The Real Cost of the War with Iran | John Sheehan | Ep. 68

Former U.S. State Department consultant, geopolitical strategist, and Non-Resident Fellow at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies John F. Sheehan returns for a deep, unfiltered breakdown of the Iran conflict — and why he believes the U.S. entered it without a clear objective, an exit strategy, or the backing of its allies.

We cover the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and what it means for global food prices, why China and Russia may be the biggest beneficiaries of this war, the role Netanyahu played in pushing the U.S. into a conflict that may be impossible to win, the collapse of the American pro-Israel consensus, whether Iran's regime can actually be toppled, the depletion of U.S. weapons stockpiles and what it means for our posture in Asia, and what a realistic path forward actually looks like.

This is the kind of conversation you won't get on cable news.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We we started a war choice. We have no idea what objectives we want to meet, where we want to be at the end of it, and what its costs and ramifications will be. It is not easy to tip over the uh closure of the Strange of Removes. Half of the world's fertilizer grocery bills are gonna go up significantly. There is no good end game for us at this point. Consulting everybody without war gaming it, he is guaranteed that we will not have a good outcome.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

So welcome to the show episode We don't know, we don't know which number this is. 70, roughly. So, but uh but glad to have you back on.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Well, it's nice of you to invite me and uh do my best to not put my foot in it and say something.

SPEAKER_03 0:52

To do my duty to guide my country and obey the scout law. A couple of people at all times.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

That's right. You and I are both Eagle Scouts, aren't we?

SPEAKER_03 0:59

That we are. That we are. It's been a while though. I feel like you've stayed pretty involved. I have I've uh I've kind of disconnected to a certain degree. But have you? At some point, I'll probably get back involved just uh just to help out. But I feel like a lot of those things, especially it's like you know, scouting and sports, and uh once you kind of disconnect from it, it can be very difficult to get back involved in the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, that's true. I actually I'm helping out a scout troop. I did I volunteered a summer camp this summer. I didn't know they were still running after all the scandals. And I I wanted to, you know rejoin. And uh I found out there was a one camp that's doing very well, and uh they just had less less scandals. Yeah, really. The scouts I I uh counseled when I was an adult leader. Uh they're fathers now. And uh after they told me all the stuff they got away with while I wasn't looking, they invited me back. Uh you know. Uh of course now I see their sons. That's that's fun. My favorite is uh pioneering. You know, lashing trees together and building stuff, even teaching them how to build a trebuchet.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

Pioneering was always fun, not tying was always enjoyable, and uh but I feel like anytime we built anything like that, somebody always got hurt. Somebody broke a bone, somebody broke a wrist, somebody had some.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

That's why we don't build build the signal towers anymore, or there's a height limit on them. So I try to bring build bridges or structures. So they get to tell their parents what they built, you know, the week. Right. You know, while they were at camp. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 2:48

Always a good time, and always, well, lots of fun learning lessons. I think the the most enjoyable part for me, too, like looking back on scouting now, is connecting with those individuals that were our scout leaders and being like, how was it how was it really though? And we were kids and and y'all were, you know, because it was our friends' dads, and they were like, it was awful. We did it because we wanted to help, but it was actually really tough. Like y'all were a lot to take care of, especially on weekends when your parents gave us that responsibility. I was like, I can only imagine. I mean, we were we were pretty terrible. I mean, we would run off and do crazy things and play with like napalm and make napalm. And that was always the most enjoyable thing for us, was just the pyrotechnic side of things for for every single one.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Pyromania is basic to scouting. But I, you know, we were we were we were lucky, we had an extraordinary group of adult leaders. They were all the mad scientists of the defense labs that you know Massachusetts like uh an archipelago. And uh when someone sent them on a uh a gag mission like a Blue Steam or a Skyhook, these guys would actually build one since they spent most of their time building stuff on black projects. Very lucky to have adult leaders like that.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

Did you ever get to have any of those conversations, or were they uh were they pretty quiet about what they were doing?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Well, no, the the one I told you about who told me about he had found extra evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and technology. He was he was the father of my two best friends. Got it. So we we had a good time.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

Well, we have a lot of uh scientists disappearing as of late. Do we? Apparently we do. I've seen a lot of that in the news the past week.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Where kind of scientists are disappearing?

SPEAKER_03 4:36

Well, it's apparently a list of which they never they typically never cover stuff like this, but Fox News actually covered it. Uh it was like Newsmax, and there were some other outlets that were starting to cover the disappearance of some of these scientists. And I don't I don't once again I don't really know names necessarily, but it seems to be popping up a lot more this past week. There's a there's a lot going on, so frankly, this is kind of one of those just like side um items that I've discovered through my online journey. But this past week it seems to be it seems to be brought to the forefront a lot more, being it's being brought to the forefront a lot more this past week, especially with everything going on. But they're all like NASA tide scientists or propulsion scientists, or they're working on black projects of some kind, but there's like eight well well-known scientists that have disappeared over the past three to six months. One was shot um within the past like six months or to a year in his home, and the others have just disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

So the Iranians getting us back or something? I don't know. You tell me.

SPEAKER_03 5:37

I mean, what does that make you think when when it when a scientist disappears, does it sound like does it sound like a foreign country, or does it sound like they're maybe getting deeper involved in the black project or black site they're involved in, and therefore they need to be disappeared altogether?

unknown 5:52

I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 5:53

It could be a million different things. I'm gonna look it up while we're while I'm listening to your response, but I'm gonna look up some of these names of these people.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Oh, I one thing I promise you, if I don't know the answer, I won't pretend I will.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

Well, we appreciate that, because it sounds like anybody knows the answer to everything nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Just certain things. Um, it's kind of disturbing if that's what's happening. We're not invulnerable.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

Yeah, so I just this is just a general Google search, but a series of eight high-profile U.S. scientists, researchers, and engineers working in sensitive defense, aerospace, and nuclear technologies have died or gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Well, since mid-2024, so not this past six months to a year. That was a total lie. Um, but a lot of them apparently are happening recently. Uh the cases which involve professionals from institutions like NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have prompted concern from lawmakers such as Representative Tim Burchett, uh, who have called for investigations into potential espionage or coordinated targeting.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Interesting. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 7:01

So you know nothing about this topic?

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Nothing.

SPEAKER_03 7:03

From your from your defense connection.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Nothing. I don't really have any defense connections. And I can assure you that no one from the administration is calling me to ask my opinion on anything.

SPEAKER_03 7:13

And why is that, John?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

I don't know. I they just must not love me. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Well, we've got plenty to discuss tonight. I feel like we're we're kind of taking a moment here to ease into this podcast because there is so much to discuss. And often I've just I jump right in and I'm like, oh, let's discuss this particular topic. Like, for example, it was Ukraine-Russia for us before, and then it was the Middle East that we did we covered in a previous episode, and then it was this and that. We've covered so much previously, and you've given us such a really good understanding of the strategy and the geopolitical landscape of some of these different um issues. But with the Iran war going on right now, I feel like it's more important than ever to discuss that topic and uh just get your general thoughts before we dive into what the maybe the future looks like with the conflict.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Well, when we discussed the Iranian regime, I did a detailed study of the structure of the Iranian regime. And uh just to show how resilient it is and not easy to tip over. When we get to it, I'll I just wanted to have some notes. Because they have a very complex structure that uh it's not easy to tip over. But I I got the notes. It's part of the draft of one of my books.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

So with everything going on in the world right now, uh let's just let's start with Iran. And uh I well, let's for let's kind of back up a bit because this this particular war, which conflict, this they didn't call a war for a little while, started as a conflict, and then now it's basically become a war. Uh started on February 28th, I believe, was the the first day. On February 24th, I made a comment on another podcast, or at least I I released a short clip from another podcast where I said it feels like something big has to happen because of the Epstein files and all the other crap going on. It feels like something really massive is going to occur here soon, so they can kind of get away from all the other things that are going wrong uh currently. But when it comes to the start of this conflict, did it you it seems like you've seen this coming for a while, based off of all of our previous conversations. You just didn't know an exact date. But in regards to the the start of this conflict, were you a bit surprised or did you kind of see this coming?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Well, I hoped it wouldn't happen. But that's there's a lot of hope going on, but hope is not a strategy. And uh you know, with the Epstein files becoming too hot to handle, someone decided somewhere to uh that the only way to blow the Epstein files out the front pages was to start a war. Which we've done. And uh without a clear sense of strategy, uh without a sense of where we wanted to be at the end of a comp of the conflict or the war, how we would define victory or an end that would be consistent with our national interests, without a justification to the American people and to the soldiers who are asking to die for us, uh, without uh having briefed our allies, without getting their support in one way or the other. I mean, whenever military action uh is contemplated, there's an elaborate staff process to consider all the things that you you want to accomplish, all the ways in which you have to meet those objectives, uh what the ramifications will be on our allies and our own national interests, uh, whether we're demanding something of a regime that is reasonable, that people will understand and support. Um and so uh to even to the point where there is in a way an agreement between your enemy and us on why we're going to war and uh you know what is at stake, you know, what is it it is that we want that is being denied to us by a a hostile regime, and um you know an agreed list of uh complaints.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

