BREAKING: Netanyahu\u2019s Terror Attack on Lebanon Destroys Trump\u2019s Ceasefire. Tucker Reacts.

Источник: https://tuckercarlson.com/live-show-april-8-2026

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Tucker [00:00:05] Last night at 6.32 Eastern time, right in the middle of dinner, Donald Trump sent out a truth post, his version of Twitter, in which he announced a ceasefire with Iran. Here's exactly what he said. This would be one hour and 28 minutes before the total destruction of Iran that he had been promising, the use of, the implied use of nuclear weapons or some other weapon of mass destruction, a weapon powerful enough to eliminate an entire country in one night. As he said. So that's what people were expecting to see. That's what he'd promised to deliver. And instead, this statement, subjects to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the complete, immediate, and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. We've already met and exceeded all military objectives and are very far along with the definitive agreement concerning long-term peace with Iran and peace in the Middle East. We received a 10-point proposal from Iran and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the U.S. And Iran, but a two-week period will allow the agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America as president, and also representing the countries of the Middle East, it's an honor to have this long-term problem close to resolution." Well, amen. Cold water on a hot day, the nation, the world breathed a sigh of relief and Schickley, please. Were people who have fought in previous wars, people in the GWOT generation, people who are conspicuously absent from the Fox News analysis of this war, people who know what it is to fight wars. Because one of the things that people who fight wars or see them up close learn is that almost anything is better than war. Even a step back or a step down, even giving up something you want while bitter is better then total war because there is nothing worse in this life than total war. And that's a generational lesson. Every generation that experiences total war learns that lesson. And so the most eloquent writing about why war is bad is written by people who have seen it and experienced it. Every big war produces in a generation of writers calling for no more wars. And then predictably, inevitably, cyclically, the next generation forgets that lesson, maybe the key lesson of existence, and the cycle of wars continues. So last night seemed like a victory for the United States, even though it was, strictly speaking, probably a loss. Now, the president didn't explain what's in this 10-point plan, this proposed agreement that he'd received from the government of Iran, but we know roughly what was in it. There've been a bunch of versions of it floating around. Are they real? 10 point, 15 point, it's impossible to know.

But the big picture points are known. And first among them is the current government of Iran will stay in power. That's the first point. So regime change did not work. Everyone admits that now, including the Israeli government with whom were embarked on this adventure. Everyone understands that there is no way to dislodge the current governments short of nuclear weapons. And so when this ends, whenever it does, the regime, the ayatollahs, the terror regime, as they say on Fox News, will be in place. And that's not a win, that's a loss. US military bases in the region have been destroyed, certainly badly damaged. From some of the US military personnel have withdrawn, retreated. That's not good. Display of power, that's a display of weakness. So there's no way to spin that. That's a loss. This war has cost hundreds of billions of dollars of US dollars, taxpayer dollars. That money comes from debt, from selling our debt, our treasuries to other countries. So that's the loss. That is a big loss.

Commodities prices have risen, not as dramatically as they might if this were to continue, but they've risen a lot. That's a loss. That's attacks on people who buy things in the United States. And then of course, Americans have been killed. It's not clear how many, because there's an awful lot of lying about it, but it's a substantial number, more than a dozen, and maybe much more than that. We don't know yet. We will know at some point. So Americans have died. America has gotten poorer. America has become weaker demonstrably. We can't open the Strait of Hormuz, which is the overriding objective of this where we can't do it by force. That's been proven. And the regime that we described as illegitimate, this crazed theocracy, these Stone Age people are going to, when this is all over, remain in control of Iran. So again, those are losses, just objectively. And yet, and here's the point, a ceasefire would still be a win for the United States because war, total war, is just that bad. It's so bad that even absorbing some humiliation and some measurable losses is still better than that. And most people understand that intuitively. You don't need to be ideological or interested in geopolitics to understand that Americans getting killed, the country going bankrupt, commodity prices wrecking the global economy, the uncertainty itself is a cost. You don't know what the future holds so you can't plan for it. All of this— is much worse than what we'd be getting with an agreement that diminishes to some extent because it's very obvious we could be still further diminished and further wounded by this. So that was the state of play. At 632, the president announces what is, objectively speaking, not a win, and yet most reasonable people accept it as a win because, relatively speaking, That's a win. A ceasefire is a good thing. And anyone who doesn't think it's a good thing has to explain why it would be in America's interest, the tangible interest of the United States to continue this. To what objective? What is the goal? No one has ever really explained what that is.

Degrade Iran, change the regime. What does that mean? Open the straight of our moose. How? Tell us how. There's not one person in the Pentagon who can figure out how to do it. These people wage war for a living. Not all of them are stupid. Some of them were pretty smart. They can't figure out how to it by force, so they would have done it already. What's your plan? Well, there's no plan, of course. So anyone who opposes the ceasefire is not an ally of the United States, but an opponent of American interests, maybe even an enemy. So with that in mind, it's worth assessing what happened to the peace fire. Well, it seemed to last a very, very short time. Now, not in name, no one is saying there's no peace fire, cease fire, but certainly in practice, because very shortly within hours of the president announcing this, Israel, our unmentioned partner in this war decided to bomb Civilians? Beirut, Lebanon. Bomb civilians, apartment blocks. That's not anti-Israeli hyperbole, that's not blood libel, that is measurably true because there's video of it, a lot of it. Because Beirut is one of the greatest and most civilized cities on the planet. It's not Yemen. Lots of people have been to Beirute. Beiru is also, by the way, the capital of the only country in the Middle East whose president is a Christian.

The president of Lebanon has always been a Christian since the founding of the country over a hundred years. So in some basic sense, this is a Christian country. It's certainly a Christian led country and it's not a primitive country. It's probably one of the top three most beautiful places in the world, but it's also one of the most civilized places in world. And for many years, the southern portions of the country have been controlled or at least influenced by a Shiite militia group, which has become in effect the government of those parts of the countries called Hezbollah. You've heard of Hezballah. I think the U.S. Congress has declared it a terror organization. No one's defending Hezbalah. But Hezbullah's main, the main thing to know about Hezbolah is that they are sworn opponents of Israel. That's why you know their name. That's why it's not just a regional problem in the Levant for you. It is an ever-present slogan that people are shouting at you all the time. Hezbollah, they're bad.

Well, why are they bad? Well, they are against Israel. That's Why. There are also the people, apparently, who perpetrated the 1983 barracks bombing against U.S. Marines and killed almost 300 American Marines. The United States was in Lebanon at the time, why was the U. S. There? Well, because Israel had invaded Lebanon. And so the Reagan administration, in response to what Israel did, decided to get involved on behalf of our closest ally, and almost 300 American Marines were murdered by Hezbollah. Not blaming Israel for that. Apparently they had advanced knowledge of it. That's pretty clear. It's been documented. But Hezbollah did it. They did it, not Israel. But we were there because of our alliance with Israel. Fact. So Hezbollah has for many years been active in the southern parts of the country, south of the now famous Latani River on the border of northern Israel. So it's a concern for Israel. But Beirut is a separate question. Beiru is a Mediterranean city that is not controlled by Hezballah. In fact, it's filled with Christians. They define the life of Beirute. They may not be majority but they're in charge and they certainly have defined it culturally. And Israel is bombing apartment blocks in Beirut, Lebanon. You know what the name of the military operation was? Eternal darkness. Israel named this operation killing hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, mostly in Beyrut, Eternal Darkness. Cause like, why even pretend anymore?

Eternal Darkness, by the way, is mentioned in X- extensively in the New Testament. It's a euphemism for hell. And that's exactly what Israel brought to Christians in Lebanon today. Here's a video of it.

Soundbite [00:11:17] I'm going to talk to him a little bit more. Talk to him more. Talk to me a little more. Good. Yeah.

Tucker [00:12:03] Looking a little bit like Gaza. And of course, that's the point of Operation Eternal Darkness. But what does it look like on the ground? Again, these are civilians who were murdered by the Israeli military using American weapons and American tax dollars to do it in order to stop a ceasefire that the American president happily announced to the great relief of the American people. All of it stopped by Operation Eternal darkness. Targeting civilians. But if you were a civilian on the ground in Beirut, what did it look like? Well, we have this video, which is distressing. This is a little Lebanese girl walking out on a sunny day with her father in a residential neighborhood in Beyrut when the Israelis come in and level the city. Here's what it looked like.

Soundbite [00:12:52] I just got out of the box. Hey, I'm here. God! What the fuck?! What the fuc- Hey, how's it going?

Tucker [00:13:12] Operation Eternal Darkness, that's for sure. So the net effect was to end the ceasefire. Again, it hasn't been announced, but the straights for moves are closed once again, not open, totally closed apparently. And the Israelis are continuing to blow up Christians, murder Christians and other civilians in Lebanon. So this afternoon, the administration announced, well, there's been some confusion here. An agreement that Israel would stop destroying Lebanon was not part of the agreement with Iran. And so clearly they thought it was, they thought somehow the United States would get Israel under control as its patron. We never promised to do that. So this was all a mistake and we'd love to negotiate the terms, but exclusive of Israel's behavior. Israel's gonna do what it's gonna to do. And, you know, they may kill more little girls in Beirut, but that has nothing to do with the bilateral we'd like to have with you. Well, it raises a couple really interesting questions that need to be resolved before we can fix this and fix our country. And the first is why would you ever go into a war with another country when you don't have aligned interests, when you have the same goals? Israel is a whole separate goal from ours. Israel would like to leave Iran a husk. A civil war between various ethnic groups, just a bleeding wound and therefore permanently weakened. They don't want a coherent nation state in Iran because that wouldn't help them. The United States, of course, doesn't want that because you can't open the Straits of Hormuz unless you have someone in charge of the territory of Iran because then pirates will close it.

