Donald Trump ran as a peace candidate. He was going to end the Biden administration s disastrous war in Ukraine, and bring peace to the Middle East. And for the past seven months, he s been trying to do just that, but we re not quite there yet. Why? Well, says Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who has been watching carefully and speaking to many people involved, because the intel agencies aren t on board.
00:02:45.460It has had its economy brought to ruins.
00:02:47.660Nothing of the last three years has been any help whatsoever to Ukraine.
00:02:55.760So, when I said three years ago, I also said it five years ago and before even Russia's invasion in February 2022,
00:03:07.280that there didn't have to be a war, that the war could easily be avoided.
00:03:12.860When I said in March and April of 2022, you could stop right now and end the war, not only was that right, it was, if I could put it this way, pro-Ukraine.
00:03:28.920Of course, it was attacked at the time as being anti-Ukraine.
00:04:03.680Go out there and hit them again until they get smashed one more time.
00:04:09.540And they're brought to their side of the ring.
00:04:12.200And again, you tell them, go out and fight because I'm your buddy.
00:04:15.920This is the disaster that the so-called friends of Ukraine, whether it is all that we saw during the Biden administration or that we hear every day from Starmer, the prime minister of UK, or Mertz, the new chancellor of Germany, or Macron from France.
00:04:37.840And, of course, from Zelensky, who is now running a, I'm sorry to put it this way, but a little dictatorship because he runs by martial law.
00:06:03.000Maybe you'll make me digress right at the start.
00:06:06.840In the early years of this century, in 2000, 2001, 2002, the U.S. relationship with China was just kind of normal.
00:06:19.120But even keel, we had good business with China.
00:06:23.160And one of my dear friends with whom I somewhat disagree on some things and agree vociferously on other things, John Mearsheimer, the great political scientist, wrote a famous book called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
00:07:55.640And for that reason and that reason alone or sufficiently, the U.S. would oppose Russia just like the U.S. opposes China.
00:08:07.640Now, of course, maybe people listening to this are saying, that's crazy.
00:08:11.140We oppose China because of all the terrible things they do.
00:08:13.840Or we oppose Russia because of all of the terrible things they do.
00:08:17.820I would take a different view of this, which is we make up stories about why we oppose big powers.
00:08:27.740But the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big.
00:08:32.060They are an affront to our desire for what the political scientists, in a fancy word, call primacy or call hegemony or call full spectrum dominance.
00:08:46.100In other words, Russia is an affront to our ability to dictate circumstances.
00:08:53.180China certainly is an affront to the U.S. ability to dictate circumstances in Asia.
00:09:00.360For that reason alone, we, we, for me, it's fine.
00:09:05.600You know, I understand there are many powers in the world.
00:10:13.440Okay, I happened to be quite deeply involved at the end of that period as an economic advisor when they were trying to get out of that horrible system.
00:10:24.000And I advised President Gorbachev in 1990, 91, and I advised President Yeltsin in 1992 and 93.
00:10:34.860They, Yeltsin said, we don't want any of this communism anymore.
00:11:09.960And by the way, what's absolutely fascinating is if you go back to 180 years ago, and I'm not kidding, to 1840, our precursor as world hegemon, that was the British Empire, they hated Russia too.
00:11:48.380And it shows an interesting answer to your question.
00:11:53.260A historian named Gleeson, in 1950, tried to answer the question, how did Britain come to hate Russia?
00:12:05.120Why is it that by 1840, the British hated the Russians so much that 13 years later, in 1853, the British went to war against Russia, a war of choice in the Crimean War?
00:12:20.960So this historian did an amazing job because it was before AI and being able to ask all these good questions.
00:12:33.180He went through all the speeches by British leaders, all the speeches in the House of Commons, all the articles written in the intellectual magazines from 1850 onward.
00:12:47.120And he posed the question, he said, we were allies of Russia in 1815 in defeating Napoleon.
00:16:53.660But the idea of Lord Palmerston was banish Russia from the Black Sea and you reduce Russia to a third-rate power.
00:17:05.440Now, all of this is fascinating because, first of all, the Russophobia was a concocted hatred.
00:17:15.240Second, the war between Britain and France on one side and Russia in 1853 was concocted.
00:17:23.060But, third, we're replaying that almost to the same script today and almost with exactly the same plot line, which is so weird but true.
00:17:38.540And why I say that is the United States, quote, or the inside deep state, the CIA and its apparatus and the rest of the military industrial complexes hated the Soviet Union since 1945, even though they were our ally in defeating Hitler.
00:18:02.280It turned to preparing for war against our ally within a few months of the end of World War II.
00:18:10.740This is by itself a very important point.
00:18:13.840And then from 1945 to 1991, we had the Cold War ostensibly against communism and against international communism.
00:18:25.520Then in December 1991, the Soviet Union ended.
00:18:32.280I don't know if I've mentioned it to you before.
00:18:34.620I was in the Kremlin that day, literally that hour, sitting next in front of Boris Yeltsin, or I was in front of him.
00:18:44.560And he said to me and to my colleagues, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.
00:18:53.880I heard it probably first in the world directly from President Yeltsin in December 1991.
00:19:03.220So here's a company we're always excited to advertise because we actually use their products every day.
00:19:43.300Merriweather Farms is the answer to that.
