Learn English with Donald Trump. President Donald Trump delivers a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Philadelphia, PA on Iran's nuclear ambitions and the need to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Trump also discusses the recent oil spill in the Persian Gulf, and the response to it.
00:00:11.240And they started the process while rapidly building conventional ballistic missiles.
00:00:16.620They were going to do it all at the same time.
00:00:18.560It threatened our overseas bases and soon could have reached even our homeland.
00:00:23.540And the regime's intention was to use this exponentially growing ballistic missile threat to make it virtually impossible to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
00:00:34.240So as you probably saw, they had a tremendous number of missiles, most of which have now been used or destroyed and very unsuccessfully used because we have been able, for the most part, to shoot them all down.
00:00:49.420And what incredible technology the patriots have been unbelievable and other things.
00:00:55.660And the laser technology that we have now is incredible.
00:01:02.180We'll do the work of, at a lot less cost, do the work of what the patriots are doing or what other things are doing.
00:01:10.360The situation was very quickly approaching.
00:01:12.540The point of no return and the United States found it intolerable, in my opinion, based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me, Marco, so involved, that I thought that they were going to attack us.
00:11:15.240And I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is used by, you know, is sold and used by other countries.
00:11:24.240And whether it's Iran, who also has some Tomahawks, they wish they had more, but whether it's Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk, a Tomahawk is very generic.
00:27:29.800The Sunday morning show, given the intensity of the bombing on Sunday night, I said several times, because we had a packed show, also given what the president was saying about unconditional surrender and Pete Hexeth, which he reinforced on 60 Minutes.
00:27:49.960I know it was shot beforehand, but what he reinforced when it was played last night.
00:27:54.260I said many times, well, we're not going to have an off-ramp by Tuesday.
00:30:50.340Great success against their air defenses.
00:30:53.080The nuclear campaign was taken out last year, and I'm sure there were additional targets that were hit this time of round to hit that.
00:31:01.780And you have had great attrition in the regime.
00:31:05.620As he referenced, two layers of the leadership have been removed.
00:31:09.800So from President Trump's perspective, U.S. national interests have been met or very soon will be met.
00:31:18.480So that, I think, is his assessment, and that's the assessment that matters.
00:31:24.100Others who want to go on to, you know, an invasion of Iran or to go on to having some type of conquest of the totality of Iran, I think, are losing that point.
00:31:39.000We have in our present that consummate, flexible realist who's able to advance our national interests and win battlefield victory, U.S. national objectives have been met, to recognize that.
00:31:53.980And not to continue in a way that would become self-defeating and that would lead to additional escalation and that would lead to a continuation of a war that need not continue when the U.S. has other adversaries, the Chinese Communist Party, as well, to face.
00:32:16.960So there's much to like in what President Trump has said today.
00:32:21.420He covered a gamut, obviously, quite a few topics.
00:32:27.820But on and on, there's much here that's positive.
00:32:43.060I just want to make sure that we fully understand it because even I'm kind of confused here.
00:32:47.240But I just don't see and I'm sure they've got back channel discussions going on.
00:32:53.020The Israelis have just come out, I think, part of the United Nations.
00:32:56.040The Israelis are talking about a completely different alternative.
00:32:59.300I mean, they're all in not just simply for regime change.
00:33:01.820I think they're going for continue to go unconditional surrender.
00:33:04.860As I said on the show this morning, I think Saturday night was a big – it showed you a gap between our greatest ally in the United States, a big gap, about what intentions were and what the follow-through was going to be.
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00:38:35.780You saw the president speak at the Republican conference.
00:38:57.480Then he went over and spoke again, very powerful, in front of the press, and then had a press conference that lasted about the speech and the press conference combined with the media lasted about 30 minutes.
00:39:11.160Technically, you've got two other things you want to bring up or I think are quite important for the audience to understand about what President Trump said.
00:39:41.380First, we had to be at the point where the Iranian regime recognized that they were unwilling to continue to develop the weaponry to hurt the United States, our national interests in the region, Israel, and our Arab and other allies.
00:40:03.060Secondly, regional hegemony, Iran sought regional hegemony, he said, and that this action has stopped Iran's bid for regional hegemony.
00:40:14.820So in terms of the causes, we preempted Iran from attacking, and then the conduct, our military objectives have been met or are being very close to being met in terms of destroying the weaponry.
00:40:29.460He referenced the ballistic missiles, that they're greatly down, right, that they're really now ragged in the ability of the Iranians to launch them, and that the drones were down to 25 percent, as he mentioned, of those attacks.
00:41:17.340He gave one of those phone interviews that he's now famous for, and he said they're going to wrap this thing up, and the markets completely turned around.
