When was the last time U.S. troops were stationed in Israel? And why are there so many American bases in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf region, and why are they there for a royal family of depraved billionaires who actually hate America?
00:04:33.820And you want to talk about cost and needlessly wasted American life?
00:04:37.260Well, don't get me started on the disastrous venture into Afghanistan.
00:04:41.480That's measured in the trillions of dollars and the thousands of lost lives.
00:04:46.620And the shocking, hasty, demoralizing images of America being chased out, leaving behind billions in equipment,
00:04:53.760really is the signature move of the Biden administration.
00:04:58.060But seriously, there are at least a dozen U.S. bases in the Middle East, all in Muslim countries like Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia.
00:05:05.840There's even a small base with a couple hundred Americans operating in Syria.
00:05:10.520Rough numbers, the U.S. has spent $200 billion building up its network of military bases in Muslim countries.
00:05:19.220The U.S. Navy alone spends about $50 billion a year patrolling the Persian Gulf sea lanes.
00:05:27.060That's obviously to protect the oil trade.
00:05:29.480Now, my point is, none of that has anything to do with Israel or the Jews.
00:05:33.940Tens of thousands of brave American military servicemen are taken away from their homes and their loved ones
00:05:40.660and put in the heart of some of the worst places in the world on standing orders to fight and die for the countries
00:05:46.320that show little allegiance to America and that few Americans could find on the map.
00:05:51.060And we don't have a cultural or ethnic or religious connection there.
00:05:55.800None of those countries that Americans are defending on the ground are called Israel.
00:06:01.760By the way, it's not just the Muslim countries.
00:06:03.940Why does America still have 40 military bases in Germany?
00:06:10.220Why are there even more troops in Japan in dozens of bases there, too?
00:06:15.22025,000 in South Korea acting as a kind of tripwire in case Kim Jong-un tries to invade.
00:06:21.360Americans would literally be amongst the first killed.
00:06:25.440Unlike Qatar, Germany and Japan and Korea are real countries with some of the world's strongest economies.
00:06:32.220Why is American blood and treasure sent over to protect them?
00:06:37.200Why does America seem to never leave a country after a war?
00:06:40.160I mean, have you ever wondered why the U.S. has a base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?
00:06:44.860You know, it's because America fought a war there in 1898 and just sort of never left, right?
00:06:52.420That's why America's in Japan, Germany, and Korea, too.
00:06:56.580Altogether, around the world, there's around a quarter of a million U.S. troops serving overseas in some 750 bases in more than 75 countries.
00:07:06.480But none of those countries is called Israel.
00:07:08.820Now, whether this is all a good idea is for Americans to decide.
00:15:01.660But of course, it's in America's interest, too, to take out the nukes.
00:15:05.000That's something Donald Trump has been talking about for more than a decade, long before he was even president.
00:15:10.660Of course, Iran has murdered and kidnapped hundreds of Americans from taking U.S. diplomats hostage in the 1970s to murdering more than 200 Marines in the 1980s.
00:15:24.480Did you know that Iran provided most of the IEDs used against American troops in Iraq?
00:15:31.100And then there's the recent multiple assassination plots against Trump himself.
00:15:35.240Yet, Israel and America both had a stake in knocking Iran down.
00:15:40.700The U.S. helped a lot of countries by bombing those nukes.
00:16:28.780So the next time someone complains about U.S.-Israel cooperation, ask the obvious question.
00:16:38.180Why are they only talking about the Jews and not the 12 Muslim Middle Eastern countries where the U.S. spends far more militarily and gets much less in return?
00:16:50.920You might have to wait for their answer while they check with their Qatari funders first.
00:17:03.760It was a very newsy weekend, including in the tense negotiations between the United States and Canada over trade deals.
00:17:16.660Donald Trump announced that he was canceling those negotiations because Canada was proposing to invoke a digital services tax,
00:17:25.220an Internet tax, not just that, but it would have it was scheduled to start today with a massive multi-billion dollar retroactive tax payable now.
00:17:37.620Well, this is what Trump and the White House had to say about that.
00:19:34.920And as I just said, which answers the translation question, as I just said, it's a question of timing in terms of the date for the final negotiations and when the tax was coming into effect.
00:19:45.760And, you know, it doesn't make sense to collect tax from people and then remit them back.