00:19:44.880They raise their cattle in the U.S., in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado, and they prepare their meat themselves in their facilities in this country.
00:19:53.340No middlemen, no outsourcing, no foreign beef sneaking through a back door.
00:21:37.340We want a normal democratic political system.
00:21:40.360We want to be friends with the United States.
00:21:42.840And I, in my naivete, said to him, President Yeltsin, I can assure you, the American people will want to partner with Russia to have a future of peace and economic cooperation.
00:23:30.520We're the only big power that should be on the planet.
00:23:33.880And incidentally, in 1992, I can absolutely assure you, no one had China on the radar screen in Washington at all.
00:23:44.300China was rice-growing villages, maybe a counterpoint to help weaken Russia, or as it was used in this triangulation to weaken the Soviet Union.
00:24:00.260But it wasn't on anybody's radar screen as potentially a competitor or a threat or anything else.
00:24:06.860So the focus was on Russia, and it remained on Russia.
00:24:10.800And we know that the U.S. deep state, and again, by that, I don't mean just a figment of our imagination or metaphor.
00:24:51.320And, of course, Cheney was our defense secretary in 1992, and Wolfowitz was his deputy.
00:24:58.400And all of the familiar figures that we came to know in the Iraq War and afterwards were on the scene.
00:25:07.980This was the end of Bush senior, and they already concocted the idea of U.S. unipolarity or primacy or full-spectrum dominance or hegemony, whatever term one wants to use.
00:25:28.080And Clinton's a kind of inconsequential, inexperience, I think, just not a serious person and didn't become one, unfortunately, during his presidency.
00:25:48.800And the deep state explains to him this is the way it is.
00:25:53.060And he also hears from Central Europe, countries that I was advising, but not advising on this for sure.
00:26:40.280And so the idea of NATO enlargement is worked out in 1993, and there's bureaucratic opposition inside by smart diplomats who say, why are we doing this?
00:26:53.800But to the deep state, the Cold War was not over.
00:26:57.660It was just revving up because we got to get rid of Russia in its current form as well.
00:27:03.360So by the beginning of 1994, President Clinton, already in a speech in January 1994, endorses the eastward expansion of NATO.
00:27:15.900And if I could just put a parenthesis around that, the U.S. had promised unequivocally to the Soviet Union in the context of German reunification as of February 2000, February, sorry, 1990, excuse me, yes, that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
00:27:45.900This remains, by the way, highly contested to this day.
00:27:50.260But if anyone wants the information, you go on something called the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can read the dozens and dozens of statements and all of the archival material, making completely, absolutely, unequivocally clear that the United States and Germany promised that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
00:29:21.300So there was no—it wasn't even heatedly debated.
00:29:25.800But Brzezinski's absolutely clear about this, and like so many learned volumes, I must say, his book, The Grand Chessboard, is very well written and fundamentally wrong.
00:29:41.100And fundamentally wrong in that he has a whole, essentially, chapter, long chapter, saying NATO will move eastward, Europe, meaning the European Union, will move eastward, and what will Russia be able to do about it?
00:29:59.460And he goes into a long analysis saying, could Russia turn to China?
00:30:09.980Russia's only vocation is the European vocation.
00:30:15.600So Russia's going to have to swallow hard and accept this.
00:30:20.700The point, Tucker, is what we're witnessing is not short-term decisions of presidents.
00:30:32.000We're watching a long-term, consistent strategy, of course, built into the mindsets of senators and congressmen and more than the mindsets built into their campaign contributions as well.
00:30:48.140So this is built into the armed services committee.
00:30:52.320This is built into the intelligence committee.
00:30:57.200This is why Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal stand up every day saying we must fight the Russians and so on.
00:31:04.780This is not short-term claims based on current politics.
00:31:12.600This is a project that dates back more than 30 years.
00:31:22.280So, I mean, ultimately, the project reaches its inevitable conclusion, which is including Russia's largest and most important neighbor, Ukraine, in NATO.
00:31:31.860So they announced that in February at the Munich Security Conference of 2022 and then almost immediately after Russia rolls across into Ukraine.
00:31:40.700And then the war commences and it's a disaster for everybody, especially the United States, I would argue.
00:31:46.080And it does what Brzezinski said it wouldn't do, which is drive Russia right into China into what's now a permanent alliance.
00:31:59.440So you go to the snack cabinet and 10 minutes later, you've consumed an entire bag of chips, your typical American chip brand, and you feel like garbage.
00:36:47.000In the meantime, also remember that in this incredible hubris of the United States, this mad arrogance, in 2002, the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
00:37:04.040So the U.S. destabilized the nuclear arms control framework fundamentally in 2002.
00:37:13.960This is not sufficiently appreciated because from Russia's point of view until today and literally on a strike on strategic bombers last week, Russia believes that the United States has killed the nuclear arms framework.
00:37:31.420So we're talking about not vague national security concerns.
00:37:36.140We're talking about fundamental national and world survival terms.
00:37:41.920Because from Russia's point of view, and understandably so, the United States doesn't want to play by any single rules whatsoever.
00:37:51.100So I just want to say that this Project Ukraine not only goes back to the 1990s, but the invitation was in 2008.
00:38:00.620The Russians said no, so in 2010, a pro-neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, is elected.
