Who's to blame for the fall of Assad in Syria? And what does that mean for the future of the Middle East? Tucker explains why Israel has been at war in 7 countries for 30 years, and why it's been a disaster.
00:01:34.120And maybe the right way to understand what's happened with Syria is to think back to a really remarkable occasion when Wesley Clark, the general who headed NATO, went to the Pentagon just after 9-11.
00:01:51.160And famously, he showed a piece of paper that said, we're going to have seven wars in five years.
00:02:31.760And I mean, we, the United States, on behalf of Israel, including in Syria.
00:02:37.700And so what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.
00:02:49.120That started with Netanyahu and his American advisors in 1996 in something called Clean Break, which was a political document that the Americans and Netanyahu made when Netanyahu became prime minister.
00:03:04.540After 9-11, it went into full gear with the Iraq wars being the first of those wars.
00:03:20.080We're not going to have land for peace, which is the idea that Israel would have a Palestinian state next door.
00:03:28.420No, we're going to have greater Israel, and we're just going to bash anybody that doesn't like it.
00:03:34.540And we're going to do that by bringing down any government that supports the Palestinians.
00:03:41.820It's a rather shocking amount of hubris.
00:03:45.340It has been, in my view, a complete disaster for the United States and for the Middle East.
00:03:51.900It has been Netanyahu's MO since 1996, actually, and he's been prime minister more than half the time since then.
00:04:00.840And the United States goes to war on his behalf.
00:04:04.760And what happened in Syria is the culmination of that effort.
00:04:10.180Netanyahu came to the U.S. in 2002, excuse me, after 9-11.
00:04:24.560Actually, he came in September 20th, 2001, if I remember correctly, and gave a speech that said, there's terrorism, but you don't fight the terrorists.
00:04:36.000You fight the governments that back the terrorists.
00:04:46.640And the first of those wars was Iraq, but Syria was supposed to be exactly the next war.
00:04:53.660And the timeline was this remarkable idea of seven wars in five years.
00:04:58.980According to all of the understanding that we now have from lots of insiders, from documents, from the archives, what happened was the U.S. got bogged down in Iraq.
00:07:28.960Syria was a normal functioning country at the time.
00:07:33.020Despite whatever you read, whatever propaganda is said, Syria was a normal functioning country.
00:07:41.860I recently dredged out a report by the International Monetary Fund on Syria in 2009 that praised the Syrian government for its reforms and its rapid economic growth and look forward to continued years of economic development.
00:07:57.720In other words, it was not this wasteland or this battlefield.
00:08:11.100It was no threat to the United States whatsoever.
00:08:13.540But it was deemed to be, by Netanyahu, a threat to Israel because of a simple reason, which is that Netanyahu wants to control all of Palestine, wants to rule over the Palestinian people, does not want a Palestinian state.
00:08:32.680And that has led to militant opposition.
00:08:39.760Netanyahu's theory is, well, we're never going to allow a Palestinian state, so we have to bring down any government that supports those militant groups against us because our core aim is greater Israel.
00:08:55.420That's not much of a worthy cause, by the way.
00:08:59.580Having a Palestinian state next door and having peace could have saved probably a million lives by now over the last 30 years.
00:09:07.680But that's not Netanyahu's crazy ambition, which is—
00:09:14.800Greater Israel means, depending on how crazy the people are, either that Israel controls not only its geographic territory, but that it essentially controls or annexes the West Bank,
00:09:33.780the Golan Heights, which they've just enlarged Gaza.
00:09:39.400Golan Heights being part of Syria, historically.
00:10:16.140I would use even stronger terms who use the book of Joshua, which is 2,700 years ago that said, well, God gave us everything from the river in Egypt, meaning the Nile, to the Euphrates.
00:10:35.320And there are zealots in Israel, and they're in the government, who believe, yes, this is God's ordinance.
00:11:51.540Maybe they can just be ruled in a military-dominant way.
00:11:59.340Of course, probably well over 100,000 have been killed in the most recent war by Israel.
00:12:09.380Well, official count 45,000 of bodies claimed from the rubble, but we know that there are a lot more that have died since this war in Gaza began.