Anyone with mines or drones can close the strait. You need a central government in Tehran to keep the straits open. And the United States being Of course, subject to international commodity prices like everybody else, the big economy doesn't want that. Doesn't want the refugee crisis in Europe and the US that will inevitably result if Israel gets its way. The United States went in there with goals that weren't exactly clear. I don't know, somehow ending the nuclear program because it's such a threat, even though US intelligence had repeatedly concluded that it was not an imminent threat. They didn't have a nuclear weapon. They didn't have ICBMs, just didn't exist. It's the WMD story from 2002, Redux. But the idea was to apparently push, brush them back a little bit and let them know that you can't do anything crazy in the region. That's not Israel's goal. So the first mistake was lashing ourselves to another country with separate goals. But more immediately, the mistake would be if you want to wrap this up with a ceasefire and a peace agreement, you would of course tell Israel to get on board because Israel is a tiny insignificant country with an infinitesimally small population and economy that only exists because you protect it and pay for everything. Israel is your client state. This is like taking orders from your housekeeper which you would never do. Why would you do that if you had self-respect? So the first thing you would do If you were sitting down to come to terms with your opponent, this big country, Iran, that you haven't been able to beat militarily would be to tell Israel, hey, we're suing for peace, we're gonna get this done, you knock it off. But the US didn't do that. This administration did not do that, in fact, apparently, according to the Israelis, they never even consulted Benjamin Netanyahu. They did not tell him that we are right in the cusp of ceasefire talks. Why? Because they were worried. That he would do what he did with Operation Eternal Darkness, Operation Hell, and scuttle the whole thing by doing something crazy, like bombing apartment buildings in Beirut, Lebanon. So apparently, getting Israel under control so the United States could save its economy and the lives of its troops was not even on the table. The one thing we know we're not going to do is tell the Israelis to behave. And that's why there is in practical terms, in effect, if not name, no ceasefire right now. The one that everybody in the United States desperately wants. So the question is, and it is the question, unfortunately, why can't the United States get its proxy, its client state, effectively its employee, Israel, under control? Why is that the one thing that's never on the table? That's the question. It's the questions that Joe Kent, one of the top U.S. Intel officials, asked when he resigned a few weeks ago. We got into this war at the urging of another country, Israel. The war did not go well. Now we can't get out of the war because of the behavior of that same country, Israel. Why? Why can't this president or any president say no to Israel? And we have a right to know why. It's not just because we love Israel and it's the only democracy in the Middle East. And if it is, then our leaders are dumber than we thought they were, but it's probably not that. Because they understand perfectly well how bad this is for the U.S. And there are, believe it or not, a lot of people in the White House who care about the United States, people with power in the white house. They're not all whatever you think they are, zombies doing BBs bidding. Some of them can see very clearly where this is heading. It's heading toward a nuclear strike by Israel on Iran. That's obvious. And that would be a world historic disaster. It's also clearly terrible for the American economy, for the the American people, not even to mention the Americans who will die in numbers if this becomes a land war. So there are people working really hard, really late trying to fix this, to get a piece, even one that diminishes us, where we have to take some lumps. They are doing that. That's the only reason we got to where we were yesterday is because people in the White House taking no credit for it whatsoever, We're... We're working! To end this, because it's bad. But those people predictably were undercut. Our country was undercut by Israel and there's apparently nothing we can do about it. So again, why is that? Once this is over, even before it ends, every American has a right to know, why does this tiny country have so much control over our government? Is it consent? It doesn't look like it. Now, Joe Kent said point blank when he resigned. And by the way, the day he resigned, he retained highest level security clearance. They tried to tell you, oh, he was a leaker, he was under investigation, it was a lie. They admitted it was lie. He wasn't under investigation by the FBI. And you know it's untrue because he held his security clearance till the day he left the building. So there's no intelligence in the U.S. Government that Joe Kent couldn't see. One of the most informed people in the world, and his conclusion was, there's something weird going on here. And one of the clues is the Butler shooting, the shooting in the summer of 2024 during the presidential election where President Trump was shot in the ear by a gunman little over a hundred yards away on the roof of a building called Thomas Crooks. And according to Joe Kent, who would know, that investigation was closed before. It pursued every possible lead. We can be fairly confident that Thomas Crooks pulled the trigger. We cannot be confident at all that he acted alone. And of course we can't know because that investigation was shut down. That's what he said. And Joe can, who you can dismiss as a wacko or a traitor, but you can't say he doesn't know what he's talking about. And you can say the Trump administration didn't trust him with all available US intelligence until the day he left. You can't that because they did. Has said out loud, he thinks the failure to investigate the Butler shooting, the shooting of our now president Donald Trump, and why wouldn't they investigate that by the way? That alone is baffling. Why wouldn't release all the information they have about Thomas Crooks? They haven't, why? It was a lone gunman wanting to tell us all you know, but they haven't. Why? He believes that is connected to the control that Israel has over the United States government, the demonstrable control. He said that. He also pointed to a couple of pretty shocking violations of the president's personal security by the Secret Service.

They allowed things to happen that never happened around a president. Now, maybe they were mistakes. You want to think they were, but who's been fired at the Secret service over those mistakes? No one that we're aware of. There's not been a wholesale reordering of the Secret Services. Their job is to protect the president, the elected president of the United States. And you do that not just because you love the president but because our entire system hangs on the idea that the people get to choose their president and he can't be removed by force. That's democracy. If you could just take out the president by force, then how is democracy real? People choose someone that larger forces don't like and they kill them, then you don't have a democracy. So protecting the life of the president is essential to the functioning of our system. And yet on at least two occasions, they've proven that they haven't been able to do that. AND YET Has there been an investigation into that? Has anyone been fired over that?

Now, those of us who don't work there have no real idea what that means, but someone who just worked there until the other day. Joe Kent said, I think that may be related to our inability to say no to Israel. Now, maybe Joe Kent's a total wacko, in which case, why was he head of the Counterterrorism Center for the Trump administration? That's another question. But let's just say he's a totally wacko. But what's the answer? The facts, the known facts have never been explained. And at this point, watching Israel once again, not for the first time, hardly for the first time short circuit American diplomacy, the expressed will of the American president elected by the rest of us to have some foreign country of 9 million people to say, no exercise veto power over our president. Short-circuit our interest, this is bad for us. We're doing it anyway, because Benjamin Netanyahu wants to. You see that enough times. This is again, not the first time we've seen this. It's not the 10th time we're seeing this. We've seen it generationally. You have to ask, what is this? And you have to find out, and you have air it publicly, because it has to end. We cannot be a free and prosperous country until we are a sovereign country. What does that mean?

Our leaders elected by us have to be able to make decisions in our interests. Not to the exclusion of everyone else, you don't have to end other people's civilizations in order for your own country to prosper. Doesn't work that way. But you have to put your people's best interests first or it's not a legitimate system. And if there's another country and an arrangement with another country that's preventing you from doing that, you have fix it. And then there are also moral questions. If that partner, your closest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, is killing kids in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran. And doing so without apology, if it's committing war crimes every single day for years with your money and your weapons, at some point you're implicated in those crimes. And you have to stop that too. It's all bad. There's no upside. Where's the upside? And so the United States has to, and hopefully the first thing we do when and if this war is resolved, is detach from Israel. Not declare war on Israel or treat Israel as an enemy. They may treat us as an enemy. As they have before, when they tried to sink the USS Liberty, an American naval vessel, a surveillance vessel, they treated us as an enemy. We don't have to treat them as an enemies, however, and we shouldn't. But we should treat them like we treat every other country as an ally, but with restrictions and reservations and red lines. No, you can't act against our interest. This distancing should begin with a total end of aid of any kind, military or economic, to Israel by the U.S. Government. And people who love Israel, some of whom are pretty successful, can send all the money they want to Israel, and that's fine. But the U S government should send not one more dollar to Israel and not one piece of- military material to Israel, not one more fighter jet or bomb or missile defense system or small arm or ammunition of any kind. Because Israel is aggressively acting against our interests. And so to continue to arm and finance them, their generous welfare state, for example, or their military defend their nation is not only contrary to core American interests, it's just masochism. Watch us hate ourselves as we fund a country that's killed more Americans than most other countries have. That's just a fact and not just on the Liberty. Every war that Israel has pushed us to join has resulted in dead Americans. And the fault lies ultimately with our leaders who are going along with us. It's their fault first. It's not the Israelis fault. It's our fault, but they're implicated in it. This relationship has resulted a lot of dead Americans, a lot. And it's time not to end it, not to set up an adversarial relationship, but to set a healthy conventional relationship where Israel can pay its own bills and fund its own military and act within the constraints imposed on it by its own economy and population. That's what normal countries do. Most countries live with neighbors that don't like them with whom they have testy relationships, but they make accommodations because they have no choice.

There's no country in the world that acts with total impunity because it knows. A much larger country will backstop it, no matter what it does, that just doesn't exist in the natural world, because it's not natural. It's grotesque. And it's terrible for the United States. And now it's obvious. And by the way, unless our lawmakers, unless the US Congress restrains this relationship and changes its nature, there's going to be political turmoil in this country. Nomas, it is really clear. Israel's pursuing what it thinks its own interests are, but those are not the same as our interests. Now, one of the problems with changing that relationship is, well, you're gonna have to deal with Israel's agents and advocates in the United States. And there are many of those. There are many those. And by the way, just to be completely clear, they're not all Jewish. In fact, most of them aren't. This is not about Judaism. It's about blind support for a nation state called Israel to the extent that it harms our interests. And you saw that on full display in the last 24 hours. So the president excitedly announces a ceasefire. A pause in the fighting in a war that cannot result in American victory, but only in further American defeat and degradation, and ultimately in bankruptcy and possibly a nuclear war. So this is a great thing. Immediately, advocates for Israel appear on Fox News, telling you that this is not acceptable. This is a loss. This is cowardice. Here's 83-year-old former general, Jack Keane on Fox, telling you this is disappointing that the killing has paused just for a moment. Here he is.

Soundbite [00:29:24] So there's a lot wrapped up in the deal. My preference would have been to keep the war going as leverage to make that deal. But we are where we are now. And I really do think if the deal blows up, it comes down to Carg Island and forcing either take control of Carg island and take control at a distribution of oil or destroy it and force an economic collapse.