But we didn't achieve any of those things. We we started a war uh of choice, we have no idea what objectives we want to meet, where we want to be at the end of it, and um what its costs and ramifications will be on our national interests. And uh when things started to go wrong in the global markets, uh like half of the world's fertilizer, which comes out of the Persian Gulf, not just oil and natural gas, but uh the cutter and the other and uh the other regimes of that area uh produce half of the world's food supply fertilizer. And uh that's all been blocked by the the uh closure of the Strait of Hermuz, which means all of our uh grocery bills are gonna go up significantly. Um and uh to the extent that we don't have a plan uh and the president is trying to ironically and weirdly get the Iranians and the Chinese to uh solve the problem so that we can end it without him losing face. You don't ask your en if you start a war and you don't know where you're going, you don't ask your enemy to bail you out so that you don't, you know, keep become embarrassed. But that's basically what's happened. And uh I am afraid that he's going to be so I mean, now that we're in this war, which I oppose, I want us to win it. But I don't see how that's going to happen. Because every time he uses words like obliterate and uh destruction and calls them reasonable when they aren't necessarily reasonable, uh and uh uh bombards them with thousands of of uh airstrikes, he actually increases the prestige of the Iranian you know, Islamic Republic because every day they resist successfully, uh their incentive to negotiate with us goes down, and the prestige they derive from resisting us goes up. And we are the kings of standoff weaponry. We can hit other countries, they can't hit hit us. But if we uh uh invade Karg Island, they're we're going to. Well, I hope not. I mean, it's the only way we're gonna topple that regime is basically by so disintegrating the tentacles that it has into every aspect of Iranian society uh down to the block committees that they use to control every neighborhood with their Basage, yeah, uh yeah uh militias um when they have in fact uh named their successors four levels down. Basically, if you get killed, so and so becomes the head of whatever department you're in, and they've they've selected their line of succession four four four people downward. Right. And when the the regime is so dispersed that it is necessarily resilient against attacks, we the Iranian regime will not collapse like the uh uh the Arab regimes in the Gulf or like uh Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Um and they have become very sophisticated at repression, and they have had twenty years longer to uh use asymmetric warfare to beat back our aerial bombardment attacks. And uh there's no sign that the regime is cracking. Uh the uh Iranian people, who used to be the most pro-American regime in in the region, uh, is now enraged at all the death that we're causing, and it's fusing with uh the Islamic Republic and the mullahs, who are able to portray this as a patriotic war and you know, call us the great Satan, Satan and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 16:23

So there's a there's a lot to break down here, too, um just to just in general. And as it relates to the start of the war, too, I want to go back to this. What do you think, because we we hear what we hear on mainstream media, and we hear what we hear from Trump on social media and Pete Hexeth, uh Secretary of War on social media and all the about we hear these things. But what do you think the the ultimate goal was go going into Iran? Because from a lot of strat quote unquote strategists' perspective, this was the best opportunity we had to topple the regime and give the Iranian people the opportunity to actually overthrow their government. Um and on the other hand, I actually heard this earlier, I saw this earlier today. Apparently, we gave we actually did send some weapons, but they're now saying they were taken by the Kurds and they didn't actually get to the Iranian people so they could actually uprise uh or rise up in the streets, or maybe we haven't given the the message yet so they can actually go and and rise up. Um but what do you think the ultimate goal was initially in going into this? Was it actually to go get the enriched uranium and and bring it out?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Well, it depends on what day or what hour we're talking about. It seems like it keeps shifting.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

It's like what is the ultimate goal here?

SPEAKER_00 17:39

I mean, they said they want to take away their nuclear project. Now Trump says that he doesn't care about that. He says that uh the nuclear material is all buried. I mean, when we struck, remember uh, you know, in January and February first, and I always thought that we uh because we had we had hit those uh facilities pretty hard, we could have sent in uh some helicopters, put some well the the regime had had his people evacuate the areas, send some commandos down in there and grab that material ourselves and then bring it back. But now they're prepared for that, and if we try to do that, uh they'll and these facilities are uh defended by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, our our men will get massacred. And if we get onto the Karg Island, I'm afraid they'll use poison gas on us, literally. And that would make Blackhound Black Hawk Down look like a picnic. So they are they have done a lot of planning uh to fight against uh using their asymmetric warfare. The Chinese have certainly coached them on how to use missiles uh to horizontally escalate the war in ways that it uh uh affects and damages uh our allies in the region. Uh and instead of our bases at Bahrain, our naval base in for the Fifth Fleet in uh Bahrain and our Army base in Qatar, um those bases have become, instead of being protection, they've become liabilities. They're getting tar they're treating those bases as targets. And I am afraid that uh if he he keeps asking for help opening the Strait of Hormouths, yes, we'll say, sure, we'll help the Chinese. Then they'll send the People's Liberation Army Navy into the Gulf and say, We're here to escort uh the freighters just like you asked us to. Only we're not leaving. And then they'll offer the the people the kingdom of the Emirate of Qatar and Bahrain. Uh we'll take over those bases. And uh you can get the Americans to uh leave if you tell them to, or and then put us in the position of saying no, we're not going. And in which case you could have a terrorist situation against our troops. So, you know, all this asking for other people to help uh close out a war that he didn't know how to start or end because of Epstein and because Bibi Netanyahu said it was going to be a cakewalk, which is what he told Trump, um has become an opportunity for the Chinese to displace us as the predominant power in the Gulf, which I certainly don't want. And yes, I would like to win, but uh last time I looked, he said he didn't care about the nuclear weapons stores. He said the regime had changed, that they were all of a sudden being reasonable, which I don't believe. Then the Pakistanis are s o uh offering their good offices to uh uh negotiate. I don't trust the Pakistanis one bit. If anyone has messed with us repeatedly, especially the inter the Services Intelligence Directorate, uh they will uh set our soldiers up to be massacred. Um I mean we used we discredited ourselves as as uh dealing in good faith when it came to negotiating with the Iranians by attacking them right in the middle of when Oman was you know brokering talks between us and the Iranians. And the only reason we had the targets we had was because we found out when once the JCPOA got started that when which gave us the right to do on site inspections is that ninety percent of our targets were inaccurate. And the only reason we knew which targets to hit was because of the uh of the uh JCPOA n negotiations. And we also knew because we had uh a couple of Nobel laureates and physicists negotiating for us. So they knew how to close out every trick the Iranians could use to hide their weapons program. And we used the information we got from those on-site inspections to hit them, which gives the Iranians no incentive to negotiate with us, especially now when he's infuriated the Iranian people by saying that he's gonna bomb them back in the Stone Age where they belong. So, you know, the Iranians don't appreciate that, even if they don't like the regime.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

Well, this is where I I want to see. I had a friend of mine on in the, you know, I don't know how many episodes ago, but we discussed this specifically and how that you know there's obviously plenty of Iranians that were frustrated with the existing regime and wanted regime change and still do. But I guess it w at my my question to your point, at what point does it become, hey, you've now just destroyed literally everything? This is not what we were asking for. We're asking for regime change. But if according to which I'm just gonna go ahead and read his his tweet from today or yesterday, is Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah, President Donald J. Trump. And it sounds a lot worse when you say it out loud, too. It sounds pretty bad when you say it out loud.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Like no one ever seen before is like he says that every other sentence.

SPEAKER_03 23:43

And my but Michael, but my to that point, if and I I'm not once again, we we've it's you and I think you and I are on the same page. It's not that we trust the Iranians, and obviously we want the best for the Iranian people, and ultimately regime change would be phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

But it was never a possibility. There was never a possibility that we were going to tip that regime over.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

And it even even now it's like, well, who are we supposed to be supporting here? Who is who is gonna go in and lead this regime change?

SPEAKER_00 24:15

They did, and the IRGC massacred them. Right. And he's and and two weeks later, or a week, a month later, he's saying, Oh, you should rise up again. They're saying, what about us dissidents? We're the one who ones who are all dead now. That's what they're telling us. You lure you just like George Herbert Walker Bush I lured the uh Marsh Arabs and the Kurds uh to rise up and let only to let them be massacred by Saddam Hussein with his helicopters, uh Trump did the same thing to the Iranian people. And they did rise up. And we sat back and let them be massacred. And anyone who told Trump that we could uh uh tip that regime over, and I'm sure that Phoebe Netanyahu told him that. Of course, Netanyahu is a very good thing.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Nancy Graham did too.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Yeah, uh Netanyahu was willing to tell Trump anything uh to get him into this war, because he's been trying to get us to do that war for almost 40 years. Um he the the I anyone who had any expertise on the Islamic Republic or Iran uh would have given Trump a thorough briefing on all the ways in which that regime has structured itself to reach ever into every neighborhood with a with the this I can just describe the different levels of control that the regime has. But there it is a it's a web, it's a spider's web that's reinforced by its endless links into an ancient 90 million person society. And it is it was never a possibility to just tip that regime over. And now he's in a position of having to invade and wage a ruthless war and dissipate ourselves when we need to be uh getting ready for the conflict with China. And and we've all and and such has been our uh being dragged into a deeper war against Iran and the Gulf that we took a bunch of the missiles from the our uh our THAAD battery in South Korea that's supposed to protect them against the Chinese. We we yanked those missiles and those batteries out of South Korea and brought them into the Gulf. And needless to say, the South Koreans are very upset about this. And the rest of Asia is saying, oh my god, the Americans are involved in another Middle Eastern war and they're leaving us defenseless. And the Chinese are delighted because we're once again engaged in a quagmire in the Middle East, and we're not paying attention to business in Asia. And and and as if it wasn't bad enough that the China the Japanese are feeling vulnerable. Trump insults the uh Japanese about Pearl Harbor right in front of the Japanese prime minister. And, you know, maybe wonder, you know, does he hate us now, too? Um and and he's asked the our NATO allies, whom he's bullied, put down, ignored, for help. And he and these the Europeans were incredulous when he asked them to help. And and they didn't want to be involved in, excuse my French, a you know what show, uh, whereby they would end up being targets themselves for a war that they know he doesn't know how to end. He hasn't even in every day he changes the uh objectives. In the last four days, he said, I don't care about the nuclear program, I don't care about the regime change. He says the regime change has already happened because we've killed so many of their uh apparatus. So and the Iranian regime has no reason to believe that we'll negotiate with them for anything. In fact, the strategic initiative has moved over to them because now they are treating our network of bases as targets, and the Sunni Arab petrol monarchies are afraid that their economies are gonna be blown up because the Iranians still have missiles. And and this idea that we can totally subjugate a country of 90 million people by destroying using up all their missiles, which means they're gonna hit our allies and uh tip over the regime, which is not a possibility. Uh and and he it's like he's saying that the Iranians want to negotiate because he knows that everyone is upset with him. So he's making up these stories about how they want to do a deal, which of course the Iranians immediately, you know declared to be uh totally not true allegations. And to make the point, they launched further volleys of missiles at our allies. So I mean, I don't think he knows what he wants. And then he's supposed to have a uh summit with the Chinese. Uh he postponed it, and even they were on the TV saying, we don't know, we don't know what he wants either. So what's the point of meeting?