00:12:22.220But all of this is to say, this greater Israel idea says we can't make peace with the Palestinians.
00:12:33.400So anyone that supports the Palestinians is, by definition, a mortal threat to us.
00:12:40.500And when you have a mortal threat, you must destroy it.
00:12:44.860And so this is the opposite of diplomacy.
00:12:47.240It's war, and as Netanyahu crowed last week, it's war to remake the Middle East.
00:12:55.380It's all spelled out, by the way, in very clear ways, but you have to dig for them.
00:13:59.260You can find it online, but you can't find it in the mainstream media because it's not discussed.
00:14:04.840But it was a so-called presidential finding that the CIA should work with Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, with others to overthrow the government of Syria.
00:14:53.060And Seymour Hersh wrote a terrific piece explaining all of that.
00:14:57.280That was never explained—I mean, I worked at a news organization at the time that made a lot out of Benghazi and the death of a U.S. ambassador and, you know, what was the Obama administration, you know, thinking?
00:15:24.240Interestingly, the whole Syrian operation—I think I counted right that the New York Times mentioned Operation Timber Sycamore, I think, three times in the 2010s.
00:15:37.160So a war that cost billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, CIA operation, covert action, links with Libya, never explained, never discussed.
00:15:51.200And even when the government falls last week, no background given.
00:15:57.140You know, we're supposed to have amnesia.
00:15:58.780We're not supposed to understand that what happens is the result of long-term plans that have been pretty disastrous.
00:16:08.680And, by the way, as I've said, Israel has driven so many American wars.
00:16:16.340And we say, absolutely, yes, that's our greatest ally.
00:16:20.120These have been at huge cost to the United States.
00:17:23.040Together with his U.S. political consultants.
00:17:26.280Together with neocons in the U.S. government for the last 25 years.
00:17:31.520They have never apologized for dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars running up U.S. debt and doing what?
00:24:40.760We're doing their foreign policy, which makes no sense, which doesn't lead to any peace, which leads to basically a war zone across the Middle East.
00:26:46.300In 2012, there was already a bloodbath underway and a lot of people dying and a lot of civilians dying and a lot of ancient historic sites because this is the fertile crescent.
00:27:00.300This is the birthplace of humanity itself, of civilization, being destroyed.
00:27:07.320And so a very senior global diplomat that I knew very, very well was tasked with trying to find peace.
00:28:40.600Has anyone ever explained why Americans should hate Assad?
00:28:46.260Because every regime change operation we ever do, we have to make sure that the opponent is the worst villain since Hitler or Hitler reincarnate.
00:28:58.820Some ophthalmologist from London is a bloodthirsty dictator.
00:29:55.820Can I can I laugh when you mention New York Times?
00:29:58.720Because they won't cover any historical background of any conflict at all, because all of this is aimed at a free hand for the security state, a free hand for the military.
00:30:19.940But why would the New York Times be parodying the security state?
00:30:22.900Well, I think that's that that's a question that goes back decades, partly because it's staffed in part by probably people from the intelligence agencies.
00:30:40.060But we know in the past that CIA just had reporters on the payroll.
00:30:45.100I mean, whether they do or not now, I have no idea.
00:30:48.000So I'm not making a current claim, but we know that that's a historic fact.
00:30:51.540We know historically that the with with very rare exceptions, the New York Times has just followed the the unnamed official sources that this is the whole M.O.
00:31:05.140This patriotic newspaper follows what it's told to do.
00:31:12.580It has not asked any questions about any of these wars in recent memory, not about Ukraine, not about the wars raging throughout the Middle East.
00:31:24.320As I said, I think there was one full page actually about Operation Timber Sycamore in 2016.
00:31:32.600You would think that something that got us into a war of 13 years where we spent billions of dollars, where hundreds of thousands of people died.
00:31:43.180Even at this stage, there would be a kind of page or a box explaining the historical background to this, but it didn't exist.
00:31:51.320First, I actually wrote, I have to say, I wrote to one of the reporters saying, couldn't you mention a little background?
