The Tucker Carlson Show - Jeffrey Sachs on the Real Origins of the Iran War and the Coming Economic Devastation

00:00:00.000 Jeff, thanks a lot for doing this.

00:00:05.960 Great to be with you.

00:00:07.080 Where does it go from here, the war in Iran?

00:00:11.460 You know, we always talk about the fork in the road.

00:00:14.460 We're really at a decisive moment.

00:00:20.280 There's an off-ramp.

00:00:22.380 It's definitely, definitely, definitely the one that we should be taking.

00:00:29.100 We should be avoiding a return to outright bombing, to renewed military action.

00:00:41.540 That's a very real possibility.

00:00:44.740 and the other possibility in my view is pretty much an uncontrolled escalation into a full-blown

00:00:53.820 war that would become a regional war and that could become a world war. I think we're really

00:01:02.540 at that moment right now. Maybe that sounds naive because why not next week? Why not the week after?

00:01:11.380 Why 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.

00:01:23.700 As 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.

00:01:40.340 As long as it's closed, it means that there is a worldwide economic crisis building.

00:01:48.980 So time is not permissive right now.

00:01:52.800 We can't say, well, we'll decide in another month.

00:01:56.780 We'll see how things go.

00:01:59.200 We'll negotiate and see what happens.

00:02:02.020 Right 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.

00:02:28.020 oil and gas, obviously, but also fertilizers and petrochemicals and many, many other key

00:02:37.900 commodities, aluminum and others, is closed. To simply open it is fine. That's basically what

00:02:47.720 the off-ramp would allow. It would be the right answer. It would not solve any of the underlying

00:03:00.200 issues that led to this, and it would not solve any of the stated objectives of the United States,

00:03:10.680 much less israel i don't believe those objectives were valid and therefore i don't think that they

00:03:18.060 should be the basis of a decision to take or to not take that exit ramp but the point is there's

00:03:26.780 a way out of this thing that would avoid uh the escalation to something quite different so what

00:03:36.400 is that other path? The other path is, well, we're in this unstable situation. The world economy

00:03:43.120 is reeling because of the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and we have to do something about it. We

00:03:51.320 can't just sit there for weeks or months, and we refuse to just allow it to reopen and not have

00:03:59.300 those goals met. So Trump and his partner in this Netanyahu might say the only thing we can do is 0.65

00:04:09.620 make the maximal threat. And if that threat does not lead to Iran conceding, then we have to follow 0.85

00:04:19.180 through not with more time and waiting because of this unstable situation, but we have to return to 0.64

00:04:27.020 massive bombing, this time even more. And what we can suspect on that alternative is that the

00:04:35.680 Iranians will, of course, strike back and strike back very hard and very rapidly. And what we have 1.00

00:04:45.780 all learned also since February 28th, since the start of this war, is that the entire

00:04:55.900 Gulf region is exposed to missile fire from Iran, as is Israel, in fact, because we also

00:05:05.880 have come to understand that the anti-missile defenses are permeable, limited, even depleted

00:05:15.160 in many areas. But we know that the desalination plants in the Gulf region, the oil and the gas

00:05:22.460 fields, the port facilities are not protected systematically and comprehensively against

00:05:30.460 Iranian attacks. And Iran would completely, totally, understandably respond to what Trump

00:05:40.160 has repeatedly threatened, which is the destruction of Iran.

00:05:44.960 So if we don't take the exit ramp, 0.91

00:05:48.460 I personally don't see anything realistic

00:05:53.600 less than an all-out war.

00:05:58.440 And while I'm an economist, a simple economist,

00:06:03.340 not a military analyst,

00:06:05.840 Having 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.

00:06:30.020 And the result of that would not be peace followed by some easy recovery.

00:06:39.100 It would be a global calamity brought upon us in a few short weeks.

00:06:46.300 So to return to the basic question, Trump could say, we're not going to go to disaster.

00:06:57.360 We just pull back.

00:07:00.020 That's the right answer.

00:07:02.380 If he says instead, we can't wait any longer, we're going to attack, I believe we will see

00:07:11.560 a different world four weeks from now, a world that is profoundly damaged, the world economy

00:07:23.140 in crisis, the possibility of escalation to a full world war. And I don't think I'm being

00:07:31.660 hyperbolic or naive to say that we are at that fork in the road right now.

00:07:39.460 The problem, once again, is that the right thing to do is not a political victory for Trump. 0.54

00:07:49.680 It's not, and it's an outright loss from Netanyahu.

00:07:54.700 Personally, I don't care about either of those.

00:07:57.840 I don't think the individual fates of two politicians should determine the fate of the

00:08:04.380 world because I don't think that the objectives of Trump and Netanyahu going into this made

00:08:10.440 any sense at all.

00:08:11.740 They 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.

00:08:25.840 So the fact that the off-ramp is not a success story doesn't bother me at all.

00:08:34.960 It's the right way to save the world.

00:08:37.640 And it's the responsibility of grown-ups to try to save the world.

00:08:45.300 not to save face, not to double down on failed gambles, not to engage in reckless escapades.

00:08:56.700 And that's why the off-ramp is the right thing to do. It requires grown-up behavior.

00:09:04.740 I don't associate that term with these two leaders very easily, unfortunately, so I'm not

00:09:12.700 extremely optimistic about

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00:10:29.340 Excellent. They would, and I agree with every word you've said, but in fairness,

00:10:34.440 They 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

00:10:45.460 That's correct. 0.94

00:10:46.180 We 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

00:10:57.720 That's essentially correct, except for a couple of important considerations. 0.87

00:11:05.240 One is that Iran has suffered very heavily by this attack.

00:11:12.600 Let's start by recalling the 160 schoolgirls killed on the first day by apparently Palantir's AI system.

00:11:25.180 Well, like we find out every day when we're looking at our screen, this is an AI.

00:11:32.600 It can make mistakes.

00:11:34.460 Well, apparently, Palantir's mistake was to kill 160 innocent schoolgirls.

00:11:41.440 This is not definitively known, but it's what is being widely reported.

00:11:47.360 So we will perhaps someday find out what really happened.

00:11:52.860 Iran has lost thousands of people.

00:11:54.620 Iran has been devastated, tens of billions of dollars of damages that will take years and years basically to recover.

00:12:04.100 For me, as a development economist whose whole career over half a century is to try to build things,

00:12:13.440 I don't like to see things knocked down this way.

00:12:16.180 The 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.

00:12:32.120 So, first, Iran has suffered a lot.

00:12:34.820 There's no glory in the off-ramp.

00:12:38.120 There's just continued bereavement, people still being buried, deaths, deprivation, suffering.

00:12:50.960 So no joy and therefore no, in my view, not a humiliation.

00:12:57.620 Second, it's weird to say, and I'm sure many people will object to what I'm about to say

00:13:05.900 or not understand it or think I don't know what I'm talking about, but I do.

00:13:11.120 The Iranian people are really very civilized.

00:13:17.320 They have wanted to negotiate for years all of this depiction of the evil of Iran

00:13:25.480 that we have been played to since 1979 also mistakes the reality in a fundamental way. 0.59

00:13:37.740 And so when you say that Iran would control the straits, actually they would not control it in 0.61

00:13:45.800 a malevolent way that Americans would be led to expect by hearing that this is the most evil of

00:13:54.100 evil empires. That's what we've been told for decades, that this is the axis of evil,

00:14:01.020 that this is the heart of evil. Netanyahu said that they wanted to annihilate us and so forth.

00:14:10.060 This is not correct at all. It is our nonstop official propaganda narrative. If you go to

00:14:23.240 Iran, which I have been very lucky to do, if you speak to Iranians, which I do frequently and have

00:14:30.420 done for a very long time, the official narrative that Iran is so evil that we can't leave it in

00:14:42.460 control of the Strait of Hormuz just gets everything wrong to begin with. And maybe I'll

00:14:50.420 just say one quick historical word about this. Where does this hatred and venom come from?

00:15:00.920 With respect to the United States, it's very simple. In 1953, Iran was a parliamentary

00:15:10.920 democracy. Iran had not invaded or attacked another country for a century and a half. This

00:15:19.600 was a peaceful country. It had been invaded several times, but it was a democracy that

00:15:26.760 didn't threaten anybody, didn't want to threaten anybody, hadn't threatened anybody,

00:15:32.380 hadn't invaded any place actually since the 1790s in a brawl over who controlled Basra.

00:15:41.680 So, in other words, very esoteric things from the 1790s. 0.60

00:15:47.600 But since then, Iran had been bothered, but had not bothered anybody else.

00:15:51.620 And 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.

00:16:19.020 And when he uttered that thought that maybe Iran's oil belonged to Iran,

00:16:26.480 immediately the British Empire, in the form of MI6,

00:16:31.740 came to the new ascendant American Empire in the guise of the CIA

00:16:37.360 and said, we got to overthrow this guy, which of course they did successfully. 0.94

00:16:43.560 They made what today we would call a color revolution. 0.94

00:16:47.080 They stirred up protests in the streets, they stirred up unrest, and Mossadegh was chased from power. 0.67

00:16:53.480 And 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

00:17:06.680 And 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

00:17:18.100 That lasted 26 years. 0.75

00:17:20.340 In 1979, as the Shah of Iran was dying of cancer, the people led a revolution, an uprising, and threw out Savak and the CIA and the Shah.

00:17:39.920 And that's when Iran had its Islamic revolution and put in the government that is government until today.