00:38:08.880He comes to power on the basis of no NATO enlargement because he knows how dangerous that is for his country being between east and west.
00:38:17.780He says, stay away to both sides and we will keep calm.
00:38:22.060In February 2014, the United States conspires in a coup that overthrows Yanukovych.
00:38:32.240And that was a coup in which the U.S. was deeply engaged.
00:38:37.420My colleague at Columbia University, my colleague now, Victoria Nuland, was the point person on the ground.
00:38:44.320Jeffrey Piat, who was a senior official for Biden back in 2014, he was ambassador, in fact, to Ukraine, and then became a senior State Department official in the Biden administration.
00:38:59.080Afterwards, senators, Lindsey Graham, he was out there, John McCain.
00:39:05.720This was a typical U.S. regime change operation.
00:39:51.140If you were a serious country that believed in democracy, President Obama would have said,
00:39:57.260we don't accept mobs entering our buildings and overthrowing our government, President Yanukovych is the elected president and he is the one we recognize.
00:40:10.540No, within a nanosecond, Obama recognized the new post-coup regime, the one that Zelensky leads today.
00:40:20.100And amazingly, you know, according to script, honest to God, one of the first things that this new regime, this regime brought to power by an American participation in a coup.
00:40:37.400Not only Americans, there were Ukrainian right wing forces also, but America played its active role.
00:40:44.740What is one of the first things they say?
00:40:46.980They say, we think Russia should exit from Crimea.
00:40:53.180We think the Russian military base needs to leave Crimea.
00:40:58.300Now, it's interesting, under Yanukovych's term, Yanukovych and Putin had negotiated not a territorial annexation of Crimea, but rather a 25-year lease.
00:41:12.580Thank you very much that Russia will keep its naval base in Crimean Sevastopol.
00:41:18.720But immediately, the post-coup regime reads the script and says, we don't think Russia should be in Crimea.
00:41:25.640In other words, a subscript, NATO is going to take over the military base in the Black Sea.
00:41:34.000That's when Russia immediately organizes a referendum and Crimea is taken into Russian hands.
00:45:48.900They absolutely believed that the economic sanctions would bring Russia to its knees, for example.
00:45:57.640There was once upon a time that cutting Russia out from swift was called the nuclear option.
00:46:04.740Kind of a mind-boggling ignorance and delusion that America runs everything.
00:46:11.140So if we put sanctions on Russia, that will crush the Russian economy.
00:46:18.600They didn't factor in the fact that Russia happens to sell commodities that are easily fungible and that are not so hard to direct to India, by the way, which then can resell to Europe.
00:50:51.840You hear them talk about their bravery.
00:50:54.360You don't hear them talk about the kinds of emails that I receive, including one that I just received from somebody who said, Mr. Sachs, they're about to send me off to die.
00:51:06.260Someone from Ukraine who just found my email publicly.
00:51:09.400And he said, I'm 48 years old and they're sending me to the front lines.
00:51:19.900They send these middle-aged people, disabled people, kids grabbed off the streets, delivery boys off of bicycles, grabbed by these so-called recruiters who are thugs who pull them into vans.
00:51:35.800And then they're sent off to the front lines and they're dying under the drones.
00:51:41.580So for the American deep state, they don't care.
00:51:51.140Then in Europe, we brought in a, the CIA has, of course, created a European-wide security system, largely out of view.
00:52:07.080But whatever the CIA does here, think of the MI6 in Britain operating in the same way, even more disastrously.
00:52:17.400Think of BND in Germany, actually, which if you go back to 1945, not to go into too many details, has its Nazi roots.
00:52:27.620But the CIA created it after 1945 with the former Nazi intelligence agents to fight against the Soviet Union, taking them straight out of Hitler's intelligence into U.S. intelligence back in 1945, so-called Galen operation.
00:52:46.620Anyway, we have this whole network, and this network is still going.
00:52:53.140So the reason you have to wage peace is the president, he's just the president, after all.
00:53:02.460He faces, throughout the U.S. government, he faces the Lindsey Grahams and the Richard Blumenthal's.
00:54:02.440Now, he's surrounded by complete hardliners, and I've been told, I don't know if it's true or not, but senior people in Ukraine have said, well, he has no choice.
00:54:16.920He'll get knocked off by his own side if he, this could be completely true, but he's not representing the Ukrainian people who he's killing.
00:54:24.960He's representing a clique that's in power right now.
00:55:42.260And he has, President Trump has usefully tried to maneuver both sides to the negotiating table.
00:55:50.840And that we should give him all our support and all credit for doing that.
00:55:57.820But this system is not tamped down in any way because just before the recent round of this one-hour second meeting of the Russians and Ukrainians,
00:56:16.360the Ukrainian SBU, the secret intelligence agency, launched two attacks deep inside Russia.
00:56:27.160One, a straightforward terrorist attack, blowing up a civilian railroad, killing a large number of children and people going off for holidays by blowing up a railroad and a railroad bridge inside Russia.
00:56:46.840The second operation was profoundly more dangerous.
00:56:52.920Zelensky probably gave it the name afterwards of Operation Spiderweb, which should tell you a lot.
00:57:01.680And that was a drone attack on several military bases, hundreds or thousands of kilometers inside Russia's territory on Russia's strategic bomber fleet,
00:57:19.540meaning the air force that carries nuclear weapons.
