00:00:44.740and the other possibility in my view is pretty much an uncontrolled escalation into a full-blown
00:00:53.820war that would become a regional war and that could become a world war. I think we're really
00:01:02.540at that moment right now. Maybe that sounds naive because why not next week? Why not the week after?
00:01:11.380Why not the week after? But the problem is that we're not in a stable situation where we can choose one or the other. We're in an unstable situation.
00:01:23.700As we speak, the world economy is reeling. It's reeling because, as everybody has learned in their geography in the last few weeks, the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
00:01:40.340As long as it's closed, it means that there is a worldwide economic crisis building.
00:02:02.020Right now, there is an ongoing building global serious economic crisis, and that is because a narrow stretch of water through which comes an enormous, extremely important strategic flow of resources.
00:02:28.020oil and gas, obviously, but also fertilizers and petrochemicals and many, many other key
00:02:37.900commodities, aluminum and others, is closed. To simply open it is fine. That's basically what
00:02:47.720the off-ramp would allow. It would be the right answer. It would not solve any of the underlying
00:03:00.200issues that led to this, and it would not solve any of the stated objectives of the United States,
00:03:10.680much less israel i don't believe those objectives were valid and therefore i don't think that they
00:03:18.060should be the basis of a decision to take or to not take that exit ramp but the point is there's
00:03:26.780a way out of this thing that would avoid uh the escalation to something quite different so what
00:03:36.400is that other path? The other path is, well, we're in this unstable situation. The world economy
00:03:43.120is reeling because of the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and we have to do something about it. We
00:03:51.320can't just sit there for weeks or months, and we refuse to just allow it to reopen and not have
00:03:59.300those goals met. So Trump and his partner in this Netanyahu might say the only thing we can do is0.65
00:04:09.620make the maximal threat. And if that threat does not lead to Iran conceding, then we have to follow0.85
00:04:19.180through not with more time and waiting because of this unstable situation, but we have to return to0.64
00:04:27.020massive bombing, this time even more. And what we can suspect on that alternative is that the
00:04:35.680Iranians will, of course, strike back and strike back very hard and very rapidly. And what we have1.00
00:04:45.780all learned also since February 28th, since the start of this war, is that the entire
00:04:55.900Gulf region is exposed to missile fire from Iran, as is Israel, in fact, because we also
00:05:05.880have come to understand that the anti-missile defenses are permeable, limited, even depleted
00:05:15.160in many areas. But we know that the desalination plants in the Gulf region, the oil and the gas
00:05:22.460fields, the port facilities are not protected systematically and comprehensively against
00:05:30.460Iranian attacks. And Iran would completely, totally, understandably respond to what Trump
00:05:40.160has repeatedly threatened, which is the destruction of Iran.
00:05:44.960So if we don't take the exit ramp,0.91
00:05:48.460I personally don't see anything realistic
00:06:05.840Having watched this for decades and tried to understand from the military analysts, I think it would be but a few weeks before a very, very large part of the infrastructure of the region was destroyed in Iran and in the Gulf and a lot in Israel as well.
00:06:30.020And the result of that would not be peace followed by some easy recovery.
00:06:39.100It would be a global calamity brought upon us in a few short weeks.
00:06:46.300So to return to the basic question, Trump could say, we're not going to go to disaster.
00:08:11.740They weren't objectives that I supported or support today or that I believed on February 28th were within reach or that I believe today are within reach.
00:08:25.840So the fact that the off-ramp is not a success story doesn't bother me at all.
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00:10:29.340Excellent. They would, and I agree with every word you've said, but in fairness,
00:10:34.440They would have to swallow a lot to walk this back because it would mean that Iran is more powerful now, in effect, than it was before the war started at the end of February.0.95
00:10:46.180We would have to acknowledge they control the strait and, you know, 20% of the world's energy and 30% of its fertilizer, Iran controls that supply chain.0.92
00:10:57.720That's essentially correct, except for a couple of important considerations.0.87
00:11:05.240One is that Iran has suffered very heavily by this attack.
00:11:12.600Let's start by recalling the 160 schoolgirls killed on the first day by apparently Palantir's AI system.
00:11:25.180Well, like we find out every day when we're looking at our screen, this is an AI.
00:11:54.620Iran has been devastated, tens of billions of dollars of damages that will take years and years basically to recover.
00:12:04.100For me, as a development economist whose whole career over half a century is to try to build things,
00:12:13.440I don't like to see things knocked down this way.
00:12:16.180The mindlessness of it, the cruelty of it, the brazen destruction, the glorification of this violence by Hegseth and others, I find completely, completely, totally repulsive.
00:15:32.380hadn't invaded any place actually since the 1790s in a brawl over who controlled Basra.
00:15:41.680So, in other words, very esoteric things from the 1790s.0.60
00:15:47.600But since then, Iran had been bothered, but had not bothered anybody else.
00:15:51.620And in 1953, the Iranian prime minister elected, respected Prime Minister Mossadegh, had the audacity to say the thing never to be said by this region, which is, I think the oil under our ground is Iranian, not British.