00:17:51.800 The United States hated that.

00:17:55.320 When you're an empire as we are, when you have protectorates, when you have places where you have your military,

00:18:03.220 And 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.

00:18:21.500 we need to bring Iran back under our control because we're an empire. If we're too weak

00:18:28.500 vis-a-vis any piece of our empire, it damages our reputation anywhere. We need to punish

00:18:35.580 these people for what they've done. And there was the hostage taking by the youth radical

00:18:47.060 groups who said, we're doing this because we want the Shah to be brought back here to 0.65

00:18:54.620 face a trial in Iran for the crimes of the police state over the last 23 years.

00:19:03.240 And the United States had taken in the Shah in a very unwise decision by President Carter 0.65

00:19:09.240 in 1979 for medical treatment, knowing that you're suspecting it was going to lead to this 0.94

00:19:17.200 kind of eruption. They demanded reparations. They demanded an apology. They demanded an end to

00:19:23.260 the U.S. subversion of Iran. All pretty reasonable, actually. But of course, it became the cause 1.00

00:19:29.740 of the United States in 1979. And another humiliation for America, which an empire 0.93

00:19:36.420 never tolerates. An empire needs to repay any kind of loss of face with some kind of extreme

00:19:46.500 punishment, not only to get that particular recalcitrant place under control, but to signal

00:19:54.480 to all the rest of the empire, don't you dare try this. So from 1980 onward, the U.S. has been at

00:20:03.780 war with Iran in various ways. In 1980 onward, we paid, we armed, we supplied Saddam Hussein 0.51

00:20:14.340 to invade Iran. A pretty sordid deal. Saddam Hussein used poison gas with American knowledge 0.72

00:20:26.680 at the minimum, and according to some testimonies, American active support. But we engaged in a war

00:20:35.580 in Iran through a proxy, through Iraq, from the very start of this 1979 government. Donald Trump

00:20:45.380 already back in 1980 said, we have to overthrow this government. So when Trump gives his

00:20:53.700 explanations for the current war. He says, oh, nuclear or this or that. These are convenient

00:21:02.420 current explanations for something that has been on his mind for 46 years as well,

00:21:11.060 because the American empire suffered a slight. A country got out from under American CIA control,

00:21:20.760 which you don't allow to happen.

00:21:24.080 And from 1980, it's been nonstop war.

00:21:29.340 It's been an economic war.

00:21:31.620 What our treasury secretary, who I increasingly regard to be a thug, basically,

00:21:38.180 not a treasury secretary, but someone who delights and gloats in crushing other economies

00:21:46.480 by using financial means or trade sanctions or financial blockages.

00:21:53.760 And Delights in it explained in Davos this year in a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo

00:22:04.760 that our statecraft destroyed the Iranian economy last year. 0.80

00:22:10.720 Well, we've been doing that kind of statecraft.

00:22:13.540 What a horrible Orwellian term for destroying another country's economy.

00:22:19.260 We've been doing that for decades.

00:22:21.800 Well, there's been a lot of noise in the news lately, but none of it matters if you can't hear it.

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00:23:15.560 That's the system should have done all along.

00:23:17.220 And we have been engaged in assassinations

00:23:20.560 of Iranian leaders. 0.83

00:23:22.160 We have been engaged in blowing up 1.00

00:23:26.280 their nuclear facilities

00:23:28.360 even when they have been pleading

00:23:32.140 let's have an agreement

00:23:33.720 that puts us under strict supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

00:23:40.640 We've been using what's called hybrid warfare,

00:23:43.120 every possible means of subversion, of economic warfare,

00:23:49.740 of direct military action, of covert operations.

00:23:55.360 Donald Trump confirmed that in the protests last year,

00:23:59.160 the U.S. sent weapons to the protesters.

00:24:02.100 That's not a protest.

00:24:03.020 that's an insurrection we were creating that did not work. But the point I'm making is that

00:24:10.300 we portray Iran as evil because it did something unacceptable to the United States that doesn't

00:24:21.520 involve nuclear weapons or any of the specific issues or Hezbollah or Hamas. It goes back to 0.67

00:24:28.520 1979. They

00:24:30.500 escaped from the American Empire.

00:24:32.460 They escaped from CIA

00:24:34.360 control. That's not allowed.

00:24:36.860 That's simply

00:24:38.160 what you're not supposed to

00:24:39.900 do. And

00:24:41.780 this war has been going on with

00:24:44.320 various pretexts,

00:24:46.440 various explanations since then.

00:24:49.360 Let me ask you...

00:24:50.240 If I could just say one more thing,

00:24:52.480 Tucker.

00:24:55.120 Trump's main

00:24:56.680 argument...

00:24:58.520 has been in the last months,

00:25:02.480 I will stop them from having a nuclear weapon.

00:25:06.760 Of course, anyone that knows the history of this

00:25:10.440 knows that this is Orwell to the nth power.

00:25:14.780 By that, I mean such bizarre propaganda.

00:25:18.240 You don't quite even know where to start. 1.00

00:25:21.280 The reason is that the Iranians

00:25:25.240 have not pursued a nuclear weapon.

00:25:29.340 Our own intelligence agencies

00:25:31.260 have said that repeatedly.

00:25:34.180 What they have pursued, though,

00:25:36.160 is a treaty with the U.N. Security Council

00:25:40.880 to confirm that,

00:25:43.100 to put them under strict monitoring

00:25:46.440 under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,

00:25:49.620 but in return for ending the U.S. economic warfare on Iran.

00:25:56.760 What Iran has wanted for 15 years is you supervise us, you control us, fine,

00:26:04.700 but lift your sanctions.

00:26:07.420 Let us breathe.

00:26:09.140 Let us have a normal economy.

00:26:11.360 Let us trade.

00:26:13.500 And President Obama, and by the way, one other thing,

00:26:18.500 Let 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.

00:26:34.800 We freeze the money of other countries.

00:26:38.080 We sometimes just overtly take it and use it for something else.

00:26:42.080 it's rather obnoxious to my point of view and rather self-defeating in the long term for the

00:26:49.640 United States to have the reputation that it just steals other people's fiscal and financial

00:26:56.360 resources. But we did that with Iran. So what Iran has wanted is diplomacy. And I come back again, 0.99

00:27:04.800 they're nice people, they're diplomats. And I sometimes tell them, you don't even know who

00:27:09.820 you're dealing with here. How nasty this is. How difficult this is. No, no, no. We want an

00:27:17.000 agreement, Professor Sachs. Do you know who we might speak to about negotiations and so forth?

00:27:23.680 Very civilized, very nice people. In 2015, such an agreement was reached. The Joint Comprehensive

00:27:33.120 Plan of Action, the JCPOA. It was reached not only with the United States, but with Britain,

00:27:41.100 with France, with Russia, with China, and with Germany. The five permanent members of the UN

00:27:47.680 Security Council plus Germany, called five plus one. Then it went to the UN Security Council,

00:27:53.600 where it was unanimously backed. Then came the Zionist lobby in the United States.

00:28:00.920 Oh, no, you can't have an agreement with Iran. 0.97

00:28:05.380 They're the evil empire. 1.00

00:28:07.060 You can't do this.

00:28:09.700 And so when Trump was elected in the first term, he ripped up the JCPOA.

00:28:16.980 This is the approach that you don't want them to have a nuclear weapon when you had the control.

00:28:22.240 No, this is the opposite.

00:28:23.580 This is, we need to change the regime because they humiliated the United States by escaping

00:28:30.400 from our empire.

00:28:32.000 We tried to defeat them in many ways, but they stood up to it.

00:28:36.420 We need to defeat them. 1.00

00:28:39.020 There's an Israeli version, which is not exactly the same. 0.99

00:28:44.720 And the Israeli version is, we need to have absolute control over the Middle East so that 0.90

00:28:53.400 we can pursue our greater Israel agenda. This is not exactly the U.S. cause, but there are people 0.67

00:29:02.320 in the U.S. that are the backers of that distinct cause. That's not Israel saying,

00:29:09.800 you escape from the American empire. That's Israel saying, we control almost all of the

00:29:15.820 Middle East militarily, but Iran we don't yet control. So that's the last big prize. And that's 0.99

00:29:24.160 the other part of this agenda right now and why Israel is even more against the off-ramp than the

00:29:33.800 United States. Trump is against the off-ramp because he can't declare victory, because he

00:29:39.120 would lose face because it would be, he'd face pressure groups because there are, we

00:29:45.180 have the Israel or the Zionist lobby, I would call it, in the United States.

00:29:51.260 For Israel, the issue is somewhat distinct, but Israel's main issue is that it wants complete

00:30:02.100 military dominance of West Asia and the Middle East and even into the Horn of Africa and North

00:30:12.040 Africa. And it almost has that. Not that it can easily control all of the territory, no, by no 0.89

00:30:20.920 means, but it is able to act with impunity. It's able to invade Lebanon. It's able to occupy Syria. 0.97

00:30:32.920 It's able to overthrow other countries, governments. And that's what it wants. 0.88

00:30:38.960 But it faces an obstacle. And the obstacle is Iran. 0.86

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00:31:58.660 30 years ago this year, when Netanyahu first became prime minister, adopted a strategy that

00:32:06.160 was explained in a public paper called the clean break strategy and the clean break strategy said

00:32:13.840 we will never accept we being our new government never accept the state of Palestine we will

00:32:22.420 occupy all of what had been the British Palestine British mandatory Palestine in other words we'll 0.98

00:32:29.900 control Gaza we'll control the West Bank we'll control all of Jerusalem and we may control other 0.72

00:32:35.740 places as well. We'll never do that, but we'll face resistance when we make that claim and hold 0.96

00:32:44.060 on to this territory. We'll definitely face resistance. We'll definitely face resistance

00:32:48.500 of militant groups. But what Netanyahu and his colleagues in the United States said was,

00:32:57.760 rather than fighting those militant groups directly, we need to bring down the governments

00:33:04.100 in the Middle East and West Asia that support those groups.