SPEAKER_03 29:50

And uh Well, maybe that maybe that's the strategy in and of itself, John.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

No, people are just people are stainless, looking as if there's some great strategy. You do not hit something.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

But I have to do it personally too, though. I have to be like, okay, there's got to be some plan here. Somebody has to have an idea of what the end goal is. No one has hearing like I keep hearing conservative talk show hosts saying that the ultimate goal is either regime change. And this is some of them, this is not all of them, by the way, because some people are just like, we have no idea what's going on in general, and we don't want any more Americans to die in another Middle Eastern war. And frankly, we want to, you know, we want to focus our interests here, not be isolationists, because I know you're also not an isolationist at all, but we want to focus on the interests of America and to your point in the coming potential large, much larger scale war with with China. But I I think this is where it goes back to like trying to justify this on a daily basis when we as like normal citizens, we're not we obviously don't have access to all this information. And so it is hard to try to be like, okay, this is what's happening when frankly we wouldn't really know anyways. But now with everything that's happened, it almost seems as though, to your point, there there any strategy or any clear objective is going to be very, very difficult to accomplish at this point. Well if not impossible.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

Well, because he doesn't have everything that I mean you yes, to listen people to people's speculations on what possible strategies could be used, that's fine. But uh when you talk about uh people not knowing you know the situation over there, the president is the most is the most well-informed person in the world, if he wants to be. But we both know that he does not do details, he does not sit in front of uh briefings that involve complex issues, and that when they start, within 30 seconds he starts pontificating on in these meandering bull sessions, and the person who's sent there to brief him leaves the room saying, I didn't get a chance to say anything that he needed to hear. And he he's he and Hegseth are praying praying to God for annihilating Iran and all this. They're all over the place. I mean, I don't think he has any idea what he wants, except to get out of this without being embarrassed.

unknown 32:34

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

So we we both know that we're we're bridging a bit of a gap here. Obviously, you being a little bit on the left-leaning side of things and me being on a little bit of the right-leaning side of things. However, I think.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

I'm not I'm not lefty when it comes to national security.

SPEAKER_03 32:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I'm very well I'm very well aware of that. I'm very well aware of the imperialistic John Sheehan, to say the least.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Even the Lebanese knew that. Yeah, yeah. I went over there. I asked my best friend, I said, What don't you want me to say to the Lebanese? I am your guest. He said, John, they know you're an imperialist. Don't disappoint them. They came from all over the country to say hello. They were almost disappointed when I didn't have a British pith helmet on my head. Oh my god. And that was the person who brought me to this friend's home, he was a Hezbollah supporter. So I mean they don't he was a supporter. I don't think he was one of the soldiers.

SPEAKER_03 33:29

But yeah, they you know, well, if anything, that might get us on a list now. That could be a good idea. Yeah, really in and of itself. So just to just to clarify for the Cameron Brown show people. But uh we'll we have on different people from all walks of life and all experience. You have a good audience.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

But I mean no, I don't there is there wasn't I mean basically I think Netanyahu promised Trump everything that he could want, and I think Netanyahu lied, and I don't think he cares what happens to American interests, I don't think he cares who's gonna die from this. I don't think he cares about uh what's gonna happen to the global uh markets in food or fertilizer, which is going to drive our grocery prices up through the roof. He doesn't care. He's got his war. The Israelis know what they want. But I don't but they want the subjugation and destruction of Iran as a sovereign power. That isn't gonna happen either. I mean the idea that we can subjugate and get and something else Trump demanded, unconditional surrender with a say in who their next government's going to be. I that's not gonna happen. We cannot impose, we do not have the power to impose that on the Iranians. And even if we did, we would so dissipate ourselves that we would lose even more strategic leverage in in uh Asia. And by the way, we are burning through ten times as many weapons uh now than we ever used by supplying the Ukrainians. And actually the Ukrainians are helping us with their technology on drones. Right. Um so and and when we ask the Europeans for help, they want to know what we're gonna do for the Ukrainians, which has to do with them and their security, and they want to know uh uh when we're gonna stop bullying them and telling them that they're soldiers who died for us in Afghanistan. You know, he said though they held back and let us take the deaths. It's a hell of a thing for the uh dead the Danes who made it a point to uh, you know, notice that we held uh Danish flags. I think it was 42 of them who died for us in uh the Al Qaeda War uh outside our embassy in uh Copenhagen. So I mean, I don't know how much you get by insulting our allies who only once in uh invoked Article V, and that was for us, without our even asking. And they volunteered by the thousands to help us, and now we ins insult them, and now we want them to bail us out of a of a closure and and the Strait of Horror moves.

SPEAKER_03 36:23

So, John, let's let's look forward here. Let's so with with all the information we've now gathered, with where we're at now, what what do next steps look like? What do you let's just put it this way what do you think the next month, six months, year looks like for this conflict and for the world?

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Well, I should preface this by saying now that we've launched a war, I'd prefer us to win. But I don't see how we can do that and maintain our posture in Asia. And main and and by the way, what is our policy for rebuilding our defense industrial base? What is our policy for surging production in our weapons inventory? They're badly depleted, not by Ukraine, which managed to annihilate uh the entire Russian army, which is now replaced by all new soldiers who are not very well trained, by the way. He says that the nuclear material, which is about 60% enriched, is buried underneath the the Natans and Isfahan and Fordo sites. If they are buried, then it's going to be impossible for us to go in with commandos and yank that stuff out. Certainly not to the extent that we got in the JCPOA. But the JCPOA, we were allowed to take basically 97% of all of their nuclear material out of there. And and they showed us where it was, and we took it. They actually abided by the deal, and we got excellent targeting information out of that.

SPEAKER_03 38:05

And we actually think they were fully abiding by the deal?

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Well, they didn't have any choice because our negotiating team had two Nobel laureates and a uh uh a bunch of physicists, nuclear physicists, closing off every possible avenue the Iranians could have taken to circumvent the deal. Um because we had people on the ground and they abided by it. In fact, the Chinese were so upset with the Iranians for for meticulously abiding by the agreement that uh they have been less than helpful of the Iranians since because they wanted the Iranians to be implacable enemies of the United States, but they accused the Iranians of being too willing to negotiate with the Americans. But now our credibility on that is shattered because uh we attacked right in the middle of uh when we were negotiating with them. And they all they were also offended, ironically. You'd think that they would want to be faced with negotiators who didn't know what they were talking about. They actually, the Iranians have a kind of strange turn of mind. They want respect. And they appreciated that we sent nuclear physicists and Nobel laureates on our negotiating team with Wendy Sherman and John Kerry and some of the other, you know, experts we sent. Uh now we've sent them Steve Whitkoff, who negotiates real estate deals, Jared Kushner, who spends half his time in the Middle East, raising money uh from his office as a public servant for his hotel in in New York and his other deals, which is rank corruption. And uh they're offended that we don't respect them enough to send serious negotiators. But they don't want to negotiate with us anyway because they don't believe that we'll abide by it. When when 9-11 happened, they cooperated with us and helped us in our fight in Afghanistan by naming all of the Al-Qaeda people that they knew about, and we went and got them. Uh then we, you know, pulled out of the of the JCPA, and then a couple of months ago we attacked them again for that 12-day war. And now in the middle of this negotiation, we've launched a full-scale war on them. So the Iranians have no incentive to negotiate with us, and every incentive to keep this war going, and we don't. So how are we going to stop this war without losing face and without acknowledging that we cannot tip over this regime? Uh and the only solution is we end the war, restart negotiations, which I think will be very hard or impossible to do.

SPEAKER_03 41:01

Um who would we be negotiating with if the vast majority of Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

I mean, we we kill them and uh you know, if you're gonna kill everyone we negotiate with, I mean, I wouldn't join the Iranian negotiating team.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

Uh Well, you wouldn't want your name known at that point if you were. And I guess that's the other question, though, too, uh, which is kind of a follow-up to this as well, is if we do which Trump did kind of mention this as well. He was like, I don't want to he literally said this, he said, I don't want to say who we're negotiating with because I don't want them to be killed. Which gives is a very clear signal to me that whatever he tries to do seems to be shot down and or destroyed by certain parties that want the continuation of this war. Which leads me into my next question for you.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Which is Netanyahu's one of them. By the way, I don't believe anything that man says. I mean, he's he's trying to convince the world that he knows what he's doing, but he doesn't.

SPEAKER_03 41:59

Are you referring to Trump or are you referring to BB?

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Well, no, BB knows what he's doing.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

Okay. But Trump doesn't know what he's doing. So let's so let's go to this. Who benefits? And this should be a very clear who benefits from the continuation of this particular conflict.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

People's Republic of China.

SPEAKER_03 42:18

More than anybody. Okay. So that's that's true. And okay, so we'll get to China in a bit. Aside from China, who else benefits? Um major parties right now that you think are well Russia certainly benefits.

unknown 42:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

We've agreed to loosen sanctions on Russia, you know, uh because uh, you know, we're letting their tankers go through to Cuba and and uh because the Russians I forgot what we loosened the sanctions on Russia for. Oh, yes, it was because of fertilizer. Because they they're ha they produce half of the other fertilizer.