Tucker [00:29:51] I mean, what do you say to something like that? Most people watch him like, oh, he was a general. He was a General. He knows what he's talking about. He's probably war gamed this whole thing out. He knows, what it is to take Karg Island. Talk to anyone who actually has been to Karg island or understands the geography of the Persian Gulf. How do you take Karga Island? Is General Jack Keane of Fox News, the first person ever to think, hey, we should take Kargan Island. Then we control the commodity flow through the Persian Gulf, that would make us powerful. No, he's not the first person to think of this. Carg Island has actually changed hands quite a few times through history. Various empires have controlled it because geographically it's a critical piece of real estate. And it's extremely hard to control at this point or once again, we would already take control of the oil. Oh really, hadn't thought of that. How would we do that? And of course, no one ever asks a follow-up question. How exactly would you do that, what would it cost us to do that how long could we hold it?

How far from mainland Iran is Karg Island? Is it within, I don't know, artillery range? Have the Iranians thought this through too? Do they see Karg island through which 90% of their energy moves as a key piece of real estate? Have they taken extraordinary steps to defend it? What are those steps and how do we mitigate? Not a thought. Just take Kharg Island, take control of the energy flows, collapse their economy. Well, then what happens? You collapse their economies, and then what? Does that open the Straits of Hormuz? Where does that leave us? Where does it leave the seven countries that face Iran? No, no thought to that at all. Just do it. And by the way, it's kind of cowardly not to do it They're children and not only they're children, we know they are because they have a decades long track record of bad decisions. Not just bad, but disastrous. These are the very same people who've gotten the United States into every pointless conflict really since the Second World War. How many of we won zero? Just a fact. The fact that you admit with sadness if you love the United states, as most of us do. None of this has worked. And if it has, tell us how, just explain. What the United States got out of any of these conflicts.

With accelerating absurdity, each one more absurd than the next, you can understand you don't want China to control South Korea. Okay, let's do the Incheon landing. You could sort of understand why you wouldn't want Ho Chi Minh sweeping into Saigon, which is now called Ho Chi Min City. Couldn't you really understand why we invaded Iraq? Not at all. And this war makes the least sense of all if you view it through the prism that most Americans would, which is, is this good for us? No, obviously not. And there's no way to achieve it. And you know there's not way to achieve a military victory, meaning a return to the status quo of February 27th, because they never explained what those means might be. Because they have no idea because they're children. And so really it's incumbent on the rest of us to increase our self-respect and stop giving airtime or any attention at all to people with a long proven track record of failure and absurdity and silliness, listening to 83-year-old generals who couldn't find Carg Island on a map, pretending that they're experts on the subject. Because they're not. And again, they've gotten it wrong again and again and again. Would you take real estate advice from a homeless person? No.

Because they're not going to real estate. So they're homeless. Like this is nuts. And so for this government to function, people who've gotten it wrong again and again and again cannot be persist in positions of leadership doesn't mean they have to be imprisoned. They'd like to imprison their enemies, but in a free country don't imprison people because of disagreement. They're saying out loud, anyone who disagrees with us should be in jail because they're Thorterians, but it means... Not allowing them in government. Why? Because they don't have the best interest of the country at heart. That's why. Obviously, or they wouldn't be calling for military action that is by definition fruitless in Sisyphean, it doesn't work. Who does that help? Not us helps Israel. That's the whole point of the program. So why do they still have positions of authority in the US government? Well, that's a really interesting question, but we could start the great sorting could begin by disqualifying anyone from government service who holds a second passport. That's really simple and not just an Israeli passport, but a Belgian passport, a Sierra Leonean passport, any other passport. If you're a citizen of another country, obviously you shouldn't be running our country because you have by definition dual loyalty. You can just leave and go to your other. Nation. No normal country would allow that. Why would you allow that? Doesn't mean people with dual citizenship can't live here, though there's an argument for that too. A strong argument for that. Pick a country. If you don't like it, leave. That's fair. You can't use this as a place to park your money, a place to hide out or hang out until you get in trouble and then flee to your other country. Like why would any nation allow that most don't? We do. We got to Stop it! But you could begin with, no, you can't serve in government if you've got two passports, sorry. Period, at any level. DMV up to DOD. And if you've served in a foreign military, come on now, especially when the US is at war, you can't serve in the US government if you're worn a foreign uniform. Of course not. You can't hold elective office if you fought for somebody else's country. Because by definition, you have fought for aims that are not the same as ours. In fact, they may be in opposition to ours. You may have fought against what's good for the United States. Certainly if you serve in the IDF, you fought against what's good for the United States, knowingly or not, you probably didn't mean to, but you did. You shouldn't go to jail for that. But you can't be allowed to work at say the Pentagon. But right now you can. And by the way, there are IDF officers working out of the Pentagon because they have an office within the Pentagon as they do at CIA and Langley.

A foreign government has offices in our critical executive branch, headquarter buildings. That's just not healthy. That's crazy. And it cannot be allowed a single more day. Why would it? Oh, that's hateful. Of whom? Would Israel allow that? Would they allow Americans? I don't know, to open an office in the Demona complex? No, because they're not insane, but we are. So we should stop that immediately. But the main problem with neocons, of all religions, just to be totally clear is that not only are they not on board with the interests of the majority of our country, they work in opposition to those interests. Wars you don't need mass migration into this country and the West and that would include Canada and New Zealand and Australia, Western Europe and the United States. That Migration. Which I think even liberals would acknowledge has not been good for anybody. In fact, it's destroyed these countries because a country, a sovereign country has control over its borders. Can't just change the population in a generation. Can't do that. That's all been abetted by the neocons, 100%. Now, why is that? Well, that's another question. But the whole thing is dark. The owner of OnlyFans is one of the biggest contributors to APAC? Hmm, tell me how that works. I don't know the answer, but it's not good.

It's not healthy. It's good for the United States. None of it's good. Apex not good, OnlyFans is not good so maybe it's surprising there's some nexus there. But above all, what is degrading to our country bad for our strategic objectives and just rotten for the nation is the lying, the nonstop lying, the refusable refusal to be straightforward about your aims. What are you actually arguing for? You never know. Lying is totally acceptable among neocons, completely. You always cloak your real objective. You saw this in the 12 day war. Oh no, no, we're just gonna get rid of their nuclear program because it's an imminent threat to the West. Okay, it's imminent threat. And some people piped up and said, I don't know, this looks like the opening salvos in a regime change war. Oh, shut up, racist. Of course it turned out to be. But nobody ever apologizes. Well, actually, you're right. You caught us the first time and now we know because we're in a regime change war or an attempted regime change, war. Yeah, just keep lying. Just say whatever it takes, whatever's expedient to get to whatever the goal is, but you never know what the goal is because they'll never tell you. It drives people crazy. It makes people conspiratorial.

That's the other problem with it. So many conspiracy theories. Well, there happened to be quite a few conspiracies. What's a conspiracy? Well, it's a group effort to achieve something whose goal is never stated in public. That's what a conspiracy is. And there's obviously a lot of that. Here's one example. This is from Fox News yesterday. One of its top shows. Here are two neocons talking about what they think the U.S. We should do next in Iran. Hopefully, if we can get arms in the hands of the people, they'll take over. I'll give you the last word. We have about 30 seconds.

Soundbite [00:39:40] That to me is very key. I've been talking about that in multiple appearances here and on radio. We have to arm the people because if we're not going to do regime change, they need to have the ability to do it. Reagan did it in Afghanistan. He did it at Nicaragua. He did in Honduras. He did at Angola. Donald Trump can do exactly the same thing. Somehow, some way those people need to be able to get armed. And need to take their future into their own hands.

Tucker [00:40:11] It's like they can't even hear themselves. I mean, the other problem is, and one of the reasons that you have to laugh at all the conspiracy talk about the neocons is a lot of them are not super bright. They don't really know very much. So here you have that guy just said, Reagan did it in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. So what happened? Well, let's see. When Reagan did in Afghanistan, he said, weapons to a group of freedom fighters called the Mahajeddin, Islamic warriors. This was back in the eighties when we were on the side of Islamic extremism against the Soviets. And now you fast forward 40 years and who's in charge of Afghanistan? Well, Islamic extremists, the Taliban. Nicaragua, 40 years ago, we sent arms to the Contras. A lot of people supported it, including me, by the way, to be clear, because the Soviets are making inroads in Nicaragua. They're a funny group called the Sandinistas led by a man called Daniel Ortega. And we are gonna regime change Daniel Ortaiga. So 40 years later, who runs Nicaragua?

Anyone got Wikipedia? Oh, Daniel Ortoiga. So whether you support it or not, it didn't work. It didn't, work. You're pointing to those successes, really? Countries that 40 years, 40 years later are run by the Taliban and Daniel Ortenga. And that's the argument for sending arms to the opposition. But what's so revealing about that clip is how the actual point, the object of the strategy is never stated. In fact, it's hidden. And it's in the most sinister way in the language of idealism and ideology. We have to end Islamism. We have stop the threat of the terrorists. We have bring freedom to the poor, benighted people of Iran. When of course the actual aim is Israel's aim, which is chaos. The whole point of this from an Israeli perspective, it's not an attack on Israel, by the way, I mean, it makes a kind of evil sense. If you want to eliminate a threat, you can't kill everybody even with nuclear weapons, but what you can do is set them at war with each other. And this has been the way that Israel has conducted asymmetrical warfare since its founding. You sow chaos among your opponents. You get them to fight each other, And that's the goal for Iran, which is just a little bit over 50% Persian. Not everyone who planned the war seemed to know that or advocated for the war seem to know that, but the Israelis know it. And they know that the goal is to stoke ethnic conflict and to some extent, religious conflict in Iran. Most Americans have no idea that there are up to 5 million Christians in Iran, they have no clue. But of course, the Israelis knew that. There are lots of Jews in Iran! The Israelis bombed one of their synagogues yesterday. Why? Unclear. Maybe they're just the love of bombing things. But it is a multi-ethnic country with religious minorities.