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01:00:16.480Partly it is a tradition of deniability.
01:00:19.540So, the CIA, for decades and decades, has done very, very dangerous things, not telling the president on the grounds that, well, better that the president doesn't quite know this because we need the president to be able to deny this.
01:00:40.040Partly because it's not just that, but also because the CIA is a self-protecting, self-operating organization that has not had accountability for 50 years.
01:00:58.680And so, it is an out-of-control organization, in my opinion.
01:01:03.180Well, how can you have a democracy if you've got a paramilitary and intelligence-gathering force that has no civilian control?
01:01:08.740Well, our democracy is a democracy in form, but not in substance on many, many points.
01:01:17.140Obviously, our foreign policy is not democratically determined.
01:01:21.980Most of what the United States does is never explained or justified or voted by the American people.
01:01:29.380So, there's nothing democratic about American foreign policy, especially when we go to war.
01:01:34.140We go to war nonstop, either without saying anything to the American people or on the basis of outright lies.
01:01:43.600And so, there's nothing democratic about it at all.
01:01:51.740It's done on contingency funding that is completely without public scrutiny, without public explanation.
01:02:01.660Now, on this particular event, of course, we've not heard anything except the White House declaring and saying to President Putin, we didn't know about it.
01:02:14.900The fact of the matter is two alarming points.
01:02:19.640One is, whether or not the White House knew, the operation itself is completely reckless and alarming because attacking part of the nuclear triad in this way is a step towards nuclear Armageddon.
01:03:16.740Because it's always been the case that desperate regimes like the Ukrainian regime will gamble the world for their own survival.
01:03:32.960It's our job to understand that American foreign policy is not to support a reckless Ukrainian regime.
01:03:43.420Given the number of leaders we've taken out, couped, assassinated, overthrown and called revolutions, whatever, same effect, regime change.
01:03:51.600What I believe we should do is very simple, and that is have a direct, clear, unambiguous negotiation with Russia over security issues.
01:04:05.960And in the end, we can't control Ukraine, but they can't fight without the United States.
01:04:14.420And because we have operated in this kind of ambiguous zone in the first months of the Trump administration, there is the ever-present effort of the deep state to turn the president.
01:04:34.320They know they can do this if they're persistent enough.
01:04:37.560They know they can keep up these operations.
01:04:39.980They know or they think they know that eventually the combined voices of Lindsey Graham and other warmongers in Congress and the Europeans and Zelensky and pounding this.
01:05:00.480And the New York Times, with its idiotic editorializing and all the rest, will tell the president, don't be an appeaser, don't give in, fight Russia.
01:05:15.440And so they believe that they'll ultimately win the fight.
01:05:20.760President Trump has not put an end to that, I have to say.
01:05:26.960He can't put an end to people saying it, but he does have the constitutional authority to put an end to it from the point of view of the substance of U.S. foreign policy.
01:06:17.800President Trump has to understand, I'm sure he does, how deep the deep state is, how far down this goes, how this is not, by the way, only Biden's losing war.
01:06:40.080This is a long story, and Trump is trying to put an end to the story because it's a failure, and he understands it's a complete failure, and he's completely right when he says they don't have the, you know, we don't have the cards, or Biden didn't have the cards.
01:06:56.760But what he can't do is leave everything ambiguous because the way our system works is that the war machine is revving all the time, all the time.
01:08:07.560He can say clearly unambiguously a few points.
01:08:11.840Sit down with President Putin, because these are the two superpowers involved in this war, and say, we absolutely agree NATO will not enlarge because this is a U.S. military alliance, and we, by treaty, agree that that will stop because that's part of our mutual security arrangement with you.
01:08:36.400We recognize Crimea as Russian, because we understand that this goes back to 1783.
01:09:36.840So I think the status quo, as I understand it, as of right now, which is Monday, June 9th, is that negotiation, you know, that it's hard to negotiate your way out.
01:09:48.800And I don't think the president, you know, he didn't start this where he's frustrated.
01:09:52.900He doesn't want to take credit for it.
01:10:43.580This, after all, is between the two leading nuclear superpowers of the world that we not go any farther than that.
01:10:52.500But President Trump can say, I'm concerned about what our own intelligence agencies may have been doing.
01:10:58.560How could it be that for 18 months this was being planned and they didn't know if that's the truth?
01:11:07.400That is a level of incompetence beyond imagining we have to clean up our shop.
01:11:12.660Or if they did know and they didn't tell me, that is a level of recklessness that we have to clean up because it's completely unacceptable for the security of the American people.
01:11:24.180And in the meantime, I and President Putin have some real discussions to do.
01:11:30.880What they would come up with would be clear demarcations that would keep the two superpowers from each other's neck.
01:11:42.220Like the Ukrainian attack, which is completely unacceptable, endangers the entire world and is preventable by the president of the United States.
01:11:54.180On that basis, then I would say after that, if Ukraine wants to continue to fight on without any of our support, any of our weapons, not buying weapons, by the way, not anything, period.
01:12:09.480Okay, they can do so, but we're done being endangered by this recklessness.
01:12:16.600I resent completely that Zelensky endangered my family last week.
