:48]  But what happened was, as I got through college and I was very involved with, you know, I was involved with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
[00:05:55]  I went to DePaul University in Chicago.
[00:05:58]  So I was involved with that.
[00:05:59]  CCGA is a very globalist enterprise.
[00:06:02]  Met a lot of interesting people, Neil Ferguson and a lot of interesting people over the years while I was involved there.
[00:06:08]  And then I went to work in government and I quickly learned, because my boss at the time was on the Foreign Affairs Committee, I quickly learned that the U.S. interventionists, the interventionistas, are actually insane.
[00:06:22]  And they're actually not as bright as they think they are.
[00:06:24]  And to them, you know, it's like having a hammer as your only tool.
[00:06:28]  Everything looks like a nail.
[00:06:30]  And I was in government around the time that we were arming Syrian rebels.
[00:06:34]  And I remember U.S. Air Force personnel coming into the office and being like, I didn't join to become Al-Qaeda's Air Force.
[00:06:42]  And, you know, so you start to question things and you start to see sort of the excesses from a policy perspective of U.S. interventionism.
[00:06:52]  And you start to say there's got to be a better way.
[00:06:54]  And it turns out there are better ways.

=== Trump's Lack of Control (06:33) ===

[00:06:56]  And then also, in terms of why am I so objective with Trump now, because don't get me wrong, you know, in 2016, man, I was like, ride or die for Trump.
[00:07:05]  Like, you know, I helped organize the scholars and writers letter for Trump.
[00:07:09]  That was the alternative to National Review's suicide letter and to the two letters that went out with all the so-called national security experts that said Trump was this amoral whatever and that he was a Russian spy.
[00:07:24]  Well, if anything, he's an Israeli plant.
[00:07:26]  But anyway, that's another story.
[00:07:27]  But the reason I've become so objective on Mr. Trump is because we lived through COVID and COVID was an example of Mr. Trump crapping the bed on an epic monumental stage.
[00:07:39]  Now, he was able to recover from that ultimately because the Democrats went too far with the law fair.
[00:07:44]  But I contend if you're seeing now, and I don't mean to go off topic here, but if you're looking at what's happening now, the Dems have not been his biggest threat.
[00:07:52]  It's been himself, his own, uh, his, his own, um, his own threat, you know, his own bad decision making.
[00:08:02]  So, and I, and I have to be objective now because now we're talking about war, matters of life and death.
[00:08:08]  We're talking about the honor and dignity of the United States, we're talking about America's staying power in the Middle East, which is gone now.
[00:08:15]  We're talking about the greatest strategic mistake in the history of modern U.S. military affairs.
[00:08:21]  By the way, we're talking also about the life and death of U.S. service members.
[00:08:28]  And as somebody who has consulted with the Air Force and the Pentagon, I care deeply about that.
[00:08:33]  And I want us to do, if we're going to go to war, it needs to be for a just, just cause with a responsible strategy.
[00:08:39]  And we are doing neither right now.
[00:08:42]  I got to get to the points where people say that if you criticize Trump, you're being disloyal to whatever it is that MAGA means.
[00:08:50]  And I love that in one of your interviews, you said MAGA means apparently whatever Trump says it means, which is not a party, it's a cult.
[00:08:57]  Right.
[00:08:57]  And people seem to forget, like, if you had not been critical of Trump when he appointed Bill Barr, or if you hadn't been critical of Trump when he deferred to Anthony Fauci.
[00:09:05]  Now, you're right, Brandon.
[00:09:07]  He did come back on some of the COVID stuff, and some of the states going too far was beyond his federal authority to begin with.
[00:09:15]  He's not perfect, and he certainly has shown a history of making personnel decision problems.
[00:09:21]  Yes, consistently.
[00:09:22]  Well, and now people say, well, he's learned from that.
[00:09:24]  And so he's not made the same mistakes this time around.
[00:09:27]  What do you think of his picks for personnel this time around?
[00:09:30]  Because I've got some issues with them, but they are now justified, not prejudgment conclusions.
[00:09:36]  Yeah, well, let me also just add one thing I meant to say.
[00:09:38]  I forgot what I was going to say, but real quick, also, we're talking about U.S. troops being used in a war and also possibly a draft because Caroline Levitt said it, and the White House is 72 hours later, has not walked it back, which means somewhere at the highest levels in the White House, behind the scenes, they're talking about this possibility.
[00:09:56]  So that's also why I'm viscerally opposed to this.
[00:09:59]  Let me just answer your question on personnel.
[00:10:02]  It is my contention that Trump actually, this time around, really didn't have any control over his personnel picks.
[00:10:08]  I mean, some he did, but ultimately, to me, it looks like Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is the individual who basically was responsible for staffing the administration.
[00:10:20]  Now, on the one hand, you say, okay, well, she's a skilled technocrat.
[00:10:22]  I'm from Florida.
[00:10:24]  I previously was involved with Republican politics in the state.
[00:10:27]  Everybody knows the Ice Maiden.
[00:10:28]  Everybody knows she's a skilled technocrat.
[00:10:30]  So, on one hand, you go, well, that's good going into the administration.
[00:10:33]  You need someone who's disciplined and Trump will listen to.
[00:10:36]  And for whatever reason, he tends to listen to women more than he does many of his male advisors.
[00:10:40]  I don't want to get into that though.
[00:10:42]  But ultimately, she's also a Jeb Bush acolyte.
[00:10:46]  She's basically everything that Mr. Trump ran against in 2016, rightly so.
[00:10:53]  And so, while she may have brought a degree of discipline with her, she also brought really bad policy picks.
[00:11:00]  I'm sorry, personnel picks that have led to bad policy outcomes.
[00:11:04]  And it isn't just in the foreign policy realm, I would remind you all.
[00:11:07]  Look at the Make America Healthy Again movement.
[00:11:10]  I mean, Robert Kennedy is basically a prisoner in his own office.
[00:11:14]  You know, they've gutted HHS.
[00:11:18]  You know, go down the litany of all of the major things that we cared about.
[00:11:23]  You know, hiring people who really weren't on board with the protectionist policy and didn't really, I mean, they have Navarro, but he's one man.
[00:11:29]  You know, what can one man do against a system that is so clearly against them?
[00:11:34]  Look at immigration now.
[00:11:36]  You know, they're both too harsh on immigration in terms of the rhetoric, and then they're also too soft in terms of actually following through the promises they made.
[00:11:48]  It's just nothing is going the way.
[00:11:49]  And then economically, you know, nothing is going the way it's supposed to.
[00:11:52]  And it's because personnel is policy and they have really bad policymakers.
[00:11:57]  And on the national security front, you're seeing how bad the policymakers are.
[00:12:01]  There is absolutely no strategy that makes any sense right now for what we're doing in Iran.
[00:12:06]  It is a complete and utter disaster.
[00:12:09]  The strategy for the United States appears to be whatever the president says on a given day, which seems to now be we want a regime change.
[00:12:17]  We want to get rid of the nuclear weapons.
[00:12:19]  We wanted to get rid of the ballistic missiles.
[00:12:21]  We want to degrade or destroy the Iranian Navy.
[00:12:24]  We want to degrade or destroy the Iranian air force.
[00:12:26]  And we want to do it all with air power alone.
[00:12:29]  Whereas the Iranian regime has but one goal, survive.
[00:12:34]  That's all they have to do.
[00:12:35]  And they fully understand, by the way, that the Americans, as this is what one person in the region said to me.
[00:12:42]  They said the Iranian generals are talking amongst themselves and they're marveling that, yeah, the Americans punched hard and fast at the outset, but they were not ready for this thing to last.
[00:12:52]  And the Iranians had an attritional strategy.
[00:12:55]  And so what they're doing is they're methodically following a strategy of just survive long enough for U.S. stockpiles to become depleted, which they are, long enough for the Americans to lose faith in the war, which they never really had any to begin with in the war, and long enough for Trump to get bored and want to move on.
[00:13:12]  The regime survives.
[00:13:13]  We lose because Trump has said repeatedly, regime change, regime change.
[00:13:18]  That's our primary objective.
[00:13:19]  It ain't going to happen.
[00:13:21]  And if he sends ground troops in, there won't be enough ground troops.
[00:13:24]  And it'll be the most politically self-inflicted wound that this man could have engaged in.

=== Iran's Attritional Strategy (17:52) ===

[00:13:30]  And by the way, this is because nobody around him, I'm having to do it from the outside.
[00:13:34]  Nobody around him is saying otherwise.
[00:13:38]  And if they are, they're being ignored.
[00:13:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:41]  I mean, when I was up in January, people high up in the administration told me that Trump, like the genius of the art of the deal, which I read from the time I was a kid, when my dad passed away, my two favorite books were Robert Kennedy Sr.'s to seek a newer world and Donald Trump's Art of the Deal.
[00:13:58]  My favorite quote of Donald Trump's Art of the Deal was expect the best.
[00:14:02]  That's the power of positive thinking, which he grew up, you know, Vincent Peel, all those people, but, you know, teaching it almost as a religion, but counterbalanced by realism, which is plan for the worst.
[00:14:15]  And what's happened in the beginning in the late summer is he scrapped the ladder.
[00:14:21]  He's no longer planning for the worst.
[00:14:22]  Not only that, it's become wishful thinking.
[00:14:25]  It's where positive thinking can go awry when it becomes illusional, when it becomes hallucinatory.
[00:14:30]  It's so bad.
[00:14:32]  Even the cabinet has been told, do not share any information that can be negative with President Trump.
[00:14:38]  Yep.
[00:14:38]  That he will react very negatively, that it's like walking on eggshells around him.
[00:14:42]  And, you know, Vance tried to whisper things to him.
[00:14:44]  Tulsi Gabbard tried to whisper things to him.
[00:14:47]  That was their mistake, by the way.
[00:14:48]  If I can just quickly interject here, my belief is that Rubio and Susie, who form an alliance, because remember, Rubio was one of Susie Wiles' first clients in Florida politics.
[00:14:58]  She was a consultant for many, many years.
[00:15:00]  So they have a very tight bond and they have the worldview that's very similar.