00:31:58.100Said, oh, very interesting idea, Mr. Sachs.
00:32:07.740And by the way, not only do I know them and some I like very much, by the way, and some have been classmates of mine a long time ago, and they know things that they don't report.
00:32:22.880And that's also important to understand that what they will say in private is the opposite of what their newspaper says.
00:32:56.320It's not explained that we gave over Middle East foreign policy to Israel a long time ago, not to U.S. interests, but to Israel's interests.
00:33:07.300And we don't hear questioning of this at all.
00:33:13.180Of course, not from the government, not from the Congress, not from oversight by any democratic institutions,
00:33:20.760nor does the mainstream media, which fewer and fewer people are interested in because they don't get any facts from it, look into these issues.
00:34:27.800Of course, all of this is a profound delusion.
00:34:33.620And that's, I think, really important to understand.
00:34:37.860We've had six wars so far, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
00:34:48.000Six out of the seven that were on the list shown to Wesley Clark, not one of them has led to stability, to peace even, much less to geopolitical interests being solved.
00:35:02.440So it's not like we're finding solutions to anything.
00:35:09.440Yes, it has allowed at unbelievable cost Israel to hold on to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza as if that's some kind of grand strategic aim of the United States or justifiable in the face of international law and nearly global opposition to such thinking.
00:36:57.400And so, when you ask what comes next, what comes next is whether President Trump can change course.
00:37:08.240This is the most important question facing the United States.
00:37:13.000And there are several different factions in Washington right now that are fighting for ultimate say.
00:37:28.100There's a piece by Mitch McConnell, our octogenarian who is completely living in a delusional past, who has a lead article in Foreign Affairs magazine calling for America to commit to primacy.
00:37:49.980And he calls for a massive military buildup to get ready for every kind of eventuality with Russia and China.
00:38:03.260And it's got very powerful interest because it's the biggest business in Washington, about $1.5 trillion of annual spending for the military machine.
00:40:23.920You're one of our world's great journalists, a person writing a front-page story about war, and she's written three times the Pentagon doesn't want it, and the editor takes that out all the time.
00:50:53.380We see little fires being set all over the neighborhoods of these war zones.
00:51:02.020And it's not only throughout the Middle East and the drumbeat for war with Iran.
00:51:08.020It's not only Biden authorizing the use of long distance strikes into Russia, which, as President Putin has accurately said and has not been denied by the United States, are actually U.S. strikes on Russia.
00:51:53.160You have to be, you know, really into this to be following them.
00:51:57.520But in the country of Georgia, in the South Caucasus region, there's a little typical regime change maneuver that's been underway in recent weeks.
00:52:11.740But the aim was to destabilize that region.
00:52:15.420The hand of the U.S. is absolutely clear in that.
00:52:20.500We see in Romania another bizarre episode where a presidential election was in its second round and the lead candidate was saying we should end the war with Ukraine.
00:52:33.140And the Supreme Court of Romania annulled the election, claiming Russian interference.
00:52:41.820And so that candidate that was calling for peace could not win election.
00:52:48.780We're seeing those kinds of events all over.
00:52:53.940In South Korea, of course, we saw something that we don't understand that's also mind-boggling, which was an attempted coup by the president of Korea, President Yeung, who called out the military to surround and arrest the parliament.
00:53:14.800And ultimately, the coup failed and the president was thrown out of office.
00:53:20.180But why he made that coup is not absolutely clear.
00:54:00.500But the week before the military action, the coup attempt, there was a visit by the Ukrainian defense minister for armaments from South Korea, something that the United States has been pushing very hard for.
00:54:19.100The United States has been trying to get South Korea to ship arms to Ukraine because the U.S. inventories are depleted.
00:54:27.780And South Korea, under its law, cannot do so because it cannot ship arms to belligerents that are engaged in war.
00:54:43.180The parliament president does not have a majority in the parliament or the former president.
00:54:48.680And the opposition opposed the armaments.
00:54:52.800So there's some possible relationship with this that when Yoon declared martial law, he said that that the opposition was siding with the North Koreans.
00:55:44.760I meant to ask you, why did Russia stand aside as Assad fell?