00:33:08.860 And that is what's called the clean break strategy. 0.74

00:33:11.440 The clean break was the clean break from the peace accords, 0.79

00:33:16.020 from the land for peace idea that Israel would return to its borders. 0.57

00:33:20.820 There would be a Palestinian state in return for peace.

00:33:24.320 That's what international law says.

00:33:27.000 But what Israel says, we're never returning.

00:33:29.520 There's never going to be a state of Palestine.

00:33:31.380 In 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.

00:33:47.960 And 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.

00:34:15.060 from what is taken to be even a biblical gift of God to the ancient Israelites from the river of

00:34:26.500 Egypt to the great river of Mesopotamia, meaning the Euphrates River. So Israel wants military 0.84

00:34:34.340 dominance. The clean break idea was when we aim for that, we'll find resistance. We don't fight 0.96

00:34:44.040 and extinguish the militant groups because we can't.

00:34:47.780 We have to fight the governments that back them.

00:34:51.040 And that's where the idea of perpetual war

00:34:54.240 in the Middle East came from,

00:34:55.740 or not perpetual war,

00:34:57.060 but actually specifically seven wars were designated

00:35:02.740 that would overthrow governments

00:35:04.820 supporting Palestinian militancy.

00:35:09.000 And those governments were Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

00:35:22.580 And we've now been pulled into Israel's seven wars.

00:35:29.740 Six of those wars have led to bloodbaths and disasters from Libya still in civil war.

00:35:37.380 Sudan, unbelievably, in two civil wars because we broke the country apart, and each of those two parts now has its own civil war.

00:35:47.600 Somalia, there's not even a government.

00:35:49.860 There is a government, actually a very nice prime minister that I know, but barely governance in the country.

00:35:58.940 Lebanon, we see it's an invaded, basically destroyed country.

00:36:04.300 Syria, the U.S. and Israel worked for 15 years from Obama until this past year to overthrow the government.

00:36:15.960 That was an active covert regime change operation.

00:36:20.120 Iraq, the 2003 war and the debacle that lasted for years after that.

00:36:28.540 and Iran was the last.

00:36:31.960 So six of the seven places are in chaos. 0.98

00:36:36.160 And from Israel's point of view, great. 0.99

00:36:39.480 We like chaos. 0.73

00:36:41.100 That means we are the military hegemon

00:36:44.660 for all of that region stretching from Libya to Iraq. 0.98

00:36:49.360 Chaos is great. 1.00

00:36:50.980 They can't get their act together.

00:36:52.740 They're all in civil war.

00:36:53.920 What could be better? 1.00

00:36:56.300 The seventh is Iran. 0.99

00:36:58.540 And that's where we're facing right now. And interestingly, when the war started,

00:37:07.220 Netanyahu tweeted, this is my dream come true for 40 years. And I had to confess,

00:37:16.280 I made a mistake. I always said 30 years because I dated it to clean break, 1996.

00:37:24.940 But I didn't know Netanyahu before he was prime minister. 0.72

00:37:28.900 I didn't know that he had 10 years more of dreaming of this war.

00:37:33.300 So the off-ramp violates not only the American conditions of defending its imperial strength, 0.80

00:37:43.520 but the Israeli dream of full control over the region. 0.78

00:37:50.060 And that's why the off-ramp is so hard. 0.76

00:37:53.680 I 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.

00:38:19.400 So 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.

00:38:35.620 Trump, absolutely, without question, no doubt, 100%, is as strongly beholden to the oil lobby as he is to the Zionist lobby.

00:38:49.600 And he said so vividly, vocally in 2024.

00:38:55.460 He said, raise a billion dollars for me.

00:38:58.660 It's a deal.

00:38:59.860 You'll get all the benefits from this.

00:39:02.000 what he did in Venezuela, he thought he was about to do in Iran as well. So this needs to be

00:39:12.340 understood as just one more piece of this. Yes, he wanted to fight with Iran for 46 years,

00:39:20.100 at least since 1980, probably 47 since 1979. But what he thinks he learned from

00:39:28.900 kidnapping the Venezuelan president and then suborning the Venezuelan government is I can do

00:39:37.220 a decapitation and then own the oil of that country. And so part of the motivation now was

00:39:46.580 revenge, bring Iran back into the empire. But part of the benefit of bringing Iran back into 1.00

00:39:52.320 the American empire is you get the oil. And he thought within one day he'll get the oil because 0.95

00:40:01.880 just like removing Maduro, he thinks, gave America Venezuela's oil, he thought killing

00:40:10.720 the Iranian governmental leadership, starting with this religious supreme leader and then the top

00:40:17.860 officials of the government that were meeting that day with the Supreme Leader, he would take

00:40:24.140 the oil. So that's the tableau. This is why it's hard to take the exit ramp, because there were

00:40:32.260 reasons for this war, to my mind, cruel, illegal, delusional. So I don't abide by any of those

00:40:42.260 reasons, but there were reasons for this war, and taking the off-ramp means that none of those

00:40:49.020 would be fulfilled. From my point of view, fine. None of them was valid. But from the point of view

00:40:56.860 of the two architects of this war, Trump and Netanyahu, that's quite hard to do. But as I said,

00:41:05.580 the alternative, which is an escalated war, within a few weeks could destroy the world economy.

00:41:15.260 Thank you for that. That was perfect. I loved it. I loved it. And it's much needed because

00:41:23.320 there's always a context. You did this with the Ukraine war once in this room, and I've never

00:41:28.000 stopped thinking about it. Thank you for that. A couple quick follow-up questions. You talked

00:41:32.820 about the ongoing war against Iran by the United States, now 46 years since 1980, first a proxy

00:41:39.060 war with Iraq, et cetera, et cetera. There are reports that the United States, in addition to

00:41:44.560 all of that, has used geoengineering to evoke a drought in Iran. Is that true?

00:41:52.740 I doubt it. There are enough reasons for drought as a natural condition of

00:41:59.480 an arid and semi-arid reason

00:42:03.580 that we don't have to go there.

00:42:05.020 Okay.

00:42:05.500 Yeah.

00:42:06.520 Second-

00:42:07.520 In fact, I can tell you one visit to Tehran,

00:42:13.740 I was in the Gulf region in Saudi,

00:42:18.180 and then I went to Tehran.

00:42:21.200 And in both places, this was many years ago now,

00:42:24.280 there was already drought,

00:42:25.660 and it was a springtime,

00:42:27.860 and there were intense sandstorms, sandstorms like none of us has ever experienced if you haven't

00:42:36.440 been in those places. And in Tehran, I was invited to a kind of cocktail party or an evening get

00:42:44.580 together, very nice on a top floor of an apartment building. You couldn't see anything out the

00:42:52.460 window because it was just completely darkened in the afternoon by this sandstorm, basically.

00:42:59.980 So the point was, it struck me then, these are arid regions.

00:43:05.440 Yes.

00:43:06.320 They are drying under the forces of long-term changes that are underway.

00:43:13.740 And having been in the Gulf and then in Iran, it's, of course, exactly the same ecosystem.

00:43:25.020 It's the same environment.

00:43:26.880 It's the most natural thing that they should be working together to solve these problems.

00:43:31.600 And you say, where do these lines of division come from?

00:43:35.840 just because someone drew a political line, it doesn't change the fact that there's the sandstorm

00:43:41.080 on one side, the same sandstorm on the other side, and they should be working together.

00:43:45.920 And so it just struck me, I'm just reminded of the fact that I had this intense,

00:43:53.680 visceral feeling then how artificial these political boundaries are, because this is a

00:44:00.080 region. And it's a region that shares some very intense human problems, like how to get enough

00:44:07.740 water to stay alive day to day. And they should be working together to solve that problem. So I

00:44:13.940 don't think in this case that you need the United States to geoengineer anything. I think it's

00:44:18.880 happening by itself. For decades, Russell Brand was one of the most famous actors and comedians

00:44:24.900 and agnostics in the world. Today, he is one of the most sincere Christians we know, a follower

00:44:32.820 of Christ. His personal transformation is remarkable. We saw it up close. He has now

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00:44:45.440 what happened to him, and it makes the case to all of us for stepping away from our secular

00:44:50.500 assumptions and returning to the only thing that matters, which is God. I've read it. It's amazing.

00:44:54.900 And right now, there's only one place to get it, tuckercarlsonbooks.com.

00:44:58.560 This is the first release from our new publishing company.

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00:45:27.620 Second question, clean break, 1996,

00:45:32.060 listed seven countries whose governments

00:45:35.020 need to be overthrown in order to create room

00:45:37.600 and strategic depth and options for Israel. 0.92

00:45:40.460 Six of those wars have taken place.

00:45:43.340 The U.S. was, and well now seven, 0.75

00:45:45.520 but the U.S. was the instrument of all of those, correct?