[00:15:04]  In my opinion, the brilliance of what Rubio did for the pro-war strategy was he was always on TV.
[00:15:11]  He was always the guy because Trump doesn't live in a universe outside of television.
[00:15:16]  He's always getting his information from TV.
[00:15:19]  So his team that goes on TV consistently and they talk to him as an audience of one, they're heard consistently.
[00:15:27]  But Vance doing all this whisper campaign.
[00:15:29]  It's like, dude, you got to go out.
[00:15:31]  You not be critical of the president, but just offer your alternative view, which there is a legitimate and a very real argument.
[00:15:39]  And then Trump listens because if he sees you on a primetime show with a lot of ratings, he's going to listen to you.
[00:15:45]  He's not going to listen to you if you know you're talking in his ear because he doesn't pay attention.
[00:15:51]  He doesn't listen.
[00:15:52]  That's just not his personality style.
[00:15:54]  And you know that.
[00:15:55]  Yeah, in fact, it's gotten worse.
[00:15:56]  One word.
[00:15:57]  Trump used to be a guy that loves second, third, fourth, fifth opinions.
[00:16:01]  Now he doesn't want to hear that.
[00:16:03]  Doesn't want to hear any negative information.
[00:16:05]  Doesn't want to hear any negative intellect that the you know Tucker Carlson tried to talk to him multiple times in person about this.
[00:16:11]  Well, now he's disavowed Tucker, too, which is unbelievable to me.
[00:16:15]  Hold on, let me say, Robert, up your volume.
[00:16:17]  Chad is saying, for whatever the reason, it went down a little bit.
[00:16:20]  Brendan, let me ask you one thing because I want to address it.
[00:16:24]  I don't read, I read the chat to follow what's going on, make sure everything's fine.
[00:16:29]  And people saying, I can't listen to this is blackpilling.
[00:16:33]  If reality or a divergence from your reality bothers you, then go and listen to other shows that tell you what you want to hear because it makes you feel good.
[00:16:42]  If you challenge something factually that Brandon says, and I'm going to, that would be different.
[00:16:47]  To say what he's saying is wrong, not upsetting.
[00:16:50]  And I hate quoting Ben Shapiro, but facts don't care about your theory.
[00:16:54]  And if you, oh, this is becoming dealt.
[00:16:56]  It might be daily blackpilling because you might need to hear some of the not rah-rah pom-pom news.
[00:17:03]  Because I do have good news at the end of this.
[00:17:06]  Yeah.
[00:17:06]  And I was double-checking, you know, Caroline Levitt.
[00:17:08]  People, I want to say, did Caroline Levitt suggest that the draft was on the table?
[00:17:12]  The all reporting, and her statement was basically when asked about the draft, we're keeping all options on the table.
[00:17:18]  The president keeps all options on the table, except it's not, it's not envisaged right now.
[00:17:22]  That's a problem.
[00:17:23]  And it's such a big problem.
[00:17:25]  If it upsets you, good.
[00:17:27]  And if you want to tune out, it'll make you feel better.
[00:17:29]  Good.
[00:17:29]  Go fishing.
[00:17:30]  But, Brandon, the issue about America having reduced its stockpiles of armaments because of its continued support for Ukraine, I'm old enough to remember Canada's got the same problem.
[00:17:40]  They are basically dwindled to nothing.
[00:17:42]  The LA fire department was low on stock because it gave it to Ukraine.
[00:17:46]  So they're now going and unleashing what they've got left in the stockpiles.
[00:17:50]  What is the impact and what are your sources for this depleting the US military capabilities?
[00:17:56]  My sources are open source, and just what I've spent years, this is one of the beats that I've covered for years.
[00:18:02]  I worked in government before, but you know, it's open source.
[00:18:05]  It's not like anybody from nobody from the administration is calling me saying, oh, this is what's really going on.
[00:18:10]  They're not doing that because they're all worried about their jobs, understandably.
[00:18:13]  So everything I do is research.
[00:18:14]  I'm a researcher.
[00:18:15]  That's what I do.
[00:18:17]  Notice, though, the Pentagon.
[00:18:20]  Well, anyway, the fact about the stockpiles, what was said at the outset of the war by the DOD leadership to President Trump was there was approximately eight days.
[00:18:34]  Hello?
[00:18:35]  Oh, okay.
[00:18:36]  Sorry, did I get?
[00:18:36]  No, no. We're good. We're good.
[00:18:37]  I just want to like, and not that AI is the be all of end-all, it's actually not.
[00:18:42]  But there are certain things that even when AI tells you this, you got to listen.
[00:18:46]  We can go to the links.
[00:18:46]  And it's something that I know as a matter of fact as well.
[00:18:48]  So sorry to cut you off.
[00:18:49]  I just want to say that.
[00:18:49]  No, you're fine.
[00:18:50]  Thank you for doing that because I get a lot of flack for this.
[00:18:53]  You know, the DOD said there was about eight days' worth of munitions for a high-tempo conflict of the kind that we were going to get ourselves into in Iran in what's known as the CENTCOM AOR.
[00:19:05]  That's area of responsibility.
[00:19:07]  After eight days, if the war continued, the DOD was going to have to start cannibalizing the stockpiles of the Indo-Paycom AOR.
[00:19:15]  Well, obviously, Indo-Paycom includes dealing with China.
[00:19:19]  We have far greater interest in deterring China than we do in whatever we're doing in Iran.
[00:19:25]  And I can't even tell you what we're doing in Iran because I don't think any of the intelligence about what was going on to lead to the war is even accurate or truthful.
[00:19:35]  But so they're now, as of yesterday, going to South Korea officially and they're cannibalizing the FAAD system.
[00:19:42]  Well, the South Koreans are throwing a crap fit because as soon as this started happening, North Korea started popping up, popping off their newest cruise missiles.
[00:19:53]  And the North Koreans are like, hey, keep going, please.
[00:19:56]  This is going to help us for when we want to do whatever we're going to do against the South.
[00:20:00]  The South Korean, there was a prominent South Korean politician when this first started coming out in the press a week ago that this was going to happen.
[00:20:08]  There was a prominent South Korean parliamentarian who went to the South Korean press and was screaming, saying, the Americans have betrayed us.
[00:20:16]  We will never trust them again.
[00:20:18]  They are leaving us vulnerable to the North.
[00:20:20]  They are leaving us vulnerable to China.
[00:20:22]  And now the Japanese are wigging out because they're saying, well, once South Korea is depleted, this war isn't going to end anytime soon in Iran.
[00:20:29]  They're going to come to us.
[00:20:30]  And then they're going to go to the Philippines.
[00:20:32]  And then they're going to finally go to Taiwan, which is already at a minimal threshold because Biden three years ago pulled all of our coastal defense and air interceptors, most of them, out of Taiwan and put them in Ukraine.
[00:20:47]  And they were promised to be replenished by this time or 2027.
[00:20:51]  Between now and 2027, Taiwan was supposed to be replenished.
[00:20:55]  I heard recently that the president has already told the Taiwanese, don't expect that shipment that Biden promised you.
[00:21:01]  It's going to the Middle East now.
[00:21:04]  And speaking of which, in the same capacity, you predicted a lot of this.
[00:21:08]  Other geopolitical analysts have as well.
[00:21:10]  The prediction of the seal clappers was this would be, you know, people were like, hey, maybe Trump knows some inside information that we don't.
[00:21:17]  Nope, he doesn't.
[00:21:19]  You can watch just by watching Trump.
[00:21:21]  One day says this, then the next, another thing, and another thing, and over here, then over there.
[00:21:24]  But Trump also knows that he stepped in it with this one.
[00:21:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:21:27]  You can tell that he's aware enough that Rare Rabbit couldn't get out of this one.
[00:21:32]  Correct.
[00:21:33]  And so one risk was the geopolitical risk from diminishing munitions that as long as Iran survives, Iran wins.
[00:21:41]  It appears Iran's other geopolitical strategic, and for those that don't know, you wrote about shadow war, about the whole nature of the Iranian regime.
[00:21:48]  Yeah, I'm no fan of the regime in Iran.
[00:21:49]  In fact, I just was on a debate on Al-Arabiya this afternoon with a senator from Tehran.
[00:21:55]  And I agreed with some of what he said, but obviously I was pushing back on certain things as well.
[00:21:59]  I'm no supporter of the Islamic Republic.
[00:22:03]  Exactly.
[00:22:03]  But you can, in order to have, you know, Charlie Kirk was good at employing this over the years.
[00:22:08]  He had become a harsh critic of the Iran regime war.
[00:22:11]  His voice is sorely missed on this issue, and I'm just going to leave it at that.
[00:22:14]  No doubt.
[00:22:15]  And the president looked him in the eye and said he would not do a regime change war in Iran.
[00:22:18]  For me personally, if you can't keep that promise to Charlie Kirk.
[00:22:22]  Well, it was a promise to his followers.
[00:22:24]  I remember 2016.
[00:22:26]  I remember South Carolina vividly.
[00:22:28]  The reason I just fell in love with Trump was when he went to South Carolina and he knew the whole audience in that debate stage were all Jeb Bush donors and lobbyists for the defense sector.
[00:22:38]  And they were there to try to make him look bad.
[00:22:40]  And he just, he just shoved it down Jeb's throat.
[00:22:43]  And he said, look, he goes, Iraq was a lie.
[00:22:45]  It was a doozy is what he said.
[00:22:46]  He goes, that thing should have never happened.
[00:22:48]  And I'm like, hell yeah, this is what I want in a president.
[00:22:52]  And here he is a decade later.
[00:22:54]  And he's actually doing, I know we haven't lost as many troops yet.
[00:22:58]  Hopefully not, as Iraq.
[00:23:00]  But ultimately, strategically, this thing could be even worse for the United States than what Iraq was.
[00:23:07]  And could you explain what that geopolitical risk is?
[00:23:10]  I mean, we're already hearing talk of the Gulf states no longer wanting U.S. Reuters is now reporting it, that they want a security arrangement, a security arrangement with Iran rather than the U.S., that the criticism of Israel has never been higher here in the United States, including people like myself, long protectors and defenders of Israel are off that train.