00:16:19.020And when he uttered that thought that maybe Iran's oil belonged to Iran,
00:16:26.480immediately the British Empire, in the form of MI6,
00:16:31.740came to the new ascendant American Empire in the guise of the CIA
00:16:37.360and said, we got to overthrow this guy, which of course they did successfully.0.94
00:16:43.560They made what today we would call a color revolution.0.94
00:16:47.080They stirred up protests in the streets, they stirred up unrest, and Mossadegh was chased from power.0.67
00:16:53.480And the United States installed what the Persian Empire would have called a satrapy, meaning that Iran became a kind of province of the American Empire under ultimately CIA rule.0.76
00:17:06.680And we put the Shah of Iran as the face of that empire and the police organization, SAVAK, as the enforcers of that empire.0.55
00:17:55.320When you're an empire as we are, when you have protectorates, when you have places where you have your military,
00:18:03.220And in the case of Iran, when your major oil companies have investments there that suddenly are lost because what was stolen from Iran is now taken back by Iran, that led to a reputational question.
00:18:21.500we need to bring Iran back under our control because we're an empire. If we're too weak
00:18:28.500vis-a-vis any piece of our empire, it damages our reputation anywhere. We need to punish
00:18:35.580these people for what they've done. And there was the hostage taking by the youth radical
00:18:47.060groups who said, we're doing this because we want the Shah to be brought back here to0.65
00:18:54.620face a trial in Iran for the crimes of the police state over the last 23 years.
00:19:03.240And the United States had taken in the Shah in a very unwise decision by President Carter0.65
00:19:09.240in 1979 for medical treatment, knowing that you're suspecting it was going to lead to this0.94
00:19:17.200kind of eruption. They demanded reparations. They demanded an apology. They demanded an end to
00:19:23.260the U.S. subversion of Iran. All pretty reasonable, actually. But of course, it became the cause1.00
00:19:29.740of the United States in 1979. And another humiliation for America, which an empire0.93
00:19:36.420never tolerates. An empire needs to repay any kind of loss of face with some kind of extreme
00:19:46.500punishment, not only to get that particular recalcitrant place under control, but to signal
00:19:54.480to all the rest of the empire, don't you dare try this. So from 1980 onward, the U.S. has been at
00:20:03.780war with Iran in various ways. In 1980 onward, we paid, we armed, we supplied Saddam Hussein0.51
00:20:14.340to invade Iran. A pretty sordid deal. Saddam Hussein used poison gas with American knowledge0.72
00:20:26.680at the minimum, and according to some testimonies, American active support. But we engaged in a war
00:20:35.580in Iran through a proxy, through Iraq, from the very start of this 1979 government. Donald Trump
00:20:45.380already back in 1980 said, we have to overthrow this government. So when Trump gives his
00:20:53.700explanations for the current war. He says, oh, nuclear or this or that. These are convenient
00:21:02.420current explanations for something that has been on his mind for 46 years as well,
00:21:11.060because the American empire suffered a slight. A country got out from under American CIA control,
00:26:13.500And President Obama, and by the way, one other thing,
00:26:18.500Let us have our own money back because the United States has confiscated tens of billions of dollars of Iran's money, Iran's money, not our money, because we do that as an empire.
00:26:34.800We freeze the money of other countries.
00:26:38.080We sometimes just overtly take it and use it for something else.
00:26:42.080it's rather obnoxious to my point of view and rather self-defeating in the long term for the
00:26:49.640United States to have the reputation that it just steals other people's fiscal and financial
00:26:56.360resources. But we did that with Iran. So what Iran has wanted is diplomacy. And I come back again,0.99
00:27:04.800they're nice people, they're diplomats. And I sometimes tell them, you don't even know who
00:27:09.820you're dealing with here. How nasty this is. How difficult this is. No, no, no. We want an
00:27:17.000agreement, Professor Sachs. Do you know who we might speak to about negotiations and so forth?
00:27:23.680Very civilized, very nice people. In 2015, such an agreement was reached. The Joint Comprehensive
00:27:33.120Plan of Action, the JCPOA. It was reached not only with the United States, but with Britain,
00:27:41.100with France, with Russia, with China, and with Germany. The five permanent members of the UN
00:27:47.680Security Council plus Germany, called five plus one. Then it went to the UN Security Council,
00:27:53.600where it was unanimously backed. Then came the Zionist lobby in the United States.
00:28:00.920Oh, no, you can't have an agreement with Iran.0.97
00:33:27.000But what Israel says, we're never returning.
00:33:29.520There's never going to be a state of Palestine.
00:33:31.380In fact, we're going to have what we call greater Israel, which is all of Palestine, including Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem, legal Israel, but also expanded parts of the region.
00:33:47.960And when you interviewed Ambassador Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, he put it very clearly that the great zealots, including Huckabee, and many of the Israeli leaders view greater Israel as control from a big slice of Egypt all the way to Iraq.
00:34:15.060from what is taken to be even a biblical gift of God to the ancient Israelites from the river of
00:34:26.500Egypt to the great river of Mesopotamia, meaning the Euphrates River. So Israel wants military0.84
00:34:34.340dominance. The clean break idea was when we aim for that, we'll find resistance. We don't fight0.96
00:34:44.040and extinguish the militant groups because we can't.
00:34:47.780We have to fight the governments that back them.
00:34:51.040And that's where the idea of perpetual war
00:36:58.540And that's where we're facing right now. And interestingly, when the war started,
00:37:07.220Netanyahu tweeted, this is my dream come true for 40 years. And I had to confess,
00:37:16.280I made a mistake. I always said 30 years because I dated it to clean break, 1996.
00:37:24.940But I didn't know Netanyahu before he was prime minister.0.72
00:37:28.900I didn't know that he had 10 years more of dreaming of this war.