00:55:51.940I think that it was a, first of all, a military choice because Russia is in the midst of a very tough war along a 1,200 kilometer front in Ukraine.
00:56:10.240And it did not want to divert any major military effort in that direction.
00:56:18.460Second, the proximate reason why Assad fell was that the main military backing of Assad was Hezbollah forces and the Iranian guard.
00:56:34.640And they had both been, especially Hezbollah, had been very badly mauled by Israel in the last month and a half and had pulled its reinforcements from Syria to reinforce Lebanese positions.
00:56:54.480And so Assad was left without the backing of Hezbollah forces, several thousand, which was the bulwark of his military.
00:57:03.320I think a third reason is that Russia doesn't think it's leaving Syria, that this isn't the end of the story.
00:57:11.260And immediately, the supposed new force in Syria, the HTS, said that it wants Russia to stay and to keep its bases in Syria.
00:57:25.700Russia has a naval base and a small one and an airfield, and Russia has redeployed its forces from within Syria to both of those bases but is probably not leaving.
00:57:40.920So I think from probably a strategic calculus, Russia just regards this as a temporary step on a path to continued conflict and that this was not the time to get into another major front.
00:58:03.820So we've got a little over a month between now and the inauguration.
00:58:09.160Clearly, as noted, the Biden administration is trying to make decisions that are evocable and deepen the war between the United States and Russia and then all these other things.
00:58:19.000If you were the Trump people right now, before the inauguration, what would you be doing?
00:58:23.280Well, I would first be clear, under the Constitution, Biden is president until January 20th.
00:58:34.800I think it's right to say that Biden should not put America into further insecurity.
00:59:18.840So I hope that politicians of both parties and I think President Trump can also make this clear.
00:59:27.520It's not to take over the government until January 20th.
00:59:31.020But Biden absolutely, in my view, is without the legitimacy to further endanger us and they should prevent any actions from abroad that threaten American security, of course.
00:59:55.260I think the biggest risk right now is continued U.S. provocations of the kind that we've been discussing in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in the periphery of Russia, in the Far East.
01:00:13.020The idea of somehow tying Trump's hands is completely illegitimate constitutionally and politically, and it's a disastrous approach.
01:00:28.420We're not playing a game of two people or a game of two administrations.
01:00:33.200We're trying to survive at a time of perhaps maximum global peril right now.
01:00:41.500So just to say, most experts that look at this think we're closer to nuclear war than we have ever been.
01:00:50.520And I refer often to the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is the graphic to demonstrate how close or how far we are from nuclear war.
01:01:04.040And that doomsday clock puts the clock puts the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been since the clock was first rolled out in 1947.
01:01:19.600So I think it behooves those people who are making the decisions in the Biden administration to stop imperiling Americans at this point and to understand that their job right now is to keep things stable, to give power over to President Trump on January 20th, 2025.
01:01:45.800One of the promises of the new administration is massive declassification.
01:02:01.360So one of the things that I'm interested in learning about is 9-11, because I think it's important to understand why that happened.
01:02:09.700And I think my guess is that one of the reasons so many documents from 9-11 are still classified 23 years later, it's hard to imagine why, is because they tell a more detailed story about why Al-Qaeda struck the United States.
01:02:24.920And it seems clear it was a response to, and I'm not defending it, of course, obviously, but it was still cause and effect.
01:02:33.800And the cause was American foreign policy, was a response to that.
01:03:12.960It was the only time that there was even a partial look inside what the CIA had been doing.
01:03:22.880What they uncovered was a viper's nest of stupidity, evil, disaster, and, of course, unbelievable unaccountability.
01:03:37.840They uncovered, of course, numerous assassination plots.
01:03:43.300They uncovered an absolutely shocking and awful program called MKUltra, which was a massive warped program for trying for mind control,
01:04:02.880where they took innocent people, vagrants, off the streets of Times Square and shot them up with drugs or drove them to suicide through sleep deprivation.
01:04:16.200Every kind of shocking thing you can't even make up.
01:04:20.340And that made for great movie series like the Bourne series, which is about MKUltra, in fact.