00:20:19.440It's very interesting to me because, of course, the G7 was Mark Carney's time to shine in Canada.
00:20:24.100Donald Trump attended at least for one day.
00:20:26.240And there seemed to be a collegiality.
00:20:28.380Carney was quite, I would even say, obsequious.
00:20:30.720Whenever he is in Trump's company, he calls him a great leader, a transformative leader.
00:20:35.460But then maybe when Trump's out of the room, Carney has a different tact.
00:20:38.540He went to Europe and recently said we're the most European of the countries and he practically applied to join the European Union.
00:20:44.680I think that the European Union has a very different approach to many of these things, whether it's their own agricultural supply management or their approach to regulation of the Internet.
00:20:55.660Right now, the European Union is on a major push to bring in regulation, including for content.
00:21:01.380The United States has a very different approach.
00:21:03.580It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
00:21:05.280Joining me now is an expert who's been following these things, and I really enjoy following him on Twitter or X, where he is called the Food Professor.
00:21:37.960Maybe Mark Carney thought Donald Trump didn't mean it when he had sent signals against it.
00:21:42.820What do you make of what happened this weekend over the digital services tax?
00:21:46.040Well, I don't know much about the digital sales tax per se.
00:21:52.060I only strictly follow the food industry and food policy.
00:21:57.160But one has to recognize how timing, the timing of rescinding the DST was certainly not ideal.
00:22:10.140It made Canada probably weaker and not stronger, unfortunately.
00:22:14.100And I've always been of the mind that when it comes to geopolitics, Canada is not really a good country to deal with its own geopolitical reality.
00:22:25.360I mean, we don't necessarily understand the orders of things.
00:22:30.080And let's face it, we are north of the only superpower in the world.
00:22:33.600And we are really prisoners of our own geography.
00:23:53.880I mean, basically, we needed an American to liberate Canadians when it comes to communications and dealing with some of these platforms.
00:24:01.720But I do see a parallel between what happened over the weekend and the agri-food sector, to be honest.
00:24:08.680We've been talking for many years now about supply management, which is essentially a system that restricts production as much as possible.
00:24:21.280If you want to produce milk, poultry or eggs commercially in Canada, you need to own very expensive quotas.
00:24:29.100It's a very restrictive market, and we have high tariffs on imports.
00:24:33.200So it's basically we produce what we need, which is actually supply management comes from the Canadians' school of thought, which is very Marxist to a certain extent.
00:24:45.860And so I do believe that in Canada we don't have one single politician willing to do anything with supply management.
00:24:54.960But there's probably one person who has the willingness and power to change anything when it comes to supply management.
00:25:02.760That would be a non-Canadian, and that would be Donald Trump.
00:25:50.320And I don't know if, I don't know how, I mean, Trump, when he gets into these dramatic flourishes, sometimes people say, oh, he's just being a showboat or that's just his personality.
00:26:02.680I think he really means it on this trade stuff.
00:26:06.480And even if he doesn't, other countries are operating like he means it.
00:26:10.980What is the likelihood that supply management for dairy, at least, gets out unscathed from these trade talks?
00:26:19.640Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is as follows.
00:26:23.100I mean, unlike the DST, I do think that supply management is a non-issue from an economic perspective for both countries, to be honest.
00:26:31.500They have a lot of dairy on their side.
00:26:39.360He understands that dairy of the SM5, and I would include poultry, broilers, turkey, and eggs, of the SM5, dairy is probably the one target.
00:27:04.520And that's why I think that Mr. Trump focuses mainly on dairy, which is 80 percent of cash receipts within the system itself.
00:27:11.220But I do believe that it's really a non-issue economically because Americans have a lot of dairy in the United States.
00:27:17.940In Canada, I don't think Canadians would want to exclusively eat and consume American dairy products either.
00:27:26.040But I do think in principle it is a really big issue because – I mean I just came back from Brazil last week and just talking about supply management in Canada, a lot of people, when they roll their eyes on it and try to understand why would an industrialized country have a system like that, which is very, very bizarre.
00:27:44.780It's the only country in the world with a system like this.
00:27:47.400So I do think as what Trump just did with DST, liberating Canada, we could potentially see an American president liberating Canadians when it comes to dairy marketing, dairy product marketing in general.
00:28:02.900So I could see Donald Trump seeing himself as the liberator for Canadian consumers, if you will.
00:28:09.140You know, I reread The Art of the Deal recently.