00:37:33.300So the off-ramp violates not only the American conditions of defending its imperial strength,0.80
00:37:43.520but the Israeli dream of full control over the region.0.78
00:37:50.060And that's why the off-ramp is so hard.0.76
00:37:53.680I have to say one more thing just because it is a little bit complicated picture. It's not incidental, and I don't want anyone to think I'm naive in this. When we talk about why the United States wants Iran within the U.S. empire, why it overthrew Mossadegh in 1953, remember the oil.
00:38:19.400So I don't want to forget to mention that that's not only a 1953 issue that brought that was aimed to ensure that Iran would not take back its oil from British and then American interests.
00:38:35.620Trump, absolutely, without question, no doubt, 100%, is as strongly beholden to the oil lobby as he is to the Zionist lobby.
00:38:49.600And he said so vividly, vocally in 2024.
00:38:55.460He said, raise a billion dollars for me.
00:43:26.880It's the most natural thing that they should be working together to solve these problems.
00:43:31.600And you say, where do these lines of division come from?
00:43:35.840just because someone drew a political line, it doesn't change the fact that there's the sandstorm
00:43:41.080on one side, the same sandstorm on the other side, and they should be working together.
00:43:45.920And so it just struck me, I'm just reminded of the fact that I had this intense,
00:43:53.680visceral feeling then how artificial these political boundaries are, because this is a
00:44:00.080region. And it's a region that shares some very intense human problems, like how to get enough
00:44:07.740water to stay alive day to day. And they should be working together to solve that problem. So I
00:44:13.940don't think in this case that you need the United States to geoengineer anything. I think it's
00:44:18.880happening by itself. For decades, Russell Brand was one of the most famous actors and comedians
00:44:24.900and agnostics in the world. Today, he is one of the most sincere Christians we know, a follower
00:44:32.820of Christ. His personal transformation is remarkable. We saw it up close. He has now
00:44:39.760recounted it in an amazing book called How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, and it recounts
00:44:45.440what happened to him, and it makes the case to all of us for stepping away from our secular
00:44:50.500assumptions and returning to the only thing that matters, which is God. I've read it. It's amazing.
00:44:54.900And right now, there's only one place to get it, tuckercarlsonbooks.com.
00:44:58.560This is the first release from our new publishing company.
00:45:01.480We created Tucker Carlson Books to bypass the censors and bring you things that are actually worth reading and sharing.
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00:45:23.660Find us today on tuckercarlsonbooks.com.
00:46:36.980That was on the lips of everyone in one day.
00:46:38.580Are you kidding? I remember I was on Morning Joe that morning that either Hillary or Obama said, Saddam must go. And Joe turned to me and said, what do you think about that? I said, oh, that's interesting. How are they going to do that?
00:46:57.620Well, it took 14 years, hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of billions of dollars, massive destruction, massive destabilization.1.00
00:47:10.520To put a jihadist in charge right now and then clean it up.
00:47:15.640To take a secular government that protected religious minorities, Alawites, Christians, everybody, for generations, generationally, father and son did the same,
00:48:41.460So could not just Netanyahu, the prime minister, but the whole country, could they live with a strengthened Iran or would they be forced to do something really radical?0.55
00:48:49.920Well, Netanyahu said a couple of days ago that they're out to annihilate us, which is not true.
00:49:04.380And it shows, I think, a deep part of the psyche of Netanyahu personally and of one strand of Israeli extremism, which is the belief and it is taught that they're out to annihilate us every generation.
00:49:30.780And the Holocaust is used as the model that we can never tolerate this again, so we must fight preemptively against anyone that would annihilate us.
00:49:51.180Well, it leads to, as even Netanyahu said, a Sparta state, a state that is just a war state.
00:50:00.780they've lost the capacity for diplomacy at all.
00:50:06.780Israel, unfortunately, has no diplomacy.
00:50:10.760It has diplomats, but the diplomats rip up the UN charter
00:50:15.600or shred the UN charter or stand in the podium of the UN General Assembly
00:50:20.860and accuse the whole world of anti-Semitism and hatred and so forth.
00:50:26.440It's not diplomacy at all because one strand of thought is nobody can be trusted.1.00
00:50:34.220We have to kill them before they kill us.1.00
00:50:37.480If you live like that, you end up as a killer nonstop.1.00
00:50:41.300And this is definitely one tragic reality of the mentality of Netanyahu or others.
00:50:53.540He's been killing before they kill us for decades.1.00
00:51:22.600Or Netanyahu would say, oh, you're, I don't know what he would say to me, not much nice, but he would say, you're so naive.0.96
00:51:35.580And what I would say to him is, but you, sir, have the idea, not out of any reason, but you have the idea that you will have a greater Israel and expunge the people that live in your area that are not Israeli Jews.0.91
00:51:56.860That's your idea, that for the millions and millions of people there, you will exterminate them or ethnically cleanse them or rule over them in some racially segregated society.0.67
00:52:10.960And then you want others to, then when others object to that, you say that they're out to destroy you.0.92
00:52:18.800Why don't you show that you have a human reason, that you have a human decency, and say that in conditions of peace, there would be a Palestine?
00:52:30.960Yes, of course, because there are 8 million Palestinians.
00:52:34.940And in a situation of peace, we could have calm with the rest of the region without going to war, subverting governments, and so forth.