SPEAKER_03 43:03

So they loosen sanctions to make sure that that fertilizer got into the supply chain.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:08

Because it's not going to the strait.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

So the Russians are benefiting. Uh and of course the weapons that might have been used against them by the Ukrainians are now being used against the Iranians. So the Russians are benefiting. Uh the Europeans, uh one might think that they're having a good laugh, a dark laugh at our getting in our into trouble. But the Europeans depend on us for protection. They are not laughing about this. They're kind of doing this. You know, what do we do now? Um it is not an easy situation. Basically, the Russians and the Chinese are benefiting, and those are the last people we want to benefit.

SPEAKER_03 43:54

More than anyone else, is what you're saying. Yeah. At the largest scale, the Russians and the Chinese are. Benefiting the most right now from the strait basically being closed off.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Yes. That's that's the ongoing conflict. That's the closest correlation.

SPEAKER_03 44:09

Okay. And what let's let's discuss China first, and I kind of want to get on the list here, but China mainly. What are the main areas in which China is benefiting? You mentioned Russia's as well, but why is China benefiting mainly from this conflict?

SPEAKER_00 44:22

First of all, to the extent that we're embroiled in this war and using up our weapons and not rebuilding them, because we haven't got a strategy to rebuild our defense industrial base. We're disengaged from Asia. We're using up weapons we need to fight them in the case they invade Taiwan, which by the way, the Chinese have stopped their little air show around Taiwan because they want to portray themselves as the reasonable, stable power who won't mess with everyone's supply lines. I mean, why if we're jumping off a cliff, which the Chinese clearly want us to do, they're not going to get in our way. But I don't they they are benefiting. We're disengaged. We're even, as I said, we're even pulling our THAD uh air defense missiles out of South Korea and redeploying them uh in in uh the Gulf. We're also sending a bunch of those to Israel. We only build like a something like a thousand Patriot missiles a year, and Israel gets a huge portion of them. In fact, they're getting so many for this war because Netanyahu wants the his Iron Dome to be replenished with these missiles that we've had, we couldn't take them from the continental United States, we took them from Korea. So there really is a zero-sum equation between you know our allies in Asia and Israel, which is not an ally. It's never allowed itself to be called our ally, and they're not behaving like our allies. Uh and North Korea, I suppose, is benefiting because we're weakening our missile defense of South Korea. So the North Koreans are happy about that too, especially since they're sending some of their own soldiers to fight the Ukrainians and Russia. So uh, and and if we destroy Iran and leave it a mess like we've left left Iraq as a mess, that will play into the narrative in the Middle East that the American strategy for keeping us down is to create chaos. Come in, blow things up, destroy countries, destabilize them, and then leave us with a mess. Just walk out and leave us with a mess. Right. So and our allies in the region are terrified of that. I mean, the Iranians have made it very clear that uh our Emirati allies are gonna pay a price for holding our bases there and paying for their upkeep. And they have bombarded these these bases and made it very clear that you let the Americans in, you're our targets now. They're not gonna defend you, they're not gonna protect you, you're gonna be our they're gonna be our targets. And uh the different Emiratis have over the years re I mean, I remember when they offered uh the Iran Iranians$25 billion if they promised not to uh you know attack them. And uh when the Iranians offered to do a non-aggression pact with the Emiratis, the Emiratis ignored them because they figured they had our bases protecting them. Well, now they're starting to say, well, maybe we should do a deal with the Iranians. And guess who's offering to broker the deal? The Chinese. The Chinese. Who are going to say, absolutely, if you want us to come in and help you open this trade of hormones, we'll come in, but they'll never leave. And the Chinese couldn't ask for a better deal than that. Have the Americans get involved in a war they don't know how to finish, invite help, and then we come in and like the uncle who comes in just for a weekend and never leaves.

unknown 48:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:12

I mean, that's uh and we're launching these wars every two years, it seems. And and by the way, this is crashing America's uh pro-Israel consensus. I mean, we last time we the first time we talked on on your podcast, we're talking about how uh the Iranian the Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank uh were shattering uh the American pro-Israeli consensus. Right. Now, according to Gallup, 60 percent of Americans are more sympathetic of the Palestinians, and they're being driven off their land uh with an obvious Israeli strategy to annex the West Bank and to r take over Gaza. Um and so the American people are now pro-Palestinian. Uh and more to the point, the uh uh Netanyahu is going through all these wars because whereas he denounced John Meersheimer, uh the prominent uh professor at the University of Chicago, for uh uh uh saying that Israel's policies uh were what they were because they couldn't get away with it because of the power of AIPAC. Netanyahu said he was an anti-Semite. Well, the fact is Netanyahu believes in the Meersheimer thesis wholeheartedly, and he's making the most of it and using it to wage this war with a blank check from Donald Trump. Well, he's doing that, and uh but the American people are waking up to the blank check that we've given the Israelis, and they don't feel they signed up for this. And we're seeing more and more sh uh news uh uh stories about the way the Palestinians are being brutally skipped off their land, subject to daily humiliations by Israeli settlers, and instead of saying that he wants peace, Netanyahu has stated openly, no, we're never going to negotiate in good faith for an agreement with the Palestinians. The same Palestinians who in 1994 did a stood up on a unanimous voice spoke recognizing Israel's right to exist and their willingness to follow up the hostile courts with a good faith negotiation. He says, no, we're not going to allow that because a sovereign Palestinian state is a gun to our head and we won't tolerate it. So all the money that they've taken over the past 35 years uh to uh in you know with the assumption of a two-state solution, that's gone. And uh we're not America hasn't made even a pretense, uh a pretense of being an uh an honest broker between the Palestinians and the United States. Whatever Israel does, we just endorse it or we do nothing. And the Palestinians are indeed being driven off their land, and the annexation process is now going full steam at.

SPEAKER_03 51:18

And uh and uh I think when you have to the other part of this too, I think when you give a lot of the the Christian base in America too, waking up to some of the the some of the things that have occurred to Christians, um and especially the Christians that were, for example, killed in in Gaza um specifically, uh not necessarily targeted. I'm not gonna say anybody was targeted, but they were there were Christians that were killed in Gaza. Um there were also recently the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, um, the priests that were trying to conduct service there recently were kept out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is like this is the first time this has ever happened um in Israel. Um I mean there are plenty of things that people are seeing and they're kind of just waking up, they're like, this is not as a Christian, this is not what I I I thought occurred in Israel, um, or I I thought occurred at all um by what's like everyone's forgotten that the Christians have a stake in Jerusalem too. Correct, correct. And so I think it's uh the Christian community is is frustrated by this, which that I guess I I would be I would definitely be one of those. I'll bring up this point too. Um right before Charlie Kirk died, and I'll bring up Charlie Kirk especially because I know you were not a huge fan necessarily. Um, but Charlie Kirk, right before he died, started to question a lot of this openly on podcasts. Um and I'm not sure if you've watched any of those videos since our last conversation because when he when he died, you know, you and I did we had a long conversation about this. Um but but since then a lot of people have started to kind of notice a pattern here that he was starting to talk about a lot of these things that he disagreed with, um, not just in in Israel, and maybe bringing up how interesting it was that there was no security response to October 7th, or there was a delayed response to October 7th, especially. Um but he also brought up, and I don't know what what the time frame was necessarily, but how the war in Iran was not necessarily a good idea for for us as a country. And so there's a lot of those clips as well that you see of Charlie Kirk talking about how a war in Iran was not very strategic for the United States of America. So a lot of those things that you would you would seemingly agree with him on, and then he just happens to die, get murdered, etc. Um, and I and I think that's just it's unfortunate that all of it seems to happen so close together with when somebody starts to question certain things for whatever reason to become a huge target of other organizations, especially with someone with such a large voice. Um so I'd be curious to know kind of your thoughts on the the connection of those two as well.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Well, I I don't know what those connections are. I'm not in the FBI, so I I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 53:50

It's just that Well it seems like the FBI was told to st to stand down and stop uh stop the investigation, especially according to Joe Kent, who just stepped down from the Center of Counter-terrorism and said this is not a good idea, and so I'm stepping down, and this is as I'm doing this, I'm telling you how I feel about it. I'm telling you this is not a good idea for us to continue.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Well, I agree with him that it wasn't a good idea, but you know, his his anti-Semitism kind of you know concerned me.

SPEAKER_03 54:15

Can't say okay, so let's let's cover that too. How is he an anti-Semite?

SPEAKER_00 54:19

Well, he said some things that, you know, I I I don't remember the exact quotes, and and maybe I'm wrong to cite it if I don't have the exact quotes.

SPEAKER_03 54:30

Um this is this is one of the this is the thing that and I'll put this out there too. This is the something that's gotten to me as of late, um, because it used to be just being racist. People, especially I always thought it was a left-leaning thing where left-leaning individuals would call Republicans or conservatives racist as a way to discredit immediately. Now it seems like it's being used across the board from all parties. You immediately refer to somebody as an as an anti-Semite or racist.

SPEAKER_00 54:55

It's McCarthyism.

SPEAKER_03 54:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 54:57

Yeah, yeah. No, I I consider I the thing with uh Charlie Kirk was you know, I did feel badly about his death. It's just that I did read a series of quotes, which I shared with you. Um I can't recall them now, but they were definitely, you know, some uh horrible things that he said. And I don't think are we referring to Charlie Kirk or Joe Ken? But I don't think that he should be uh remembered as uh as a martyr for peace and kindness, because that's not what he uh believed, you know.