00:28:12.980I read it a very long time ago and then I reread it in 2016 and then I read it again when he was reelected because I think he really explains his personality.
00:28:22.960And some people who think he's just being dopey or goofy, I think they misunderstand that it's quite planned and he's got a style and he's been practicing living this way for 50 years.
00:28:36.020So there are ways to decode what he's doing.
00:28:39.140And so, Professor, I don't think he would care if he's viewed as a liberator of Canadian dairy consumers.
00:28:46.100Here's an idea I'm going to throw at you.
00:28:48.880Perhaps he realizes that the dairy cartel is extremely protected by the Canadian establishment, which it is, both the government and the opposition.
00:28:58.180So perhaps if he makes a lot of noise about dairy and threatens dairy, which he might not care about as much as Canadians do.
00:29:05.860I think that's what you're suggesting, Professor.
00:29:08.780That maybe he can at the last moment do a deal with Canada if he comes off really tough on dairy and then said, fine, I'll give you your dairy.
00:29:17.720But in return, I want a large concession about something that I care about.
00:29:22.180So maybe he's making a fuss about dairy precisely because he knows it's so dear to Mark Carney's heart and Pierre Polyev's heart and the block of a croix, of course, and the NDP.
00:29:40.620I can only imagine how those negotiations are going.
00:29:44.980No, I think your instinct serves you well.
00:29:47.560When you look at Bill C-202, which just got passed by both the House of Commons and Senate, if you look at the vote in the House of Commons, all MPs, all MPs voted in favor of 202, which really grants immunity to the SM5 from any concessions during future trade talks,
00:30:11.280So Donald Trump can see this as a lightning rod, a political lightning rod in Canada, and we'll see that as a way to rattle things in Canada domestically.
00:30:21.640And you would enjoy having that as a tool to get what he really wants.
00:30:27.720It's not necessarily access to our dairy market, but there are other things he's after, like our minerals, water, and things like that.
00:30:35.740But I do see supply management as being weaponized against us as a result of adopting Bill C-202.
00:30:45.100Well, we'll keep watching this carefully.
00:30:47.320Obviously, a bit of an embarrassment for the Carney government.
00:30:50.400I'm sort of surprised that they were contemplating doing something that would have been seen as provocative right in the middle of the negotiations when they're just about a few weeks away from it to pull that move.
00:31:02.100Trump likes to say, you don't have any cards.
00:31:05.860That was a phrase he used with Zelensky when he came to visit.
00:31:09.800I feel like that's true with Canada because although we think we – like I remember during the leaders' debates, they were all asked by the moderator, what American products are you personally boycotting?
00:31:20.320And they said, you know, alcohol or whatever.
00:31:23.460Like that's not going to bring America to its knees.
00:31:26.120The fact that people are not buying bourbon is not going to cause Donald Trump to switch course.
00:31:30.860I just feel like, you know, it's a blessing to be next to such a giant because we have access to their economy, but it's also a danger.
00:31:38.640And I think that maybe Mark Carney's elbows-up comment is better for a campaign than in actual negotiation rooms.
00:31:45.960I don't think we have a lot of cards to play, and I say that as a Canadian.
00:31:52.360I think it's – regardless of the outcome here, I think it's important to recognize that America will remain our number one partner regardless.
00:31:59.120And despite Donald Trump's style, I do think that most of the media has actually focused on style and not necessarily on the message, on content in general.
00:32:12.040When you look at the facts, when you look at strategy, Donald Trump has been pretty consistent and predictable as well because I hear the word unpredictable a lot these days, and I don't think that Trump is unpredictable at all.
00:32:28.160I think he's very predictable, and we need to understand that geopolitics are not simple.
00:32:33.480And when it comes to the United States, we need to remain allies and work with the United States despite Donald Trump's style in general.
00:32:42.540Well, I sure hope that our Canadian government negotiating team has reread Art of the Deal because he – Trump really goes through some of his greatest deals and explains why he said certain outrageous things and the purpose of making outrageous offers.
00:32:57.760Like, it really is a trip through his mind as a negotiator.
00:33:01.820So I hope our team at least understands it.
00:33:03.840It seems like you have a good understanding of a two-professor.
00:33:06.440It's really great to connect with you.
00:33:07.580I'm grateful for your time, and I'll keep following you online at The Food Professor.