00:52:46.520Netanyahu's position is there's no possibility of diplomacy.0.98
00:52:53.080We must kill them before they kill us, but without trying to have any peace, without0.99
00:53:04.640trying to understand that there are legitimate, deep, moral, legal, and historical reasons1.00
00:53:14.460for doing something different from greater Israel that kills, maims, destroys, expropriates
00:53:23.740the Palestinian people and claims territory seemingly wherever they want in Lebanon or
00:53:31.900Syria and who knows where else, according to Ambassador Huckabee.
00:53:37.060So I don't give any credence to Netanyahu because his starting point is not only fear, but his starting point is something obnoxious, which is we don't recognize the people that live among us that we have expropriated, that we have taken the land, that we have killed in by the tens of thousands.
00:54:06.400that we have denied basic political rights.
00:54:26.740but from a complete absence of diplomacy
00:54:29.760that recognizes that there's another side
00:54:32.940that needs to be dealt with as human beings.
00:54:35.840And where that extremism comes from is, I'm not sure, it's very pathological.
00:54:44.920You could find it in some religious extremist views that this is our land, God gave it to us, it's nobody else's, and everyone else has to get the hell out.
00:54:56.760I'm not sure exactly what motivates it, but there's a complete collapse of understanding that there are people to talk to that actually want to make peace.
00:55:11.960so i always thought that it was netanyahu was leading this that he had a particular worldview
00:55:18.140um and that i don't know through his brilliant political skill he was able to control the
00:55:25.140country now it seems like there are a lot of people who have even more radical views and one
00:55:30.700of them would be danny dannon whom i know i always thought was kind of a reasonable guy he's the
00:55:35.280israeli ambassador to the united nations there was an amazing exchange between you and him
00:55:40.100at the UN fairly recently that made me think, wow, it's not just Netanyahu. Can you explain
00:55:46.460that exchange? Well, I can explain the exchange, and I can also say that there are two variants
00:55:53.500of Israeli extremism that are not the same, but they are now literally a coalition. I mean,
00:56:00.680They're literally a political coalition, and they are an ideological coalition as well.0.99
00:56:11.300So one is the view, every generation, they're out to kill us, we have to kill them before they kill us.0.90
00:56:18.760The preemptive strike, the clean break idea, but again, grounded in this perverse, maybe related idea0.97
00:56:28.780that there will never be a Palestine alongside an Israel,0.76
00:56:32.660which is actually what led to clean break,0.87
00:56:36.500led to all these wars, led to the militancy,
00:56:38.980was the absence of Palestinian political rights
01:00:09.800That's not theirs, even though the Palestinian people were living there for well over a thousand years.0.85
01:00:21.660Probably, incidentally, according to some historical studies and interpretations, perhaps Jews who converted to Islam in the 7th century when Islam swept across the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa in its foundational moments.
01:00:47.040The Islamic societies, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates enabled Jews and Christians to live within the Islamic lands and to live peacefully and to govern themselves primarily, but to pay a tax.
01:01:08.660And so as a way to avoid taxes, many people converted. We know this. And probably today's Palestinians, many of them are descendants from across centuries of Jews who were the settlers who were living there before the 7th century sweep of Islam across the land.0.65
01:01:32.960That's a footnote. Even David Ben-Gurion, the so-called founder of the state of Israel, held that view in the 1930s and 40s, calling the Palestinians really the original Jews of the land who probably converted and became the Palestinians.
01:03:37.660Someday a Messiah will come and there will be again the Holy Land for us.
01:03:43.560But in the meantime, stay calm, live where you are, behave, and obey God's laws.0.58
01:03:52.360That was the idea of the Jewish religion, of the rabbinic Jewish religion.
01:03:57.480So the variant on display now that this is our land, God promised to us, we need to redeem it, God will protect us, is a new variant that came in the 20th century with the actual founding of the state of Israel.
01:04:18.000It was not the original Zionist movement, which was almost completely secular.
01:04:25.660It had a couple of rabbis, which had some modest influence.
01:04:32.080And then it especially came after the 1967 war and the conquest of the Palestinian territories then and the occupation of them and the beginning of the settler movements.
01:04:47.760And things became radicalized after that.
01:04:52.080And some radical rabbis and militant, militarist, violent, violence-preaching rabbis,
01:05:00.300like Mayor Kahane, which is an American rabbi who preached violence for the settler cause in Israel,
01:05:13.460And that group grew with the illegal settlers in the occupied lands, illegal because you're not allowed to settle territory conquered in war, according to international law.
01:05:30.080And the UN Security Council said repeatedly, no, you can't have settlers there.
01:05:36.280I started visiting Israel myself 54 years ago, and when I first went in 1972, the first settlements were taking place, and I was a high school kid, so I didn't understand much of anything but of what was going on.0.51
01:05:59.560But they told me this was making facts on the ground so that this would be ours.
01:06:05.640We would have our security and so forth.
01:06:08.000Facts on the ground was the famous expression.
01:06:11.180When I continued to go back in the mid-70s, the late 70s, suddenly there were groups of young zealots dancing in the streets of Jerusalem, proclaiming God's will about these settlements.
01:06:28.300because these were settlements and places mentioned in the Bible.
01:06:32.820This was suddenly now the redemption of God's promise.
01:06:38.240This was not traditional Judaism, but I mean traditional from 400 A.D. to 1970.0.80
01:06:49.840I'm talking about 1,600 years or so.0.95
01:06:55.880This was something brand new. It was a fervor. It was a zealotry. It was a fundamentalism that emerged that said, this is ours. No one can interfere with this. More than that, it's God's command that we control this land.