SPEAKER_03 55:30

Well, I would love to know which things you're referring to that being. Well, I you know, I think once again, this is where we love the we love the media and how they love the. Okay. But it's not a hard point.

SPEAKER_00 55:46

If you Google what he said, uh Well, let's google. Let's Google that.

SPEAKER_03 55:50

We have we have a computer. Let's Google it. What did what did he say?

SPEAKER_00 55:53

I I'm not prepared for that. I'm just saying that I I your your question is is there a link between the other things?

SPEAKER_03 56:00

This is the honesty of independent media, right? This is the honesty of independent media as we get to question each other on the spot.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

Yes, that's true. Don't we? Uh I just my point is I don't have any knowledge linking his uh concerns about Israel with his death.

unknown 56:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

That's the question you're asking me. And I I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 56:21

Kinda. I guess I guess to a certain degree. Not just Israel, right? But we're we're talking Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan. I mean, there's so many different bodies involved here, right? It's not just it's not just Israel. And I say this all the time because people love to point the blame at Israel for everything. And I'm like, that's not that's also not true. There's so many bigger uh other parties involved here that we need to consider at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 56:42

What you're talking about is there are a lot of moving parts to a war like this.

unknown 56:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 56:48

My concern is that Trump did not take account of these many moving parts when he launched a war. War, I mean, as Sun Tzu said, is not to be undertaken lightly because it involves the risk of a ruination of a state and the destruction of one's people. And he he said some words like cool and neat compared to you know talking about waging war. I I never felt that way about war. And um I there's no I from the army I could tell you there's no such thing as a surgical strike. And when you look at the devastation, not just in uh Iran, but in Lebanon, where and and Gaza, where entire buildings, people stayed inside to stay out. The Israelis, you know, knew about the insurgency, the Maoist strategy for an insurgency, which he said that people live in in insurgents live in a population like fish, and that they can uh they can sustain the surgery, the the uh insurgency by getting along with the people in which they you know hide themselves. Well, the Israelis had no intentions of sending their army into Gaza and fighting hall to hall, stairway to stairway, how you know, inside uh uh Palestinian heights uh uh uh uh uh buildings uh in what is generally regarded as the most vicious kind of uh warfare, you know, urban warfare where people going fighting room to room. So what they did is they used artificial intelligence to uh generate their targets, and the artificial intelligence was designed to track the movements of someone they wanted to kill, and it would give them a list. It may be here, here, here, and here. Well, the Israelis sent their airstrikes and their missiles to destroy the whole buildings where these people could be in, which meant, of course, they killed everyone else in those buildings. And anyone who has to look at a picture of Gaza now sees the whole strip has been destroyed utterly. There isn't a building intact left in that whole place. So the Israelis decide we're not going to let the uh Hamas insurgents survive in in uh in water, like Mao said, because we're gonna drain that ocean by just basically destroying every building. So no one could hide inside the buildings because they were destroyed. Well now they've killed 70 to 100,000 people and destroyed Gaza utterly, and the Palestinians are living in an open-air prison in tents, and they use any uh uh excuse they can make to keep the aid from the people who are on the verge of famine. Uh they say, oh, uh UNRWA, the the UN Palestinian, oh, they're they have links to Hamas. Well, I'm sure there are people who work in those aid agencies who were Hamas sympathizers. But to say that no aid should go in because Hamas might get it, you're talking if anyone were were against Hamas when that war started, there is no one who in Gaza. Now no Palestinians have limited goals when it comes to the Israelis. I mean, they have killed thousands of them, they have destroyed Gaza utterly, and they have given the Israelis no reason to believe that they meant them well. In fact, they they've killed them all. So, I mean, anyone had this done to their uh community, they would be pretty enraged at the people who did it. So if if uh Hamas wasn't the dominant uh political reality in Gaza, it certainly is now, and by destroying every building that mil uh uh Hamas militants might live and killing dozens of people in the buildings who were hiding, I mean that that's a war crime. And we're paying for it. In fact, we're going into debt paying for Israeli security, and the Israelis have said we need more money because we can't afford to pay this uh for this war on our own. So Trump is giving them 20 billion, 14 million, as many billions as he wants, and and Netanyahu is using the last gasp of the Mirzheimer thesis to wage a comprehensive war in the whole region. And in fact, turning this war with Iran into a regional war. He's attacked Lebanon, he's destroyed Gaza, he's attacking Iran, and he couldn't care less about what's happening to our bases in the region or to the American economy economy or to our uh position in East Asia or anywhere. And uh so, and all because he's got leverage through Epstein, I mean, which probably accounts for the lack of consistent uh uh objectives because he they boozled Trump into this war saying that it would be easy to tip over that regime and that it would be easy to destroy once and for all their nuclear project, which is an impossibility. And now the Iranians have no incentive to negotiate with us because whatever they tell us we're gonna hit, we're gonna bomb. So what's the point? Where are the Americans down? I mean, you if if you and I can't think of a satisfactory conclusion to this, I just feel like exactly what they want. They want us holding on to a war that we cannot continue to wage, and they are happy that we are disengaged from Asia.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:58

Well, if there's one thing we know about President Trump is that he likes to win. And he likes to make it. No, he always chickens out.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:06

Remember Taco. Trump always chickens out.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:08

He does not like to do it. I wouldn't say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:10

I wouldn't say he's asking people to bail him out of this war.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:14

All I'm saying is if Trump likes Trump likes to win, and I and whatever I don't I to your point though, I don't know what winning looks like in this because he's announced recently that we we've won, the war is over, makes this big declaration, and obviously that's not true, and we all kind of knew that wasn't we all knew that wasn't true, but now we're very clearly seeing that it isn't true. The horse straight up for moves is still not open, and we're still dropping bombs, and they're still attacking Israel, and they're still attacking our bases. We see this, I we see this footage. Like, I mean, I think this is the biggest thing. There's a lot of AI out there, and we try to sift through the BS as much as possible, but what we generally know is that there is still a war happening, we still have our fighter pilots being shot down over country, um, we still have things happening. So the the common sense, the knowledge here is okay, it's still happening. So that was that was to try to stay faced and wrap things up, but it just didn't it didn't work. So they're now onto this next phase of the plan, which I'm not sure what the next phase actually is, but it sounds like if they don't actually strike any kind of deal by Tuesday, that we're gonna literally send Iran back to the Stone Ages and we're gonna be depleting ourselves of our military arsenal and our weaponry at a rapid pace, which kind of seems like it's a way to drum up the economy in a in a way. And I'm almost kind of starting to think is this a way to avoid uh a fatal fall off the clip for our uh our economy and to drum up a war machine that ends up stimulating the the economy? Because that's what's happened in previous wars, right? The economy does skyrocket with the with the you know insertion of a lot of money in the into the war machine. So is that the is that the goal? Once again, I'm asking myself all these questions on a daily basis. I don't actually know anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56

It's not we had more than enough justification to reconstitute our defense industrial base when it was exposed as being lacking during the Ukraine war. And it it's clear that he does not have an endpoint. He's looking for a face-saving way out, there isn't one. And anyone who believes that we can subjugate 90 million Iranians is delusional. And no, we're not gonna win this war. There is no good end gain for us. And the Iranians may not like the Islamic Republic and the mullahs, but they certainly don't like what's happening to us now. And um we're we're stuck with with this war.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:48

I mean, before we seem like we keep doing this to ourselves over and over and over again. Yes. It's like we it's like we don't learn from our mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:56

Well, they they the era the Middle Eastern. Think that chaos is our strategy. They cannot believe that we go into these wars over and over again without knowing what we're doing, with delusions in our eyes about what we can accomplish. They cannot believe that we're not listening to our Middle East experts on the nature and the structure of the Iranian regime, how hard it is to tip it over, and that they haven't game wargamed it out from the beginning to the end before launching the attack.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:38

But have we not? Have we not warmed war gamed it out from the beginning to the end? No, we have not numerous times. Are there not many experts in the school that do this?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:46

People who have wargamed it out did their best to rescue the situation by doing some very in-depth uh staff talks between our military and the Israeli Defense Force. That's why we have coordinated with the Israeli Air Force to hit these different targets in Iran. That was the best our military could do is to make the most of our and Israel's intelligence on what to hit in Iran. That does not mean that we are looking for the same outcome that the Israelis are.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:29

We all know that, though. That's very clear. The Israeli outcome isn't is not what we want as an outcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

Yes, but we're paying for it, and we're backing it up. And we don't know how to get out of it. Because we don't, we we have never, every time someone I mean, you've produced a few good uh ideas of strategy here, but at one point or another he and Higgs have repudiated all of those. Literally saying, Oh, I don't care about the nuclear program anymore, or I don't have to worry about regime change because it's already happened, but it clearly hasn't. They're just making stuff up because they want to get through the one day's news cycle, and because they're trying to reassure the capital markets that this war won't last. Because we needed a strategy to rebuild our arsenal long ago, and he has not taken it. He has not announced a single strategy to rebuild our defense industrial base. He hasn't even responded to the idea of uh gaining ascendancy with the drone war. In fact, although we have asked taken the Ukrainians up when they were offering helping us learn uh how to use drones, uh which by the way, the Iranians are learning to use too, because they're starting to attack our bases in in the Gulf.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:55

But uh, I don't know how many more Shahid drones they have, but they've got plenty of Shahid drones than they've been using throughout the duration of the war, but they've had those for a while now. They've been turning them out at a cheap clip.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:05

Right. But the economy of war is changing. Uh uh a drone for a couple of hundred dollars or several thousands of dollars can devastate targets, and and we've got these very expensive Patriot missiles going after them, and all they have to do is swarm their targets, and we miss a good portion of the drones coming in to hit us.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:31

Yeah, but but we now I mean and I say this too, like you uh uh Yes, it's expensive, obviously, with a million-dollar missile going after a$2,000,$5,000 drone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:39