[00:23:35]  We feel like a battered, gas-lit wife, time for a die.
[00:23:41]  We have the projection of U.S. power.
[00:23:44]  We have taking a massive beating.
[00:23:47]  We have China seeing, wow, if you can't beat Iran, how exactly are you going to really deter us?
[00:23:52]  And then we got Southeast Asia, South Korea, Japan, who are also, along with Europe, the most negatively, adversely hit by the closure is done.
[00:24:01]  It's now they see harm.
[00:24:03]  If we're not willing to defend the Gulf states, why are we going to defend them?
[00:24:06]  We're going to credibility.
[00:24:07]  So can you go through all the geopolitical risk that war?
[00:24:11]  So what you're talking about, we'll just start at the end there.
[00:24:12]  We're talking about his credibility.
[00:24:14]  And, you know, we used to talk about credibility gaps during the Cold War.
[00:24:18]  And, you know, well, that's still very prevalent.
[00:24:20]  And so if you're, and, you know, I said this earlier, I think I said it on Twitter and everybody kind of reshared it.
[00:24:27]  But basically, if you are an enemy of America, it is dangerous.
[00:24:31]  But if you are a friend of America, as the Arab states are experiencing, it is lethal.
[00:24:36]  It is, you know, devastating because the Iranians, and this is purposeful.
[00:24:41]  The Iranians have studied the American alliance structure in Iran very closely.
[00:24:45]  They've had 47 years to prepare for this.
[00:24:47]  They knew this was coming.
[00:24:48]  They fully understood this was going to happen eventually.
[00:24:51]  And what they did was they assessed, they said, look, the Israelis are clearly the drivers of this thing.
[00:24:56]  They're committed.
[00:24:57]  They will fight to the last.
[00:24:58]  Well, they'll fight to the last American, but they're going to keep going.
[00:25:01]  The Americans are clearly committed for a variety of reasons to the Israeli position, most notably because we are compromised at the highest levels by the Israelis.
[00:25:11]  The Arabs, though, the Arabs are a different story.
[00:25:14]  They are aligned with the Americans.
[00:25:15]  They've given, I mean, how much money did Qatar and Saudi Arabia alone give to the Trump family personally the last two years?
[00:25:21]  You know, so they have, they thought, bought a lot of support from not just the U.S. over the last decades, but from specifically the Trump administration.
[00:25:31]  And what we saw was the Arabs get targeted first.
[00:25:35]  They get hit the hardest in many cases economically because the Iranians fully comprehended the source of the Arab power is their economy.
[00:25:44]  It's their exposure to international trade.
[00:25:46]  It's the energy flows.
[00:25:48]  It's tourism.
[00:25:50]  If you deprive them, even for a short window of that, the whole game is up for the Arab side of that tripart alliance.
[00:25:57]  And then suddenly it gets very hard for the United States and the Israelis to project effective power in the long term into Iran.
[00:26:04]  And so that's why you've seen such a concentration on both the Arab states and obviously Israel, because Iran's true enemy is Israel.
[00:26:12]  But yeah.
[00:26:13]  Let me ask you this.
[00:26:14]  People are going to accuse you of then, you know, the only thing you're going to do is allow Iran to get a bomb from the disagreement.
[00:26:21]  Yeah.
[00:26:21]  And well, I'll let you feel this because it's a two-part question.
[00:26:24]  From the neighboring Arab nations, from their perspective, now they've been attacked by Iran.
[00:26:29]  Why would their inkling not be to go all in with supporting the U.S. to eliminate the Iranian threat?
[00:26:34]  And what's their alternative?
[00:26:35]  And also, you'll get to the, you know, you just want Iran to have a bomb.
[00:26:38]  You're fine with that.
[00:26:39]  Okay.
[00:26:39]  Not at all.
[00:26:40]  Yeah.
[00:26:40]  No, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:41]  So the first part to your question, the Arab states have always been pivot players in the region.
[00:26:47]  They've always been the hinge.
[00:26:49]  And so they have to play nice because they're partnered with us.
[00:26:53]  They make a lot of money off of us, the United States, and therefore they have to play nice with the Israelis.
[00:26:59]  But ultimately, fundamentally, the regimes may have, and I believe that most of the Arab regimes, even Qatar, has no problem.
[00:27:06]  Look, Qatar secretly deals with Israeli intelligence routinely.
[00:27:09]  And I'm not even going to get into all that here because that's a whole rabbit hole I went down on another show.
[00:27:15]  But so the Arab states, the regimes there have no problem working with the Americans.
[00:27:20]  They prefer working with us and therefore they work with the Israelis.
[00:27:23]  It's the population of these Arab countries, the Arab street.
[00:27:26]  They don't like Israel.
[00:27:27]  They don't like what's going on in Palestine.
[00:27:30]  They tolerate it because the money is so good coming from trade with us.
[00:27:34]  That's going away now.
[00:27:36]  And now the Arabs are looking around, filling up their bathtubs with water because their desalination plants are being blown up and shut down.
[00:27:43]  And they're going, what the hell is this all for?
[00:27:45]  And by the way, the American position is eroding anyway, physically in the region, because all of our key bases, well, most of our key bases have been flattened in this war.
[00:27:55]  And how much do you want to make a bet that countries like Bahrain or countries like Qatar or even Saudi Arabia, which have felt the damage disproportionately, are going to be really welcoming of return to U.S. forces after this war is over, whenever it is?
[00:28:09]  I think there's a realignment occurring.
[00:28:11]  And if the Iranian regime survives, and I think at this point they will, if they can survive, there's a whole new reordering of the region that is devoid of the United States, which ultimately I'm fine with.
[00:28:22]  I'm America first.
[00:28:23]  I want to do Western hemispheric defense.
[00:28:25]  Fine.
[00:28:25]  I don't like the way we're getting out of there, but fine.
[00:28:28]  That will see, unfortunately, Israel not only in a degraded state, but will see them isolated significantly from the wider region in ways they weren't before 10-7.
[00:28:38]  And then also it will see the Arabs probably cooperating more closely with whatever comes out of Iran.
[00:28:43]  And to your question, to your point about the nuclear weapons, I just want to say I have always opposed Iran getting nukes.
[00:28:49]  I've always feared if they got nukes, that it will lead to a breakout in the region.
[00:28:53]  And I think you're seeing that already happening.
[00:28:55]  Saudi Arabia has this partnership with Pakistan.
[00:28:58]  And I think that's probably partly because of the fear of Iran.
[00:29:02]  But also, there was a way to avoid the nuclear genie from being let out of the bottle in Iran.
[00:29:09]  It was the Abraham Accords, which was President Trump's initiative in his first term.
[00:29:13]  It was a brilliant, brilliant first step toward reordering the region in a pro-American fashion that wouldn't have required war or wouldn't have required us to hand the region over to Iran and therefore Russia and China.
[00:29:26]  But we shredded the Abraham Accords between Biden's presidency and now what's going on under Trump's second term.
[00:29:31]  The Abraham Accords are not viable.
[00:29:33]  So now it's either war or retreat.
[00:29:35]  And that's where we are.
[00:29:37]  So the entire Gulf region may be completely outside of American influence and control.
[00:29:44]  And this is the time that's how it's going to play.
[00:29:47]  It won't happen immediately.
[00:29:49]  Two years, five years, 10 years, how long it lasts.
[00:29:51]  The other impact of that is the petrodollar, depending on how much people believe in it, may also go away.
[00:29:58]  I think that was baked into the cake already.
[00:29:59]  It was just a question of when, not if.
[00:30:01]  Yeah, no doubt.
[00:30:02]  It'll accelerate bricks rather than decelerate bricks.
[00:30:06]  And you know, ironically, real quick, I have been told by so many people that I know in the administration, don't you see this was all about containing China?
[00:30:14]  And I'm like, well, the opposite is happening here because this is accelerating.
[00:30:17]  Now, China's being hurt by this.
[00:30:19]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:30:20]  They're being hurt by this.
[00:30:21]  And ultimately, I believe China would prefer to see the war over quickly because they prefer stability above all else.
[00:30:27]  But don't get me wrong.
[00:30:29]  The Chinese are happy to see us bogged down.
[00:30:32]  They're happy to see us pulling interceptors out of their part of the world because they know they won't be coming back anytime soon.
[00:30:37]  So the Chinese are still, and they know this is going to fast track the new Chinese world order.
[00:30:44]  It was coming already at this point, but now it's unfortunately almost unstoppable.
[00:30:49]  Yeah, indeed.
[00:30:50]  And in fact, it's basically we're going to have a power base shift through Iran for China and Russia.
[00:30:56]  Like if I was looking at strategic allies in the Gulf states, Russia might seem one that's less likely to get us bombed and attacked and destroyed than the U.S. to be blown about.
[00:31:06]  Russia is also a hinge player.
[00:31:08]  In fact, I argue that we are not yet at a full multipolar world.
[00:31:11]  We're actually in an unstable trip.
[00:31:13]  Well, all tripolar systems are inherently unstable.
[00:31:15]  I highly recommend people read Randall Schweller Jr.'s book, Deadly Imbalances, which came out in 1999.

=== The Unstable Tripolar World (03:07) ===

[00:31:22]  He documented this.
[00:31:24]  It's a very good book to read if you want to understand.
[00:31:26]  But there's a tripolar system trending toward multipolarity, which is more than one country running the world.
[00:31:32]  And Russia in this tripolar system is also a pivot player on the global stage.
[00:31:37]  And what we've been doing is isolating and turning them into an enemy when actually they are the key to helping us diplomatically resolve the situation in Ukraine, to resolving the situation in the Middle East and to resolving the ongoing problems with China and North Korea in Asia.
[00:31:55]  And I thought when Trump came in last year, this was the plan.
[00:31:59]  They were going to flip Russia and work with them.
[00:32:02]  Thus far, we've done the opposite.
[00:32:04]  Thank you, Susie Wiles.
[00:32:05]  Thank you, Marco Rubio.
[00:32:07]  People always love asking for sources and then challenging your source when you give one, because if you use AI, they'll challenge AI.
[00:32:15]  If you use, I don't get into this.