01:07:19.100It's not about security. It's not about division. It's not about where to draw lines. It's not about treaties. It's God's command. That's a big part of the Israeli political scene right now.
01:07:34.480It's half the motivation, and it's why all of this is so radicalized and so zealous.
01:07:42.700But as we were talking, it's extremely important in the U.S. context to understand the Christian Zionist dimension to this
01:07:54.400because Zionism did not originate with Judaism, strangely, or with Jews, I should say.
01:08:02.300Herzl was encouraged in his Zionism by a Christian Zionist, and Christian Zionism was an evangelical belief that the Jews should go back to make a homeland in the promised land or the holy land.
01:08:22.800And that has roots hundreds of years before these Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the 19th century.
01:08:33.340And a big part of the Christian Zionist movement started in Britain in the first half of the 19th century.
01:08:40.800These were Christians reading the Bible and reading the Bible in very particular ways, one may say, increasingly with an emphasis on the last book of the Bible, Revelation.
01:08:53.660So what's called eschatology or the end of the world beliefs.0.51
01:09:00.060And part of that eschatology preached by a British preacher named Darby with a huge effect subsequently in the United States was that the Jews should go back to the Holy Land so that the second coming can occur.
01:09:18.460because the book of Revelations says that the second coming of Christ will occur
01:09:23.820when the Jews are in control of the Holy Land.0.59
01:09:27.040It happens, interestingly, that these Christian Zionists were often rather confirmed anti-Semites0.82
01:09:36.020that wanted the Jews out of their own country.0.85
01:09:39.080They didn't want the Jews in Britain.0.66
01:09:40.620They didn't want Eastern European Jews migrating to Britain and so forth.1.00
01:09:45.360So they wanted them conveniently anyway out of Britain and back in the Holy Land.0.85
01:09:52.720But the point is, there is a set of non-religious claims.0.96
01:13:46.900If our current system remains in place, which is an open question, but if it does, that's going to be abrupt.
01:13:52.640I mean, people aren't going to get elected if they're taking AIPAC money.
01:13:54.760We see, nobody supports what's going on right now.
01:13:58.620And wait four weeks if they don't choose the off-ramp in the next few days.
01:14:03.520Wait a few weeks what it's going to be like when their incomes are decimated, when the world's economy is in a tailspin because suddenly they realize in four weeks half the gulf has been blown to pieces.
01:14:44.220And by the way, from a Christian perspective, you can only support Christian Zionism if you ignore the Gospels, which are the heart of Christianity.0.85
01:14:50.960I mean, there's nothing in there that supports it.0.75
01:14:53.540You would think, by the way, the greatest speech I know of is the Sermon on the Mount for everybody, for the whole world.
01:15:04.840This isn't a matter of who believes, but blessed are the peacemakers.
01:20:34.700Iran does not want to live as a militant state. I know it because I watch and I discuss for decades.
01:20:45.480It wants to live, though, not as an American satrapy. So the idea that if we leave, Iran is0.76
01:20:54.940just overpowering and they're going to defeat Israel and so forth. No. First of all,0.89
01:21:01.660first of all, Israel will not be defeated. It has nuclear weapons. It would use them.0.94
01:21:10.900Iran does not have nuclear weapons. It actually doesn't want nuclear weapons. If we had the
01:21:15.460slightest sanity, honesty, and rationality in the world, it would be the easiest thing in the world0.97
01:21:22.800to make sure that Iran has no nuclear weapons because they don't want them.0.74
01:21:27.420And the first thing, just in digression, that you would do if you wanted to make sure that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, you would not kill the religious leader who issued the decree that nuclear weapons are against the religion.0.62
01:21:46.040But the first thing they did was to kill the very religious leader that issued the so-called fatwa to prohibit nuclear weapons.
01:21:56.240So Israel, the idea that it's in dire threat if we leave is wrong.
01:22:03.960We also need to remember there's a whole world out there.
01:25:09.060If you believe Mike Huckabee, then what I'm saying is not acceptable.0.65
01:25:17.580If you believe that Israel should control all of this land, should, and if you take Israel's leadership that they will, I would still advise Donald Trump, don't fall for it.
01:25:37.920It's a $10 trillion disaster for the United States, not the least in America's interest.0.87
01:25:49.240Netanyahu is a repeated failure and liar and everything he's told us for 30 years has turned out to be the opposite.0.96
01:25:56.920So I'd say that anyway from our point of view.0.84
01:25:59.180But yes, if you believe that your purpose is greater Israel and continued expansion of Israel's borders, then what I'm saying, no, you wouldn't accept it.0.91
01:26:13.340You say, why should we settle for that?0.50
01:26:19.080I believe in a secure state of Israel.0.78
01:26:21.480I believe in a secure state of Palestine.0.94
01:26:23.960I believe in getting on with our lives and not focusing America's resources, squandering them endlessly for decades in this absolutely delusional Israeli cause of greater Israel.0.90
01:26:45.260And it needs to end now before we have a complete disaster.
01:26:49.600Can Trump constrain control Netanyahu?
01:26:53.960Of course. The question is, can Trump constrain himself? Can he say, just ending this, I thought it was going to be a one-day Maduro-type operation. That's what Bibi told me. Bibi was bullshitting me. Now I understand it. It didn't work. I'm stopping this, and I'm telling Bibi, you stop this too.