01:12:25.080But it's not, I mean, you're describing a scenario where this war is being run by three intelligence services, in your description, CIA, MI6 and SBU, without democratic input, without control by elected leaders,
01:12:38.940including the president of the United States, and without the interests of the nations at heart.
01:12:45.960Can you just define sort of a little more precisely what's going on?
01:13:20.840The pipeline exists because it still is the Biden pipeline.
01:13:25.540It still is whatever Europe is managing.
01:13:29.400But that pipeline of armaments and finance is basically coming to an end and Trump should end it definitively.
01:13:41.160And then Ukrainians literally can't fight.
01:13:46.520Of course, Europe would try little bits here and there.
01:13:52.460And if they're stupider and more reckless than one can imagine, they may try more stunts like the ones that they did a couple of weeks ago, which endangered the whole world.
01:14:05.920But they cannot fight a war afterwards.
01:14:10.160At that point, you know, what would happen?
01:14:13.620What would happen is either Russia indeed takes over essentially Ukraine in terms of military occupation or a peace is reached.
01:14:49.560But they're very powerful in the U.S. system.
01:14:52.720And in the U.S. system, this war has not been an unpopular war for the U.S.
01:15:00.400It's been a deep state project for more than 30 years.
01:15:05.460And the idea was to shield the American people from it, mainly secret, once in a while, like we had the story about how the CIA was operating all over Ukraine that the New York Times ran one day.
01:15:20.520You hear bits and pieces, but the idea is to shield the American people from these wars.
01:15:26.100The main way we do it is that we don't have our boots on the ground.
01:17:39.620Ever, because most of the time, with one pertinent, horrible example, presidents have gone along with the CIA.
01:17:51.480Of course, the one horrible, shocking, disgusting example is John F. Kennedy, who famously said that he would like to take the CIA and tear it into a thousand pieces.
01:18:07.600And maybe those were his last words, in essence.
01:18:12.540So if you look big picture at the United States, you don't have a real country as long as the CIA.
01:18:17.980I mean, everything since November of 63 has been post-coup.
01:18:21.660I believe that we have not brought this absolutely dangerous part of our government under any effective control for a half century.
01:18:36.660The last time that there was any slight measure of control and accountability was 1975, 50 years ago, with the church committee.
01:18:50.660Frank Church from Idaho, uniquely in the whole history of the CIA since 1947, did a real investigation.
01:19:00.460Of course, as soon as they looked under the covers, it was horrifying, horrifying what they found.
01:19:09.180They found recklessness, assassinations, coups, regime change operations, MKUltra, the shocking CIA attempts to create assassins.
01:19:31.060And Manchurian candidates, so-called, and experimentation with hallucinogens for the sake of intelligence operations.
01:20:49.880And I could go on with 50 examples like this where the deep state is unaccountable, where there are no answers, where nothing is heard.
01:21:00.960Yesterday we heard about Area 51, you know, we heard about how the U.S. military concocted phony stories which lived for decades in order to hide secret weapons development programs.
01:21:19.960Our government lies every day, the security state.
01:21:25.920And the danger of that is that don't call that national security.
01:21:41.360We should be the safest country in the history of the world.
01:21:46.340And we would be if it were not for the risk of nuclear war.
01:21:51.580And yet we're closer to that than at any time because of the stupidity, I have to say, of these deep state, unexamined, unaccountable strategies of going up against other major powers in the most reckless ways.
01:22:09.640And I use the language because we're just a few days after an absolutely disgusting, unacceptable intelligence agency operation attacking strategic bombers deep inside Russia.
01:22:25.600Well, how long before there's like an attack that Russia can't ignore and that does lead?
01:22:34.020I mean, it seems like all the incentives are in place for the Ukrainians working with MI6 and CIA to push us into a global conflict with Russia.
01:22:46.040And if it's not Ukraine, it's Israel or someone else.
01:22:50.360There's so many, our foreign policy is so suborned, so much not in America's interest, so much used by the military industrial state or particular lobbies in favor of particular places.
01:23:08.920We could be yanked into war for absolutely no consequential reasons whatsoever when we should be enjoying the height of our national security.
01:23:23.000And in 1991, I witnessed it with my own eyes.
01:23:26.960We had everything we could have ever dreamt.
01:23:31.140Our erstwhile foe, and that's another long story why they were the foe.
01:23:38.600But our erstwhile foe of the Cold War said, we don't want to be an enemy.
01:24:16.540But that's why the president of the United States has to stop the war machine.
01:24:22.420So no matter how you feel about Donald Trump, it's hard to deny that his second term has been a whirlwind.
01:24:27.320It's amazing how fast this administration is advancing its agenda, reporting illegal aliens, slashing government waste, an entirely new trade strategy.
01:24:36.720No one has ever seen anything like it.
01:24:39.580Now, many people are thrilled by this fast start, but it's going to take a lot more than this to achieve the ultimate goal.
01:24:44.620And that's why our friends at the Heritage Foundation are mobilizing supporters, patriots across the country, to support this administration and the broader conservative movement.
01:25:30.000To the second conflict raging that, as you just said, has the potential to engulf the world, and then that's Iran, which is obviously connected to a bunch of other conflicts around that region.
01:25:46.780Where are we in averting a war with Iran right now?
01:25:53.060Good news, of course, is that President Trump is negotiating.