[00:32:17]  MSM.
[00:32:18]  But no, from my understanding, it's been, I don't want to say upwards of 20, but 17-ish bases have sustained some level of damage.
[00:32:27]  That's what I'm hearing.
[00:32:28]  And there's satellite imagery showing the extent of the damage.
[00:32:31]  And they're covering it up, by the way.
[00:32:33]  They're now having Maxa or whatever the new firm is that's doing it.
[00:32:36]  They're covering it up.
[00:32:37]  They're taking 10 days now to process these images because they're scrubbing them.
[00:32:41]  So just be aware of that.
[00:32:43]  One of the questions in the chat is it's the be all and end all.
[00:32:47]  Trump has access to information that we don't have access to.
[00:32:50]  Therefore, sit down and shut up.
[00:32:52]  And people, just to say, first of all, that was always the excuse in every administration.
[00:32:56]  We have access to information.
[00:32:58]  Yeah.
[00:32:58]  As if it can be relied on, because if it's information coming from the likes of Millie, who you don't have a Millie per se left in the administration, but there might be others in there who don't mind seeing Trump destroy his legacy.
[00:33:09]  So whether or not they have that information, whether or not it's reliable, and whether or not that can't be used.
[00:33:13]  Well, let me just nip this in the bud because I was an OG Trump guy in 2015.
[00:33:20]  I was telling people that the intelligence services was corrupted.
[00:33:25]  They were abusing the FISA warrant process for political ends.
[00:33:28]  The consensus of the U.S. intelligence community was that Trump was a Russian spy.
[00:33:35]  That was the consensus.
[00:33:36]  And that was the basis of them abusing their power and going illegally and unlawfully against Trump in 2016, wiretapping him, terrorizing him with lawfare.
[00:33:48]  So now these same people are now suddenly saying, well, the intelligence community is always right.
[00:33:52]  Well, no, sorry, that's not how it works.
[00:33:54]  The intelligence community is almost separate from the White House.
[00:33:57]  In fact, there's a famous instance, and I think Oliver Stone showed this in his movie, Nixon, but there's a famous dialogue between Nixon and Dick Helms, head of CIA at the time, in which Nixon says, hey, that's not presidential policy, what you're doing, Dick Helms.
[00:34:13]  And Dick Helms says, no, but it's CIA policy.
[00:34:16]  And the president says the CIA has no policy other than what I dictate to it.
[00:34:20]  And Helms looks at him and says, you really think that, sir?
[00:34:24]  And so we have a rogue intelligence apparatus, and there's a lot of factions in it.

=== Rogue Intelligence Factions (15:40) ===

[00:34:30]  And a lot of those factions want us to be at war right now.
[00:34:33]  You know, Afghanistan ended the way they didn't want it to.
[00:34:36]  Ukraine is clearly kind of starting to slow down.
[00:34:39]  So they need a new front.
[00:34:41]  And oh, by the way, now, because it's so badly implemented and the strategy is so horrific and we are so not doing well.
[00:34:51]  Now the deep state is very happy because they get a twofer.
[00:34:54]  They get their war and all their money and all their power increase.
[00:34:57]  And oh, by the way, they get to then lay the blame all at their hated Donald Trump.
[00:35:02]  And Donald Trump is just letting them do that.
[00:35:05]  He's letting them do that.
[00:35:06]  Like they did with COVID, by the way.
[00:35:08]  Yeah, no doubt.
[00:35:10]  Speaking of which, and I remember and Viva and I were critical.
[00:35:13]  I don't mean to yell.
[00:35:14]  I just sometimes hear this all the time.
[00:35:15]  Don't worry, just dude.
[00:35:17]  And if you need to swear, you can drop a nice FBI.
[00:35:20]  Well, my pastor might be watching, so I won't, I won't do that.
[00:35:23]  But no, I'm thinking, you know, there was a comment about a dildo in the comments, and I'm thinking, you know, but anyway.
[00:35:31]  I mean, you know, the when we were during COVID and being very critical at the stage when Trump was going along with Fauci and Berks and all these people and mocking Sweden, saying, see, there are no lockdown policy is stupid.
[00:35:44]  When he went and became a cheerleader for the vaccine, we were highly critical and it was predictive of the damage it would do to him.
[00:35:51]  And it did.
[00:35:52]  So for those people that just want to stick their head in the sand, that's a good way to do it.
[00:35:55]  Let me just also, on that one, I don't mean to keep cutting you off, but my third book was a book called Biohack, China's Race to Control Life.
[00:36:03]  And that book came out.
[00:36:05]  I wrote it.
[00:36:06]  So because of what my wife, my wife, did for a living.
[00:36:09]  She's a geneticist.
[00:36:11]  She was affiliated with NIH for a while.
[00:36:13]  So I remember when this thing broke out and they were describing what COVID does.
[00:36:20]  I remember her telling me, oh, that reminds me of something we were playing with in North Carolina.
[00:36:24]  And now she doesn't work there anymore, hasn't worked there in years, nothing to do with it.
[00:36:28]  But I started researching it.
[00:36:30]  And because of the fact that I do occasionally brief the DOD, I started talking to people in the DOD.
[00:36:36]  Two Marine colonels in Marine intelligence pulled me aside in early January of 2020, and they used the term biological 9-11.
[00:36:45]  So I proceeded to write the manuscript for this book.
[00:36:49]  I pitch it to every publisher imaginable.
[00:36:51]  And you couldn't believe right-wing publishers.
[00:36:53]  Don't say that.
[00:36:54]  Don't get on the air and talk about that.
[00:36:56]  This is not because Trump was trying to get a deal with the Chinese on the trade, the trade.
[00:37:01]  He was trying to maintain that deal he just signed in December of 2019.
[00:37:05]  So believe me when I say I have been censored before because I had the truth before anybody.
[00:37:10]  And of course, all these other people now are claiming they had the story.
[00:37:13]  That was from me.
[00:37:13]  I knew COVID came from a lab.
[00:37:15]  I knew the lab it came from because I knew what the patents were linking COVID in China to EcoHealth Alliance and Fauci at the NIAID.
[00:37:24]  So, you know, I've been proven right repeatedly on these things.
[00:37:28]  And in that case, again, Trump crapped the bed because he had bad personnel pics around him.
[00:37:33]  And the so going to the, we mentioned the geopolitical risk, lack of U.S. protection of power, lack of influence in the Middle East, lack of influence in Southeast Asia, massive shift to Russia, China, and Iran as a new axis of power.
[00:37:45]  But now let's shift to the military aspect.
[00:37:48]  Yeah.
[00:37:49]  First, let's talk about the idea that bombing can create regime change.
[00:37:54]  Tried in Korea didn't work.
[00:37:56]  Tried in Vietnam didn't work.
[00:37:57]  Tried in Afghanistan didn't work.
[00:37:58]  Exactly.
[00:37:59]  You know, we've tried it again and again and again and again and again.
[00:38:01]  Tried it frankly during World War II with Germany.
[00:38:03]  5.29 million sorties were flown by the U.S. Air Force against North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with a massive U.S. conventional force on the ground.
[00:38:13]  After a decade, we still lost.
[00:38:15]  Well, but hold on, let me interject the obvious response, Robert.
[00:38:18]  Back then, they didn't pick up.
[00:38:20]  They might have wanted to, but they didn't assassinate the leaders.
[00:38:22]  So necessarily, when you kill the leaders, you create regime change.
[00:38:26]  I don't agree that it's a regime change.
[00:38:28]  I think we just changed the leadership.
[00:38:30]  You know, like when we say regime change, okay, Joe Biden becomes president, whether legally or probably illegally.
[00:38:36]  He becomes president in 2020.
[00:38:39]  Okay, does that mean the U.S. government is changed?
[00:38:42]  No, it means the leadership has changed and there will be a slight alteration to policies.
[00:38:46]  The same thing happened with the killing of Kamani, where, yeah, we whacked him, but now his son is taking over.
[00:38:53]  And guess what?
[00:38:54]  He's going to carry over the ideological pretensions of the regime, which is the problem for us in Israel.
[00:39:00]  We don't like their ideological regime.
[00:39:03]  Okay, fine.
[00:39:04]  But ultimately, I don't believe it's a regime change because it's not a new group.
[00:39:09]  It's the same as before.
[00:39:10]  It's just a younger guy who, by the way, is PO'd that we killed the grandkids in that bunker.
[00:39:16]  And we did.
[00:39:17]  Yeah, I mean, the Israelis.
[00:39:19]  His wife and his mother and the Israelis did, technically, because it was their, yeah, anyway.
[00:39:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:25]  Yeah.
[00:39:25]  I mean, but for those that, you know, the new supreme leader, son of the now martyred supreme leader who saw his father, mother, a wife, sister, a niece, nephew, and a grand child killed in that attack.
[00:39:39]  Right.
[00:39:40]  And whether you think they're crazy head-chopping Islamists or not, I don't think anybody's going to be okay with their family members being whacked like that, especially when they were told you can come out of your hole, whereas there's a temporary truce.
[00:39:52]  We're going to meet on Monday and start talking.
[00:39:54]  And that whole thing was a ruse.
[00:39:55]  And the Americans allowed the Israelis to abuse American prestige and honor.
[00:39:59]  And we will be paying down that debt for many years to come in diplomacy.
[00:40:04]  No one will ever trust us again.
[00:40:06]  Can you explain?
[00:40:07]  By the way, if you want a retarded post of the day, always just go to Clay Travis's feed.
[00:40:11]  He has multiple examples.
[00:40:12]  It's a sin that they continued over for Rush.
[00:40:15]  I knew Rush a little bit, that they should never have been allowed to continue.
[00:40:19]  Utter disgrace.
[00:40:20]  Candy ass from Vanderbilt, loser.
[00:40:23]  A long history of Clay.
[00:40:24]  But one of the things he was celebrating.
[00:40:26]  Mark Stein should have been the replacement.
[00:40:28]  Oh, exactly.
[00:40:29]  Was the sneak attacks during diplomacy, which we've now done arguably four times, Hamas, Iran twice, and tried to murder Putin during negotiations.