01:27:18.080And could that work? Well, when Trump said to Netanyahu, stop the bombing of Beirut, we had a demonstration. It can work. Could Israel continue the war without the United States? Basically not for one day.
01:27:37.300Could Israel actually survive the global opprobrium, including the American opprobrium of Israel's extremism?
01:27:48.580I don't think for one day, actually.0.50
01:27:56.340And if Israel's totally, completely a rogue state without the American empire backing it, without the American military backing it, without the American intelligence, without the satellite data coming in, it's not Israel's, it's America's, believe me.0.66
01:28:17.320Without all of that, no, Israel cannot do anything on this.0.81
01:28:22.320But we bought into the whole package.0.71
01:28:26.060We bought into it for a mix of perceived American self-interest in our global power, that Israel's hegemony in the region was consistent with our desire for global control.0.78
01:28:41.560We bought into the Iran story because Israel's story that we got to kill them before they kill us is not inconsistent with our desire to have revenge and to control their oil.0.71
01:28:54.280In other words, it's a partnership, and it's a real partnership, but Israel's capacity to have this war that stretches now from Libya to Iran, that's an American capacity, but we're bleeding from it.0.66
01:29:17.800We're bleeding from Israel's wars, and this, I think, is really important to understand.0.56
01:29:25.200You know, Trump said something quite interesting, the Washington gaffe, meaning that he told
01:29:32.080the truth, not off script, but he said we can't afford the wars and those things like
01:29:42.380child care, Medicare and Medicaid and other those individual things, he said.
01:29:49.460And you know what? It's true. We're bleeding. And what did he do? He said, okay, we're going to cut0.65
01:29:58.580all those things that Americans actually need and want because we want our health care.
01:30:05.460We actually want to be able to have dental repairs or get medicines or see a doctor or have an operation if our lives depend on.
01:30:20.580And Trump said, no, we have to have war instead.
01:30:24.240So he put in a budget a couple of weeks ago, which didn't get any attention because it won't be enacted by Congress.
01:30:32.860But he'd put in a budget in which the military spending goes up another half a trillion dollars, and the things like he said, you know, the health and other things, oh, we can't afford that, goes down in this budget to make people who are hurting in this country, they would hurt desperately more.
01:30:57.780Not to mention the gas pump, not to mention everything, food prices and everything else that they are already facing from these wars, but will face cataclysmically if they don't choose the off ramp.
01:32:49.540it can work if he doesn't do that and in the next few days uh you know this accelerates
01:32:58.260and you've said if it does accelerate iran's first move will be to destroy civilian infrastructure
01:33:02.820in the gulf uh desal energy the rest what are the effects at that point like what are the
01:33:11.300let's just start with the economic effects on the rest of the world yeah strangely enough
01:33:15.700I came into my profession, which I've been a professor at universities for 46 years and advised well over 100 governments around the world.
01:33:28.560I came into this profession writing my Ph.D. dissertation on the oil shocks of the 1970s.
01:33:36.540I wrote the first model of how they worked, why they had such negative effects.
01:33:44.220After 73 and 79, so I wrote the book literally, and it's published in 1982 called The Economics of Worldwide Stagflation.
01:33:55.500The results of those two oil shocks give us an idea of what would happen.
01:34:01.540And what happened in 1973-74 when there was an oil embargo, and then in 1979-80 when there was the Iranian Revolution, was a big disruption of oil supplies.
01:34:16.100It sent oil prices soaring, and it sent the world economy into a tailspin.
01:34:21.420And it was a very particular kind of tailspin because people lost their jobs, incomes went down, and inflation soared at the same time.
01:34:32.480And so you had an economic downturn and a rise of inflation, which at the time was viewed as a paradox because usually you have a recession and the prices calm down or you have a boom and the prices accelerate.
01:34:47.140But this was a contraction and an inflation.
01:34:49.520So people had less money coming in and everything cost more to buy.
01:35:53.500What will happen in the next few weeks if we don't choose the off-ramp is the physical destruction of a lot of the Gulf region and of the Middle East more generally.0.58
01:36:07.300Because the U.S. will rain missiles and bombs on Iran, and Iran will launch what it has against targets in the neighborhood to show deterrence and hoping that that deterrence will stop something.0.65
01:36:26.040Often, instead, what you get is just both sides unleashing their arsenals.
01:36:32.440And what will happen in a short period of time is not a closure of shipping, but a destruction of the physical capacities of providing the oil and the gas and the fertilizers and the petrochemicals and the other very core commodities for the world.
01:36:55.760economy. And it doesn't take that much to bring the world economy into a tailspin because you
01:37:05.860don't need to close down half the oil supply. You might need to shut off 20% of the world
01:37:15.280oil supply. And that by enough will send the prices soaring, make Americans really suffer
01:37:24.260across the board because it's not only at the gas pump and not only in the utility bills,
01:37:31.480but also in the cost of food, which will soar from this as well, because there will be a
01:37:39.820worldwide disruption of food supplies coming from this because we're a very significant
01:37:46.960proportion of the urea, which underpins the nitrogen-based fertilizers of the world,
01:37:53.620come from this region. From natural gas?