01:06:34.280What were the decisions taken in overthrowing various regimes?
01:06:40.960What about a number of assassinations that we have every forensic reason to know were conspiracies that the U.S. never allowed to be understood?
01:06:55.980Whether any of this is ever found, I don't know.
01:06:59.060But if it is, it would change the course of America back to a true republic.
01:07:04.600Because what happened in this country is that we were overtaken by the security state.
01:07:12.520And we became a system of confidentiality and unaccountability.
01:07:24.060And a lot of people are paid to keep quiet or to salute whatever the military industrial complex or the intelligence agencies are doing without asking questions.
01:07:37.000Because when you have $1.5 trillion a year spent on that, you're a pretty big business.
01:07:42.620And it has affected the universities, the think tanks, of course, the Congress, which asks no questions of any serious kind.
01:07:52.120And so major, major events of fundamental significance for our insecurity take place without any truth-telling at all.
01:08:04.080So all of this is to say, it may be the most important thing that President Trump could do would be to open up the historical record so that we understand what has really happened.
01:08:20.040Because we are 90 seconds to midnight.
01:08:23.040We are closer to nuclear war than ever.
01:08:25.460We have a military machine in the service of the Israel lobby or in the service of the military contractors or in the service of the deep state on its own or for whatever other crazy idea.
01:08:41.700And we just don't have democratic deliberation or accountability about this.
01:08:51.240If we did, we would change the direction of this country.
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01:10:01.280Well, the system is designed with accountability at the heart of it.
01:10:19.340And we have oversight committees in the House and the Senate that are supposed to be making certain that the intelligence community, the IC,
01:10:27.840is operating in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.
01:10:39.120Our system of government is actually rather ingenious.
01:10:43.740It's ingenious because you can buy a piece of government at very low cost.
01:10:49.520If the military industrial contractors just buy off a couple committees, that's enough because they're the only ones that have responsibility.
01:10:58.880If the health insurers just buy off the health committees in the House and the Senate, that's enough.
01:11:06.360If the Israel lobby just gets its hold on a couple of committees, they run American foreign policy in the Middle East.
01:11:14.880So what I have found to be ingenious about our completely corrupted political system is how inexpensive it is to buy your corner of the story.
01:11:50.660And the idea that a few congressmen, and I know some of them, that they're really constraining anything that the CIA or the intelligence community does, no way.
01:13:02.220Even the report of the House committee that issued a report a couple of weeks ago says, yes, there was obviously a lot of cover-up and a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of engagement of U.S. scientists in this.
01:13:18.520And we know that the U.S. government lied up the wazoo on all of the question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that made the pandemic, and has lied until today.
01:13:32.140We know that the intelligence agencies know a lot that they haven't said.
01:13:55.520Especially since the evidence is now overwhelming that it was a laboratory creation with U.S. scientists and U.S. funding playing a huge role in this.
01:14:08.100Do you think the new president will pardon Edward Snowden and Jelena Assange?
01:14:20.660And he is an absolutely remarkable person.
01:14:26.200And, yes, he is a hero because he told us what the government was actually doing towards us.
01:14:34.240And, of course, the security state, which really runs America, therefore immediately branded him as the worst villain.
01:14:43.680But we found out more from Snowden about the risk to our freedom than from just about anybody else.
01:14:52.880And Julian Assange, you know, almost every day I invoke a memorandum that he enabled me to see and you to see and all of us to see that explains the Ukraine war better than anything else.
01:15:16.540And Julian Assange deserves all of the credit for this.
01:15:22.240And it's also an interesting story, if I may just say in one minute.
01:15:27.020Our current CIA director, William Burns, in 2008 was the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
01:15:34.520And when he was U.S. ambassador to Russia, he understood completely, perfectly, that the U.S. push to expand NATO to Ukraine was disastrous.
01:15:48.920Pure provocation, crossing Russia's red lines, likely to create a civil war inside Ukraine and a possible war between the United States and Russia.
01:16:00.700And he wrote a memo back to Condoleezza Rice, our secretary of state.
01:16:09.360And the memo said that the entire Russian political class opposes NATO enlargement and for real reasons.