[00:40:39]  Absolutely.
[00:40:40]  Absolutely.
[00:40:41]  You're seeing the pattern here.
[00:40:42]  You're seeing the pattern.
[00:40:43]  Can you explain to people why that's a bad idea?
[00:40:46]  So this is what Israel does.
[00:40:49]  This is what rogue states do.
[00:40:50]  But the United States, we're not a rogue state, at least technically.
[00:40:54]  We're supposed to be the beating heart of the post-war order.
[00:40:58]  And this was sort of the, if you want to say social contract between the United States and the rest of the world for being the unipolar power.
[00:41:07]  The rest of the world said, okay, Soviet Union's gone.
[00:41:10]  It's end of history, supposedly.
[00:41:12]  We will subscribe to the world system of an American-led system because you agree, America, to respect some semblance of international decency and law, whatever.
[00:41:25]  And we said, yes, we will do that.
[00:41:27]  And ultimately, we have now shown over the last year, we will not do that.
[00:41:32]  You mentioned Putin.
[00:41:33]  I want to just say this, the Trump presidency started out phenomenally the second term.
[00:41:38]  By March, April of last year, something happened where it just sort of went off the rails.
[00:41:44]  And it went off the rails with a specific instance.
[00:41:47]  It was when Putin and Trump were negotiating, and then Putin gets in his helicopter and someone tries to blow it up.
[00:41:54]  And it was under the auspices of a U.S. negotiation.
[00:41:58]  So there was a kind of a truce there.
[00:42:00]  And everybody blamed Ukraine.
[00:42:02]  We, I know, we were involved because we provide the targeting data.
[00:42:06]  The CIA does and the DOD does for the Ukrainians.
[00:42:11]  So maybe the Ukrainians pulled the trigger, but it was our targeting data and Putin knew it.
[00:42:15]  And ever since then, we have been using these truces.
[00:42:18]  Witkoff and Kushner in particular have been using these truces with different powers that we don't like to lull them into a false sense of security.
[00:42:26]  And then we do something crazy.
[00:42:28]  And what that means is the rest of the world is watching this and they're saying, how can we trust the Americans?
[00:42:34]  How do we know they're not going to try to whack us when we go to sit down at a big, beautiful table with them?
[00:42:38]  We're just going to, I'm sorry.
[00:42:40]  No, well, there is this.
[00:42:41]  I mean, I'll have to play devil's advocate for those who are not here.
[00:42:44]  There is a dispute as to whether or not the drone attack that targeted Putin's residence was targeting his residence or a military facility.
[00:42:52]  It was that's a different, that's a different thing.
[00:42:54]  I'm talking.
[00:42:54]  I'm talking about the helicopter attack, I think, last year.
[00:42:57]  No, no, true.
[00:42:57]  I'm talking about the more recent one where there was an alleged attempt on Putin's life.
[00:43:02]  And then the question becomes: who do you believe in a time of war?
[00:43:05]  But it doesn't matter anymore because we've already abused the trust so much.
[00:43:08]  Even if that was a freak out thing, the Russians, I can tell you, the Russians don't believe it was an accident.
[00:43:14]  They're quite aware that they think they're quite aware that that was an attempt, another one.
[00:43:18]  It's because we keep proving it.
[00:43:20]  Now, so we mentioned the geopolitical risk, the problems of using diplomacy as subterfuge.
[00:43:25]  We, America, constantly use the fact that Japan bombed us during negotiations.
[00:43:29]  Stimson, the Secretary of War, when the media during the Second World War would interview Stimson and FTR, they would always point out the Japanese lied to us.
[00:43:38]  They said they wanted to negotiate, but it was just to buy time for their fleet to get into position.
[00:43:42]  That makes them the villain.
[00:43:44]  Well, we're the villain now, apparently, then, by that metric.
[00:43:47]  Yeah, no doubt.
[00:43:47]  So that's a geopolitical risk.
[00:43:49]  That's the risk of blowing up diplomacy and losing credibility globally.
[00:43:52]  So you lose military credibility in terms of show of force, power, protection of power.
[00:43:56]  You lose geopolitical allies in the South, pretty much all of Asia, all the way through the Middle East.
[00:44:02]  Those are the risks that are at issue.
[00:44:04]  Now let's talk about the military risks at issue.
[00:44:07]  The current things being proposed to the president are to use, this has been afoot now for months, to use ground forces, and there's different proposals.
[00:44:17]  One, the original idea was that these idiots thought Azerbaijan and the Kurds would all unite with this secret rebel army that supposedly existed inside.
[00:44:28]  It's like Hitler ordering units that exist only on a map in 1945.
[00:44:34]  No, I'm not saying, I'm not saying Trump is Hitler.
[00:44:36]  I'm just saying that sort of delusional, you know, Steiner's units will move.
[00:44:41]  Well, Steiner has no troops.
[00:44:43]  He's hiding in a ditch, you know.
[00:44:45]  So, you know, so I mean, that by now, Trump has now realized Kurds aren't joining.
[00:44:50]  Azerbaijan is not joining.
[00:44:52]  There's no easy place for us to physically access to do meaningful ground troops.
[00:44:57]  There's issues with the diminution of the size of our army and whether we even have the scale.
[00:45:02]  We don't have the force structure for what he's thinking.
[00:45:05]  Yeah.
[00:45:06]  So explain one, what are the force structures?
[00:45:09]  We do not have the capability to do a 2003 lightning run or thunder run into Baghdad.
[00:45:15]  Not only that, the topography of Iran is very different from Iraq.
[00:45:20]  And the differences are, knowing the size.
[00:45:25]  Well, we have no friendly borders.
[00:45:27]  It's very mountainous, etc.
[00:45:30]  And we also don't have the force size.
[00:45:32]  We don't have the ground troops, and they're certainly not in the region.
[00:45:36]  In fact, we were pulling what people we had as far away from the Iranian ballistic missile and drone threat as we could.
[00:45:44]  Since January, we've been doing that because they knew that Trump wanted to blow this thing off, and he knew that everybody knew that they were going to hit American bases.
[00:45:52]  So the Trump administration, the Pentagon, was trying to relocate U.S. ground forces as best they could to safer venues.
[00:45:59]  Well, so already we're at a diminished capacity in terms of ground troops, not to mention the fact that we've, until very recently, and I credit Pete Hegseth with this, we had a recruitment crisis.
[00:46:10]  He started to reverse it.
[00:46:12]  Now I don't know what it's going to look like because there's a lot of people who are not on board with this.
[00:46:17]  And so, you know, we don't have the force size.
[00:46:20]  It takes months and months and months to build that capacity up.
[00:46:23]  Oh, by the way, the rally points are gone in the Middle East.
[00:46:26]  All the bases are blowing up.
[00:46:28]  Everybody's running for cover.
[00:46:30]  So there's nowhere for us to rally and kind of, you know, what is it, focus forces there.
[00:46:36]  Also, the capability to invade Iran is very, very hard.
[00:46:42]  It's very tough terrain.
[00:46:44]  It's mountainous.
[00:46:45]  Think of Switzerland.
[00:46:46]  It's a big mountainous area with some deserts in the middle.
[00:46:49]  This is not a country you want to try to invade from the outside.
[00:46:53]  So what the Pentagon is doing is they're trying to appease President Trump to say, okay, we're not going to be able to do a conventional invasion, not without a draft.
[00:47:01]  So failing that, we're going to look at the Afghanistan option.
[00:47:05]  Now, remember, in Afghanistan in 2001, one of the things that we did was right after 9-11, and this is a testament to the jawbreaker guys, Gary Burnson, Gary Schroen, the Garys of the CIA.
[00:47:18]  They basically, with the special forces, invaded Afghanistan three weeks after the towers came down.
[00:47:24]  And with backpacks full of cash and Kalishnikovs and satellite radios, they identified focused, organized locals, the Northern Alliance.
[00:47:33]  By the way, that was given to that contact was given to us by Putin.
[00:47:38]  They organized and enmeshed themselves as force multipliers with the people on the ground who were organized.
[00:47:44]  And they marched into Kabul within a month or so of invading.
[00:47:49]  But the locals in Iran are very different.
[00:47:52]  Yeah, you've got Azeris.
[00:47:54]  Yeah, you've got Kurds.
[00:47:55]  Yeah, you've got the MEK, the Mujahideen-e-Kalk, which is the likeliest group we would try to partner with in a special forces invasion of Iran.
[00:48:03]  The problem is the MEK is hated by much of the rest of Iran.
[00:48:08]  And the other problem is that their fighting capabilities are nowhere near what the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan was at the outset of the Afghan war.
[00:48:18]  That was the height of their military capability.
[00:48:20]  We just went in and sort of tweaked it, and they were able to do what they needed to do.
[00:48:25]  The Kurds of Iran, here's a fun fact.
[00:48:28]  The current president of Iran, Pazeshkian, he was raised in the Kurdish section of Iran.
[00:48:33]  He speaks Kurdish.
[00:48:35]  The Kurds of Iran are not like the Kurds of Iraq.
[00:48:38]  The Kurds of Iran are part of the elite in Iran.
[00:48:42]  What that means is that they are disinclined to side with their Kurdish brothers from neighboring Iraq, whom they view as brigands.
[00:48:50]  They don't want to align with them.
[00:48:51]  So this whole, this is why the Kurdish offensive died very fast.
[00:48:55]  Plus, I think behind the scenes, Turkey, which is at war with the Kurds, Turkey told Trump, if you do this, it's going to be hell for you to pay.
[00:49:02]  And so that died quickly.
[00:49:04]  I'm sorry.
[00:49:04]  Yeah.
[00:49:04]  No, let me ask you this.
[00:49:06]  One of the talking points or one of the positions you hear is we heard it with Iraq as well, but set that aside.
[00:49:11]  The local population is going to welcome you with open arms as the first.
[00:49:15]  Well, no, so I hear, you know, the people saying this tend to be Iranians in exile, and it makes sense why they would be saying that.
[00:49:22]  I don't know what the local Iranians, Iranians living in Iran, are saying, and especially since you're dealing with a population of nearly 100 million broken down into various groups.