01:25:58.760He's resisting Netanyahu's constant call for the U.S. to go to war with Iran.
01:26:08.640And that call by Bibi for yet another war in the Middle East is yet another of these long-term deep state projects.
01:26:21.160This is an Israeli project primarily, but the U.S. has been a party to Netanyahu's wars going back essentially 30 years.
01:26:29.920Netanyahu came to office as Prime Minister of Israel first in 1996.
01:26:36.200He did it with the backing of the U.S. political advisors, many of whom became senior U.S. officials.
01:26:45.680And he did it on the basis of a strategy, a political strategy called Clean Break back in 1996.
01:26:56.320And what Clean Break meant was a clean break with the idea of the two-state solution.
01:27:05.200So the two-state solution means that there should be a state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side.
01:27:13.340That goes back to the United Nations' 1947 partition plan idea.
01:27:20.400Netanyahu leads a political party, the Likud, and a political alliance which holds that Israel should dominate all of the lands of that region,
01:27:35.940including Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, but also into Lebanon and Syria and borders undefined,
01:27:47.280but a very expansive view of what Israel's rule should be.
01:27:53.480That's a quite outlandish and outrageous idea to most of the world.
01:28:00.380And I would say to most Americans who say, look, just make peace and get on with it.
01:28:06.760And the Palestinians who are 8 million people should have their place.
01:28:10.200And the Israelis who are 8 million people should have their place and get on with it.
01:28:18.300But this idea of the Clean Break is, no, we don't want to get on with it.
01:29:58.000And the U.S. became the complicit party to this because of the U.S. deep state vision that Israel is our battleship or aircraft carrier in the Middle East, that it is our strategic asset in the Middle East.
01:30:19.200And because of the Zionist lobby, which is itself a complicated political concoction in the United States.
01:30:26.560But in any event, the U.S. completely bought into the Netanyahu idea, which is war after war after war.
01:30:38.760And it's not well understood, but it should be because we've been told pretty clearly by no less than General Wesley Clark, for example.
01:30:51.180Who was the commander of NATO forces, that the Pentagon has had a list of wars to prosecute that essentially is Netanyahu's list, actually.
01:31:08.300After 9-11 in particular, that went into overdrive.
01:31:14.000The U.S. as Wesley Clark was told, and as he subsequently explained to us, and as others have also explained to us, an Air Force commander named Dennis Fritz, who wrote a very important book called Deadly Betrayal in 2024, telling the same story in essence.
01:31:39.780The Pentagon had a list which the neoconservatives or the deep state of the U.S. would carry out, which was we would take out the regimes in opposition to Israel.
01:31:55.020And those regimes included, it's a long list.
01:32:01.140Of course, not only the Palestinians, that's the point, but also Syria.
01:32:06.880That was the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was viewed by Netanyahu and by the U.S. deep state as an Iranian client.
01:32:18.780So Syria would be one, Lebanon would be another, Iraq under Saddam Hussein would be another, the Iranian regime would be a fourth, and then, believe it or not, three countries in Africa, which are Islamic countries that supported the Palestinian cause.
01:32:44.040And that was Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, that was Somalia and the Horn of Africa, and that was Sudan, which was a Sharia state in the 1990s.
01:32:59.860Well, God damn, we've been to war with all of them except Iran, and not by accident.
01:33:06.880The list is literally the guide in this case.
01:33:14.480And again, it's not simple for Americans to connect the dots because these stories are not told, they're not explained, they're not debated, they're not voted.
01:33:29.220These are presidential actions, by and large, one after another.
01:33:35.020So let's go through them step by step.
01:33:41.840We now know, not only was it under wrong pretenses, weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, it was under completely phony, concocted, false pretenses.
01:33:56.160And in 2002, the Pentagon actually did a PR analysis of how to sell the war to the American people, a unit by a guy named Abe Shulsky.
01:34:11.040And he came up with a PR strategy, literally public relations, that the right narrative was weapons of mass destruction.
01:34:19.200So this is not as it was subsequently told to us, oh, we made a mistake.
01:34:24.780We didn't know that Saddam didn't have them.
01:34:28.480This was a concocted narrative in 2002 to justify a war in 2003 to take away a regime that Netanyahu deemed to be hostile to Israel.
01:34:42.840Then in 2011, again, something very basic but not understood by the American people because, again, the government lies and cheats and doesn't explain, the U.S. went to war in Syria.
01:35:06.240There was never a presidential speech.
01:35:09.480But the president said, President Obama said, Assad must go.
01:35:16.940Okay, every time you hear an American president say some other leader must go, say, oh, my God, here we go again.
01:35:25.820And the president signed a presidential finding called Operation Timber Sycamore, assigning the CIA with the task of organizing, training, financing, and arming an insurgency to overthrow Assad.
01:35:44.220That came to fruition just in recent months.
01:35:49.320That's how the new government came in.
01:35:53.460Yes, unfortunately, very much unfortunately, it was after 13 years of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed sites in Syria that date back thousands of years.
01:36:09.880In other words, it was a destruction of one of the heritage sites of humanity because Netanyahu said, that guy's too close to Iran.
01:36:33.960As all these migrants came in and wrecked European politics, not one politician in Europe said, oh, the United States shouldn't be engaged in an overthrow of Syria.