01:37:56.460From the natural gas production, exactly. From the oil and gas fields, the hydrocarbon
01:38:04.880production, and other petrochemicals as well. I'm afraid that it won't take long for this to
01:38:13.620happen and well governments will fall if that happens globally yes one one leader uh pulled me
01:38:20.580aside a few weeks ago i don't want to say who exactly but uh said um that uh that person was in
01:38:27.100a uh in a uh a country that has a lot of oil production not not from the region and said
01:38:33.620jeff you don't understand i governed our state oil company these are complex systems yes they
01:38:43.600don't get rebuilt so fast, believe me. This was a very authoritative figure, and I really take that
01:38:51.780to heart. Well, energy extraction, refining, petrochemicals, distribution, it's all about a
01:38:56.260million times more complicated than people understand. Exactly. And these are very
01:39:00.060sophisticated plants, and they are not built for war. They are built for just normal, peaceful,
01:39:08.000complex sophisticated operations and a lot of that could be destroyed in a very very short period of
01:39:17.340time no i i appreciate that and i think the view in the u.s seems to be like if there's oil under
01:39:22.540the ground you stick a straw and it comes out then it's if you ever if you go and tour a
01:39:28.240petrochemical plant or oil refinery or any extraction facility i mean it is like highest
01:39:33.820level technology smartest people super hard to understand the market i'll tell you we had uh
01:39:40.300you know one of a place you know well and i know well one of the most sophisticated places in the
01:39:45.820planet uh the the emirates yes uh asking uh the federal reserve a few days ago for emergency swap
01:39:55.500lines that may be needed in the event of a crisis this is kind of shocking because uh first of all
01:40:02.140The Emirates you think of as super rich.
01:40:06.020It's the place where rich people go to put their money in the region.
01:40:11.940Of course, it's completely destabilized by all of this.
01:40:14.920It's a complete disaster for them, what's happened.
01:40:18.140But they are girding for the downstream effects of what I'm talking about,
01:40:26.160which is that first you get the physical destruction.
01:40:29.240Then you get the real economy, so-called, the actual physical production of industrial products, of employment in the manufacturing sector and cascading across the economy, having huge negative consequences.
01:40:48.700But then you get the financial effects because people say, is this place viable anymore?
01:41:23.220And then I want to mention, because I want to mention for completeness, it's more speculative, but the daily evidence is growing that the, what we call the interannual phenomenon of ENSO, which is fluctuations in air pressure and currents in the, or sea surface temperatures in the Pacific, which cause El Ninos.
01:41:53.220which people know about, and La Niña's. It looks like a very large, maybe what they're calling a
01:42:01.840super El Nino, is building for later this year. And it may not happen, but the evidence is growing
01:42:10.020that it seems like that's the case. So people might be curious, what does that mean? It means
01:42:14.860that warm surface water over the Pacific would spread to basically the west coast of South
01:42:22.660America. When you get a very powerful El Nino, the temperatures and rainfall patterns and drought
01:42:32.220patterns and storm patterns in all of the tropical and subtropical regions of the world
01:42:39.300are hard hit. One of the things, for example, that happened in the 1973-74 oil shock was that there
01:42:48.600was also an El Nino that year, just remembering. And it was the combination that sent food prices
01:42:59.780soaring worldwide. And if we have that dual combination, I've been saying to myself for years,
01:43:11.220the next big El Nino or super El Nino is by itself going to be world destabilizing because
01:43:18.220There are a lot of countries on the edge right now, on the edge financially, on the edge socially.
01:43:24.600The world's an unstable place because it's been so perturbed by everything that's happened in the last years that many places are just on the edge of solvency in their governments or financial stability and so forth.
01:43:42.580But if you combine a mass destruction in West Asia, the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, with a super El Nino, I don't even know.
01:43:57.760Somebody's going to have to write the next book quickly about this because we would not have had a shock like that since World War II, certainly.
01:44:06.440And the effects on political destabilization, on the effects of governments falling, the potential cascading of this war would be tremendous and uncontrollable.
01:44:24.460Just think, in addition to everything else, a naval fleet from China is heading towards the Gulf right now.
01:44:33.840It's heading towards the Gulf to escort Chinese vessels, or I don't know if it's only Chinese flagged or vessels heading to China to give them military escort.
01:47:36.180What do you make of, I know you're not a famously observant man.
01:47:41.420however things are happening that certainly don't have any precedent in our lifetime
01:47:48.040i mean you've watched the world carefully for 50 years and all of a sudden anomalous things are
01:47:53.540happening all over people are behaving in ways you never would have expected they behave
01:47:57.640do you allow for the possibility that some of this is preordained that like there's that
01:48:03.080no getting off the train i don't uh i've studied history now for my whole life
01:48:10.760And I've seen disasters. I've studied intensively disasters and near misses and avoided disasters with care.
01:48:25.820I wrote a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath. I've studied World War I and World War II upside down, right side up from every country's perspective.
01:48:38.440I've spent half a century looking at this.
01:48:42.840Terrible things happen because individual leaders and governments make miscalculations.
01:48:54.260They don't understand the ramifications.
01:48:57.760They have a breakdown of systematic processes.
01:49:03.020So I don't think that this is ordained, but I think we're close to overload right now, which is what you see happening around crises often.
01:49:16.360It means that very consequent decisions need to be made skillfully and the decisions are a big deal. They have a very, very large consequence.
01:49:31.600I would call them non-linearities, meaning it's that the consequence of the choice can take us into disaster or into solution.
01:49:49.980So in other words, these are really big choices.
01:49:57.140And the truth is individuals make a big difference.