[00:49:31]  That's right.
[00:49:33]  What are your sources for what the sentiment would be where?
[00:49:36]  Persia is 2,500 years old at least.
[00:49:40]  It is one of the most ancient civilizations in the world.
[00:49:45]  In fact, I believe its borders have remained mostly the same for that entire time.
[00:49:52]  This is a multi-ethnic, polyglot empire, if you want to call it an empire, nation-state, whatever.
[00:50:00]  The people there do not like their regime generally, but people here don't like our regime generally.
[00:50:07]  So that's not really a metric to go off of.

=== Geopolitical Risks in the Region (14:40) ===

[00:50:10]  You have a handful of people who rallied in December and January in the streets, and they were promptly slaughtered by the government or arrested and quieted down.
[00:50:20]  And once the government of Iran removed the Starlink problem, those protests died off very quickly because they were not organic and they were not the majority.
[00:50:30]  And so now that the regime, which is very good at maintaining, it's sort of like the KGB of the old Soviet Union, very good at internal, you know, squelching internal resistance, they have pretty much lopped off the heads of any potential leader that could lead a resistance effectively to their, and the problem is organization.
[00:50:48]  So you could have a mass movement, but without organization, there's nothing but chaos and they'll never be overthrowing the government.
[00:50:55]  And so the people have been bloodied and beaten by the regime.
[00:50:59]  But here's the problem now.
[00:51:01]  The resistors have already been weakened by the suppression.
[00:51:05]  Now you have the Israelis bombing Tehran constantly.
[00:51:09]  You have the Israelis against U.S. wishes last weekend blowing up northern Tehran's oil refinery, creating a toxic plume over Tehran, making Tehran look like Dresden.
[00:51:21]  Well, guess what?
[00:51:22]  All of the protesters now suddenly don't have any sympathetic feelings toward us or any sympathies among the people in Tehran or in the country because now Trump is ostensibly with Israel blowing up things and making that kind of environmental mess.
[00:51:38]  But also last weekend, Trump, in one of his undisciplined statements, mentioned, well, if we don't do regime change, we're going to at least take Iran and break it into smaller countries.
[00:51:51]  So now you're triggering Persian nationalism, which goes back 2,500 years.
[00:51:55]  And at that point, they're rallying around the flag and they're saying, we don't like our government, but I tell you what, it's better than some kind of chaos that's going to be imposed on us, like what happened in Syria and Libya and for a time in Iraq.
[00:52:07]  Yeah, I mean, speaking of, you have three factors in play.
[00:52:09]  Shia Islam, which celebrates martyrdom, was literally built by their founders standing outside their tents.
[00:52:16]  And the regime still has core support.
[00:52:18]  That's the religious stuff.
[00:52:21]  To remind people of the Shia, their heroes are martyrs.
[00:52:25]  In that respect, they're like Jesus.
[00:52:27]  And remember, I just want to add in.
[00:52:29]  Remember the Sunni-Shia split, right?
[00:52:32]  Muhammad dies, and there's a contesting of who will succeed him.
[00:52:37]  The Sunnis want the elderly sort of leaders of the Muslim world to pick the successor to Muhammad.
[00:52:45]  And the Shiites, the Iranians, who are mostly Shiite, say, no, no, it has to be the blood, the bloodline of Muhammad because he is divine.
[00:52:53]  And in the seventh century, or I can't remember now, seventh, eleventh century now, but basically that has defined the religious and geopolitical divide in the Muslim world for hundreds and hundreds of years.
[00:53:04]  And a critical factor with that is that their leaders that hardened the sect, that made it Shia what it is, stood outside a couple of small tents, surrounded by overwhelming force, knowing if they didn't forfeit.
[00:53:20]  Yeah, knowing if they didn't surrender, they were all dead and they chose to all die.
[00:53:25]  With the babies, with the children.
[00:53:27]  That's the mindset of that's the foundation of Shia Islam.
[00:53:31]  So the idea that we're going to surrender because we bomb them, it's going to be just the opposite.
[00:53:37]  The more we hit them, the more their resolve will build and build and Brendan, I had on, it was last week or the week before, three proponents of regime change, Iranians in exile, you know, one of whom said he'd happily go back when I would love to see that regime fall, just by the way.
[00:53:52]  I would love to see it go.
[00:53:53]  The question is, it's not going to happen.
[00:53:55]  They specify that the reason why the stats say like 80 million or 90 plus percent are Shia Muslims is because it's checked off, as a matter of fact, on your birth certificate.
[00:54:04]  If you don't do it, you get persecuted.
[00:54:05]  My understanding is nonetheless, it's like 35 to 40% who self-identify or who are practicing.
[00:54:12]  And that's 30 million people in a country of not.
[00:54:15]  And we killed the Ayatollah, who is the equivalent of the Pope in the Shiite faith.
[00:54:19]  See, the Shiite faith is much more hierarchical than the Sunni variant.
[00:54:23]  The Sunni is a lot more like a Baptist or a non-denominational in the Christian world, whereas the Shiites are more like the Catholics, where they have this sort of hierarchy and the Ayatollah sits atop it.
[00:54:33]  So we blew up their religious leader and their political leader all in one.
[00:54:36]  And oh, by the way, we killed his grandkids and all the other family members.
[00:54:39]  Why not?
[00:54:40]  Let me ask you this.
[00:54:41]  And we're going to come back to other stuff.
[00:54:43]  What would have been the alternative?
[00:54:44]  People out there say, look, all you guys do is complain about what was done.
[00:54:48]  I don't.
[00:54:48]  I wrote a book in 2022 outlining the alternative, and I'm happy to talk about it here because it ain't never going to happen now.
[00:54:54]  The alternative, as I mentioned earlier, was we take the brilliant, Nobel Peace Prize-worthy, in my opinion, Abraham Accords, and we build off of that.
[00:55:04]  We should have built off of that.
[00:55:05]  Can't happen now.
[00:55:06]  It's too late.
[00:55:07]  It's done.
[00:55:07]  But had we actually, once Trump gets in power, once he starts dealing with the Russians, he could have easily gotten the Russians to help him stabilize the Iranian situation.
[00:55:19]  And they wanted to because the Russians are dying to cut deals with the Americans again now that Trump's in power.
[00:55:26]  But thank you, Susie.
[00:55:27]  Again, not happening because of Susie and Rubio.
[00:55:29]  But anyway, and Ratcliffe.
[00:55:32]  So we should have leveraged Russia's role with Iran, and we should have built off of that to bring the Israelis and the Arab states closer together.
[00:55:40]  They were already doing it before 10-7.
[00:55:43]  Even in the first year of Biden, they were already carrying over the Abraham Accords.
[00:55:47]  And the whole point, at least as Kushner and Avi told me when I talked to them in 2018 at the Capitol Hill Club about it, the whole point of the Abraham Accords was we were trying to find a third way, not war, not surrender to Iran's growing power, a third way which would basically allow us to elevate our partners in the region, the Arabs and the Israelis, get them together, not just on security, but on trade.
[00:56:12]  And then we could step back and we could focus on greener pastures.
[00:56:17]  But that's gone now.
[00:56:18]  But so people who say, what's my alternative?
[00:56:20]  The alternative was very clear.
[00:56:22]  What?
[00:56:23]  Well, it was.
[00:56:23]  It was, but it's no longer.
[00:56:25]  It's non-existent.
[00:56:26]  So what now?
[00:56:26]  Now the argument is we're all in.
[00:56:28]  And if you don't get on board, you're un-American troops.
[00:56:31]  Well, no, the argument now is if Trump doesn't get us into an off-ramp right now, this thing's going to keep escalating and become this generation's Vietnam.
[00:56:39]  Only this time, it'll destroy American military power projection for at least a generation.
[00:56:44]  So if you want to have that, we're going to keep going and rah, rah, rah.
[00:56:48]  But guess what?
[00:56:49]  There's no end that's victorious for the United States here unless we use nukes or unless we use ground troops.
[00:56:56]  And I don't think anybody in this audience wants either of those possibilities.
[00:57:00]  The Israelis do, but nobody in this audience, I hope, does.
[00:57:04]  So that's why the only alternative now, and this is actually, I'm glad you brought this up.
[00:57:09]  This is what I wanted to talk to you about.
[00:57:10]  The alternative now is this.
[00:57:12]  Either what I just said, total escalation, or we walk away and let the pieces fall as they may, or the third option.
[00:57:19]  And this is in the last 72 hours.
[00:57:21]  And this is what I'm praying for.
[00:57:23]  Mr. Putin, sensing an opportunity, he's very wily.
[00:57:26]  He's like a Cheshire cat.
[00:57:28]  He sensed the opportunity here, calls up Trump and told him, I can help you end this Iran war like tomorrow, because I know the new leaders, they all want to deal with me, blah, blah, blah.
[00:57:40]  In exchange, I don't know what the conditions were, but I am told that he has a lot of conditions.
[00:57:47]  He wants, Putin wants to link resolving the Iran conflict to resolving the Ukraine conflict.
[00:57:53]  Now, on the face of it, many of my friends in the State Department, no, no, we can't do that.
[00:57:57]  That's terrible, blah, blah.
[00:57:59]  We have eaten, we don't have, we have, we have, we have made such a mess of this.
[00:58:04]  We don't have a choice.
[00:58:06]  I argue this is how Trump, and this is very Trumpy.
[00:58:09]  He takes the big L and he turns it into a big W, a total W.
[00:58:14]  And he does that by he sits down with Putin at a big, beautiful table.
[00:58:17]  He says, we're linking resolutions to Iran and Ukraine.
[00:58:21]  You're going to take everything in Ukraine up to Odessa and that's it.
[00:58:24]  And you're going to get us in a position where we are no longer having to worry about Iran, you know, picking at us, which is what they're going to keep doing, even if we just pull out.
[00:58:34]  We use the Russian who wants to be used in this way.
[00:58:37]  They're dying because Putin wants to be seen as the great man.
[00:58:40]  He wants to be seen as the man.
[00:58:41]  Let him have it.
[00:58:42]  Let him be Peter the Great.
[00:58:43]  You go for it.