00:41:24.400I think oil is at 88, got up to 120 today.
00:41:47.840I think the president is seeing that the military options from this point forward are not particularly attractive.
00:41:55.020But he doesn't want to quite wrap it up yet, and that will create the potential reality for spoilers who want to keep us in the war.
00:42:03.020The people that are messaging, and we're messaging ahead of the press conference, frankly, on Monday, that the war must go on were the same people who suckered the president into the war.
00:42:13.700The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Josh Hammer, Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, they're going to message all night on Monday night that this was, yes, Mr. President, thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:42:27.220Many of these folks are already poo-pooing the increase in gas prices that Americans are paying in the pump, saying that it's a small price to pay for Israel's war.
00:42:39.420What – he did put a – he put a condition there that I'm confused about this condition, so help it make sense to me.
00:42:48.180But he was pretty adamant that they had to select somebody.
00:42:55.120He wanted his hand – he said this in the last couple – he wanted to participate in choosing.
00:43:00.460He uses the Venezuelan model, and he goes back to the Venezuelan model today and say, hey, we're closer than ever.
00:46:41.840I think it galvanized Persian nationalism.
00:46:44.900This is the one thing you didn't want to do.
00:46:46.420Once you galvanize Persian nationalism, it's the Persian people.
00:46:49.340It's not this Islamic Republic against, this is why I think you haven't seen uprisings in the street besides the fact that they killed 30,000 of their best, you know, guys who would get to the streets.
00:46:59.220I think part of this is now they look at it as a nationalistic cause because they look at it as Israel in the United States against them as a nation and a people.
00:47:07.420It's not this Islamic Republic, which they hate and, you know, two-thirds of them probably hate.
00:47:12.000Let me play, can I play the Dan Senior thing?
00:47:13.960Let me play the Dan Senior thing and I want to pick your brain on this, Kurt.
00:47:16.360I will tell you, Jessica, I have never seen integration between the United States military and another military, not just between the United States and Israel.
00:47:27.820Certainly that has never been the case.
00:47:29.460But the United States and any other sovereign military, I've never seen this level of integration.
00:47:35.540Aircraft from both countries, you know, in the skies above Iran at the same time, all feeding into a central command function, sharing the same information between those aircraft, sharing the same intelligence, sharing in some cases the same command structure and chain of command.
00:47:59.180U.S. CENTCOM put out a post yesterday with the Israeli flag and the American flag talking about how these air forces are just achieving total excellence and performing with incredible excellence and success and professionalism working together.
00:48:12.580It's really they're they're attached to the hip.
00:48:16.440It's it's I think about the 91 Gulf War where the U.S., the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, asked Prime Minister Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, to show restraint that Israel couldn't get involved.
00:48:28.620Why couldn't Israel get involved, according to the Bush administration?
00:48:31.560Because that would fracture the coalition, which included many Arab countries.
00:48:35.960The Israel and the Arab countries couldn't be seen in the Arab countries' eyes to be fighting on the same side.
00:48:41.080Now that is we've completely inversed that.
00:48:44.600Now you have Israel and the U.S. fighting side by side, totally locked in, and the Arab countries are joining that coalition.
00:48:50.920So we are living on so many levels through truly historic times that I couldn't have even imagined in terms of the transformation in the region, potentially, and certainly the transformation in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
00:49:03.340Okay, that's not Steve Bannon saying it's Dan Senior, and everybody knows Dan Senior is a, how do I say, former spokesman for the Iraq debacle under Bush, where he lied, bald-faced lied to the American people only every day.
00:49:17.240But he's also, let's say, quite close to the Netanyahu click in Israel.
00:49:26.000They got guys, he says it, one joint command.
00:49:29.140It is impossible to have happened on Saturday night, what happened on Saturday night, with that structure, and it's from his lips, that structure, to have, oh my God, the Axios story that sits there.
00:49:43.240And even Lindsey Graham putting out a tweet afterwards, hey guys, we've got to calm down, unless the Israeli Air Force, the IDF, and the Senior Command of Israel bald-faced lied to the Americans.
00:49:53.800And I think right there, that was an inflection point.
00:49:55.720I believe President Trump, because they said, oh, he's going to have a heated conversation with Netanyahu.
00:50:00.180The allies are not together on this at all.
00:50:04.060Our war aims, and you just saw President Trump, the war aims of President Trump look quite different than the war aims of Bibi Netanyahu, Kurt Mills.
00:50:12.140And this is why, I think Saturday night was an inflection point.
00:50:17.040I don't want any oil assets, I don't want any infrastructure touched, right?
00:50:22.680I'm trying to get the Persian people on our side.