00:45:48.240 Okay, great. 0.90

00:45:49.320 So this was Israel's plan,

00:45:50.980 but the U.S. military was used. 0.68

00:45:52.380 The U.S. has spent $5 to $10 trillion on this Israel venture.

00:45:59.080 This is the basic point.

00:46:01.520 Yes, we've had our own misguided ideas about this, but it's just bizarre. 0.93

00:46:10.960 Of course, Iraq, we know in detail that this was a concocted war. 0.74

00:46:16.800 But Syria has never been understood in as much depth, but it's the same story. 0.52

00:46:25.540 Why suddenly did Barack Obama feel the compulsion to task the CIA with overthrowing Bashar al-Assad?

00:46:35.380 Assad must go.

00:46:36.580 Yes.

00:46:36.980 That was on the lips of everyone in one day.

00:46:38.580 Are 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?

00:46:57.620 Well, it took 14 years, hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of billions of dollars, massive destruction, massive destabilization. 1.00

00:47:09.580 Refugee crisis.

00:47:10.520 To put a jihadist in charge right now and then clean it up.

00:47:15.640 To take a secular government that protected religious minorities, Alawites, Christians, everybody, for generations, generationally, father and son did the same,

00:47:24.780 and replace it with a guy

00:47:26.700 we thought we were fighting against.

00:47:28.640 And to destroy, of course,

00:47:30.220 historic sites as they're doing 0.93

00:47:32.060 in Iran right now,

00:47:33.760 cultural sites, I should say,

00:47:35.380 that are human heritage,

00:47:37.400 not only Syrian or Iranian heritage,

00:47:40.780 but world heritage,

00:47:42.160 because they've lasted thousands of years 1.00

00:47:44.240 and then our idiocy, 1.00

00:47:45.820 we're destroying them in hours. 1.00

00:47:47.800 Yeah, I would say evil,

00:47:48.840 but yeah, no, that's...

00:47:50.460 Okay, so I just want to be clear with that.

00:47:51.680 Third question about the off-ramp.

00:47:54.780 so the United States would have to,

00:47:57.480 the president,

00:47:58.100 but the whole government

00:47:58.840 would have to swallow that,

00:48:00.380 would just have to admit

00:48:01.100 that it didn't work 0.89

00:48:01.880 and Iran is now more powerful.

00:48:04.140 Iran is an economic power,

00:48:05.260 which we didn't understand,

00:48:06.360 I don't think,

00:48:06.740 before this war

00:48:07.280 we thought of them

00:48:07.760 as this emerging military threat.

00:48:09.520 Turns out they're an economic power

00:48:10.900 because they control the strait. 0.92

00:48:12.420 But from an Israeli perspective,

00:48:15.060 there is this process,

00:48:17.380 which I've seen many times,

00:48:18.200 where people talk themselves

00:48:19.440 into believing their own rhetoric.

00:48:22.760 So you start out by saying

00:48:23.700 The real threat from Iran is its nuclear program, but you don't mean it. 0.88

00:48:27.420 You just want to take Iran out because you don't want Hezbollah and Hamas to hassle you. 0.96

00:48:30.600 Got it.

00:48:31.780 But if you say it enough, you start to believe that the main threat to your existence is this government. 1.00

00:48:37.720 And I think the Israelis are there. 1.00

00:48:39.260 Like, I think they believe that.

00:48:41.460 So 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

00:48:49.920 Well, Netanyahu said a couple of days ago that they're out to annihilate us, which is not true.

00:49:03.140 That's a heavy thing to say.

00:49:04.380 And 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.

00:49:30.780 And 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.

00:49:51.180 Well, it leads to, as even Netanyahu said, a Sparta state, a state that is just a war state.

00:50:00.780 they've lost the capacity for diplomacy at all.

00:50:06.780 Israel, unfortunately, has no diplomacy.

00:50:10.760 It has diplomats, but the diplomats rip up the UN charter

00:50:15.600 or shred the UN charter or stand in the podium of the UN General Assembly

00:50:20.860 and accuse the whole world of anti-Semitism and hatred and so forth.

00:50:26.440 It's not diplomacy at all because one strand of thought is nobody can be trusted. 1.00

00:50:34.220 We have to kill them before they kill us. 1.00

00:50:37.480 If you live like that, you end up as a killer nonstop. 1.00

00:50:41.300 And this is definitely one tragic reality of the mentality of Netanyahu or others.

00:50:53.540 He's been killing before they kill us for decades. 1.00

00:50:58.080 He's a killer. 1.00

00:50:59.340 He has become a nonstop killer. 1.00

00:51:02.700 He kills in the name of self-defense,

00:51:05.720 but he kills in the name of preemptive self-defense.

00:51:10.360 And so if you believe that the others are out to kill you

00:51:13.360 and you must not talk to them

00:51:15.160 and must not try to understand

00:51:16.940 or must not do anything else, 0.96

00:51:20.020 you end up as a nonstop killer. 0.99

00:51:22.600 Or 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

00:51:35.580 And 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

00:51:56.860 That'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

00:52:10.960 And then you want others to, then when others object to that, you say that they're out to destroy you. 0.92

00:52:18.800 Why 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?

00:52:30.960 Yes, of course, because there are 8 million Palestinians.

00:52:34.940 And in a situation of peace, we could have calm with the rest of the region without going to war, subverting governments, and so forth.

00:52:44.900 But you don't try to do that.

00:52:46.520 Netanyahu's position is there's no possibility of diplomacy. 0.98

00:52:53.080 We must kill them before they kill us, but without trying to have any peace, without 0.99

00:53:04.640 trying to understand that there are legitimate, deep, moral, legal, and historical reasons 1.00

00:53:14.460 for doing something different from greater Israel that kills, maims, destroys, expropriates

00:53:23.740 the Palestinian people and claims territory seemingly wherever they want in Lebanon or

00:53:31.900 Syria and who knows where else, according to Ambassador Huckabee.

00:53:37.060 So 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.

00:54:06.400 that we have denied basic political rights.

00:54:11.040 And without that, how can he think

00:54:13.620 that there could be some kind of solution?

00:54:17.640 So Netanyahu's absence of an exit ramp

00:54:21.640 starts from his own radicalism,

00:54:24.720 not only from his fear,

00:54:26.740 but from a complete absence of diplomacy

00:54:29.760 that recognizes that there's another side

00:54:32.940 that needs to be dealt with as human beings.

00:54:35.840 And where that extremism comes from is, I'm not sure, it's very pathological.

00:54:44.920 You 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.

00:54:56.760 I'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.

00:55:11.960 so i always thought that it was netanyahu was leading this that he had a particular worldview

00:55:18.140 um and that i don't know through his brilliant political skill he was able to control the

00:55:25.140 country now it seems like there are a lot of people who have even more radical views and one

00:55:30.700 of them would be danny dannon whom i know i always thought was kind of a reasonable guy he's the

00:55:35.280 israeli ambassador to the united nations there was an amazing exchange between you and him

00:55:40.100 at the UN fairly recently that made me think, wow, it's not just Netanyahu. Can you explain

00:55:46.460 that exchange? Well, I can explain the exchange, and I can also say that there are two variants

00:55:53.500 of Israeli extremism that are not the same, but they are now literally a coalition. I mean,

00:56:00.680 They're literally a political coalition, and they are an ideological coalition as well. 0.99

00:56:11.300 So one is the view, every generation, they're out to kill us, we have to kill them before they kill us. 0.90

00:56:18.760 The preemptive strike, the clean break idea, but again, grounded in this perverse, maybe related idea 0.97

00:56:28.780 that there will never be a Palestine alongside an Israel, 0.76

00:56:32.660 which is actually what led to clean break, 0.87

00:56:36.500 led to all these wars, led to the militancy,

00:56:38.980 was the absence of Palestinian political rights

00:56:42.300 alongside Israeli political rights,

00:56:44.800 the so-called two-state solution.

00:56:47.780 And since Netanyahu's party, Likud,

00:56:50.580 going back to its opening charter in 1977 said,

00:56:54.660 there will never be a Palestinian state, nothing to talk about, no terms, no security arrangements

00:57:04.400 to make it possible. This will all be Israel's sovereignty from the Jordan River to the 1.00

00:57:10.840 Mediterranean. There was never a basis for a diplomatic way out within Israel from Netanyahu's 0.57

00:57:21.060 point of view. Now, there's a second variant in Israel which gives a theological interpretation

00:57:29.620 of this. Netanyahu's interpretation is mainly security and secular with the only theological

00:57:40.600 twinge being this idea that they're always out to kill us every generation. And the Holocaust put 0.91

00:57:49.180 that into overdrive for completely understandable reasons, but not rational reasons that attend to 0.90

00:57:57.200 current realities. So I'd say Netanyahu is basically the security vision, but again,

00:58:07.480 to my mind, irrational, cruel, illegal, self-defeating, disastrous. Not real security

00:58:16.220 for Israel, but security in the phrase, we kill them before they kill us. Then is a very different 0.98

00:58:25.720 variant that is now the coalition partners, represented by two now well-known leaders to us,

00:58:35.500 Ben Gavir and Smotrich, two cabinet ministers who are religious. Religious with a very strange 1.00

00:58:45.520 idea. And it's a new form of Judaism, which actually attaches to some ancient texts, 0.96

00:58:55.940 but was not a real form of Judaism for 2000 years. It's not what I grew up with at all.