And countries like that are ripe for internal division. So the point of the exercise is not to get weapons in the hands of freedom fighters. Who would those be? How do we identify an Iranian freedom fighter? No, the point is to stoke an endless civil war, which once ignited are famously hard to end. That's the point. How does that serve our interests? Well, of course it doesn't. Israel, which seems to have an interest in destroying Europe, certainly a desire to destroy Europe, Prime Minister said it himself, Rome is our real enemy. Still angry about 70 AD, 2,000 years later, his words, not mine. So clearly Israel wants to harm Europe. They've said so, they've helped do it. That would definitely harm Europe and the West. How does it help the United States? Well, not at all. But here you have two prominent analysts on Fox News telling you that for the sake of the Iranian people, we need to do this, really? The same people who are being bombed, whose infrastructure, civilian infrastructure is being destroyed? The same who will starve to death if this keeps up? We're really doing this for them? How is starving me to death in my interest? Are you really trying to help me? No, of course not. How much better it would be? How much more Christian would it be just to say what you're trying to do out loud to tell the truth for once. And then the rest of us could assess it. We could argue against it on good faith terms. We could probably even accept it. Even if we disagreed with it, if we knew what it was but you never know what it is with liars, with people who are committed to saying whatever it takes to get their goal achieved without explaining what the goal is. So that mode of communication, of operation. That whole worldview is totally corrosive to our country. It is totally immoral. Lying is bad. And because lying is now the currency of government, thanks to people like the people you just saw on the screen, some of us have lost track of this. So you can't accept anything the government says at face value. You have to parse every statement. Well, maybe this means that, or it's a bank shot intended to achieve this. You have no clue. That is so bad for your society. Living in a hall of mirrors gives you vertigo after a while. Those kind of people should have no role in any decision the U.S. Government makes going forward. Period. And if they support arming the freedom fighters of Iran, let them do it themselves. And if support overthrowing the regime, let them fly there themselves and attempt to do that, if it's that important. But for not one more day, should people like that have access to levers of power in this country and they should absolutely not be allowed to write our legislation. This country needs to free itself from the influence of a foreign power and restore freedom to its own citizens. The freedom to criticize a foreign country, to boycott it if they so choose, to speak their conscience without the fear of being arrested or accused of a thought crime. People like that have made this country increasingly authoritarian where people who are born here no longer feel free to say what they really think. The last election was supposed to end that. Instead, it accelerated it. How did that happen? It's not even clear, but it did happen.

And so the first thing we need to fix when this is all over is the system that produced this disaster in the first place. Not just a change of presidents. That won't be enough. We've just proven it's not enough. You need to change the system that acts on not just this president, but every president to produce results that are terrible for the United States. That's the first we need do. The second thing we to do is figure out how exactly Iran was able to do this. How did that happen? It'd be fun to go back and look at the tape from cable news in the months preceding this war and just clip the portions where they describe what Iran is like. All experts on Iran, not a Farsi speaker among them, but know a lot about Iran. This is before anyone had heard of Karg Island. They'd know the population of the country, knew nothing about the country except that it was a primitive country. And so when the presidents were going to bomb them back to the Stone Age, most Americans must have thought, well, I thought they were already in the Stone Age. Well, who knows what age they were in, stone age or medieval? Who knows what their caliphate was really like? It turns out that their military power and their economic power we've vastly underrated, vastly. They've done, and this is noted with real sadness, much better than anyone expected, including the Israelis. No one saw this coming. So how did this happen? How did this primitive country that shoots protesters in the street and beats up women because they're women or whatever they were telling you on TV, how did that country chase away US aircraft carriers that aren't anywhere near the coast? How did that countries shoot down some of our most advanced aircraft, Warthog, Blackhawks, et cetera? How'd they do that? We have gotten as a society into a very bad and self-destructive habit of not allowing questions like that, honest questions about our own failures.

And the reason that's bad is because unless you understand what you did wrong and repent of it, promise not to do it again, you tend to keep doing it. And yet in this country, for some reason, the reasons are pretty obvious, we have allowed the people who make those mistakes to browbeat the rest of us into silence And whenever someone pipes up and says, well, wait a second, we're spending a trillion dollars a year on this military and we can't get our aircraft carriers within striking distance of the coast of Iran? Because why? Shut up, Islamist! Were you siding with Iran? Well, no, I'm siding the United States, but what's the answer? We pay for this military. We were told we had total dominance of the skies, but then they shoot down our aircraft. Apparently a lot of them. We can't know because everyone lies about everything, But- Apparently, a lot of them, but one is shocking. How did they do that? Is it worth having an aircraft carrier in 2026? I don't know, but the people who build aircraft carriers certainly have an interest in telling us we need them.

During the Ukraine War, at the point, maybe a year or two in, when the public was starting to ask like, wait a second, our airports are filthy. Our schools don't work. I have to work two jobs just to pay my bills. And I still can't afford a house. Started to add those people, which is most people. Started to ask the question, why are we sending all this money to Ukraine? And by the way, where is Ukraine? And Putin bad, okay, Zelensky's, Jesus got it. But like, what has this got to do with us? And why is it good for us? And the answer that we all received from members of Congress, Republicans in the Senate and Democrats was it's a great deal. Actually, it turns out, this is like congressional accounting, Actually... That money, which seems like it's going to a foreign country, actually comes back to us because it goes to American defense companies, Raytheon and the rest, Lockheed. And so what we're really doing is funding American jobs. This is an industrial policy, really. And so it's a kind of slight of hand where we seem like we're being generous, but actually we're benefiting. And there may be some truth in that, but that's not a truth.

Totally, I mean, you can assess whether that's like a, the kind of country you want to live in where the only real manufacturing base is weapons. Probably not, but that's where we are. And it's not a crazy argument to make on a practical level. I mean there are military contractors in every congressional district, there always were. And so it does produce American jobs, but it also sets up an incentive those companies and the lawmakers who fund them to maintain the status quo. And the status co is of course, always going to favor a larger, more expensive weapons systems because those are the most profitable. A system like that will never invest meaningfully in say drone technology because there's just not enough money in it. But you watch the war in Ukraine and you watch that 40 odd days of the war with Iran and you realize, well, wait a second. Maybe we should have invested more in drone technology or taken a big picture look at what the United States would need to project military power beyond its shores and maybe aircraft carriers and the whole suite of weapons systems, the most expensive in the world, aren't really the way to project the military power because it doesn't work and they can be defeated or least constrained at a thousandth the cost. By less technologically advanced countries like Iran. But that would be a very obvious conclusion. In fact, that was the conclusion of any smart, non-aligned person for the last five years. Is it really worth having an aircraft carrier if you have to open the straights of our moose? Maybe not. Well, apparently not. But we have been unable to have that conversation because the vested players in the whole economic chain coming from the United States Congress through the Pentagon and out to, well, the entire economy of Northern Virginia has discouraged it. So we've continued to do the same thing the same way, except at a higher volume for a very long time.

And now we are seeing the results, which are embarrassing. And we actually can tell ourselves we're the strongest military in the world. And you want to be the strongest military in world because that's great. But if you are the strongest military in the world, why can't you force Iran to open? The bottleneck at the end of the Persian Gulf and let vitally needed commodities out to the rest of the world, including you. Like if you're so powerful, why can't you get it done? And so what we've learned is we're really not as powerful as we said we were and probably as we thought we were and that's bad for us, but it's also dangerous because it invites aggression. We need to fix that by being honest about what just happened, no more lying. We should learn something from what is happening right now. And that process will require the people who made bad decisions to be punished for them. Imprisoned or killed, but certainly humiliated because they deserve it. When was the last time a public official was ever really humiliated? Even the ones who get fired get fired with like a statement like we thank you for your service. You're so great. You're doing something more important. How about you committed dereliction? You did a terrible job. You don't have to kill yourself or anything, but you can't work here again. And we're not going to endorse you. We're not gonna pass you on to the next employer with like, a fake letter of recommendation. Oh, you did such a good job. No, you were terrible. That's why he fired you. Only in a system like that, a true meritocracy, can you have excellence, but that's the opposite of what we have. No one is ever punished.

No one's ever criticized. No one ever takes the fall. No leader is ever humiliated. Only the people beneath him who carried out his orders. That's the definition of a perverse system that produces, not surprisingly, perverse results like the ones we're experiencing now. So that's next thing we need to do. Be honest about how Iran, this primitive country, just humiliated us. That's not anti-American, that's pro-American. We love our country enough to want to know, and we need to know. And the final thing we need to learn from this particularly ugly experience is that you have to have leaders who care about you. Because that really is the basis of good governance. Brilliance or superior planning, those are important sometimes. But what really matters is intent, is the will to protect and serve the people you've been elected to protect and serve, to put at the very center of your agenda, the people who put you there, the people in your country, a love of those people gets you a lot farther than the best funded government program ever made. It's a lot like parenthood. You don't have to know a lot, but you have to be totally committed and the commitment has to drive from the love that you have for your children.

And if that is the case, you'll be a pretty good parent, good enough for sure. And if you don't that, it doesn't matter how much money you have, your kids are gonna be screwed up because you will do a bad job. So it's about intent. How do you divine intent? How do know what a person wants? Well, by the way he behaves, you judge the tree by the fruit. And so any leader whose focus is outward rather than on his own country is going to be a bad leader. And this is the core problem with maintaining a global empire. You are never going to find a leader. You will never find an American president who is more interested in governing America than he is in governing the world. And honestly, would you be? What job would you rather have? King of the world? The world! King of the world! Colossus! A stride! Here I am! I'm king of the world! I'm making all the decisions! I'm going to eliminate your civilization for breakfast! I'm gonna overturn your economy for lunch! And tonight we may have Operation Eternal Darkness. I mean, there's an appeal to the megalomaniac, to all of them. It's not just this one. It's all of them. That is irresistible to leaders. I run the world. Now running America, by contrast, is hard and messy. And you know a lot of the people, you're gonna make them mad. You go to war with the Houthis, people don't know what a Houthi is. They're never gonna meet a Houti. There's no cost to you whatsoever in the short term. But let's say you just ran America, how'd you like to fix Baltimore? Be responsible for Gary, Indiana or Detroit or Los Angeles or New York. These are hard problems. How do you fix American schools? They're totally useless. No one's even trying. And the reason they're not trying is because they're totally distracted. Well, because it's hard, of course. The solutions are not obvious, but they're even being attempted anymore. And this is a generational thing. 30 years ago, people still talked about our schools. We gotta think of a way to make our schools better.