[00:58:44]  We will do business with him.
[00:58:46]  We'll get rare earth minerals after all this is done.
[00:58:48]  But you've got to now link Ukraine and Iran together in a peace deal.
[00:58:52]  The Russians will help us with Iran.
[00:58:54]  We will help them with Ukraine.
[00:58:56]  And we can walk away relatively happy.
[00:58:58]  We'll eat a little bit of crow in the beginning, but it's diplomacy.
[00:59:01]  That's what you do.
[00:59:02]  Nobody gets everything they want.
[00:59:04]  And then we can build a new world together.
[00:59:06]  Otherwise, we go up the escalation chain and we go off the cliff because that's where this is going right now if things continue.
[00:59:14]  Can you explain what the military, from a logistical perspective, what the prop risks are with the other risk that they're talking about is limited ground forces to seize the yeah, they said the same thing in Vietnam.
[00:59:27]  Yeah, around the Straits of Hormuz.
[00:59:29]  Another one is to seize the island where they do refinery.
[00:59:32]  And another one, a third option that's being proposed to the president is special forces with like scientists and engineers to somehow get and take out all the enriched uranium.
[00:59:41]  This is like, this is the stuff.
[00:59:42]  This is like an episode of Veep.
[00:59:44]  I mean, this is like, this is ridiculous.
[00:59:46]  I mean, can you imagine sitting?
[00:59:47]  Can you imagine what an actual general sitting at the table is hearing these political people talk about, thinking, what are you talking about?
[00:59:54]  This is lunacy masquerading as policy.
[00:59:58]  This is not good for anybody.
[01:00:01]  We can't do any of that.
[01:00:02]  Everything you just outlined, we're going to get into a shootout at a nuclear reactor.
[01:00:07]  I mean, like, what are we going to send science?
[01:00:09]  I'm old enough to remember when we sent anthropologists into Afghanistan, and that was as disastrous as you can imagine.
[01:00:17]  So, you know, ultimately, no, they might try that.
[01:00:21]  It will be a complete disaster, just like what's going on around Zaporizhia in Ukraine.
[01:00:26]  It will be a complete disaster.
[01:00:28]  Limited ground forces.
[01:00:30]  Like I said, the special forces Afghanistan redux ain't going to work here.
[01:00:35]  It's not.
[01:00:36]  It's just not.
[01:00:37]  It's not feasible.
[01:00:38]  So then that gets us into a regular ground invade.
[01:00:41]  Or what is it?
[01:00:42]  They're going to take Karg Island.
[01:00:43]  I heard that Trump already overruled that, though, today.
[01:00:46]  You might want to confirm.
[01:00:47]  I know you guys have the ability to check right now.
[01:00:49]  I thought I heard that he said, no, we're not going to do that because somebody must have sat him down and said, if you blow up that island oil refinery, you're going to create a big mess and we're going to get blamed.
[01:00:59]  Like Chernobyl, like, you know, we don't want to do that.
[01:01:02]  So that does not seem to be on the table anymore.
[01:01:05]  The latest one is to seize, to try to get control of the Straits of Hormuz by doing a ground force invasion of that region, of the southern tip there.
[01:01:15]  Can you explain how that makes us all sitting ducks?
[01:01:19]  Well, first of all, I don't believe we could acquire control of that region.
[01:01:23]  I think it's too big.
[01:01:24]  And we don't, again, we don't have the relevant force structure, I don't think, unless maybe British and French and maybe some others get involved.
[01:01:33]  That's a different story.
[01:01:34]  I don't know how reliable they are right now, though.
[01:01:38]  It sounds great on paper, but I don't think people realize how the Iranians have arrayed their underground missile cities and their drone facilities in such a way where they're going to be able, they're decentralized, right?
[01:01:53]  So they're going to be able to overwhelm whatever defenses we put in.
[01:01:56]  And oh, by the way, I was explaining earlier, the stockpiles are depleting of these interceptors that we have from around the world now.
[01:02:03]  So what, we're going to put a couple of interceptors in Carg Island and think that's going to be enough?
[01:02:07]  No, we're going to run out.
[01:02:09]  Anything, it's going to put more strain on the already depleting arsenals.
[01:02:13]  They briefed Trump on this.
[01:02:14]  The generals did.
[01:02:15]  I know they did because that's the Reuters story with Emerald Kotcher, where he was fired for leaking it to the press.
[01:02:21]  Trump was briefed.
[01:02:22]  You can't do this.
[01:02:23]  Trump is not listening.
[01:02:25]  He's just wanting to go for it.
[01:02:28]  Now, one of the risks, you've talked about it elsewhere.
[01:02:31]  People, I think, write it off as an absolute impossibility.
[01:02:34]  Others say it's an inevitability or was the plan all along, the use of nukes, Israel invoking the Samson option.
[01:02:41]  I was, you know, the father of all, the most powerful conventional weapon is like hundreds of times weaker than the least powerful of the nuclear weapons.
[01:02:52]  It seems that if that cat gets out of the bag, that is mutually assured destruction is what it was called forever.
[01:03:00]  You know, to those who think that this is crazy talk, because you floated the idea of the possibility, how do you convince people that this is not actually lunacy?
[01:03:10]  This is, you know, this is sort of Dr. Strangelove come to real life.
[01:03:14]  It is exactly that.
[01:03:15]  Well, and I just want to make something clear.
[01:03:17]  This, even, I think a year ago would have been an impossibility.
[01:03:20]  But sit down and listen to the Tucker interview with Huckabee.
[01:03:24]  Listen to what Huckabee says.
[01:03:27]  These are fanatics that are leading us right now, a certain group of Christian Zionists.
[01:03:32]  And the Zionists will, in their view, if they're about to fall in Israel, they're going to start cacking off nukes everywhere.
[01:03:38]  That's the Samson option.
[01:03:40]  And right now, what's not being reported, and you can't find it on Western media, you're going to have to go your VPN and change countries.
[01:03:48]  And you see it in other countries.
[01:03:51]  Israel is being flattened right now by the Iranian missiles.
[01:03:54]  So that's, this is another thing we're in an area of informational warfare where you don't know what to believe.
[01:03:59]  You see videos, they're AI generated.
[01:04:00]  People retweet them.
[01:04:01]  They get discredited.
[01:04:02]  Not all of them are AI videos.
[01:04:04]  And so the question is, what is the level?
[01:04:05]  We know that there have been- So it's significant because where is Netanyahu?
[01:04:09]  Does anybody, has anybody seen this guy in 96 hours?
[01:04:12]  Was he in Greece at last?
[01:04:14]  I don't know.
[01:04:14]  You tell me.
[01:04:15]  I can't keep up.
[01:04:16]  You tell me.
[01:04:17]  Nobody's really seen this guy.
[01:04:18]  You know, Churchill was on the ground giving speeches as the Nazis were blowing up the West End.
[01:04:24]  Where is Netanyahu?
[01:04:26]  We hear that his brother might have been killed or injured in a strike.
[01:04:29]  I mean, clearly the Iranians have very good targeting data.
[01:04:32]  Thank you, China and Russia.
[01:04:34]  Clearly, they have very good targeting data.
[01:04:36]  Thank you, Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
[01:04:39]  So clearly, there is a concerted effort to decapitate the Israeli leadership.
[01:04:44]  And now the Iranians are getting very close because the interceptors in Israel are either depleted or destroyed or damaged.

=== Who Is Netanyahu Now (09:50) ===

[01:04:50]  And there's not enough replacements.
[01:04:52]  So the reason I bring this up is because if you're sitting in Israel and you're watching your bunkers get blown up with your leaders and you're what maybe they're not dead, I don't know.
[01:05:00]  But if you're watching this full kind of squeeze on Israel and now the Hezbollah is opening up on you and now the Houthis are getting ready to pop up on you and the Americans are clearly not as committed as you thought.
[01:05:13]  Not as committed.
[01:05:14]  Clearly, Trump's still kind of looking for off-ramps here.
[01:05:19]  The Israelis at that point get into a use it or lose it mentality, I think.
[01:05:23]  And it is not impossible for them to detonate at least a low-yield nuke to reset the geopolitical situation as they think it will be.
[01:05:31]  But here's the deal.
[01:05:32]  If they do that, Russia and China will immediately not only come down on Israel, they will also then say, okay, America's proxy, they did that over there.
[01:05:44]  We're going to do that to Ukraine.
[01:05:46]  We're going to do that to Taiwan or the Philippines, or probably in China's case, Japan, because they hate Japan.
[01:05:52]  So, you know, we don't have adults in the room.
[01:05:55]  And remember, we spent the last 30 years tearing apart all the old nuclear agreements with the Russians.
[01:06:01]  So we have spent, and some of those needed to happen.
[01:06:03]  They should have been renegotiated.
[01:06:05]  But anyway, but basically, you know, we don't have any adults in the room.
[01:06:09]  And the Israelis, understandably, are desperate.
[01:06:12]  The Israelis are desperate.
[01:06:13]  And so they, you know, they're doing whatever they're flailing.
[01:06:16]  And that's why I just, I wish that we could just get an off-ramp.
[01:06:19]  It's good for Israel.
[01:06:21]  Maybe not Netanyahu, but it's good for, I mean, Israel, the people there are just suffering.
[01:06:26]  And their leadership set this thing off even more than the Americans did.
[01:06:31]  Israeli, and there should be some kind of accountability within Israel, which is a democracy.
[01:06:36]  There must be.
[01:06:37]  And the only reason there's not is since 10-7, Netanyahu keeps opening new fronts, opening new fronts to distract his people, to distract the investigators.
[01:06:46]  Anyway, and speaking like, so let's say one option the president has is to just leave.
[01:06:52]  Just say, we're done.
[01:06:53]  We're out of here.
[01:06:54]  Now, that may quite, what do you think Iran then does?
[01:06:58]  I assume they stop hitting U.S. bases, but maybe open the Straits of Hormuz or and do they just decide we're just going to focus on Israel?
[01:07:05]  What do you because they're going to security agreement?
[01:07:08]  They're going to make it.
[01:07:08]  Yeah.
[01:07:09]  I'm sorry.