00:59:01.840 It's not what I grew up with as a Jew at all. It's something absolutely late 20th century,

00:59:09.200 early 21st century. One of the parties is called Jewish Power. And it is the idea that-

00:59:17.440 That's its actual name?

00:59:18.500 Yes. In Hebrew, yes. We redeem God's promise to us by becoming greater Israel.

00:59:30.080 So the act of this expanded Israel is a religious demand upon us. 0.69

00:59:41.720 This is our redemption is this very political military program that we have. 0.94

00:59:51.240 And that is Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, which says on a religious basis, we couldn't have a state of Palestine next door.

01:00:01.920 God gave us that land.

01:00:05.220 That's ours.

01:00:07.260 That's part of the promised land. 0.99

01:00:09.800 That's not theirs, even though the Palestinian people were living there for well over a thousand years. 0.85

01:00:21.660 Probably, 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.

01:00:47.040 The 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.

01:01:08.660 And 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

01:01:32.960 That'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.

01:01:50.440 But today—

01:01:51.540 Wait, Ben-Gurion said that?

01:01:52.780 Ben-Gurion said that, yes.

01:01:55.340 What was—not to get sidetracked, but Ben-Gurion was secular, I think.

01:01:58.900 Yeah, of course. All of the original Zionists were secular. 0.53

01:02:00.980 Yes, from Eastern Europe. 0.61

01:02:02.480 So what were, I don't understand.

01:02:05.980 I know they wanted to leave Europe, I get it.

01:02:08.680 But what was the justification in his mind

01:02:11.440 for displacing millions of people from their land

01:02:14.880 if he acknowledged that they were the actual heirs of Abraham? 1.00

01:02:20.800 Yeah, the idea was Jews are,

01:02:25.880 instead of a religion in their view,

01:02:28.200 these were not religious people, by the way.

01:02:30.100 They didn't consult with the rabbi, so it's all very ironic.

01:02:34.000 But in their view, Jews are not a religion.

01:02:37.500 They are a people.

01:02:40.000 And in the ideology of Europe in the late 19th century, a people needs a state.

01:02:45.820 And so the idea was there should be a Jewish state.

01:02:51.860 That was the name of the founder of Jewish Zionism, Theodor Herzl's first book, The Jewish State.

01:02:58.840 Well, that all makes sense to me.

01:02:59.940 No, no, no, but he asked, so where?

01:03:06.520 And one option was, oh, maybe what is today's Uganda.

01:03:10.960 Yep. 0.97

01:03:11.180 It wasn't the Holy Land.

01:03:13.740 It wasn't some religious compulsion or a return to this promised land.

01:03:21.240 And in part, and ironically, again, very weird twists, the rabbis had said 1,500 years earlier, don't go back to the Holy Land.

01:03:35.120 Live where you are, stay peaceful.

01:03:37.660 Someday a Messiah will come and there will be again the Holy Land for us.

01:03:43.560 But in the meantime, stay calm, live where you are, behave, and obey God's laws. 0.58

01:03:52.360 That was the idea of the Jewish religion, of the rabbinic Jewish religion.

01:03:57.480 So 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.

01:04:18.000 It was not the original Zionist movement, which was almost completely secular.

01:04:25.660 It had a couple of rabbis, which had some modest influence.

01:04:32.080 And 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.

01:04:47.760 And things became radicalized after that.

01:04:52.080 And some radical rabbis and militant, militarist, violent, violence-preaching rabbis,

01:05:00.300 like Mayor Kahane, which is an American rabbi who preached violence for the settler cause in Israel,

01:05:12.140 gained a following.

01:05:13.460 And 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.

01:05:30.080 And the UN Security Council said repeatedly, no, you can't have settlers there.

01:05:36.280 I 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

01:05:59.560 But they told me this was making facts on the ground so that this would be ours.

01:06:05.640 We would have our security and so forth.

01:06:08.000 Facts on the ground was the famous expression.

01:06:11.180 When 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.

01:06:28.300 because these were settlements and places mentioned in the Bible.

01:06:32.820 This was suddenly now the redemption of God's promise.

01:06:36.900 This was something new. 0.92

01:06:38.240 This was not traditional Judaism, but I mean traditional from 400 A.D. to 1970. 0.80

01:06:49.840 I'm talking about 1,600 years or so. 0.95

01:06:55.880 This 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.

01:07:19.100 It'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.

01:07:34.480 It's half the motivation, and it's why all of this is so radicalized and so zealous.

01:07:42.700 But as we were talking, it's extremely important in the U.S. context to understand the Christian Zionist dimension to this

01:07:54.400 because Zionism did not originate with Judaism, strangely, or with Jews, I should say.

01:08:02.300 Herzl 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.

01:08:22.800 And that has roots hundreds of years before these Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the 19th century.

01:08:33.340 And a big part of the Christian Zionist movement started in Britain in the first half of the 19th century.

01:08:40.800 These 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.

01:08:53.660 So what's called eschatology or the end of the world beliefs. 0.51

01:09:00.060 And 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.

01:09:18.460 because the book of Revelations says that the second coming of Christ will occur

01:09:23.820 when the Jews are in control of the Holy Land. 0.59

01:09:27.040 It happens, interestingly, that these Christian Zionists were often rather confirmed anti-Semites 0.82

01:09:36.020 that wanted the Jews out of their own country. 0.85

01:09:39.080 They didn't want the Jews in Britain. 0.66

01:09:40.620 They didn't want Eastern European Jews migrating to Britain and so forth. 1.00

01:09:45.360 So they wanted them conveniently anyway out of Britain and back in the Holy Land. 0.85

01:09:52.720 But the point is, there is a set of non-religious claims. 0.96

01:10:03.020 Our security depends on this. 0.99

01:10:05.060 They're out to kill us.

01:10:06.760 We need dominance. 1.00

01:10:08.640 They're evil. 0.99

01:10:09.900 They have nuclear weapons. 0.99

01:10:11.480 They want whatever.

01:10:12.860 those are all security side. But then there's this whole strong religious dimension. And when you

01:10:21.620 had the amazing interview with Ambassador Huckabee, which was, I think, a world eye-opener,

01:10:30.500 he displayed in a way that people all over the world had never seen before, this very particular

01:10:40.140 British and American Christian Zionism. It's very particular. It's 19th and 20th century. 0.53

01:10:51.500 It's a very specific way of reading a couple of books of the three books of the Bible, I would say.

01:11:01.000 the Genesis, the promise of the land, the book of Joshua, which says, go kill everyone in the land

01:11:12.100 so you can take the land. It's a commandment strange in the Bible to commit multiple genocides

01:11:19.960 in the name of God to get all the land that has been promised to you. And then the book of

01:11:26.140 Revelation, which is the final book of the New Testament. And it's a very, very particular

01:11:32.140 reading. It's not at all mainstream Judaism. It's not at all mainstream Christianity anywhere in

01:11:40.720 the world, but it has its important political base in the United States and more traditionally

01:11:51.520 in Britain. So what we're seeing in Israel is an extremism that is shocking. And now coming back

01:12:01.040 to my exchange with the ambassador at the UN, I said to him that I thought Israel was and is

01:12:08.860 committing suicide. I didn't accuse Israel of what it's doing to others. That's implicit perhaps in

01:12:18.200 what I was saying, but I said it's committing suicide because it's taking such a violent

01:12:24.360 extremist course that it's putting it outside of the bounds of civilization, outside of

01:12:34.320 the bounds of opinion in all parts of the world, putting it outside of international

01:12:42.740 law and relying entirely on the United States to do that. Because if Israel did this on its own, 0.84

01:12:53.560 it would be immediately suicidal. It wouldn't stand for a day. It thinks the United States 0.93

01:13:00.360 is going to support this extremism on an unending, unconditional basis. But you and I know that's

01:13:10.740 not true. Americans are sickened by this extremism. They're sickened by the tens of

01:13:19.100 thousands of innocent deaths in Gaza. They're disgusted with this war in Iran. They're disgusted 0.66

01:13:26.380 with the trillions of dollars that the United States has spent for Israel's clean break. 0.91

01:13:32.920 We're sick of it. Most Americans are just sick of this right now. 0.76

01:13:37.780 Overwhelmingly, and the polls show that. 0.82

01:13:39.360 So I read analysis that says it's going to take, you know, years and years for America to reset its relationship with Israel.

01:13:45.580 I think that's absurd.

01:13:46.900 If our current system remains in place, which is an open question, but if it does, that's going to be abrupt.

01:13:52.640 I mean, people aren't going to get elected if they're taking AIPAC money.

01:13:54.760 We see, nobody supports what's going on right now.

01:13:58.620 And wait four weeks if they don't choose the off-ramp in the next few days.

01:14:03.520 Wait 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.

01:14:18.080 What are they going to say then?

01:14:19.400 So how is this going to be sustained when just Americans basically don't want to be the agents of mass murder and mass suffering?

01:14:32.280 And most of us don't believe that the mass expulsion of people is somehow God's command.

01:14:41.540 We don't believe that.

01:14:42.800 Well, no, it's insane.

01:14:44.220 And 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

01:14:50.960 I mean, there's nothing in there that supports it. 0.75

01:14:53.540 You would think, by the way, the greatest speech I know of is the Sermon on the Mount for everybody, for the whole world.

01:15:04.840 This isn't a matter of who believes, but blessed are the peacemakers.

01:15:09.360 Of course.