00:50:26.820If we've got to do things in Tehran, I want the bombing of, like, the Air Force Command Center that the IDF did take down, I think, on Saturday night, which is a hard target.
00:50:36.900But I don't want to spread this war into a Dresden-type firebombing of Tehran.
00:50:42.880That's exactly what I don't want, because you know what?
00:50:44.900Then the Persians will dig in, and we'll be here five years from now.
00:50:48.520This is, to me, the beginning of the separation that led President Trump to this podium today to kind of say, hey, I'm thinking about this.
00:50:56.740We've got a couple other things I want to do on my punch list, but we're out.
00:51:23.280I think the reality here, though, Steve, as you are alluding to, is that the president is going to have to tell the Israelis no.
00:51:29.460The president is going to have to disappoint Lindsey Graham.
00:51:32.140He's going to have to disappoint and reject the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
00:51:36.940He's going to have to reject Tom Cotton, or we're just going to do this again and again and again.
00:51:42.200The Iranian political system is opaque, so they've put in the sun.
00:51:46.600But in many ways, there could be an opportunity there.
00:51:49.580The analysts who understand the country, which are few and far between, basically are of the mind that this could be the moment that they are passing from a clerical dictatorship to more of a military dictatorship.
00:51:59.600That Moshtaba is, in some sense, the cat's paw of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
00:52:05.760And, you know, military dictatorships are not Jeffersonian democracies, but they could be more pragmatic.
00:53:27.360I mean, the president's laid out some conditions.
00:53:29.580I mean, Levin just said, is this times-based or conditions-based?
00:53:32.800He said the president has laid out some things that he wants to accomplish, that he thinks accomplishes his war objectives, and then we can move on.
00:53:43.320And part of that is obviously to deal with the regime and what the regime's going to do.
00:53:48.520But the Israelis, more than ever, are all about regime change and destroying the regime.
00:53:52.640Those are two, right now, diametrically opposed—you know, the president did not mention unconditional surrender.
00:53:59.780He did not mention the total and complete destruction of their war-making capability.
00:54:05.480If you're going to take out any possibility of their power projection on their own people, as hard as this is to say, you're going to be there for a while.
00:54:13.660Because these people are not pushovers.
00:54:31.580The guys that want us to stay forever are already all over this.
00:54:35.200You're going to see it on Fox News tonight.
00:54:36.620You're going to see it on Fox and tomorrow.
00:54:39.500They're going to be, you know, saying, President Trump, you can be Churchill here.
00:54:43.040Or you can, you know, you can actually look and try to get a peaceful exit.
00:54:47.800And they're all going to be for taking the hard way.
00:54:49.980And as you can tell, the hard way is not going to end next week or the week after the week after that, sir.
00:54:55.120I thought it was interesting that Mr. Senor went after George H.W. Bush, of course, because attacking George H.W. Bush for not marching all the way to Baghdad in Gulf War I became the rallying cry for what became the neoconservatives.
00:55:08.260And they're the people who ruined Mr. Bush's son's presidency and helped ruin U.S. position in the world.
00:55:15.000And so I think it's very interesting that they attacked H.W.
00:55:17.100Because they don't want President Trump actually to repeat the lessons from the Bush 41 White House, which is you can wipe out, you know, a tough military, but you don't go all the way.
00:56:31.540And President Trump has explained the causes of this war, why we went to war.
00:56:37.440That was to preempt an Iranian attack.
00:56:40.460He also talked about the conditions, the conduct of the war that would lead to its end, right, to having the U.S. win the peace.
00:56:49.020And that was when the Iranian leadership said, we're not going to continue, in essence, to build, I'm paraphrasing, but to build the ballistic missiles, to reconstitute an air force and a navy that's going to be able to hurt U.S. national security interests, Israel, and the allies in the area.
00:57:08.100So President Trump has a path to winning the peace.
00:57:11.520I would just say, secondly, and finally, Steve, that there are really three sets of targets here we're talking about, counter-leadership targets, counter-force targets, and counter-value targets.
00:57:21.920Counter-leadership targets the Israelis seem to have been driving.
00:57:26.560Counter-force targets were the military targets.
00:57:28.640That's what President Trump wanted to hit, going after the ballistic missiles, going after the air force, the navy, the nuclear facilities, obviously, last year, and continuing those attacks.
00:57:41.580And then the counter-value targets President Trump does not want to hit, right, very importantly, because that ties into nationalism.
00:57:48.000If you start going after the value, what the society values, the oil, the infrastructure, the way people make their money, the sources of the economy, you're going to generate a tremendous nationalist reaction.
00:58:02.500Trump did not want to counter-value target.
00:58:04.980He wanted to counter-force target, very importantly, and maybe counter-leadership targets.