01:16:20.780And that memo famously became known as yet means yet.
01:16:32.300OK, something like this should be understood by the American people.
01:16:37.360We've just spent around 200 billion dollars.
01:16:40.700We've just caused deaths of perhaps six or 700,000 Ukrainians on completely false pretenses, on false pretenses that, as the New York Times has wrongly stated unendingly, that the war in Ukraine was, quote, unprovoked.
01:17:00.900Not only was it provoked, the U.S. provoked it.
01:17:05.160And not only that, our senior diplomats knew that, knew that at the time and wrote about it.
01:17:12.260Now, this memo makes this perfectly clear.
01:17:15.620Anyone can go online and type William Burns, yet means yet, cable, and you will come up with this cable.
01:17:22.800And then you can read why in 2008 we knew that the deep state push for NATO enlargement was mind-bendingly stupid, dangerous, provocative, and likely to get us into disaster, which it did.
01:17:43.460Do you think that a congressional committee called Condoleezza Rice and said, could we have the documentary evidence to understand the choices you're making?
01:18:15.280If you don't want leaks, don't have a world run where every consequential fact is hidden from the American people and it enables one disaster after another.
01:18:27.740And just to make clear how disastrous this is, Bill Clinton, who was, in my view, a completely ineffectual president in a long list of ineffectual presidents, came to office in 1993 when the doomsday clock was at 17 minutes from midnight.
01:18:48.560Meaning that it was the farthest away from nuclear war in the whole history of the nuclear age.
01:18:57.140Every single president, starting with Clinton, brought the doomsday clock closer to Armageddon.
01:19:04.580So we went from 17 minutes to midnight to 90 seconds to midnight with no accountability or explanation at all.
01:19:13.320Do you think it's fair to say that anyone who opposes pardons for Ed Snowden and Julian Assange should be looked at with suspicion or is actually an enemy of the country?
01:19:27.220Well, I think that they may just be ignorant or don't understand, or maybe they're New York Times readers.
01:19:33.060In other words, there are a lot of people who really don't understand the situation right now, don't understand how dangerous it is, don't understand how lawless it is, don't understand how we're driven by these long-term aims that are absolutely disastrous.
01:19:54.900I thank Mitch McConnell, by the way, for writing his essay that the goal is primacy.
01:20:03.960If our goal is primacy and we pursue that like this octogenarian who can barely function anymore says we should, we'll all get blown up.
01:20:14.980We'll move from 90 seconds to midnight to 60 seconds to midnight to 30 seconds to midnight and goodbye, because we can't have a world where the United States says we're in charge of everything.
01:20:27.300If you aim that way, we will end up with World War III that will not go well.
01:20:34.260Well, we're begging South Korea for munitions.
01:20:37.360So the truth is we don't have the power to affect that anyway.
01:20:39.780But, you know, this is the interesting thing.
01:20:45.020Already, you could know back in 2014, don't overthrow the Ukrainian government.
01:20:54.180You could know in 2015, honor the Minsk agreement that would end the war.
01:21:00.420You could know in 2021, negotiate with Russia because actually Ukraine, I won't even say Ukraine, the United States cannot win a war in Ukraine against Russia.
01:24:32.880Because the forces that are worse than mediocre, that are right now on top of a $1.5 trillion a year machine, that have been running disastrous wars, that have been bringing us closer and closer to doom, don't want any accountability.
01:24:56.160And what Tulsi Gabbard would represent is competence, honesty, forthrightness, and not having been a party to all these failures.
01:25:10.600So, if you're the incoming administration, how hard do you fight for her nomination?
01:25:14.060Well, she's critical because this is the most important question facing the United States today.
01:25:24.720We have major financial, social, political, economic, institutional questions.
01:25:31.060But the most important question facing us is, is a country that potentially is more secure than any country in the history of the world going to do itself in by a self-provoked World War III?
01:26:17.680He could end the war in the Middle East, not by bombing Iran.
01:26:21.140That would do the opposite, but by enabling a two-state solution in the Middle East and the wars would all end.