01:15:10.380 Should resonate.

01:15:12.060 I think it does resonate with people all over the world.

01:15:16.320 the message of Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount is completely the opposite of what we're doing

01:15:25.240 right now. And that is not from a Christian or Jewish or any other. That's from a human 0.96

01:15:30.980 perspective because he was speaking about humanity, about what is decent for human beings,

01:15:37.400 about how human beings should treat other people. They should not kill them. They should not make

01:15:43.760 strangers out of them. The good Samaritan was the one that rescued the man on the side of the road.

01:15:51.160 The Samaritan who was the outsider, he's teaching us something. And the part that I love about the

01:15:57.720 teaching that I think is so important is why do you point to the moat in the other's eye when you

01:16:06.080 have the plank in your own eye. And what Jesus is saying very clearly, don't be a hypocrite. 0.97

01:16:14.440 Yes. 0.92

01:16:14.660 And don't just say they're evil without reflecting on yourself. This is so basic. All of that

01:16:22.980 is left out because this new version of Judaism or of Christian Zionism is

01:16:32.920 one chapter of Genesis, or maybe two, chapter 15 and chapter 18, God's promise. The book of Joshua,

01:16:42.500 which is probably a political tract written during the late 7th century BC during the reign

01:16:52.800 of King Josiah of the state of Judah as a political tract that says, murder other people

01:16:59.520 to take the promised land.

01:17:01.220 And then the book of Revelation,

01:17:02.740 the gospels are not part of that text.

01:17:04.920 And it's clear that they're not

01:17:06.740 because the message of the gospels

01:17:08.480 is completely different.

01:17:10.380 Yeah, Jesus is saying,

01:17:11.400 you've been told don't murder.

01:17:12.440 I tell you, don't even be angry

01:17:13.540 at someone else.

01:17:15.060 It's a message of radical reconciliation

01:17:18.180 and nonviolence.

01:17:20.540 So that's just what it says. 0.94

01:17:21.700 I mean, it's inconvenient, but it's true. 0.94

01:17:24.380 So I guess my question is though,

01:17:25.820 if the United States withdraws

01:17:27.620 under popular pressure, 0.90

01:17:29.080 it's unconditional support for Israel

01:17:31.000 and the Iranian regime stays in place, 0.80

01:17:33.760 some form of it does. 0.90

01:17:35.600 And once again, Iran is more powerful 1.00

01:17:37.240 than it's ever been 0.98

01:17:37.940 and now has a clear incentive

01:17:39.420 to buy a nuke from Pakistan or somewhere else.

01:17:43.300 Those are like,

01:17:44.540 what does Israel do at that point? 0.74

01:17:46.880 That's my concern

01:17:47.760 because now it's kind of out of options.

01:17:49.900 Yeah, so here's what I think.

01:17:52.080 First of all, 1.00

01:17:52.780 we should look at Iranian invasions 0.97

01:17:57.100 of other countries. 0.81

01:17:58.280 As I said, it hasn't happened for 230 years, if I have the arithmetic right.

01:18:06.760 As far as I know, the last actual military operation of Persia or Iran was against Basra in the 1790s.

01:18:20.060 Iran is not out to destroy Israel.

01:18:24.240 Iran does not want to be destroyed by a petulant, annoyed American empire from which it escaped. 0.51

01:18:36.180 This is the most basic point. 0.98

01:18:38.420 And if you've dealt with Iranians for decades, as I have, that message is absolutely clear.

01:18:44.140 So Israel is not a threat from Iran.

01:18:51.340 It is not a threat from Iran.

01:18:55.500 This is the basic point.

01:18:57.100 Iran wants its place in the world.

01:19:00.240 It doesn't want to be bombed and destroyed by Israel and the United States.

01:19:07.720 This is the first most important point.

01:19:11.280 Second, Iran has supported Hezbollah and Hamas.

01:19:18.340 and it would stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah

01:19:25.940 if there is a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.

01:19:32.820 This is a most basic point.

01:19:35.340 You want a path to peace, you make peace.

01:19:39.760 And the way to peace is there are two peoples in that land.

01:19:45.180 When it started, there were 90% Palestinian Arabs.

01:19:51.620 Now it's roughly half and half between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

01:19:57.480 But there need to be two states, or I'm fine if there's one democratic state, but Israel doesn't want that for sure, so two states.

01:20:06.620 But there can't be one state in which Israel rules over everybody or kills the others or expropriates the others. 0.51

01:20:18.560 That's what's not possible.

01:20:20.760 But if there is a political settlement within Israel, then there will be an end of the militancy as well.

01:20:32.440 And this is a fundamental point.

01:20:34.700 Iran does not want to live as a militant state. I know it because I watch and I discuss for decades.

01:20:45.480 It wants to live, though, not as an American satrapy. So the idea that if we leave, Iran is 0.76

01:20:54.940 just overpowering and they're going to defeat Israel and so forth. No. First of all, 0.89

01:21:01.660 first of all, Israel will not be defeated. It has nuclear weapons. It would use them. 0.94

01:21:10.900 Iran does not have nuclear weapons. It actually doesn't want nuclear weapons. If we had the

01:21:15.460 slightest sanity, honesty, and rationality in the world, it would be the easiest thing in the world 0.97

01:21:22.800 to make sure that Iran has no nuclear weapons because they don't want them. 0.74

01:21:27.420 And 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

01:21:46.040 But the first thing they did was to kill the very religious leader that issued the so-called fatwa to prohibit nuclear weapons.

01:21:56.240 So Israel, the idea that it's in dire threat if we leave is wrong.

01:22:03.960 We also need to remember there's a whole world out there.

01:22:09.980 We don't like to admit that.

01:22:11.780 It's not the American way, but there's Russia, there's China, there's India, there's Brazil.

01:22:18.720 I'm mentioning countries in the so-called BRICS. 0.98

01:22:22.260 They will tell Iran.

01:22:26.240 No. Now you have peace. Now you live peacefully. 0.71

01:22:32.140 So Iran cannot engage in some regional takeover to become the super regional power because they're also profoundly constrained.

01:22:46.500 Right now, they're trying to stop themselves from being destroyed by American bombs, precisely what Trump has threatened repeatedly.

01:22:55.400 the end of their civilization, which, by the way, is 5,000 years old, 20 times longer than the

01:23:03.020 United States. So they're not about to do all these terrible things. They're not about to hold

01:23:14.260 a chokehold over the world economy. President Xi Jinping, who has, let's just say, a lot of

01:23:22.700 influence with Iran as a main consumer and supplier and trader and many, many other things

01:23:31.560 said yesterday, the Straits of Hormuz need to be opened, need to be opened.

01:23:39.400 Iran is not going to do all these horrible things that are imagined. And when I say leave,

01:23:48.900 It wouldn't hurt to leave also with an agreement.

01:23:54.340 Okay, we're leaving.

01:23:56.140 You don't invade.

01:23:57.240 We're not invading you.

01:23:58.440 Israel, there's going to be a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as is the core of international law since 1967, indeed, since 1947.

01:24:13.520 And you'll live peacefully.

01:24:17.760 They'll live peacefully.

01:24:19.300 And you won't have nuclear weapons.

01:24:21.740 You'll go under IAEA inspection according to the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,

01:24:29.240 which, by the way, Israel doesn't abide by, of course, at all.

01:24:33.480 So it's already asymmetric. 0.76

01:24:35.500 But Iran has said, okay, we'll do it asymmetrically.

01:24:38.840 But put us under this.

01:24:40.680 Don't put us under the bombs.

01:24:42.060 So all I'm saying is there's no sense in which the exit ramp means Iran becomes the great threat to Israel and the dominant threat. 0.98

01:24:55.120 But what it does mean, and I think this is really the fundamental point here, I have to say, greater Israel is an untenable project. 0.98

01:25:06.580 This is the most basic point.

01:25:09.060 If you believe Mike Huckabee, then what I'm saying is not acceptable. 0.65

01:25:17.580 If 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.

01:25:37.920 It's a $10 trillion disaster for the United States, not the least in America's interest. 0.87

01:25:45.440 Stay out of it.

01:25:46.300 Stay clear of it. 0.99

01:25:49.240 Netanyahu is a repeated failure and liar and everything he's told us for 30 years has turned out to be the opposite. 0.96

01:25:56.920 So I'd say that anyway from our point of view. 0.84

01:25:59.180 But 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

01:26:13.340 You say, why should we settle for that? 0.50

01:26:15.980 But I don't believe that.

01:26:17.600 I believe in peace. 0.79

01:26:19.080 I believe in a secure state of Israel. 0.78

01:26:21.480 I believe in a secure state of Palestine. 0.94

01:26:23.960 I 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

01:26:41.800 It's absurd. 1.00

01:26:43.220 It's tragic.

01:26:44.120 It's got to end.

01:26:45.260 And it needs to end now before we have a complete disaster.

01:26:49.600 Can Trump constrain control Netanyahu?

01:26:53.960 Of 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.

01:27:18.080 And 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.

01:27:37.300 Could Israel actually survive the global opprobrium, including the American opprobrium of Israel's extremism?

01:27:48.580 I don't think for one day, actually. 0.50

01:27:50.840 Israel needs to trade.

01:27:52.440 It needs tourism.

01:27:53.680 It needs contracts.