01:50:01.600At times like this, what we've seen, what I've tried to understand, you know better than I do,
01:50:09.920but I'm trying to understand the decision process in the U.S. government right now.
01:50:14.500Normally, you would have a deliberative process.
01:50:20.480We know process that I've studied very carefully, as have many, many scholars, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
01:50:29.420President Kennedy immediately installed an executive committee, XCOM.
01:50:35.400And during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they met repeatedly, they debated, they discussed options.
01:50:44.400It was all put on tape. It's all been studied for decades later.
01:50:49.480Many of the judgments that were made were very wrong.
01:50:52.260And one of the lessons, by the way, of the Cuban Missile Crisis was that it was President Kennedy's cool and rationality and decency that saved the world, actually.0.67
01:51:05.840Quite a remarkable truth, because many hotheads and many hotheads in senior military positions, especially Curtis LeMay, said, no, go blow up the commies.0.74
01:51:21.000And almost to the point of insubordination, LeMay was pressing Kennedy to launch attacks and basically accusing Kennedy of not standing up properly for America.
01:51:44.540Kennedy did, saved the world. But what it showed was a mix of very detailed deliberation, back channels that were extremely important. For example, then the UN Secretary General Utant played a huge role as an intermediary and good judgment of the leader.
01:52:08.480Today, I can't see any process. What we hear from outside accounts, and again, you know better than I, but what we read is that this was Trump's decision, basically, led by Netanyahu.
01:52:46.480I think he has the wrong framework of the world, just a wrong understanding.
01:52:52.040Of course, he also has his incentives for his job and everything else. I'm talking about his understanding of the world. And Trump bought into that. Normally, there would be the National Security Council with detailed interagency assessments.
01:53:10.940There would be the national intelligence agencies reporting.
01:53:18.560Our friend, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, would be weighing in heavily.
01:53:28.840The joint chiefs of staff would be explaining doubts, which they clearly had.
01:53:35.540There would be consultations with senior members of Congress.
01:53:39.220That was routine. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the President of the United States consulted with the leaders of Congress in detail, by the way, even though this was an emergency commander-in-chief, yes, but he knew there was a branch of Congress that was essential for this.
01:54:00.100I don't see any such decision-making taking place right now. And this is absolutely dangerous, actually. The President of the United States needs to get real analysis, data, intelligence, internal debate, opposition.
01:54:30.100And the president has ultimate decisions on many things, not on everything, but on many things, but not on the basis of a gut, not on the basis of a whim, not on the basis of,
01:54:43.980I believe that Iran is like Venezuela, which I think was part of the idea, not on the basis of Netanyahu spinning some absurd yarn, or Mossad spinning some absurd yarn to one person with a group of sycophants listening in and saying,
01:55:08.020well, I don't know. It looks doubtful, but I will follow you, Mr. President. That is not
01:55:15.140the kind of deliberative process that keeps us in safety.
01:55:21.020And yet, I think that's exactly the process. I don't think there's any decision maker or even
01:55:25.780anyone who influences the decisions greatly other than Trump.
01:55:29.880I think the degradation of our political system is so deep right now that maybe there is no chance for that.
01:55:46.180But I do every day plead with the congressional leaders to do their constitutional duty because they're not doing it right now.
01:55:57.020And it's not, you know, be good and go tell Trump they're a co-equal branch of government that under Article 1 of the Constitution assigns them the responsibility for war, for the declaration of war.
01:56:14.280It's not even shared. They are the only branch that can declare war. And when, I don't know how many umpteen times now, the Republicans, all but one, all but the best Republican senator by far, Rand Paul.
01:56:34.400I regard him as the best senator in the whole Senate, and all the Democrats on the other side but one, John Fetterman, who I regard as weird in his complete, total allegiance to Israel's reckless agenda,
01:56:54.800vote that Congress should not have any oversight over this war, completely contrary to the whole0.57
01:57:05.560framework of the Constitution, it shows how degraded we have become.
01:57:11.680Maybe it's an inevitable process where, you know, in late stage republics like ours,
01:57:18.440all power vests in the executive, the legislative body. Well, think of it this way,
01:57:22.160Since you know so many world leaders, is there any legislative body in any country you're familiar with that has become more powerful in the last 10 years?
01:57:35.220I know lots of places that have very high levels of deliberation, very rational processes.
01:57:45.060By the way, people will be very surprised to hear me say it and they'll doubt it and they won't believe it.
01:57:50.680But China has among the most deliberative processes that I see in any government in the world, because we portray Xi Jinping as the leader who decides everything.
01:58:06.960I was just in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, and they've just announced a very, very sophisticated economic program, and I spoke to many people that were part of it.
01:58:21.420It was two years of detailed deliberation over cutting-edge sectors and what to do and how to combine public and private initiatives.
02:01:22.920And that idea that there was a legislative branch where you would have lions of the Senate and the House of Representatives and a speaker who would be an independent voice of politics as the People's Tribune, it actually worked to an extent.
02:01:45.920It really did. I was there. I watched it. I saw it. I quite loved it.
02:01:51.680We don't have that right now. So could it work? Yes. I think there are many interesting things to do in our digital age. We can get people involved much more. We can have public deliberations in different ways. We can upgrade, update the way that our system works.
02:02:15.900But yes, the system could work. It doesn't have to dissolve or devolve to one person operating on gut hunches based on delusions of grandeur that could send the world to disaster. That doesn't have to be the way the world and our system works.