School choice. Sound like a good idea? Did it work? I don't know. No one ever mentioned it again. Nobody cares. Our leaders don't care. They don't. And that's why the country is withering. Because people who don't care are inattentive. Sometimes they're actually a little bit hostile. Sometimes they are very hostile. No matter what their disposition, they're never going to save you because they don't care enough to save. No leader who really loved his country, no matter what they tell you, would have embarked on this disaster. They kind of nod to caring, we're gonna save you from the nuclear threat of Iran. Was there a nuclear threat from Iran? Shut up, hater! Was there a nuclear threat? But shut up! Okay, okay. There's no even real attempt to tie what they do outside our borders with most of our money to any benefit to you whatsoever, because that's how little they care. And that actually has to change. And it's not just a matter of the looming debt crisis, which is real, or the fact we spent hundreds of billions on a fruitless war that diminished us. It's not even about that. It's bigger than that. Coming out of this, we have to demand, regardless of party or even ideology, leaders who have a gut level love and concern for the American people. That is the test. That's the acid test for holding office in the United States. You have to care. We can probably devise ways to measure whether you care. But if you don't care, you're gonna have to join the neocons in doing something else. So that's what we've learned so far for where we're going, whether this ceasefire, assuming it even is a ceasefire will hold. We want to talk to someone called Alistair Crooks, who is not famous in American media by and large, But is outside the United States, I think, regarded as one of the most experienced and wisest observers, mostly non-aligned observers, of what's happening in the world, particularly in the Middle East. He spent most of his career as a British diplomat intelligence officer. It's not an endorsement of British intelligence, which has been much discredited in the last 25 or 30 years, but certainly one of most knowledgeable governments for most of its existence. I mean, they managed the world and they sent people out into the world who really understood how things worked at a granular level, not just a 40,000 foot level, but understood the languages and the cultures and the geography of the nations that they were trying to influence. So he has spent his entire life outside his own country and has actually personally negotiated ceasefires in the Middle East and knows it very, very well, lived for years in Beirut. And so we asked him, where do you think?

This is going. Here's the conversation. Mr. Druck, thank you very much for joining us. Do you believe that the ceasefire that the president of the United States announced last night can hold?

Alastair Crooke [01:01:10] It's very tenuous. At the moment, it's very tenuous, it is already eroding somewhat, and I'm not sure that the contradictions in the tensions, the underlying tensions within the C-SPAR can hold. It may be that it's already eroding that Israel has been attacking Lebanon. There is some dispute as to whether Lebanon was supposed to be a part of the ceasefire or separate to it. Initially it was definitely a part. Now Mr Netanyahu is saying it is not and it seems to be that that has been confirmed by the press secretary at the White House. But the Iranian reaction to that is that they have an equation. Either there's a cease bar for all or there's a cease-fire for nobody. I know that what's happening in the margins at the moment in the parliament in Tehran is that the security committee there. Are saying okay if Hezbollah is a target and is being targeted and being killed at the moment and it is not part of the C-SPAR but well then maybe we'll consider that the whole of Israel is not a part of this C-Spar and we'll continue to target there. So it is quite tenuous and I understand that in the last period The Iranian authorities have refused to allow ships to pass through Homs. They've stopped at the moment.

Tucker [01:02:54] Can you describe what you referred to at the beginning as the underlying tensions in the ceasefire, the misaligned interests that may torpedo it in the end? What are they?

Alastair Crooke [01:03:08] Well, I would explain it not in terms of just sort of literal what is in and what is not in. I would say from the Iranian perspective, the purpose of what's happened, or at least the attack that took place on Saturday last, we killed the supreme leader, that has given an opportunity to change the situation. To break the paradigm. They want to get out of the cage. What do I mean by the cage? Well, it's not the sort of physical cage of Gaza where there are fences and drones flying over, but nonetheless, it has been 74, 75 years of caging. If you look at a map, you'll see all around Iran, every side, it is handled on a military basis. All around. It is hemmed in by sanctions, by tariffs, by economic siege on the country, by political, even cultural isolation. And they see this therefore not as an attempt, not as a process that will lead, if you like, to new deterrence. A new form of a sort of, we'll go back, there'll be a cease bar, then it'll end and then there'll be another round of military. They want an end to war. They want this to bring about an end the war and they believe they're on a strong position. In fact, I know this will seem counter-intuitive to many of the audience, but actually Iran has emerged stronger. From this month of war than it did at the end of the 12-day war last June, in many ways. Firstly, because in economic terms, they are benefiting. For example, in the last first month of this war, they have earned more revenue from their oil sales. Tankers passing from Karg Island to the Hormuz and being sold. In this one month they have earned double what they've ever earned in previous years in one month. And just to take as an example for example on Sunday they loaded five tankers in Karg island at the terminal there That was 7.7 million barrels of oil. Uh and they owned 850 million dollars in one day from that so the revenue from if you like potential revenue from hormones will be enormous it would be probably in a year just under a trillion dollars on the basis that they're charging at the moment They're not only charging that but they're also demanding it in one which is part of the bigger if you will plan they have which is to break the sanctions. Not only to break the hormones, but by insisting that carcass have to be charged in yuan, the Chinese currency, and not in dollars, to get permission to pass through Bar Ketham Island and Jarod Island, and they are then escorted by the Iranians through Thank you. Through the elements the other but in the other aspects which will be seen strike probably listeners are even more surprising is that their casualties are probably less than in the 12 day war why well because what they learned from the 12th day war is evacuate all public buildings that you possibly can. That's keeping hospitals but everything else empty. State buildings, security buildings, educational buildings, all are empty. And so the attacks, which are focused very much on those, have caused far fewer casualties. You'll know there may be a caretaker or someone who unfortunately is killed in these. And of course, civilians be killed. I mean, many civilians be know, where residential areas have been attacked, but on the whole. They have had numerous casualties. And the second thing is that their military is in better shape than it was at the end of the war. But first of all, the reason for that is, again, a rather strange one. The Iranians bought a lot of these decoys, huge numbers of decoys from the Chinese, that imitated airplanes and missiles and so on. But the Chinese gave them a twist which was interesting and I didn't know this before but they have a heat source so the women picked up by radar or by sensors it looks real because you know it not only looks the part but it actually emits the heat of a real missile or an airplane. And so largely the Israelis and the United States have been bombing deep courts. They've also been trying to bomb the main missile cities. But if you take a main one like Yaz, it is buried in a granite mountain, 800 meters deep, really deep, and there's concrete and there's a whole railway system. Underneath this tunnels and railway systems under this mountain and they deliver the missiles on railway trucks and the railway takes it right up to the entrance, an airtight door opens, it moves to the entrance and the missile is fired, the airtight door comes down and the train withdraws. Well the Israelis have been bombing and bombing us and you know the mountain is getting blacker and blacker but it's not affecting their missiles and these missiles and I've made this point many times. You know, what they haven't understood about the mosaic system that the Iranians started planning for this asymmetric war 20 years ago is that they are dispersed across the extent of Iran, which is a huge country with mountains and forests the size of Western Europe, effectively. And they are buried deep, deep. That was the lesson that the I'm bringing this to them. From the attack on Baghdad in 2003. They saw how air power could come in and could destroy the command center and the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein at that time and they decided we have to manage a way that we will not suffer a decapitation strike. So they implemented this asymmetric role where the leadership is completely dispersed across the country. Again, autonomous, if you like, commands. They have their own missiles. The commander has the initiative to fire those, to use troops. And they are completely immune from any cut or communications. Or an assault or a decapitation strike, because they have preset plans, sealed plans. Each commander has his sealed plans of what to do if the supreme leader is killed, and they tell him what the next proposals are.

So it's like a sort of huge retributed machine that snaps into action the second the command is lost and it will continue the war will continue with pre-set plans and we saw that happen on that Saturday when the Supreme Leader within the hour those plans were unfurled and attacks were starting on Gulf states or US military bases in the area. So, all in all... What I'm saying is that, you know, and people, I think, are being quite surprised at the resilience that Iran has shown in this. And now they're trying to, if you like, leverage this resilience to bring about a major change in the situation. And the Iranians have... You know, some equations that it's best to understand if you want to understand what that position is, it's like the one I mentioned about the CISPA, but it is security for all or security for no one, prosperity for all in the region or prosperity for no-one. If we are attacked? We will move up the escalation ladder accordingly, but the aim is to try and bring about a complete change, as I say, to change the region through the control over the hormones, to change um the region away from being a petrodollar region. Away from it being, if you like, a part of the economic sphere of Wall Street, and to try and to move to a different economy in the Gulf area. And also... By insisting on one, it is trying, if you like, to change the whole basis and the whole geopolitical sit sighting of Iran, and for it to come back as a major geopolitical part in the region. That's it, essentially.

Tucker [01:14:15] If Iran, it's from what you've described, if Iran were to achieve those goals or even the majority of those goals, it would be a major global power, not just a regional power, it seems to me.

Alastair Crooke [01:14:30] Exactly. And this is why, I mean, you know, what is happening in Iran and with Hormuz, portends a big step in the billable path, because already we still see, you know, signs of this taking place. Their demand that every ship passed has got to confirm that its cargo is paid for in one. And we're seeing, consequentially, Russia has already announced that in the future, any sales, any purchases of Russian oil or gas or products by Europe will have to be in one from now on. That's it. Then you've seen a big European bank, Deutsche Bank, now stopping, if you like, the issuance so much of their debts in dollars and are issuing condoms. That is based in either the digital renminbi or the ordinary renminbis and was achieved success. People have been, it's been oversubscribed people coming back and taking this. So what they're is actually if you like, in a small way, but they're trying to tantalize an economic shift away from the very the leveraged, financialized, economic world. Which, incidentally, has been so damaging to America and Europe too, because it's prioritized the financialized world at the expense of the real economy and real jobs. And it's all about trading and making money by trading or something else. But it isn't from making goods. No one does that now. Not enough money in it. You can make more money in an hour on the stock markets, trading across futures markets and other things. So it's also part of, if you like, that greater project that the Chinese and Russians are engaged in of going back to much more self-sufficient economies that are not just based on financialised products and dealings but actually produce things for people, produce things people and therefore contain salaries to people. And they think this is what they need to move towards. And they want to change the Gulf in that direction by persuading them to deal with Iran, that they have no choice, but they need deal with the Iran. And they should give up, if you like, all these big data centers by Amazon and AI centers and should change to a much more simple economy.