01:26:29.540He could end the talk of the war in East Asia, which would be the utter disaster and folly, by recognizing that we shouldn't be meddling in China's internal affairs.
01:26:45.100And Taiwan is an internal affair of China.
01:26:48.740And he should be restoring a framework of nuclear arms control.
01:26:56.260I give him four Nobel Peace Prizes for that.
01:26:59.940If he chooses that direction, he'll be the most consequential president in our modern history, perhaps in our history, because he will reestablish security for the American people.
01:27:09.720If he follows the hardliners, he's just going to add yet another years of bringing us closer to doom.
01:27:21.420The Ukraine war is settled literally in one call, just as he says.
01:27:25.720Because all he has to do, really all he has to do, is pick up the phone and call President Putin and say, you know, that 30-year effort to expand NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia was ridiculous, unacceptable, unnecessary provocation.
01:28:37.580And the cause of this war is that Russia does not want the U.S. and its missile systems on its 1,200-kilometer border with Ukraine right now.
01:28:51.080And Biden was so stupid, and I'm using the term, of course, it sounds, I don't know how it sounds, but it's true, that he couldn't say that and avoid the war.
01:29:03.320That was obvious how to avoid this war.
01:29:45.680It's fighting because it does not want this regime, which was installed by the United States in 2014, to have U.S. bases, NATO, U.S. weapons and missile systems on its border.
01:30:02.880And the fact that Biden just proved the point by saying, yeah, we'll fire the missiles into Russia, make it all the more clear why they're concerned about this.
01:30:47.000Then, another idea, well, we'll give Russia this territory, Donetsk and Lugansk and maybe Kherson and Zaporizhia and Crimea, but all the rest of Ukraine will be part of NATO.
01:31:05.560So, if you understand what this is about, where it came from, why it continues to this moment, there is one phone call that ends it, which is get to the underlying cause of the war.
01:31:20.360The underlying cause of the war, going back to a decision that Bill Clinton made in 1994, is the decision to expand NATO to Ukraine.
01:31:32.340And, by the way, they want to expand it to the South Caucasus, to Georgia, which is also in turmoil right now.
01:31:38.280It's very interesting, Tucker, that Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled this out to the letter in 1997, and it's fascinating to read his account.
01:35:08.260So what would happen if they succeeded in killing Putin?
01:35:13.280I mean, what, I don't understand why that would be in America's interest to have 6,000 nuclear warheads unsecured floating around in a country that's 20% Muslim and very complicated.
01:35:26.820And like, that seems like the last thing that you would ever want to do.
01:35:31.720When he's the most pro-Western leader in Russia.
01:35:33.960Yeah, let me address it in a little bit different way.
01:35:38.580In the last year, the leaders of Hamas wanted to make peace with Israel.
01:35:48.460And their political negotiator was a man named Haniyeh.
01:35:53.900What did Israel do when the peace feelers came out?
01:35:58.460They assassinated him to make sure that there would be no attempt by Hamas to make peace.
01:43:31.720This is the best thing we have going for us.
01:43:35.120Now, in his first term, he hired a lot of very irresponsible people.
01:43:40.720That like war or that like duplicity or that like the deep state or that like accountability, unaccountability, like John Bolton, one of my least favorites among all of these.
01:43:57.300And, and, and, and, and Trump hired them.
01:44:00.580So the question now is probably not his deep sense, which I think is absolutely right.
01:44:10.180But now his tactical sense inside the U.S. government, please don't let the deep state continue on a path that it's been on.
01:44:20.960And don't let the normal hardliners, because Washington is filled with people who have been on the payroll of the military industrial complex their whole careers.
01:44:36.420And the incoming administration is such a, a mix right now.
01:44:43.540And we see that the clarity of those who want to control this, how hard they're being, you know, how harshly they're being opposed like Tulsi Gabbard.
01:44:57.500Or, or let me say Bobby Kennedy, though, his department is health, but he understands this peace side as well, very clearly.
01:45:09.360These are the ones that they're fighting because we have been for, I'd say, again, 30 years at least, and arguably, basically 80 years since the end of World War II on a particular jab.