01:27:54.920 It needs finance. 0.66

01:27:56.340 And 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

01:28:17.320 Without all of that, no, Israel cannot do anything on this. 0.81

01:28:22.320 But we bought into the whole package. 0.71

01:28:26.060 We 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

01:28:41.560 We 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

01:28:54.280 In 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

01:29:17.800 We're bleeding from Israel's wars, and this, I think, is really important to understand. 0.56

01:29:25.200 You know, Trump said something quite interesting, the Washington gaffe, meaning that he told

01:29:32.080 the truth, not off script, but he said we can't afford the wars and those things like

01:29:42.380 child care, Medicare and Medicaid and other those individual things, he said.

01:29:49.460 And you know what? It's true. We're bleeding. And what did he do? He said, okay, we're going to cut 0.65

01:29:58.580 all those things that Americans actually need and want because we want our health care.

01:30:05.460 We 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.

01:30:18.580 We want that.

01:30:20.580 And Trump said, no, we have to have war instead.

01:30:24.240 So he put in a budget a couple of weeks ago, which didn't get any attention because it won't be enacted by Congress.

01:30:32.860 But 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.

01:30:57.780 Not 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.

01:31:15.000 So can Trump say this?

01:31:20.320 He has to say this for the American people, first of all.

01:31:24.160 He has to, because this is really about us right now.

01:31:29.960 He has to listen to the American people.

01:31:32.920 We don't want this.

01:31:34.380 It's no good for us.

01:31:36.060 It's anyway crazy extremism.

01:31:39.060 We don't buy into this.

01:31:40.560 We don't buy into the story.

01:31:42.340 We don't need this.

01:31:43.580 We don't need the American empire owning Iran.

01:31:46.780 We don't need revenge for 1979. 0.88

01:31:49.620 We don't need greater Israel. 0.96

01:31:51.720 We don't need all of these things.

01:31:54.820 We need our health care, our dental care, our daily lives.

01:31:59.560 We want peace.

01:32:00.640 We don't want to be murdering schoolgirls.

01:32:03.580 We don't want to be murdering people.

01:32:06.880 We don't want to be destroying ancient cultures in different places in the world.

01:32:13.480 And Mr. President, your partner cannot do this.

01:32:19.540 for one moment without your backing.

01:32:25.520 So your job is to tell Mr. NetYahu, 0.88

01:32:32.500 your clean break, 30 years, 0.98

01:32:36.100 maybe $10 trillion of American treasure

01:32:39.600 now piled up in debt.

01:32:42.100 We tried your approach.

01:32:43.880 It's done.

01:32:45.140 Now we're going to try peace.

01:32:47.420 That's what he needs to tell him.

01:32:49.540 it can work if he doesn't do that and in the next few days uh you know this accelerates

01:32:58.260 and you've said if it does accelerate iran's first move will be to destroy civilian infrastructure

01:33:02.820 in the gulf uh desal energy the rest what are the effects at that point like what are the

01:33:11.300 let's just start with the economic effects on the rest of the world yeah strangely enough

01:33:15.700 I came into my profession, which I've been a professor at universities for 46 years and advised well over 100 governments around the world.

01:33:28.560 I came into this profession writing my Ph.D. dissertation on the oil shocks of the 1970s.

01:33:36.540 I wrote the first model of how they worked, why they had such negative effects.

01:33:42.980 After the 73 of Macquarie War.

01:33:44.220 After 73 and 79, so I wrote the book literally, and it's published in 1982 called The Economics of Worldwide Stagflation.

01:33:55.500 The results of those two oil shocks give us an idea of what would happen.

01:34:01.540 And 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.

01:34:16.100 It sent oil prices soaring, and it sent the world economy into a tailspin.

01:34:21.420 And it was a very particular kind of tailspin because people lost their jobs, incomes went down, and inflation soared at the same time.

01:34:32.480 And 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.

01:34:47.140 But this was a contraction and an inflation.

01:34:49.520 So people had less money coming in and everything cost more to buy.

01:34:52.480 That's it.

01:34:52.980 And that's what was called stagflation.

01:34:55.360 Now, the difference of then and now is that the two shocks then were temporary stops of the flows of oil.

01:35:08.580 One was a boycott by the Arab countries against the U.S. and other buyers, like shutting down the Stradivore Moves.

01:35:16.360 Just to be clear, what were they mad about?

01:35:17.680 They were mad about the 1973 war.

01:35:23.160 U.S. support for Israel.

01:35:24.180 Exactly.

01:35:25.320 Just to be clear, but the cost to us.

01:35:27.020 This has been the same issue.

01:35:28.840 I was four years old when that happened.

01:35:30.600 This goes back a long way.

01:35:32.840 And then 1979, 80 was the Iranian revolution.

01:35:37.960 And the oil got turned off, but the oil fields weren't destroyed.

01:35:44.860 There was no war in the oil fields.

01:35:47.960 There was no physical destruction of infrastructure.

01:35:51.320 Refineries weren't destroyed.

01:35:53.500 What 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

01:36:07.300 Because 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

01:36:26.040 Often, instead, what you get is just both sides unleashing their arsenals.

01:36:32.440 And 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.

01:36:55.760 economy. And it doesn't take that much to bring the world economy into a tailspin because you

01:37:05.860 don't need to close down half the oil supply. You might need to shut off 20% of the world

01:37:15.280 oil supply. And that by enough will send the prices soaring, make Americans really suffer

01:37:24.260 across the board because it's not only at the gas pump and not only in the utility bills,

01:37:31.480 but also in the cost of food, which will soar from this as well, because there will be a

01:37:39.820 worldwide disruption of food supplies coming from this because we're a very significant

01:37:46.960 proportion of the urea, which underpins the nitrogen-based fertilizers of the world,

01:37:53.620 come from this region. From natural gas?

01:37:56.460 From the natural gas production, exactly. From the oil and gas fields, the hydrocarbon

01:38:04.880 production, and other petrochemicals as well. I'm afraid that it won't take long for this to

01:38:13.620 happen and well governments will fall if that happens globally yes one one leader uh pulled me

01:38:20.580 aside a few weeks ago i don't want to say who exactly but uh said um that uh that person was in

01:38:27.100 a uh in a uh a country that has a lot of oil production not not from the region and said

01:38:33.620 jeff you don't understand i governed our state oil company these are complex systems yes they

01:38:43.600 don't get rebuilt so fast, believe me. This was a very authoritative figure, and I really take that

01:38:51.780 to heart. Well, energy extraction, refining, petrochemicals, distribution, it's all about a

01:38:56.260 million times more complicated than people understand. Exactly. And these are very

01:39:00.060 sophisticated plants, and they are not built for war. They are built for just normal, peaceful,

01:39:08.000 complex sophisticated operations and a lot of that could be destroyed in a very very short period of

01:39:17.340 time no i i appreciate that and i think the view in the u.s seems to be like if there's oil under

01:39:22.540 the ground you stick a straw and it comes out then it's if you ever if you go and tour a

01:39:28.240 petrochemical plant or oil refinery or any extraction facility i mean it is like highest

01:39:33.820 level technology smartest people super hard to understand the market i'll tell you we had uh

01:39:40.300 you know one of a place you know well and i know well one of the most sophisticated places in the

01:39:45.820 planet uh the the emirates yes uh asking uh the federal reserve a few days ago for emergency swap

01:39:55.500 lines that may be needed in the event of a crisis this is kind of shocking because uh first of all

01:40:02.140 The Emirates you think of as super rich.

01:40:06.020 It's the place where rich people go to put their money in the region.

01:40:11.940 Of course, it's completely destabilized by all of this.

01:40:14.920 It's a complete disaster for them, what's happened.

01:40:18.140 But they are girding for the downstream effects of what I'm talking about,

01:40:26.160 which is that first you get the physical destruction.

01:40:29.240 Then 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.

01:40:48.700 But then you get the financial effects because people say, is this place viable anymore?

01:40:54.100 I'm withdrawing my money.

01:40:55.480 but the Emirates operates on a U.S.-backed dollar standard

01:41:01.860 and suddenly you have a run on your banks,

01:41:04.060 you have a run on your financial markets.

01:41:06.040 So they're already asking,

01:41:07.500 can we have emergency lines of credit?

01:41:10.180 And maybe yes, maybe no,

01:41:12.440 but that's the tip of the iceberg

01:41:14.340 of the financial consequences

01:41:17.180 that can come from all of this.

01:41:18.980 So you get a huge cascade of effects.

01:41:23.220 And 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.

01:41:53.220 which people know about, and La Niña's. It looks like a very large, maybe what they're calling a

01:42:01.840 super El Nino, is building for later this year. And it may not happen, but the evidence is growing

01:42:10.020 that it seems like that's the case. So people might be curious, what does that mean? It means

01:42:14.860 that warm surface water over the Pacific would spread to basically the west coast of South

01:42:22.660 America. When you get a very powerful El Nino, the temperatures and rainfall patterns and drought

01:42:32.220 patterns and storm patterns in all of the tropical and subtropical regions of the world

01:42:39.300 are hard hit. One of the things, for example, that happened in the 1973-74 oil shock was that there

01:42:48.600 was also an El Nino that year, just remembering. And it was the combination that sent food prices

01:42:59.780 soaring worldwide. And if we have that dual combination, I've been saying to myself for years,

01:43:11.220 the next big El Nino or super El Nino is by itself going to be world destabilizing because

01:43:18.220 There are a lot of countries on the edge right now, on the edge financially, on the edge socially.

01:43:24.600 The 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.