Tucker [01:17:37] So it's been clear from an American perspective since the first days of the war between Russia and Ukraine that the US dollar as the global reserve currency was in retreat and it was obviously going to change at some point, it always was. And maybe that could be managed in some way. You're describing a very abrupt change. I mean, if a fifth of the world's energy is settled in Chinese currency, that seems like just the end. Of the dollar as the global reserve currency, or maybe I'm overstating it.

Alastair Crooke [01:18:09] I mean, I don't think that is the aim. I think the aim at this point is to construct enough pay to get leverage over the West and to get them to understand because it's not just oil and gas. It is also the precursors for equipment, helium and sulfuric acid and all these things that we need for our supply lines. So it's, you know, if there's a parallel, I would say that the sort of second part of it is a parallel to what we've seen in China. When Mr. Trump imposed those tariffs, high tariffs, 155%, China started saying, well, I'm sorry, we're going to impose restrictions on rare earths and important minerals also until you bring down the tariffs. And that was achieved by China by using that leverage to bring about a change in the trading system there. And in the sense, almost Straits gives the opportunity, particularly if the Red Sea is included, where so much of the world's commodities pass, and of course Anshan and the Hussis are quite capable of controlling that in a similar sort of way. So yes, it is a change in that direction, but China I believe is very powerful. I was in China at the end of last year and I was very much aware that they are cautious because the way they've applied AI in China is not in the way we do it in the West. I was talking to some of the factory owners and he said, look, you know, Alistair when you know at the beginning of this year I take it into co-factory I have his husband is now 200, one year later. And he said, all of that is because we apply soft AI, you can call it robotics or automation or what, automatics or whatever, but we apply software AI for productivity to get our costs down. And our manufacturing costs are falling by 2%. And I turned him and I said... That's terrible because, you know, we can never compete with that. You must be aware that's quite dangerous because you are entering a suicidities point. Because we have cost inflation and you have cost deflation, this is not going to be a very easy thing. So you have to manage this. Your you know your lucid at the end point with great terror, otherwise you end up in a worst conflict with the West. But the Chinese don't want to push themselves to the forefront, displace the United States and the you know the special currency, but they could do it, you're right. You could do tomorrow. For example, when I use WeChat in China, You know, it has 1.4 billion users on that one platform, 1. 4 billion, and you can pay, you can take insurance, you can get a loan, everything you want on that. They could roll that up so easy. I mean, you know, the scale is already there, they could roll it out of tomorrow, but I don't think they want to do that. They're not trying to create a crisis that will affect the whole of the trading system of the world because China depends on trade, and it doesn't want to break the system, but it wants to gently remove the system in a different direction.

Tucker [01:22:18] You mentioned that Iran between the end of the 12 day war in June and the start of this war at the end February had received quite a few decoys from China. Is that the extent of the military aid that the Iranian government has received from the government.

Alastair Crooke [01:22:39] No. But people say, well, I don't see anything. We don't see it in Iraq. No, because you wouldn't see it. Because what they have provided is that the Iranians used to use GPS, and the West found it quite easy to disrupt GPS signals when they wanted to or to spoof them into thinking it was a different location. The Iranians had gone on to the Russian system first of all, but now at the beginning of this period after the June War, they moved to Beidou, the Chinese digital system, which is linked to their satellite. They have a complete satellite system. As you know, over the earth, and we've seen some of the pictures from them that they're very good. And they also, in the in the agreement, in the cooperation agreement between Iran and China, agreed that they might have access to the highest grade military quality digital communication system of Beidou. So the satellite system, there are earth receivers in Iran, the satellite system is late. To that and the radars are linked through Baidu to a single command post or to each single, if you like, missile city to provide the targeting and the data. And during the first stages of this they also put one of their intelligence ships called Ocean One off the coast of the Persian because. Which was able to intercept communications. It was also able to map undersea. In other words, they could map any Israeli or United States submarines that were operating. All of this late and it's late in a sort of huge digital map that is available which gives the targets and it gives the way in which those targets can be attacked, what type of missile can be used. It was used by the Pakistanis in a rather simpler form in their war against India, which you know the pilots and the Pakistani pilot didn't have to see its target on radar. Because it could see the whole situation, the whole map. We call this, in the West, the IRS, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance. This was the big asset that the United States gave to the Ukrainians, the ability to have an integrated type of targeting and data all in one. All presented even down onto a laptop if necessary but onto a cockpit or into a missile center. So what I'm saying is, and there's no confirmation of this from the Chinese or anyone they keep quiet about it, but this time the shoe is on the other foot. Is the Iranians that have the IRS, the Intelligence Reconnaissance System, is quite clear. I mean, you know, I don't have to prove it because, you know when a B1 takes off from Fairford Airport, the RAF in England, the Iranian's pick it up within a second that it's taken off a note and they can talk where it's going and what to do about it. So they obviously have much more sophisticated, if you like, targeting and data management than in the past. I think the Russians helped it in a different way, more with drones. You know, the Iranians helped them with their drones, the Shaking drones. I mean, the Russians asked for them for use in Ukraine, and they took them and then they upgraded them. And now some of that upgrading is coming back to Iran. Got to see, I think, a rush.

Tucker [01:27:14] How difficult would it be for the United States to defeat militarily the Iranian regime at this point?

Alastair Crooke [01:27:24] Oh, as such, I don't think it's possible, not in that sense, if you mean to destroy the ability to continue a military conflict with Israel and the United States bases in the region. I don t think they can. The Iranians have even buried their construction plants for missiles. Then all of a sudden... And these missiles, they come up, if they're not in advance in coming out on the train, they come out from silos, you know, 200 meters deep and they just come straight up out of the is automatically there's a rotating you know, Grom, and it moves the next missile directly. It doesn't get exposed. It's not out in the open. It is 200 meters underground. And then the airtight door shuts as soon as the missile has left. I think it would be very, very difficult to defeat Iran in that sense, to destroy its military capabilities. And it will be even less possible to take control of almost. Now from Iran. You have to look at the geography, I mean, and the terrain of Humus to understand why this would just really be a non-stop.

Tucker [01:29:04] So if Iranian oil sales, as you described them, are potentially gonna bring a trillion dollars U.S. To the Iranian government over the next year, that would, I think from an American perspective, increase the incentive to blow up Karg, where I think the overwhelming majority of Iranian energy is loaded onto ships. And you're hearing people talk about that. Well, let's just eliminate Carg Island. Is that, would that work? Is that possible?

Alastair Crooke [01:29:42] It wouldn't work, and you know, this is a festival card, festival card as you know lies at the far end, almost. On the other shore there are cliffs and then behind that it's barren, very barren with no vegetation, the hills and mountains, those whole range of mountains goes right of the straights. And so first of all is how would you get from this to CARB? I mean you can't sail them up the whole moose. In fact what I understand is that what they call I think MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, ship. HMS something or USS something rather I can't remember his proper name. It did erupt with 2000 Marines on board and Iran fired a couple of missiles across its bows and it is now removed to about a thousand kilometers off the Persian coast because it doesn't want to risk moving any closer, which is what happened to the also which happened to the carriers. They have to move further and further back so that they couldn't actually use the fighter to strike aircraft on their deck because it was too far. They'd have to start refueling them even over the target and that is an unacceptable risk for them. So I don't think you could get troops there. Could you land them on the borders? Well, Cog Island is in an artillery range of the Iranian side of the Hormuz. And it's certainly within ballistic missile. So your troops would be there and they would have both missiles and they would have artillery fire all the time. How would you resupply them? How would you deal with them? Would you create a sort of an air base on the back? Well, actually, the Iranians would allow that because in the Iran-Iraq war, they were specialists in opening corridors, and during the Iraqis to go in their corridors because they thought they were unprotected. And then they close our door. And then they killed the troops in it. The Iraqi has a big ministry. It is a million men under arms and the Basis are near another million. They would, I think, not find it difficult to deal with a substantial landing of troops. It is terrible. The mountains there, you know, there are the cliffs are full of anti-ship missiles and the mountains also are full off sort of caves and tunnels where artillery is in position. Digging artillery out of mountains is a terrible expensive job and in any case you can't get into That wouldn't give you, if you had Targ Islands, you wouldn't have control of all moors because...

The Iranians have, as I say, anti-ship missiles, but they also have, which we haven't seen used so far, submersible drones. These are small drones that are in tunnels under the water. They are submerged tunnels and they can exit under the water from those tunnels. They have lithium batteries which can last about four days. They have the capacity to loiter and then use our special intelligence to select the target and to attack the target. Then they have surface drones, about 600 fast ship surface drones. Most of those are concealed also. And they have finally, which is not acknowledged much, but they have about 25 to 30 millisubmarines. And the draft in the HOMOS is relatively shallow. These submarines are mini-submarines, very small, and they can fly up and down HOMOs, and they could fire anti-ship missiles from the submerged... They are under the under the waters or attack it with other forms of drones by these small submarines. So there would be very long time to go it in there and certainly even more harmful. We've seen what happened over the weekend where the US lost many aircraft Partly because of an attempt to rescue two... Crew from the F-15, but also the subsequent operation, which was probably an operation to try and take the enriched uranium from Issa, a nuclear facility, that went wrong and there was an ambush. Many planes and helicopters were destroyed in that process and it failed. I think that was what, you know, Trump was very much a country boy, you know, that they could. Do a Maduro, do a Venezuela, you know, the special forces would go in one night along Easter weekend when the markets were closed. They would go to where Grossi, the head of the IEA, say, you know, there's half of the enriched uranium sitting in a tunnel in Esfahan and take it and then come back and before the market opens, we've won. It's a great success. But it went badly wrong. My guess is that's over. You can't repeat that exercise now. Not because the Iranians know of it. They knew all along. I mean, they're not stupid. They knew that a main aim of Trump would be to try and seize the uranium and then sort of put it out as a trophy. We destroyed their nuclear capabilities. Now we have more than half. Rossi said it was 60 to 70 percent of the total 430 kilos of 50 percent enriched uranium.

Tucker [01:36:44] When the president threatened yesterday to eliminate the civilization and to destroy the country, what weapons do you think he was thinking about using?