But we also have now laser weapons and the lasers have not I know it I just talked to someone about that. Yes, we are working on directed energy weapons, but uh we do the what you're talking about is we have not reached the point where we can send a laser to shoot down missiles. The all we're able to do now is what they call dazzle these the guidance systems of these missiles by spoofing them, by sending an electromagnetic pulse or other kinds of uh charges at these incoming weapons so that they crash into the sea or they blow up in in mid-air.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:20

That and we haven't even managed to which is why the fiber optic cables were introduced in Ukraine. Right? Pardon me? Which is why the fiber optic cables were introduced in in Ukraine.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

Yeah, but you know, the the Ukrainians are learning to fight the new way of war very rapidly. We need to learn from them. In fact, we need to thank them for showing us all the gaps in our own defense strategy and doctrine and weapon systems and sharing them with us. Uh we didn't need to go to war to find out that information. But uh we are learning that America's defense posture is atrophy, and we need to rebuild it. The best thing we could do, I suppose, is declare victory, go home, and do an all-out plan to rebuild our defense industrial base. And uh and that means massive government investment in our industry. I mean, I I I could I have a uh I did some statistical work on the uh percentage of America's manufacturing plant and equipment from the 1940s to uh the end of the 1960s. And there was almost a one-to-one relationship between the uh value of the capital of our defense industrial base with the total capital invested in all of our manufacturing base. It was but it was about$8 trillion. And when we allowed our manufacturing industry to offshore to China, it took most of our defense industrial base with it. Which is one of the reasons I have problems with Trump's trade uh uh uh tariff policies, because i uh anyone who says tariffs don't work and all they do is hurt the consumer is they're not being truthful. Yes, of course tariffs make a difference, and they do protect infant industries, but only if you've got an industry to start with. I mean, it it it makes no sense to put up a tariff against products that are made in another country if we haven't got our own industry to make to protect and to make those those widgets. But that's what we've done. We've erected tariffs without an industrial policy to for its import substitution. And when we did have a policy, namely with the CHIPS Act, the uh Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, and some of the other policies that the Biden administration started, uh we were notified of all the things that we had to do to rebuild those industries like the CHIPS. But and it was revealed that we didn't have enough manned uh trained manpower to staff these uh uh facilities, these fabulous uh uh fabrication plants, that should have been our focus, to develop a strategy to reconstitute our defense industrial base and concentrate on that to the exclusion of everything else. Because yes, we're gonna we're not gonna come out of this war the way we want to, but the one thing that we can do, because it's within our borders, is to rebuild our defense industrial base and our manufacturing sector. And that would be something worth borrowing money for. And it would uh by the time we uh do an inventory of all the different things that we need to do to rebuild our economy, from infrastructure to heavy manufacturing to high technology manufacturing to rare earth metals uh uh processing and refining, we would have more than enough jobs for all the people who were going unemployed. And yes, we would have to train them. But FDR proved that we could do that in the 1930s and the 1940s because he didn't just use the New Deal, you know, to give people jobs and to rebuild our infrastructure. He used it to, for example, rebuild our Navy. People don't know that half of the WPA's uh money went into rebuilding our Navy. He cut the defense budget in half, technically, but then he used a huge portion of the WPA money to build battleships and aircraft, particularly aircraft carriers, and our aerospace sector. Um and that's something we could do. And it it would enhance our strategic posture, it would enhance our ability to defend our allies in East Asia, and it would enhance our ability to protect our bases in the Middle East. So we're not gonna come out of this war the way we want to. We'll just have to say, well, we did the damage we could. Uh we'll do some sort of deal with the Iranians if they'll even bother to talk to us. But no matter what they do, we're gonna rebuild our defense plan. And that's something we can do without, you know, undue interference from it from another country. That's the one thing we could do that would enhance our strategic posture.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:39

So it sounds like your solution to fixing the government spending problem and ultimate issues is to increase government spending. Yeah. To give the government more control.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:51

Well, yes. The idea that the government is. Oh no, I do believe that getting the government out of the way allows the free market to flourish and manufacture.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:04

If you can actually get the government out of the way, which I don't actually think is truly possible, personally.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:11

Well, I don't want to get the government out of the way because the government most all of new industry is financed uh by the government. That's what the the uh the statistics I uh derived made an undeniable fact. That the new industries that are based on the latest technologies take 20 years of setup costs and long-term investment that private sector investors do not have the uh horizon time to invest in. That means the the federal government uh spends the money uh to transition these industries from basic research to applied research to commercially viable production. And there isn't a single competitive American industry, whether it's aerospace, medicine, computers, any of it, that didn't receive massive subsidies from the federal government. And it just happens to be that the only industries we're still competitive in are the industries that get these federal subsidies. And that uh uh the uh Asians have used the American system, which they call the Asian way, it's not, it's our it was Henry Clay's idea and Alexander Hamilton's and Abraham Lincoln's uh to invest in the long-term technology uh uh of advanced manufacturing and to keep that investment going until in the exact way that the Chinese have done to re-reconstitute our manufacturing and our defense industrial base. And um they're they're just the and besides all the tax cuts that private sector investors are getting, they're not spending it here. We know for a fact that it's all gone to Asia. And when Tim Cook of uh Apple says, oh well, we're not set up uh to build uh iPhones in America, well, they weren't set up to build them in China either. It was only uh possible after Apple invested billions of dollars to set up the production system in China that produces all those Androids and cell phones and and uh iPhones. Well, that's what we have to do. Stop sending all that money over to China, invest it here, and do what Roosevelt did, which was not only to end the depression and and uh rebuild the defense industrial base, but we were able to outproduce the Axis powers and the Allies, including Russia, all at once, combined, we produced more than they did. And it gave us 20 years of prosperity after the after the end of World War II. And we stopped raising taxes, we cut all these taxes on the assumption that they would let the hundred flowers bloom of uh industry, and all that happened is our our Wall Street exported all of our technology and our capital to China. And that has left our defense industrial base atrophied, it's given us the rust belt, and it has destroyed the middle class. So uh the only answer is to reverse those policies and return to what we did in the 1930s and the 1940s, which gave us the greatest industrial power in the world. There's no reason that can't be done, there's no reason we can't train people to do this stuff, and there's no reason that people who benefit from these technologies, that the federal government finances should be allowed to export that technology to China. If you buy some PhDs technology from one of the universities that are part of our industrial competitiveness, they those uh that research should be uh attached with intellectual property covenants so that it cannot be offshore to China. It can only be used to invest here.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:23

So, John, I want to I wanna Can you hear me? Yeah. I don't want to cut you off completely, but I I want to I want to break this up just a little bit. Um because we've done lots of China talk previously. And I feel like a lot of people can get probably the same information from previous episodes where we did discuss a lot of this as it relates to China. Um I I want to I want to focus back on Iran for just a moment though, because I want to wrap this up within the next seven minutes. Um but my question has to do with the Strait of Hormuz. Um you've made predictions previously, and these are I mean, this was years ago that you made these you made these comments to me that we were going to continue our war or can that more wars were going to break out. Um now we're seeing that. This is years later. More wars have broken out. You mentioned previously that we were going to see um potential widespread starvation, and you made some other kind of not doomsday, you know, quote unquote comments, but I am curious to know what your thoughts are. If the straight of our moves does not open up within the next few weeks, what does the outcome look like for the world?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:31

Well, we're going to get stagflation. Well, I actually not stagflation is misunderstood. Inflation does not come from just rising prices. Uh you can have rising prices without inflation. It just means that you're uh paying more with less income. That's not inflation. That's actually deflation. Um, it's um with grocery uh without the fertilizer, for half of the fertilizer that we depend on from the Middle East and the other half from Russia, we're gonna have higher groceries uh prices. So that's gonna act against the economy and probably contribute to inflation. Not well, not inflation, but higher prices. And um it is we are gonna uh that's gonna be the first thing that's gonna happen. Um and the only thing that's going to help us reconstitute our defense industrial base is to invest in it, and that means higher tax rates for people like you and me.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:49

John, let's go back here for let's go back here for just a second. I feel like we've jumped. I feel like hold on, I feel like we've jumped around error just a bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:56

As it relates to the straight of home, because I feel like you're you're researching something while we do this too. I'm not and I'm gonna rapidly try to get those topics. Yeah. Um so let's let's let's take just a moment here though. Let's go back to the straight of home news. Um let's focus on on that piece because that is that is what we're doing. We're gonna have to do now. We're gonna have to just declare victory and go home. Sorry?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:18

We're we're gonna have to declare victory and go home. I mean, I want us to win. I would like to see the uh uh the regime, the Iranian regime collapse. They're not our friends. Um but we we're not gonna be able to tip that regime over. And the longer we involve involve ourselves in in that uh um quagmire, the more we become disengaged from um um from Asia and even Europe.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:56

Because that's another thing that's a he has alienated NATO. We're in danger of being kicked out of NATO. Which is not in our interest.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:06

Well, John, I uh once again, I'm gonna wrap this up here here here shortly. But are there any concluding thoughts, though, on the the current situation in Iran? Well, let's see. Anything we didn't cover that you want to cover for the next couple minutes?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:20