01:43:42.580 But if you combine a mass destruction in West Asia, the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, with a super El Nino, I don't even know.

01:43:57.760 Somebody'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.

01:44:06.440 And the effects on political destabilization, on the effects of governments falling, the potential cascading of this war would be tremendous and uncontrollable.

01:44:24.460 Just think, in addition to everything else, a naval fleet from China is heading towards the Gulf right now.

01:44:33.840 It'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.

01:44:49.620 Suppose there's a war going on. 0.73

01:44:51.840 Suppose the United States says we have a blockade and we interdict a Chinese vessel.

01:44:57.920 Suppose that a Chinese destroyer comes alongside.

01:45:02.360 you know we're not in self-control right now uh sailors are not in self-control captains are not

01:45:11.660 in self-control uh we're living uh at uh at uh nanosecond speed maybe uh palantir's uh maven

01:45:22.180 system will say shoot uh who knows what will happen but we're just lighting fuses that could

01:45:30.980 blow up everything if we choose the ramp of escalation. And I think it will go faster

01:45:39.380 than we imagine. And without control, we don't seem to have any real control in our government

01:45:48.320 right now, even of basic processes. We don't have interagency reviews. We don't have

01:45:55.360 expert intelligence that are guiding policy. We don't have anything that is systematic.

01:46:01.660 I think in Israel, it's the same way. When you have a cascade of crises, when missiles are at

01:46:10.480 hypersonic speed and you're making decisions with a few seconds warning or a minute or two warning

01:46:20.920 of incoming missiles, oh, what are we doing with all of this gamble when the whole premise

01:46:30.560 of this war was wrong and when the tactical premise that this was a one-day operation

01:46:38.240 was proved wrong by the second day, why are we still facing this possibility of complete

01:46:45.940 disaster. And I have to say, I'm sorry to say it, Tucker, but every few days I get an email from

01:46:55.080 somebody who says, I really appreciate what you say, Professor Sachs, but I do want you to know

01:47:02.720 that we're in the end times and that this is all as prophesied. And so thank you for your voice.

01:47:12.340 They're not hostile messages.

01:47:14.460 They're very nice, sweet people who say we're in the end times.

01:47:20.540 I'm hoping we're not in the end times.

01:47:22.940 This is the basic point.

01:47:24.500 We should have some prudence.

01:47:27.280 Somebody should reach the president of the United States and say stop before disaster.

01:47:33.060 I've tried.

01:47:34.080 I wonder, what do you make of that?

01:47:36.180 What do you make of, I know you're not a famously observant man.

01:47:41.420 however things are happening that certainly don't have any precedent in our lifetime

01:47:48.040 i mean you've watched the world carefully for 50 years and all of a sudden anomalous things are

01:47:53.540 happening all over people are behaving in ways you never would have expected they behave

01:47:57.640 do you allow for the possibility that some of this is preordained that like there's that

01:48:03.080 no getting off the train i don't uh i've studied history now for my whole life

01:48:10.760 And I've seen disasters. I've studied intensively disasters and near misses and avoided disasters with care.

01:48:25.820 I 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.

01:48:38.440 I've spent half a century looking at this.

01:48:42.840 Terrible things happen because individual leaders and governments make miscalculations.

01:48:52.060 They don't talk to each other.

01:48:54.260 They don't understand the ramifications.

01:48:57.760 They have a breakdown of systematic processes.

01:49:03.020 So 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.

01:49:15.240 What does that mean, overload?

01:49:16.360 It means that very consequent decisions need to be made skillfully and the decisions are a big deal. They have a very, very large consequence.

01:49:31.600 I would call them non-linearities, meaning it's that the consequence of the choice can take us into disaster or into solution.

01:49:49.980 So in other words, these are really big choices.

01:49:57.140 And the truth is individuals make a big difference.

01:50:01.600 At times like this, what we've seen, what I've tried to understand, you know better than I do,

01:50:09.920 but I'm trying to understand the decision process in the U.S. government right now.

01:50:14.500 Normally, you would have a deliberative process.

01:50:20.480 We know process that I've studied very carefully, as have many, many scholars, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

01:50:29.420 President Kennedy immediately installed an executive committee, XCOM.

01:50:35.400 And during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they met repeatedly, they debated, they discussed options.

01:50:44.400 It was all put on tape. It's all been studied for decades later.

01:50:49.480 Many of the judgments that were made were very wrong.

01:50:52.260 And 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

01:51:05.840 Quite 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

01:51:19.180 Let's go to nuclear war. 0.90

01:51:21.000 And almost to the point of insubordination, LeMay was pressing Kennedy to launch attacks and basically accusing Kennedy of not standing up properly for America.

01:51:44.540 Kennedy 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.

01:52:08.480 Today, 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.

01:52:24.480 Netanyahu. 0.75

01:52:25.200 That's correct.

01:52:25.860 Okay.

01:52:26.380 Netanyahu has an agenda.

01:52:28.540 His agenda, in my mind, is fanatical and wrong and has been mistaken for 30 years and has cost America a fortune.

01:52:41.420 It's just been wrong. 0.71

01:52:44.080 I think the man is a disaster.

01:52:46.480 I think he has the wrong framework of the world, just a wrong understanding.

01:52:52.040 Of 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.

01:53:10.940 There would be the national intelligence agencies reporting.

01:53:18.560 Our friend, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, would be weighing in heavily.

01:53:28.840 The joint chiefs of staff would be explaining doubts, which they clearly had.

01:53:35.540 There would be consultations with senior members of Congress.

01:53:39.220 That 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.

01:54:00.100 I 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.

01:54:30.100 And 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,

01:54:43.980 I 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,

01:55:08.020 well, I don't know. It looks doubtful, but I will follow you, Mr. President. That is not

01:55:15.140 the kind of deliberative process that keeps us in safety.

01:55:21.020 And yet, I think that's exactly the process. I don't think there's any decision maker or even

01:55:25.780 anyone who influences the decisions greatly other than Trump.

01:55:29.880 I think the degradation of our political system is so deep right now that maybe there is no chance for that.

01:55:46.180 But I do every day plead with the congressional leaders to do their constitutional duty because they're not doing it right now.

01:55:57.020 And 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.

01:56:14.280 It'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.

01:56:34.400 I 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,

01:56:54.800 vote that Congress should not have any oversight over this war, completely contrary to the whole 0.57

01:57:05.560 framework of the Constitution, it shows how degraded we have become.

01:57:11.680 Maybe it's an inevitable process where, you know, in late stage republics like ours,

01:57:18.440 all power vests in the executive, the legislative body. Well, think of it this way,

01:57:22.160 Since 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?

01:57:32.740 They're all shrinking in authority.

01:57:35.220 I know lots of places that have very high levels of deliberation, very rational processes.

01:57:45.060 By the way, people will be very surprised to hear me say it and they'll doubt it and they won't believe it.

01:57:50.680 But 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.

01:58:06.960 I 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.

01:58:21.420 It was two years of detailed deliberation over cutting-edge sectors and what to do and how to combine public and private initiatives.

01:58:33.120 Very sophisticated.

01:58:34.280 complicated we don't have that right now so this is quite strange we have just the opposite but i

01:58:40.660 wonder do you think that our big picture asking a lot to predict something like this but that our

01:58:45.600 current system survives this moment we have one uh overwhelming delusion that is held firmly by

01:58:59.500 a president who has his own personal delusions, and that is that America reigns supreme in

01:59:07.960 the world.

01:59:09.460 And every day when President Trump says, we are the most powerful blah, blah, blah, blah,

01:59:14.140 in the history of the world, this is, of course, he feels good saying this, of course, maybe

01:59:23.660 his followers feel good saying this, but it's completely, totally the wrong approach to our

01:59:33.200 world right now. The serious part of our world is the world faces many deep challenges. There are

01:59:42.540 many nuclear armed countries. There are many powerful countries. We need to find a way to get

01:59:51.160 along, to understand each other, to cooperate, to solve problems, and to avoid the traps of

01:59:58.600 a war that can destroy the world economy or even the world in a short period of time.

02:00:07.220 So all the bluster is a remnant of the idea that the U.S. has pursued during its imperial

02:00:17.660 era since World War II, that we should run the world. And Trump has a particular view of that,

02:00:26.760 which is that he should run the world. And so we have a workable system. It's actually worked

02:00:36.780 quite brilliantly at times. It's a pretty complicated machinery. It could be updated

02:00:45.660 it in some pretty useful ways, but I used to work for some years in internship positions

02:00:53.420 in the Congress in the 1970s, and Congress actually worked as an institution, for example.

02:01:00.980 It held hearings, it wrote papers, it proposed legislation, it actually did things. There

02:01:08.900 There were leaders, Fulbright and others, who spoke out and wrote brilliant books and did all sorts of wonderful things.

02:01:19.540 And I met many of them as a kid.

02:01:22.920 And 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.

02:01:45.920 It really did. I was there. I watched it. I saw it. I quite loved it.

02:01:51.680 We 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.

02:02:15.900 But 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.

02:02:38.200 Or ends.

02:02:38.760 Or ends. Exactly. Thank you.

02:02:41.600 Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much for that.

02:02:44.080 Great to be with you, Tucker. Thanks.

02:02:45.900 We'll be right back.

The Tucker Carlson Show - April 24, 2026

Jeffrey Sachs on the Real Origins of the Iran War and the Coming Economic Devastation

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