Alastair Crooke [01:36:56] I really don't know. It sounded very ominous to me. I mean, that he could take out, you know, this is a big country. I'm in a huge country, 95 million people, you know, infrastructure and industry. I meant the size of the whole of Western Europe across it. I means, how could he, how, how would you do this by any convention? I don't understand. Maybe he was deliberately hinting at some sort of nuclear device, but I can't tell. But that's, I suppose, one possibility of what he meant by this would be the death of a civilization and it would not return again in the future. It would it over. Well, how would you do that in such a big scale? I don't know, or maybe he was just talking and didn't really mean what he was saying. It was a bluster. We just don't now. This makes it very difficult for not just the Iranians, but everyone to sort of negotiate them in this time, because they're finding it very hard to understand what is now promise and vision. It seems to me that he wants to get out of this war to which he was invited by Netanyahu and enthusiastically accepted. He wants to go out because he has this timeline. The midterm elections are coming up, and he's always said, you know, I've got to, you in four to six weeks so that I can concentrate on trying to save the midterm results. But now, after the failure of trying to extract the uranium from Isfahan, I think the only thing that was facing him was a long walk or massive escalation. And that wasn't going to work well for the midterms or his situation in the country. So I think he was hoping for a way out. Is it going to work? Can it work? Well, that's what I mean about the contradiction. Iran doesn't want a ceasefire. It wants an end to the wars, an end to its siege. It want to be able to get out. And play a role in the region. And of course, that is not the interest, not only of Trump, but particularly of Israel. Israel has been pressing, I read the Hebrew press, Originally, we do sort of summaries of it. And they've given up on the idea of what they call a regime change in Iran. They realized it's not going to happen.

It's not gonna work. Maybe it never was going to work. I mean, they say this, you know, in the Hebrew press, much more frankly than in the English press. They say this very clearly. It wasn't going to, it wasn't gonna work, then came Netanyahu said they must hate Kargail. This has got to be done. Coached on the ground. Calk Island is the key thing that they have to do. Well, they have now come to the conclusion. I mean, the Israeli military experts who know the reach of that, like the military and the defense agency, have said, you know, you're not going to, what are you going to do? Please sit on Calk island. You'll just be sitting target. You will have huge casualties. And so even the Israelis understand that. So that's why we now have the switch that is taking place, which is over. Okay, now we have to destroy that infrastructure, electricity, water supplies, railways. In the last days, the entire railway system of Iran has been attacked by Israel. Across the entire country, they've been destroying the railway system. I mean, it is civilian infrastructure, it is a criminal thing to do this to the civilian population. But that's what pressing on Trump to do, to try and push him further down. They want it really so that Iran is not functional as a going state, but it is too broke. And then they want to see it divided up into sort of ethno-sectarian spatelets, rather like Syria, this happened to Syria, so that it is weak and easily dominated.

Tucker [01:42:10] What would it take to do that? Is that even, leaving aside whether or not it's evil, and of course it is evil, but if that were your goal, do you have a realistic chance of achieving it? And if so, how?

Alastair Crooke [01:42:26] It will be difficult, but you could do some of it. The Iranian electrical system is notably decentralized. This is all part of the rethinking of asymmetrical warfare from the 2003 period. So for about, I think it's 150, 160 different know, electrical plants that are all interconnected. And so they have a huge number of small plants that are decentralized across Iran rather than, you know, a few big power plants. And Bushehr is probably the biggest one that they have, but that's a joint project with Russia. But David, Iran has attacked that twice. And I think this was a message. And you asked me what was happening. But first of all, Israel attacked Nantaz, which is another nuclear site facility. Nantz is still damaged from when Trump bombed it. But then they landed a missile quite near to Bushehr, which is a functioning nuclear power plant, jointly run by the Russians. And it's under full IEA supervision because the Russians want it like that. And then they landed a missile quite close to Dushyar and then now they've landed in the recent days a missile that has damaged it, not heavily just but hit it. And of course the IEAs were very concerned about this and the Russians have now withdrawn all their staff from it. But in my view, this was a message not to Iran, but to the United States.

And the message was to say, you know, well, if you don't do it, we have the capability to eliminate these nuclear, to go down the road of attacking the nuclear. In other words, to use a technical nuclear weapons. So I think this was a pressure point that was put on to the White House to say, look, either you do what we say and destroy their capabilities, their infrastructure, or maybe Israel will be forced to move to a different level of attack. I don't know to a nuclear level

Tucker [01:45:15] That would not be the first time the Israelis have threatened that. They threatened that in 1973, so it's been over 50 years of the same threat. Do you believe that that's a real threat? Do you think Israel would use nuclear weapons in Iran?

Alastair Crooke [01:45:32] At the last resort, possibly, but not before. No, I don't think so. I think it would be very much a last resort. But you know, Israel is becoming less, I've been writing for some years to say that, you know it's no longer possible to see and understand a large segment of the Israeli population through secular rationalist lenses, which we tend to do. We have to look at it through eschatological ideas and see what they are looking to. And there you see, I mean, you take somebody, someone, a minister like Spotridge, I remember six, seven years ago. Who say, you know, this is the plan. We're going to get rid of all of the Palestinians, all of them, the Arabs, the territories, but we require one thing. This was seven years, six, seven years ago, and he said, we're missing one thing, we need a big crisis or a major war to finish off this project. In other words, there is a large segment that are not frightened of Armageddon, but actually are looking forward because this is the redemption in the stoop. So there's no point saying to them, you know, as we in Europe do say, well it doesn't make any sense to provoke a big war. It makes absolute sense if you're an eschatological messianic believer to do these things. So, you know, we have to try and understand it in these terms too, I think. And there is the danger, the sort of eschatological, the messianic theme that is present, has been predicted that it would be present. And it's gripped probably more than half of the Australians, the sense of Amelie, the day of fighting the war of Amilie. And this is going to lead eventually to Armageddon and redemption.

Tucker [01:47:47] Given that, how do you understand the pressure from Israel on the United States to continue fighting Russia? It's very clear now, it's always been clear, but it's rarely spoken in public in the US that Israel and its advocates in the U.S. Have been the prime drivers of the Ukraine war, pushing United States to fund Ukraine in a fight against Russia and Putin. Why? What is the thinking there? What's the strategy behind that, do you think?

Alastair Crooke [01:48:20] I think it's the same people, and it's the same supremacist thinking, the idea of control. And there is, I think, in the case of Russia, great ancient resentment dating back, first of all, to the failed attempt of the Bolsheviks to institute. A society that ended all reliance on family, community, religious, to create people as just units, units in a society, in a sort of technocratic society. That failed and then Stalin was instrumental in, as they believe it, in killing many of those. People who largely were originally, many of them came from the US and were prosecutors. And I remember watching a video of Putin addressing some of the acidic members in Moscow and he was saying to them, you know, and he was warning them and he said, you, you'll know that I think the figure he gave was 83. Percent of the Bolsheviks were Jewish and most of them didn't speak Russian, basically Yiddish. So the Russians are very aware of this history and then they were made aware of it again in the 90s when the oligarchs, the period of the oligearchs put him down on that. Of the oligarchs. There were seven oligarchs, normally. Six were Jewish and tied to financial institutions in the West, whether in America or in Europe. And the consequences of that period with the shock treatment, the shock economic treatment that was visited on Russia, I mean, were the consequences on the society. So I think Putin has always tried to carefully maneuver and manage, if you like, what he understands is a sort of power system, which is higher and larger than the power system in Europe and the United States in the conventional way, based much of it on sort of finance and banking going back to the 19th century and the impulsive people, the act of pranks and so on. And that has given them a very to their relations and we've seen that caution sort of obvious in Syria at times, but also in Putin's relations with Israel. I don't mean it in any deliberate way, I'm just saying that I think he's a cautious person, a lawyer by training, and he understands. The the power, the global power and its ability to mobilize and its ability to use proxies to damage and maybe even defeat a country. And so, you know, this is, I mean, it's interesting because this is exactly the parallel that we're dealing with now with with Iraq. In the sense that I think the United States would like and Iran would be content to find a security solution, a permanent security solution not just a ceasefire. To which would involve of course things like sanctions or removal of sanctions, I think very similar to what Russia has been looking for. But just as in the Ukrainian situation, the European determination to continue the war on Russia using the Ukrainian proxies has really stopped the ability to find a political solution. A political architecture because what Russia wants is quite clear. I think Russia wants to set the boundaries very clear. What are the boundaries of the sphere of interest of nature and what are Russia and China and Asia's sphere of interests? Where does the boundary between these lie and what does that mean? That's what I think he means when he talks about security on a big ship. This is what Iran is effectively saying. You have to do something about stopping Israel because otherwise Israel will not allow you to come to any serious, meaningful agreement with Iran. If you don't, then Iran will do it its own way, which is going to be, And you said what happens about humors, but... Uh you know they only have to keep almost tightly closed for three weeks and the pain across financial markets in the west of one of supply lines and upon food and all these issues will become very very severe so you know that's saying you know this is your these are our equations. It's either security for all or security for no one. Prosperity for all, or prosperity for no-one. And we are intent on it. And, you know, the Iranians have a huge resilience. They're unusual people. Remarkable in many ways, because they're reading. Of the revelation of the prophet is that you are mandated as a human being to oppose the oppression of others. You are mandated similarly to look after and to take care of the dispossessed. I mean these are the fundamental things. You go back to Kabbalah, you see that is the principle. These were the principles that the Imam induced. And the third principle was the need to have active minds. I want the people to have active minds, to think for themselves and to think well, and for that reason made it compulsory that if you went to university you had to want to study Islamic philosophy, you also had to study Western philosophy. The two run together in Iranian universities. So this gives them a very strong, and it explains why Iran is viewed as an enemy by people who are oppressing other people. With, who are enforcing special rights on some people and not on others in the region. And that is where it is. And I think that eventually we're going to get to the point because the tensions in Israel are huge now, enormous tensions that are there. You know, the kitchen staff went to the cabin the other day and said, listen, the IDF, the military force is collapsing. We're totally overextending. It is collapsing and, you know, there's nothing we can do about it unless you want to produce another 400,000 troops. We can't do it. We are overextended. We need to get out of level. We are failing. We have failed with Gaza. We had failed in Lebanon. We thought we'd defeated Hezbollah, and now it has inflicted huge costs on us, huge damage on us. You have failed. They are saying that to let me out. It's in the Hebrew press more than it's in the English language press, but it's a real crisis. And why it's such a big crisis is in Israel, the army has always been the spinal cord of the state. You know, left, right, religious, secular, all did their service in the army. It was the thing that kept it together. And the chief of staff is saying, it's broken. It's completely bust. And the political leadership says, no, you're just being defeated. We are on our way to a great Thanks. And we're going to establish Greater Israel across the Middle East. And within Israel, people are saying, you're wrong. It's not going to do that.