01:36:46.240They can't connect the goddamn dots because everything's a lie.
01:36:52.860So when Obama comes out and says Assad must go, which I think in retrospect was a pivot point in modern history like that, because Syria is not Yemen.
01:37:03.420By the way, Syria was viewed, you know, up until then, there's an IMF report, which I like to cite of 2009, praising the authorities on their growth strategy and reform.
01:38:22.520I'll tell you, again, Dennis Fritz, very interesting.
01:38:26.120He's a very smart former Air Force commander who, strangely enough, resigned from the Air Force in 2003 because he couldn't get a clear explanation of why we were fighting Iraq.
01:39:02.780Then he was called back in 2005 to the Pentagon for a remarkable reason.
01:39:11.900And that was the Douglas Feith, who was a senior Pentagon official, a neocon close to Netanyahu, the whole shebang, said, we want to declassify papers around the Iraq war.
01:39:28.100And, okay, so Feith came back because he was an expert on classification and security issues and so forth.
01:40:16.760And he said he was shocked by what he read because he's reading it and he realizes this is Beebe's war.
01:40:23.760We're going to war because Israel said so.
01:40:27.280And Feith was Beebe's man in the Pentagon.
01:40:30.700But how could Douglas Feith, who's an American citizen and an American official at the American Pentagon, do the bidding of a foreign government like that?
01:40:41.920Well, because America has been doing Israel's bidding for 30 years for because of the Israel lobby, because of the concocted idea that this is U.S. security.
01:40:51.840But sending young people to die, I mean, that's a pretty heavy thing to do.
01:40:56.160As long as it's not American people to die.
01:40:58.460Well, in that case, it was more heavy.
01:41:01.780But actually, I apologize for that statement because most of the wars, we don't send our own Americans.
01:56:20.900I consider that so bewildering if a grownup says that we need to have a long, hard talk about a lot of facts.
01:56:32.360But that is simply the most absurd, imaginable idea.
01:56:40.160Iran, by the way, is a civilization of, by usual count, 5,200 years.
01:56:49.160Persia is the usual name given for Iran.
01:56:52.560Oldest continuous in the world, I think.
01:56:53.760Yes, it's arguably the longest continuous civilization, though many jump up and say,
01:57:00.200no, we are, maybe the Georgians say it or the Egyptians say it,
01:57:03.140so I won't get into arguments among my friends.
01:57:06.100Except this is actually a great civilization that has lasted for 5,000 years.
01:57:14.880They're not going to bring it to an end by bombing the United States and having Persia or Iran disappear from the world map literally physically by atom by atom by such an attack.
01:57:32.940I mean, the attention, the full attention of huge parts of the U.S. government,
01:57:37.400billions and billions and billions and trillions over the years of American tax dollars have gone to responding to this threat.
01:57:44.000We have bases all around the region, all focused on Iran, which we maintain, including a huge one in Qatar, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:57:51.480All of this effort by the United States focused on this Iranian threat that you claim doesn't exist.
01:57:56.880Remember that Iran was, first of all, Iran was a democratic country in 1953.
01:58:06.600The prime minister at the time named Mossadegh had this absolutely outlandish idea,
01:58:15.240which was that the oil under their ground belonged to Iranians.
01:58:21.540This was a very weird idea because the British knew it belonged to the British.
01:58:27.260The Americans expected that it belonged to the Americans in the new age.
01:58:33.160And so CIA and MI6 overthrew the Iranian democracy.
01:58:39.640Then we installed a police state known as the Shah of Iran and SAVAK.
01:58:46.980It's supposed intelligence and enforcement authority from 1953 to 1978 when the Shah was dying of cancer and he was a hated figure in Iran.
01:59:11.700Jimmy Carter was talked into taking him into American, into the United States.
01:59:19.300And that provoked the reaction and the taking of hostages by American hostages in Iran.
01:59:28.000And the Iranian revolution was taken badly by the United States.
02:01:57.400And so in order to overcome the deep state, in this case, it's the Israel or Zionist lobby because it's got a pretty complicated domestic heritage and base.
02:02:11.080In order to overcome what has been 20 years of wars of choice in the Middle East and to stop them, it requires a lot of political capital and attention by President Trump.
02:02:23.920In just like in Ukraine, he's absolutely on the right track, but he's getting attacked by everybody for being on the right track.
02:02:35.000And he's trying to express America's real interest.
02:02:39.920America cannot have a war with Iran, by the way.
02:03:24.300And the arrogance of a Lindsey Graham or the American Congress that thinks we can do whatever we want, wherever we want, and win whenever we want, when everything has been trillions of dollars of cost in one disaster after another, that arrogance actually continues until today.
02:03:56.280But I don't understand on what basis this optimism arises.
02:04:00.640The optimism is misplaced, let us say, because these people have gotten us into one debacle after another.
02:04:09.300And if, you know, when Lindsey, I'm going to pick on Lindsey Graham again because he's been the biggest warmonger in the Senate, if, when he speaks, if there were little logos on the screen, Iraq war supporter, this war supporter.
02:04:25.780If people understood, okay, this guy's told you the wrong thing, five wars in a row, then, okay, then we let him speak and let everyone understand this guy gets it wrong every single time.
02:04:40.000And that's true of most of these warmongers.