Yeah, I'll just look at my notes here. I think we need to throttle Netanyahu. I mean, he is ragging us around by the nose and um getting us involved in uh in wars that he wants, and there isn't uh a scintilla of evidence that he cares about, our broader interests. And uh we need to basically cut the Israelis off of all further aid and force them to negotiate for a two-state pull uh solution, whether they want to or not. And I'll tell you what they do whenever they're brought to uh uh Camp David or some such venue. First, they use up as much time as possible talking about uh some Palestinian terrorist outrage with invariably sympathetic uh Israeli uh victims and to it evoke you know an emotional response from the American negotiators who, of course, say, oh gee, I'm sorry, that sounds terrible. And then when we say, all right, enough of that, let's get down to brass tax, then they uh uh delay they demand reassurances on uh protocols to protect their settlers in the West Bank. They do that for as long as possible uh until someone finally says, wait a minute, you're involving us in endless uh hypotheticals to protect settlers in the West Bank that aren't supposed to be there in the first place under international law, under the agreements that you made to us, and even under Israeli law. These settlements are illegal. And then when we finally say enough of that, then Israeli negotiators literally, and they do this as a performance after their kabuki play of pretending to have anxiety attacks to elicit the uh sympathy of the American negotiators. Oh God, we're giving the Israelis nervous breakdowns because they're so afraid. And then when that doesn't work, they start packing their bags and making a show of uh wanting to go home. Well, we Americans should say, look, we know what your stratagem is. We're not buying it. You are going to negotiate, and we're cutting you off of all aid and practically arresting you until you make uh a good faith effort to negotiate because you are leaving the West Bank and you are leaving uh Gaza. And we're not giving you one dime or one weapon until you say uncle right now. That is the only way that we're going to get the Israelis to uh negotiate with the Palestinians. And we're gonna have to be on the Palestinian side because the Israelis will play kabuki play and their fake anxiety attacks, and they will stonewall as long as they can, and and with a view to uh weighing uh waiting out the Americans uh because they also know that every president tries to do the legacy play at the last year of his administration by Middle East peace, in which case the Israelis always run out the clock on us. Well, we can't allow them to do this anymore, nor can we allow them to do uh uh another uh war with these Iranians. In fact, we should say so. We should say, well, we did the best we could for you with Iran, and we waged the war that you've been asking for for 30 years, and it isn't gonna work, and we're not playing this game anymore. We're not going to uh give you any more weapons to attack anybody, you're gonna stop uh shelling uh and bombing Lebanon, you're gonna stop these daily killings in Gaza, and we're you're gonna stop annexing uh the West Bank. And we don't care how much you protest, how much you call us names and anti-Semites, you have taken advantage of the American people for too long, and it stops now. And boy, we're you're gonna get some denunciations from this podcast because of that. But it's it's long past time that this is done, and uh it is not an accident that 60% of the American people have uh had enough, and they are starting to become justly sympathetic to the the plight of the Palestinians who are being murdered and herded off, you know, like sheep and to be slaughtered every day. There isn't a day that you see the news where some new Palestinian hasn't been killed by the Israelis, especially their settlers on the West Bank and in Gaza, who and then have to say, well, the Israeli Defense Force is investigating the matter. Yeah, sure they are.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:21

Well, this is what once again, all this is this is very complex, and I appreciate you know your insight and your perspective. The war has to stop.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:28

We cannot get a good outcome.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:29

That's what we're well, I'm a I would like to, I mean, I I'm saying like I'm a peace guy, I'm a peace guy nowadays, I'm a peace guy. Like I truly we we want peace in in the world. And I don't know what's I don't know why it's wrong anymore, though, to say like I don't want another war. I don't I don't want any more battles. I I want us to try to negotiate as best we possibly can. I want peace everywhere we can possibly get it. But for some reason, trying to talk through ways to negotiate with people that that we label as terrorists, like we can't we can't negotiate with them. They're terrorists, so we have to kill them. And that's how we justify that's how we justify everything, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:08

We can't we can't indulge that line anymore.

unknown 1:30:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:12

Every time we negotiate, oh, they're terrorists.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:14

And the the the people and at what point do you become the quote unquote terrorists? I guess that's my question. At what point do we kill too many people or support too many atrocities? And you're like, listen, like I'm not saying everything's an atrocity, but we've now supported some of these you know situations and wars that have turned into loss of a lot of innocent lives. Not all of those people were bad people. And I think that's where a lot of people are sort of the wheels are starting to turn and say, not all those 75,000, rough 50 to 75,000, however you want to say, in Gaza, they're not all Hamas. That was not all there were I mean, maybe, maybe some a large percentage of them, but hey, not all of them, regardless of how you think through that and try to rationalize it in your head, right? Make peace with the money. It's hard to rationalize it anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:00

You make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:03

Although we're even making enemies of our friends these days.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:08

I mean, well, this podcast might make some enemies too, but you know, we're uh simply trying to speak of it from a logical perspective.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:15

Well, you you you have asked the right question. Is there a way to get out of this war you know, with some satisfactory conclusion? I would say not any longer. I mean, I would be very surprised if the Iranians agree to deal with this. They probably will out of necessity, because it's not in their interest to have their country destroyed or brought back to the Stone Age. And no, they don't deserve to be sent in the Stone Age, no matter how much Trump says they belong in the Stone Age. I mean, they are not our friends. I do not trust the Iranians. Uh but you know, I I've been in politics. I I I don't trust anybody really. I mean, humans are human and they they betray and and do worse. But at this point, he got into a war without going through all of the ins and outs, which is the first mistake. And it basically it guarantees that by the end of the war, which of course is always harder to get in get out of than it is to get into. Um he he's created by going into this war without consulting everybody and without war gaming it, he is guaranteed that we will not have a good outcome. And there's nothing we can do about that. The only thing we can do is say, all right, enough is enough. We've told the Israelis we've done the best we could for you. Now we have to look after our own allies, and you're not one of them, because you refuse to say that you are, and we're going to rebuild our own defense industry. And no, we're not going to give you any more weapons until you make peace with the Palestinians. No matter what contrived emotions you exhibit to, you know, run out the clock or to make us feel guilty or by calling us anti-Semites. Because I'm not an anti-Semite.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:17

Well, you did it earlier too, by the way. You referred to, I don't know who you referred to as an anti-Semite. I don't know if it was Joe Kent or or Charlie, but Charlie loved Israel. And I mean, through and through. He was an avid supporter of Israel, which once again, there's nothing wrong with. I mean, I I think we're all on board with that too. Love, love, love, you know, there's nothing wrong with a strong Israel as long as we can obviously have a very honest conversation about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:38

Well, that's right. And which we haven't been able to have because any time someone started honestly confronting the Israelis about their refusal to have a new uh two-state solution, they would unleash the anti-Semitism line. And to use McCarthyism to shut down the debate. Well, that debate cannot be shut down any longer. We need to have a reassessment of our relationship with Israel. And uh it is um what was I gonna say? Uh um god, I had so anyway. The I will come to me. We we cannot continue to give them a blank check. And uh they are co Charlie Kirk had a lot of Jews with the Israelis because he was part of the Christian evangelical coalition that believes that uh the state of Israel started the end times, the the rapture cycle in the Bible. And that uh because they believed this, they would give uh wholesale support to Israel and its desire to conquer the Palestinians land.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:52

But I could tell you once again, he was once again, he was very critical towards the end.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:57

I know that that's I can tell you that he's not going to be the first person of significance who who criticizes the Israelis. The next person who does that is going to be Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:10

Because he is sorry, that could not cut out there. The next person is gonna be who?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:14

Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:16

Because he's gonna look for people to blame for this catastrophe, and he's going to say that Netanyahu lied to me, etc.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:26

You think so. You think he'll actually say that publicly.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:29

Yes, because if anyone is capable of flipping on you, uh Trump will. And a huge portion of the Trump base is already trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jews, uh, you know, having to do with George Suros and the Rothschilds. I keep hearing the Rothschilds mentioned. They, it is only one tweet away from the American Christian right wing turning on the Israelis uh and having these anti-Semitic Semitic uh conspiracy theories unleashed as an excuse for this war. And the they already demonstrated in Charlottesville saying that Jews will not replace us, which is terrible, and there were not fine people there. They were evil, and I will stand with my Jewish brothers in my fraternity because I cannot imagine my life without Jews in it. And I do not want Israel destroyed, and I do not want anti-Semitism. And criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu or Idomar Ben Gavir or Smotrich, that does not mean someone's an anti-Semite because they don't agree with that trio.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:48

Well, thank you. So here so that's that's the point here, right? What's in this is not a this is not an anti-Jewish conversation. This is and this is not an anti-Semite conversation in any means. This is this is simply a conversation criticizing the actions of human beings. And I've been saying this a lot as of late. I'm like, why can't we just simply be critical of the actions of human beings without McCarthyism taking place? And that's what's been so frustrating to me because we've we've discussed a lot tonight, but with everything that you've said, I've heard, I mean, for even a qu a tenth of what you've said, people were referred to as anti-Semites.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:22

Yes, but Netanyahu stoked that. He said that anyone who criticizes him is an anti-Semite. That's not true. And and and it it is I am actually afraid for Israel. If if Netanyahu pushes the wall down to the point where uh a vicious reaction against Jews is provoked by this war and by what's happening in the occupied territories, we will end up with an unmanageable resurgence of anti-Semitism that I will be proud to denounce. Um and he has Netanyahu has failed as a strategic thinker by not understanding that the only phys uh human shields that he cannot afford to lose are the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank. Because if the Iranians send a nuclear-tipped missile to Israel, they cannot destroy Israel without also irradiating and vitrifying the Palestinians who are right next to the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:34

And you made that comment. Huh? But you made that comment in a previous in a previous podcast, and I I I understand that entirely. But this also goes back to we've been saying now for 30 plus years that we were are nervous, scared, etc., that Iran's gonna have a nuclear weapon. They still don't have a nuclear weapon at this point.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:54

No, they don't. So And they know that if they hit us with a nuclear weapon, we would respond in kind.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:02

What's it? But they still don't have one. But we keep saying if they do, and I think this is in the past 30 plus years.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:12

But you know, we've same thing with Iraq having a, you know, the Iraqis having a nuclear weapon. They didn't.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:17