Actually, you are going from one defeat to another, to a bigger defeat. And that we have to take stock and think again of where we go.

Tucker [01:58:37] Why, given the fragile state of the IDF, would the IDDF be bombing residential apartment buildings in Beirut, not in southern Lebanon, but in Beyrut, a country with a Christian president? Why would they be killing civilians in Beirut right now?

Alastair Crooke [01:58:58] Well, what some of the military people in Israel are saying is that this is clearly a last gasp by the government there to present, if you like, a victory before they have to concede that they will join the ceasefire. And, of course, that this was a show of force, even though it was completely ineffective show of force, military terms. This was just simply destroying residential power blocks, many of them. And it was of no purpose other than for, you know, the political grand deeds to say, oh no, look what we've done, we've got freedom of action in Lebanon, we can go where we want and destroy what we want. Well, maybe we will agree to join the Fired, Trump pushes us hard enough to do that. But it has no purpose and the idea of no is actually, they are going to, I think, completely withdraw, except that they say, and this is what the defense minister is insisting, they have to demolish all the houses for a depth of seven kilometers in 11. Flatten them, they have to be like Gaza.

I mean, they don't hesitate to say it's got to be like Gaza, and that's going to be a buffer zone. And the military say, what is the point of that? The idea, saying to their leaders, say, what is that point of fact? Because actually, the Hezbollah's missiles, most of them are north of the Litani. The Litani is the river that provides the I can't remember how many kilometers, but it's about the third of the way up in Lebanon. And he says, they can still fire from north of Litani into northern Israel. And they're causing huge damage and huge losses. In one day, I mean, the idea of loss nearly a hundred Makarovar tanks, main battle tanks, now they did an ambush and they've done it on other days. In other days, they've lost aces. And maybe 50 in another day. It's like 2006 in Lebanon when I was there and they did the same thing to the Merkava there. And, you know, of course, I mean, actually, I think a few of the lead tanks, the crew get out, but most of them, they don't get out. So there are big passion is taking place. I mean, the thing is a mess, a disaster. And this is why I think that, ultimately, the demand for a real ceasefire is mostly going to come not from Trump and those associates around him that are close to Israel, but may come from Israel itself, because they've experienced huge damage. And, you know, What is the point of this? I mean, they cannot... They cannot political gain from the system. They've created mayhem across the region and nothing is working through their paper. This is not going to be a sort of love-in with the Gulf states, Abraham, courts or anything after what has happened in this period. So they have to rethink where they're going and I think that probably will happen. Maybe not yet, it's not right yet, but I think they will.

Tucker [02:02:56] I think in the United States, doesn't the US have to think about how to disengage from Israel given that the cost to the relationship is very obvious to the American public now? We would not be in a war with Russia, we're not for pressure from Israel and its advocates. We would be in war with Iran, we are not for a relationship with Israel. So can the United State disentangle from Israel without getting hurt in the process, What do you think?

Alastair Crooke [02:03:26] Well, there are those in Israel who advocated. I know that's surprising, but on the right wing, there are others who say it, and even Netanyahu says, it's time for us to disengage and be less reliant on the United States. I think he reads the writing on the wall, and frankly, he sees the writing on the walls, so let's anticipate it. But how are they going to do that? I mean, is... Is a different question. As I was saying earlier, you know, the whole, it's not just the geopolitics of the region is shifting because of homos and the way the war is, but I'm saying that, you know the mainstay of Israel has been the technical industries of the Gulf and the Gulf states and the money of the Gulf states which has supported it. And I think that is probably going to change and change quite tremendously. I'm not sure it depends to the degree with which the Gulf states can also read the writing on the wall and realize some of them, I think, have begun to do that. They're thinking about how to deal with how to deal with Iran, that they need to come to terms and to come through an arrangement so they can export their energy and whatever else they want. But that is going to mean, and the Iranians say that, you can't do that and also be beholden to Microsoft and Amazon and have all of their data centers. And because we understand what data centers are, they are for security. They are for surveillance, for monitoring every telephone call and every structure that takes moves in the Middle East, so that you can assassinate them if you want them. We are not going to accept this type of technology in the region and that's why they've attacked them and seem to have attacked that big Amazon center in the UAE. I think cost 30 billion to set up. It's the biggest. You won't find it on Google Maps because it's hidden, but it's a huge AI center there. So I think, yes, I think that is the way. So what is the business model for Israel for the next 10 years? That is going to be a question.

Tucker [02:06:02] Where does this war leave the Gulf states, the GCC?

Alastair Crooke [02:06:08] It leaves them badly damaged, many of the people leaving, particularly Dubai and UAE, it leaves them needing to rethink how they can, if you like, manage a relationship with Iran which allows them to export their goods. Even though it will mean disengagement from the Western financialized world. But they will lead to do that. I think they will find they have little choice ultimately. At the moment, they're full of indignation and anger that they've been attacked and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, if they want to lose their products, either through the Red Sea, by the way, it's only pipeline. To the Red Sea has just been attacked. I don't know if it's completely destroyed, but it's just been attack for that was their alternative to supplying oil. They could supply five million pounds a day off the coast of the Red sea, but that has been attacked now. So, I mean, the pressure is on the Gulf states to come to terms, and some of them will, I believe. Some of them will. More Italy and others may not.

Tucker [02:07:41] And finally, how do you think most likely this is resolved and over what time period?

Alastair Crooke [02:07:53] I think that this is going to be resolved in the way that I indicated. I think initially we will see the negotiations that the Americans, although they've said, The White House has said that the 10-point plan is the base for discussion. About the political settlement. This is the base, this is the anchor, if you like, the 10-point plan that Iran has produced. It's a real initiative. It has been signed off by the Supreme Leader, the young Supreme Leader and by the Security Council. It is not one of these plans that come in from Pakistan, by talking to sort of... Ephemeral people. This has come out of the security structures and with the support of the IRGC. And the Supreme Leader read it, asked for some amendments to it, and gave it its privileges. So it is a serious doctrine. I think that inevitably in the negotiations whoever is negotiating with his bounce, or Witkoff, or whoever, they will then revert or try and say, yes, but we have to go back to these other issues. You may not enrich uranium in Iran, and one of the principles that the Iranians have said is we have the right to enrich in Iran our uranium ore as a source of energy.

They will then say, well, you cannot have such missiles, you're going to have to dismantle your missile systems and you will need to put limits on them and we will have to inspect them and we'll have to monitor it. And Iran will say, no way is that going to happen. And they will say you'll have the give up the Hormuz completely, that you will have to give up the hormones. And they will say no we are in control of it and we don't intend to give it up and then the negotiators on the American side will probably say well if you do what we set out in our 15-point plan or whatever it is then slowly sanctions will be lifted on you according to how you behave and Iran will say listen you forget our basic equation Prosperity for all or prosperity for now. If you do that, you're gonna have an economic crisis. And I think probably that is where we're going to go. There will be eventually financial economic crisis certainly in Europe, but in America too. The stock market will go, it will be a crisis. And people will eventually, you know, unfortunately, pain is the greatest instigator of pain. I mean, I think when the pain becomes efficient, then there will be a decision in the White House that they have to rethink. How they approach this and that maybe the 10-point plan was something that they could actually work with and that they understand that those were preconditions to a ceasefire, not the discussion points during a cease-fire but the precondition and they include the lifting of sanctions and first primary sanctions and secondary sanctions that affect Iran. I mean, you've heard these same stories from Masha. I mean this is the same sort of thing, and either people will face up to that, or it's going to be a long painful period in coming ahead for us, unfortunately. But I think it's important, I was going to say. But nonetheless, I think that's. Not a bad thing, not a disaster, because I do think, I mean maybe I'm going too contrary, but I think we in the West need a process of capacity. We've sunk into nihilism and we've into a sort of negative modernism and an economic structure. That damage the majority of our peoples. The minority get hugely rich by doing very little, but many people are suffering today. I mean, it's hard. Jobs are getting scattered, and it's hard. And I think that we do need sort of what I call creative destruction, a little bit, to help us rethink. For a start, what sort of economic structure do we need to address the problems we have? Because the economic structure we've had in the spirit has not, has thought about this bipolar world. There is, you know, the world of the billionaires and the world the rest, which is getting progressively intolerable. And you know our people are only people wherever it is in Europe and others they think well you know protest doesn't work because we protest nothing happens. Voting doesn't work we can vote for 3.D or 3.Gov it doesn't change the economic system and bring about a change. And that's what we want to see. And I think the whole of this period, partly stimulated by what the Iranians are doing, and even by their sort of thoughts about it, is going to provoke people to think more deeply in Europe about, you know, How do we actually not just produce a cosmetic? Market relations type of change, but how do we actually find a solution that would provide a decent living for our people?

Tucker [02:14:36] I think that's the most hopeful thing I've heard in a long time, and I'm grateful for your analysis. Alistair Crook, thank you very much. So if you've made it to the end of this episode, one recommendation, go back, rewind the last three minutes of what Alastair Crook just said about what this crisis could lead to. That the shoots of renewal are poking up from the soil. They are there. If you look carefully, you can see them. What we're doing is not working and hasn't worked for a long time. It's not even worth a portioning blame for that. That's enough to just observe it, acknowledge it, and know that it's true, because it is true. The majority of the American population is not being served by the current system. And yet, some sort of horrible revolution is the last thing we want. It is possible, and if we're wise, we could make it true, that what we're going through now leads to something better, a better future for our country, the United States, and for the West, and maybe for the world. This doesn't have to end in total destruction. It could end in renewal. And no one has ever put it better than Alistair Crooks just did so. Watch it again if you have the time. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next Wednesday.

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