[01:07:09]  Yeah.
[01:07:10]  No, they're the, if we, so like, I'm, I'm fine with, you know, that the term is with, and I, and I think Trump should be happy with this term because it means that he's flexible and we need that in the leader, taco.
[01:07:20]  Trump always checks us out.
[01:07:21]  I'm fine with that.
[01:07:22]  Please, taco, Mr. President, this is such a bad war.
[01:07:26]  Just taco.
[01:07:26]  It's cool.
[01:07:27]  We're with you.
[01:07:28]  You can reset from there.
[01:07:30]  You can't reset if this goes on much longer.
[01:07:32]  So, but here's the problem.
[01:07:34]  The Iranian regime, you mentioned earlier, they are fanatics, right?
[01:07:39]  And the Iranian mindset is very interesting because it's been very legalistic almost in the way that they've responded to the provocations from us.
[01:07:47]  They didn't initiate the war.
[01:07:49]  We initiated it with the Israelis.
[01:07:51]  No, but people are going to argue they initiated by making continued threats of continued threat.
[01:07:56]  Everybody makes continued threats.
[01:07:58]  This is international relations.
[01:08:00]  The person who dropped the bomb first under the auspices of a peace deal or of negotiations was Israel and the United States.
[01:08:06]  So, and I'm not taking up for the regime either because I don't think we can do deals with them anyway.
[01:08:11]  But here's the deal: the Iranians have gone up the escalation ladder in a very disciplined and methodical fashion.
[01:08:17]  They have always risen to match.
[01:08:19]  They have never overmatched.
[01:08:21]  They've always, we go up one, they come up.
[01:08:23]  We go up, they come up.
[01:08:24]  And this is very intentional on their part because the goal here, remember for them, regime survival using time.
[01:08:33]  The Taliban used to say the Americans have all the watches, we have all the time.
[01:08:37]  That's the Persian mindset right now.
[01:08:39]  So basically, the United States is faced with an enemy now that feels like, hey, we got him where we want him.
[01:08:50]  They want us to keep strike.
[01:08:51]  I'm sorry.
[01:08:52]  Hold on.
[01:08:54]  And by the way, everyone, come over to Viva Barnes-Law.
[01:08:56]  We're going to get to all the questions, the tip questions.
[01:08:58]  We're going to raid, redacted in a few minutes.
[01:09:01]  I didn't realize what time it is.
[01:09:02]  How long do we go?
[01:09:04]  Well, you could, we've kept you longer than we said we were going to.
[01:09:07]  So when you need to check out the- Hold on, let me just give me one second.
[01:09:10]  You know what?
[01:09:12]  Mute yourself, take yourself out, and I'll get to some of the chat, some of the humble rants, Robert, while we're here.
[01:09:17]  King of Biltong in the house says, premium Bill Tong from Biltong USA, high-protein, keto-friendly, no-additives, authentic South African flavor, meets U.S. beef.
[01:09:27]  Shop now, Biltongusa.com, code 10 for 10% off.
[01:09:30]  Bill Tong says Adams and Jefferson met the Ottoman ambassador at the time about the abductions, and he said they have the right.
[01:09:37]  Oh, I should go from the bottom up.
[01:09:38]  Question, what are the chances that Trump is privy to information?
[01:09:40]  None of us are.
[01:09:41]  I got that one.
[01:09:41]  In 1788, the Ottoman Empire kidnapped U.S. sailors and payments were 12% of the U.S. GDP.
[01:09:47]  What do you make of the bribes, tribute paid to Iran by Obama and Biden?
[01:09:52]  Think Trump refused to pay and chose war.
[01:09:54]  Adams Jefferson met the Ottoman ambassador at the time of the abductions.
[01:09:57]  He said they have the right as per the Quran.
[01:10:00]  Jefferson sent the Navy to destroy.
[01:10:01]  Say, does this seem simple?
[01:10:04]  Can I answer that?
[01:10:05]  And then I have to go because I've got Gary Vogler coming on my podcast, NatSec Talk on Rumble.
[01:10:12]  So everybody, please subscribe to that.
[01:10:14]  But Gary Vogler is going to be on and he's going to be talking about the oil war.
[01:10:19]  He's an expert, by the way.
[01:10:20]  Great book he's got at the Libertarian Institute.
[01:10:22]  Anyway, I'd like to answer that.
[01:10:25]  I'm not advocating we negotiate.
[01:10:28]  I was advocating a containment and deterrence strategy, just like the Cold War.
[01:10:32]  If you can negotiate at times like we did in the Cold War, great.
[01:10:35]  If not, hey, we would have had an alliance on the ground that would have deterred them, put them back in the box that George W. Bush let them out of in Iraq.
[01:10:44]  But now we're in a position where negotiations aren't going to help.
[01:10:47]  It's not going to help.
[01:10:48]  We have to just say, we're getting out.
[01:10:51]  We're getting out and the Russians can cover our ass as we leave, but we're done.
[01:10:55]  And we're going to have to accept a world, and I'm fine with this, in which the U.S. military has no significant place in the Middle East.
[01:11:03]  And you know what?
[01:11:04]  Russia, China, tag you're it.
[01:11:06]  Have fun.
[01:11:07]  Have at it.
[01:11:08]  Because we've got all the oil and all the gas we need here in the United States.
[01:11:12]  We have a Western hemisphere with a big, beautiful two sets of oceans.
[01:11:17]  We're building Golden Dome.
[01:11:19]  We can do Western Hemispheric Defense plus Golden Dome.
[01:11:22]  We don't need to worry about the Middle East.
[01:11:24]  But the longer we stay in this fight, it only works against us.
[01:11:29]  Because, like I said, the Iranians have a very staggered approach.
[01:11:33]  So anyway, what is the name of your Rumble channel?
[01:11:38]  It's Nat Sec Talk, N-A-T-S-E-C Talk.
[01:11:42]  Okay, perfect.
[01:11:42]  I'll get it.
[01:11:43]  And you can follow him on We the Brandon on X.
[01:11:46]  I would love to come back, guys.
[01:11:48]  And maybe you're going to.
[01:11:50]  Eventually, we'll do the studio because I, you know, apparently I live near you.
[01:11:53]  So yeah, no, we're going to do this again.
[01:11:54]  We'll do it in the studio.
[01:11:55]  I like to, I like, you know, if it pisses people off in the chat, good.
[01:11:59]  I'm happy to be the villain if it talks sense into a president I supported three times in a row.
[01:12:06]  I'm saying this as an ally, not as an enemy.
[01:12:10]  From your mouth to God's ears.
[01:12:11]  We're going to stay going on, Brendan.
[01:12:13]  We'll talk soon.
[01:12:14]  Thank you very much.
[01:12:14]  Sure.
[01:12:15]  Talk to you later, guys.
[01:12:15]  Bye-bye.
[01:12:16]  Have a good one.
[01:12:17]  Robert, you want to go over to locals?
[01:12:19]  We'll take some of the questions.
[01:12:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:12:20]  You can ask the question over.
[01:12:22]  Feeling barnslaw.locals.com.
[01:12:25]  Let me let me at least, for those who gave tip questions, we'll read them for everybody here and I'll put up Brendan's links afterwards.
[01:12:31]  Let me see.
[01:12:32]  We got something from Mr. Mike.
[01:12:34]  Well, let's say.
[01:12:34]  Viva, I'm going to come in hot here.
[01:12:36]  It appears this is from Eschatan.
[01:12:37]  Not only did the U.S. bomb a girl's school with three Tomahawk missiles, I only heard two, they had a fourth linger, record the scene, see people, and not understand it was a parents and children trying to save their kids.
[01:12:48]  Then they sent a fourth one into Incinerate was left.
[01:12:50]  Okay, I don't know about that.
[01:12:51]  I'll ask Brendan afterwards and I'll look into that in as much as we can rely on any information.
[01:12:56]  Now, Mr. Mike says, What is Brandon's take on the Caspian Sea region in the Iran war?
[01:13:01]  How will that region play out?
[01:13:02]  Well, we'll get that one on part two.
[01:13:06]  And what we're going to do right now, I know some people don't like Redacted, but that's the next in the lineup.
[01:13:10]  So go raid them.
[01:13:11]  Redacted's fun.
[01:13:12]  Redacted.
[01:13:12]  I like Redacted.
[01:13:14]  People, you want to hear what you'd like to hear.
[01:13:16]  Go watch The Simpsons.
[01:13:18]  Well, and again, how well did that work for people when they were cheerleading Trump making mistakes on COVID?
[01:13:24]  How did that work for Trump when they were cheerleading his vaccine support?
[01:13:28]  How did that work for Trump when he made other mistakes on the Epstein files?
[01:13:34]  So cheerleading Trump off a cliff is not helping him or you.
[01:13:40]  You can go watch Jimmy Door, Owen Schroer.
[01:13:42]  There's a number of great ones.
[01:13:43]  Redacted is out there.
[01:13:44]  What's their title?
[01:13:45]  They always have calculations.
[01:13:46]  I give some inside intel on the locals one on actually some military base information that I got from a good source, but that'll be over at locals and on the effort to cancel Barnes.
[01:13:58]  Unavailing and unsuccessful, unfortunately, for the war whores.
[01:14:03]  Go raid Redacted.
[01:14:04]  We're going to go over it.
[01:14:05]  Now, hold on.
[01:14:06]  And sorry, Rumble Premium.
[01:14:07]  I figured it out.
[01:14:08]  And I don't know.
[01:14:09]  I'm going to pretend.
[01:14:10]  If I could show you my screen, you might understand what might have been my miscomprehension.
[01:14:14]  But I now can go to Rumble Premium and Locals only.
[01:14:19]  So we're doing that right now.
[01:14:20]  Robert, we don't have anything for tomorrow.
[01:14:22]  Tomorrow I'm just going to be covering the news like a normie.
[01:14:24]  I know, I think I'm going to be on with Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, another good patriotic American who opposes stupid wars.
[01:14:32]  So I'll be on with him tomorrow, I think, at 2 or so Eastern Time.
[01:14:37]  You know, tomorrow I I avoid travel 'cause you know what tomorrow is.