02:04:42.980But I think, you know, just to say, this will continue, unfortunately, as long as we don't have peace a little bit further to the west of Iran.
02:04:58.120And that is we need Israel and Palestine, two states living in peace and not this plan that is the clean break that is breaking us that goes back 30 years.
02:05:13.500In other words, the harder work even than avoiding the war with Iran is the United States finally telling Israel, come on, there's a limit.
02:05:54.980It's hard, again, because the narrative for decades has been the opposite, because Americans don't understand how much we have paid for these terrible, absurd, deadly Israeli-led or provoked or desired wars.
02:06:19.800And because there are deep beliefs and misunderstandings about the region that are just reproduced and replicated over time.
02:06:33.000Again, just like Iran, I deal every day with diplomats from around the world.
02:06:44.280It's my privilege and good luck that I speak with leaders all over the Middle East.
02:06:52.400For example, in Egypt, in Saudi, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Iran, all over the Middle East.
02:07:07.260And they have said to me for years and years, if there is a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, we normalize relations with Israel.
02:07:21.840We, of course, we, of course, support the mutual security of the two states.
02:07:31.700And they have said that not only privately to me at length, explaining the situation, but publicly in what's called the Arab Peace Initiative, which goes back to 2002.
02:07:41.940So it's been 23 years where the Arab states have been saying clearly, when Israel says there's no one to talk to, there's everyone to talk to.
02:07:54.720Everyone wants peace, quiet, and economic development.
02:08:00.240Believe it or not, they want to live their lives.
02:08:55.300But what we don't hear and get an explanation of, and this is what people need to understand, Netanyahu's completely uninterested in that, totally, totally uninterested in that.
02:09:08.820He doesn't say, oh, we need to say, oh, we need to defeat Hamas, then there can be a Palestinian state.
02:09:15.240No, of course not, because that's fundamentally not the idea.
02:09:19.700Fundamentally, the idea is we defeat Hamas, we rule.
02:09:27.560But the problem is, leaving aside who's right, who's wrong, philosophical and moral justifications for this or that policy, you have millions of people living there.
02:11:39.280Osama bin Laden said that he planned 9-11 in part because of what was happening between Israel and the Palestinians and America's support for Israel.
02:13:01.160So, if the president follows through on America's national interest, not on the grandiosity that we can do anything we want, anywhere we want, because we are the United States of America and our mission is to defeat Russia or our mission is to defeat Iran or our mission is greater Israel.
02:13:23.860If we follow the American national interest, if we follow the American national interest, it's absolutely straightforward what to do.
02:13:31.900It is no war with Iran and negotiated treaty.
02:13:35.000It is two states, Israel and Palestine.
02:13:51.400This is hard because every one of them confronts a narrative that's 30 years old or 50 years old, that is deeply entrenched, that is fundamentally based on the premise that America can do what it wants anywhere in the world because it's all powerful.
02:14:15.760At the core of everything, at the core of everything, Tucker, is a kind of arrogance of power that has been proved to be wrong from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq.
02:14:35.640It's not that we're hopeless and helpless and I'm not defeatist in that way.
02:14:44.160I'm saying that if you choose the wrong battles, you can't win those battles.
02:14:51.580If you choose battles that are not in America's interest, you'll go away because they're not.
02:14:58.040Afghanistan wasn't fundamentally in America's interest or Iraq wasn't fundamentally in America's interest or Ukraine wasn't fundamentally.
02:15:05.620And by the way, that's also not isolationism, that's just being smart, prudent, normal, and also recognizing, don't be so afraid.
02:15:18.480Our only risk in the United States, honestly, now we know it's not the UFOs.
02:15:24.920That was a concocted thing of the Air Force.
02:15:47.160Just be normal and we can have secure, prosperous lives for all of us.
02:15:52.360When you overstate your power, your power evaporates.
02:15:55.780The U.S. is so much less powerful than it was before the invasion of Afghanistan.
02:16:00.220We have much more risk objectively than we were before.
02:16:03.740And anyone that measures risk, I often refer to this doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which says we're closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before in human history.
02:16:56.200It does feel like it could be 1995 again.
02:17:00.320But there is one new one, and that is that Qatar, Qatar, Q-A-T-A-R, very small Gulf state, wholly within Saudi, I think the largest natural gas field in the world, biggest American air base in the region,
02:17:17.180that that country is like a powerful enemy of the United States and is controlling America's media, controlling America's higher education system,
02:17:27.040and that most bad things and all bad opinions come from Qatar and Qatari propaganda.
02:18:01.740They gave the president a nice plane, and it's not a danger to the American people.
02:18:09.260You know, if we were to calm down a little bit, we actually could have all the safety in the world we want.
02:18:17.460But this is really, this is actually the truth.
02:18:22.180If we drop our angst on big bad Russia, actually, we didn't have a chance to talk about it this time.
02:18:31.840Maybe another time, big bad China, which is also not going to invade the United States, not going to threaten us, not going to go to war with us.
02:18:40.500They got their, they're trying to deal with aging, and they've got their declining population and many other things.
02:18:56.360And now I'll add another country that's not a threat, Qatar.
02:18:59.140And by the way, there are 193 UN member states, and I would say 192 of them are not threats to the United States if we just behave with some prudence and don't get ourselves edging towards the nuclear war.