Well, he he actually surprised us, and I was glad that we took him on when he was weak. But the Iranians, uh Netanyahu said, all you need is to let me have a war and we'll bury the Iranian nuclear project forever. Well, guess what? We just went in to Iran and has bombed the hell out of it to give him what he wants. And guess what? It isn't gonna work. There is no way you can suppress a country of 90 million people permanently. It's just not possible.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:46

So, John, wrap we're gonna wrap up with this question then. Sorry, we're in an hour or forty here. What if it does work?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:54

Oh, that would be great. I want us to win. But, you know, hope is not a strategy. I mean, I I remember basic training. I was given an exercise to seize a hamlet, and my first sergeant said, Cadet, what are you waiting for? I said, Well, I didn't want to just rush in. I wanted to see if what people were doing. You know, walking in or out of their tents or whatever. He says, Cadet, there isn't an ambush. We got a schedule here, so move your ass. So I said, okay. He says, he says, you're worried about your men. I said, yes, I am. He said, good, you might make it through the next war. Well, you know, I wouldn't launch a war unless I knew what the hell was gonna happen if I gained it all out and I was prepared for the blowback. Well, none of that was done. And we have only begun to see the blowback that we're gonna get from this through terrorism and you know, maybe losing our bases in the Gulf, which is a and and maybe him stupidly asking for help opening the strait and having the People Liberation Army Navy come in and agree to help them.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:02

And then we'll point it's it's like with terrorism's obviously a huge part of it, which we're gonna probably see an increase in in general, with very frustrated people around the world, which I guess is kind of a logical next step for them. If you're pissed off, you might as well go try to inflict as much damage as possible to the global system, um, but screwing you over, bombing you, killing your friends and family, etc. But as a follow-up to that, I guess the other part of it is there's like the the conspiracy theory conspiracy conspiracy theory false flag side of things, too, which at this point is like, you know, false flags are also very real too, and they do happen, but you're not gonna know what is and what isn't. There's just gonna be mass chaos at that point.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:35

So But I'm more concerned, as you know, with the I the Chinese agreeing to quote help us in the Strait of Hormuz and never leaving. That's what I don't want.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:46

But you're also nervous. Well, we talked about the kind of the back door into Russia, too, which the nation is being weakened too, and the Chinese taking over a large swath of Russia. Now they also have the opportunity to potentially take over the Strait of Hormuz with uh simple you know negotiation tactic.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:02

Well, yeah, but none of this was thought through at the beginning of this war.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:07

But once a Chinese vessel gets sunk in the strait, obviously that's we start the next level of escalation, right? It's like once that physically occurs, there's really no turning back at that point. Is that kind of your general thought process?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:21

Well, if we send our marine expeditionary unit onto Karg Island and the Iranians use poison gas on it, the pressure in the United States to escalate will become unstoppable, and then we'll be even in a bigger wider war. And and it will totally distract us from Asia. That would be a catastrophe for us. We need the Palestinians where they are as human shields against uh uh nuclear missile from Iran into uh Israel.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:56

We also need not to be Even though Iran doesn't have a nuclear missile, which is Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:01

But you since we're doing hypotheticals, you know, I I present that horror show scenario. Plus, I do not trust the Pakistanis, who by the way, are armed with nuclear weapons. I mean, how how soon the Iran how soon it will be before the Iranians ask the Pakistanis, can we have a couple of those nuclear weapons?

SPEAKER_03 1:43:24

Well, that's that's my other comment, too. And I once again to play the other side of this as well as you know, they have other allies that could give them a nuclear weapon if you use for it. And so to your so to your point, I feel like we're we're very concerned with them enriching uranium, but I think more than anything, we should be probably more concerned with like just say simply but a nuclear weapon being given to them by one of their allies.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:50

Well, which proves that you can't bum Iran into a nuclear uh without a nuclear weapon if someone gives it to them. There is no end to these scenarios. And and who's trying to help us? The Chinese and the Pakistanis?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:05

So I wonder who's listening at this point in the podcast still. Well, I used to. We're probably gonna go in circles with different hypotheticals and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:13

Well, I there was a brilliant man, his name is Nelson Kyung, who's an IV doctor at the Mass Ionir, and I met him at one of my events at the Harvard Asia uh center. And he and I he said, Come into my library at Mass Sion Ear and we'll talk about the Chinese power structure. Because I asked him about it. And it was supposed to be a 45-minute meeting. It ended up being six hours and 45 minutes. And he said, Well, you know, China is central, and all other countries will be uh tributary countries of China. I said, Well, you can understand why we Americans and our allies will resist that. He says, That's because you're a brainwashed American. And he was effectively the leader of the main pro-mainland Chinese community in Boston. And uh and uh a senior person in China for on the four different important agencies, and the uh eardoctor to the Ball Bureau. He was easily one of the most brilliant men I'd ever met. And we talked for almost seven hours, and we went through some of these scenarios, and uh he uh he kept asking me where in the federal government I worked. He couldn't believe that I was not CIA, you know, which of course I told him I wasn't. And he, you know, he was very confident of the rise of China, and he was even disturbingly confident about how we keep taking one misstep after another that makes it easier for them to rise, and not necessarily peacefully.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:00

And uh I well, I would like to think that we have the ability to be peaceful with every country around the world. That is that is my utopian mindset. And at the end of the day, maybe that's the focus of all this, is thinking through all the complexities, but try also trying to figure out the best solution.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:17

Um so maybe if he had figured them out before he launched this law war, that would have been good.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:24

He wouldn't have told you either way, even if he did or didn't. But you know, because he probably not speaking terms, John.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:30

Yeah not if he didn't know what these issues were, because he refused to listen to briefers tell him what they were. Yeah, and I can assure you, he's not calling me out for my advice.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:41

Yeah. You know, just little old me. Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:44

Well, John, I would be too depressing.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:48

Maybe that's what people think when they listen to these podcasts. They're like, how are these guys not depressed? It's like, well, we might enjoy this a little bit too much and enjoy the the complexity of this realm a little bit too much. Which is why I've always I've said as of late, too, is I've tried to figure out is chaos a strategy? And I think to a certain degree. I think chaos.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:05

That's what the Middle Eastern think.

unknown 1:47:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:08

And it isn't their strategy, but that's what they that's the effective result. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:11

But it absolutely can, you know, it can be considered a strategy at this point, because it seems like it.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:17

But it regardless, I uh as an imperialist, I prefer to consolidate power with long-term strategy. The genius of Chinese strategy is the patience of their formulations. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:29

They are very patient. They are very patient. Yes, they've also been around a lot longer than we have.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:33

So without conspicuous advice from us on how to run their show. Yeah they've somehow managed.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:40

They could care less. Yeah. Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:46

One of the the these students at Harvard, they swagger around. These Chinese students tell us we're all done, and we might as well go out and let the crows eat us. And I and and then they accuse us of racism. I said, why? He said, Because you don't recognize our cultural superiority. I said, Well, our definition of racism is when you think someone is inferior. Well, you are inferior. I said, ah. I said, well, how do you know that I shouldn't? I'm a white guy. I said, I've been colon, I'm so white bred, the crusts are cut off. Why shouldn't I mistreat you? Oh, well, we're superior. I said, so it's racism in your mind if I don't acknowledge your racial superiority? Yes, they said. They're very confident about their future. And they are very confident that we're doing one damn stupid thing after another to accelerate our decline. Which is not destiny. It's it's totally reversible. But, you know, the first thing we should not do is alienate the people we were gonna need to protect ourselves. Namely, the most successful alliance in history, NATO, and our alliances in Asia, and rebuild our defense industrial base.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:04

Well, according to the T the New York Times, it's the North American Treaty Organization. Which they just they just typed out, apparently this past week. And Trump called him out on it. It was actually very funny. But oh well I mean He referred to them as idiots. He said, Oh, all these Ivy League guys and people that are like Wells.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:32

I'm not at the same level of intelligence as Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:35

I don't you know, John, I would agree with you on that. I think it's different. I think I think y'all are at different levels. Um But with that with that being said, I uh once again I appreciate you coming on for another thought provoking conversation. None of these conversations are are are we asking people to agree or disagree with us? We're simply trying to bring more awareness and visibility and thought provoking uh ideas and comments too. So hopefully it gets People thinking a little bit more about the comments.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:01

Well, yeah, I would like to see their comments.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:03

Yeah. Well, if we can start getting people to leave comments on YouTube, that'd be cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:08

Well, that's not allowed on YouTube?

SPEAKER_03 1:50:10

No, it it is. I'm just saying the most the most comments I've gotten on an episode are on the Flat Earther episode, which I which I did with uh a very well-known Flat Earther, and I've gotten plenty of comments on that episode. But these conversations don't tend to get many comments at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:26

Flat Earth Society. Well, that was interesting, yeah. I I am excited. I hope we go back to the moon and stay there.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:37

I hope we go to the moon in general, John.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:40

Yeah. That's another long-term government investment. Yeah. In fact, there isn't a piece of there isn't one piece of iPhone that wasn't uh created from federally funded technology.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:55

I I understand your position on that entirely.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:59

All federally funded technology should have an intellectual property covenant attached, whereby it's only used in America. All right, John.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:08

Let's just give the government more control. I get it. I get it.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:11

Yep, yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:12

Understood. That's your opinion. That's your that's your approach to all this, is just give the government as much control as possible and trust the government. Just trust the government, John. They're they they do no wrong. They do no wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:24

Ah, the reducto ad absurdum argument.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:27

At all times, they absolutely love us, they want us to thrive, they don't want to control us. You're right. This give the government all the control.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:35

With that being said, we're gonna wrap up for the night. We're gonna come, we'll be back. We will definitely be back, especially if people are so listening at this point. We will definitely be back.