01:45:25.600Which, at least Mitch McConnell does us the service of naming by its name, which is primacy.
01:45:33.140And if we continue on that course, Trump will fail and the United States will be gravely endangered.
01:45:39.720And if he reverses that course, he stands to be a great and historic president.
01:45:47.040Because there's so much at stake, you sort of wonder what the people who oppose that kind of reform would do.
01:45:51.840I mean, the national security state has been willing, eager to use violence abroad again and again and again, murdering people.
01:47:34.340So, this is not the exuberance, and I would say the hubris, of 1991.
01:47:41.280And I was there then as an economic specialist and an advisor, unpaid and informal, but an advisor to President Gorbachev and an advisor to President Yeltsin and an advisor to Ukraine's President Kuchma on how to stabilize their desperately destabilized economies and how to move to market systems.
01:48:09.660And the United States was not interested in peace.
01:48:15.420We had this hubris that history had ended.
01:48:19.780We had won, and now America would run the show.
01:48:23.500The difference today is that we're 33 years after the end of the Soviet Union.
01:48:31.540We tried the neocon approach for 30 years now.
01:48:36.120We have engaged in all of Netanyahu's wars.
01:49:12.240They completely misjudged how we would push the rest of the world into unity, as I mentioned with Big Brzezinski saying Russia will never side with China on this.
01:49:26.260Well, of course, he got wrong the most fundamental diplomatic change of our age, the rise of China and the creation of a group that does not want U.S. hegemony and a group that is increasingly integrated in production and military and security and diplomacy.
01:49:47.600So, we are at a time where the failures are self-evident if people open their eyes and the American people know it, in fact.
01:49:57.940So, it's not even convincing the American people, oh, it's worse than you think.
01:50:07.480How about jobs, some housing, reduce crime in my neighborhood, keep the inflation down, could you keep the debt from destroying American public finances?
01:50:18.140They're not interested in Mitch McConnell's primacy continuing.
01:50:23.180He's an octogenarian, go, done, you're done.
01:50:28.640So, in this sense, it's really possible for this administration, this incoming administration, to change course because it doesn't require a massive public education.
01:50:44.820It requires seeing down the deep state internally.
01:50:48.800It requires making sure that the key appointments that want competence, honesty, and security for America actually get the job.
01:50:58.460And, of course, it requires President Trump following through on his profound main insight, which is that there is no reason for war with Russia.
01:51:56.580I am able to ask questions, to check facts, to understand circumstances.
01:52:05.240I speak to lots of people engaged all over the Middle East on these questions, and it's simply not true.
01:52:14.240So the first thing one should do, period, in this world is talk to the other side.
01:52:21.020And if Donald Trump has that, this would be the farthest reach, but if he has that impulse with Iran too, he will be perhaps amazed, perhaps gratified, but he would do a huge service for the American people, huge service for the American people.
01:52:43.660My sense is that, you know, a war with Iran feels inevitable.
01:52:50.740I'm obviously opposed to it, but tell us how you think that would go if it happens.
01:52:56.020There's nothing inevitable till it happens.
02:00:03.560I need to ask you because the phrasing, the official lines, kind of the stupidities and sillinesses on almost any story of the kind that we're talking about get repeated across the mainstream space very, very quickly.
02:00:25.560And not only on the U.S. side, but generally in the British media as well.
02:00:33.560And so there's certainly some, there's an official narrative, of course.
02:00:40.340So this is part of the story that senior White House briefing Jake or somebody else briefs.
02:01:32.620I think one of the best lines of modern history is the line of Sinclair Lewis that you can't convince a person to believe something when their salary depends on believing the opposite.
02:02:03.060And we thought that checks and balances of the U.S. government would be a stabilizer and especially that we would have voices in Congress that would be able to ask real questions.
02:02:24.600We had J. William Fulbright, who was not only brilliant and a critic of American foreign policy, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
02:02:37.940We have Rand Paul, and we had Tulsi in Congress, but basically almost nobody now.
02:02:45.480They're scared, or they don't want to talk, or they're paid for by, who knows, RSX or Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics or Boeing or somebody.