The Israel Lobby: 20 years later w/ John Mearsheimer - The Grayzone live

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to the gray zone. It's Max Blumenthal and I'm going to be joined momentarily by the esteemed international relations scholar and author of what is now the legendary text, or co-author of what is now the legendary text, *The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy*. I think it's behind me on my shelf somewhere. Oh, there it is. With Stephen Walt. And this book was first introduced to the public in the form of an essay in the *London Review of Books* almost 20 years ago. It will be 20 years ago next week. So, I'm really looking forward to that conversation. He'll be uh joined, he'll be joining us, I think, in about five minutes, and then uh I'm due to be joined by Aaron Mate, as always.

Uh, Aaron and I are going to provide the war report on what is a failing war for Israel initiated by Donald Trump. Uh, I got already a super chat, so yeah, I'll I'll take that real quick. Is there any truth to a number of Delta Force being taken as POWs from that failed raid? It was reported and then fell off the radar. I don't know about any failed raid or any Delta Force raid. There's a lot of AI slop going around on Twitter X. A lot of fake videos. I wonder if those videos are being introduced to discredit uh those of us who are critics and opponents of this war. You have to be very careful. And there have been false claims about Idomar Beng being assassinated, about Netanyahu's brother being assassinated. Uh, I don't know where these are coming from, but I noticed there are certain accounts, including some accounts in Hebrew that are posing as Israelis who are filtering this out there. And it's an effort to augment reality when the reality as it is, and I guess this is the point I wanted to make and the point I'll be making throughout this stream before John Mearsheimer joins us. The reality as it is is very unfavorable to the United States. Uh, less so to Israel, but for the United States empire, for Donald Trump, this is a losing war. Donald Trump has already lost the war politically, he has lost the war economically. And while the US military has air power that is unrivaled in human history and can continue to pound Iran, even Trump himself has acknowledged they're sort of out of targets. They're just bombing civilian areas now. It's gratuitous and they're not achieving anything tactically.

Israel is another matter. Uh, because Israel doesn't function like a, even remotely normal country. And Israel's objective is actually being achieved, not just tactically but strategically, by keeping the US in the war, by keeping Donald Trump uh on an escalation ladder where he is moving towards, as some senators claimed coming out of the Gang of Eight briefing, this secret briefing they have with Marco Rubio and the National Security Council, that the US is edging towards troops on the ground. So maybe there will be a Delta Force raid in the near future. That's exactly what Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu want. They want US boots on the ground. They want dead US soldiers, lots of them. They want the US fully entrenched in the region indefinitely. They love seeing the US reposition THAAD anti-THAAD air defense systems from South Korea to defend Israel. They don't want a pivot to Asia. They don't want the US to take on major geopolitical rivals like China, as much as they want the US to fall into this trap that has been laid by Israel for decades. According to Netanyahu, it was sort of his 40-year plan. And that's that's what I'm going to discuss with John Mearsheimer. Why was this war launched? Why are we even in this war that's driving oil to over $100 a barrel? That may drive oil to $200 a barrel. Who told Trump to initiate this war? It's the lobby. It's Israeli influence at its apex. And it's all come to a head 20 years after the publication of *The Israel Lobby*.

I uh was uh talking to Mario Naffa two days ago. He's one of the few interviewers who sort of challenges me. Um, and he said, "Oh, I don't know why this is how this is a war for Israel. Let's, you know, like, you know, the US would have done this on its own." And you know, I pointed to a number of things, including statements by Marco Rubio, by Donald Trump himself, by Lindsey Graham. We've all seen them saying Israel was going to attack, so we just had to go in and assassinate the Ayatollah. We had to go in and initiate this regime change war, which no longer is a war for regime change, but there's there's a deeper story there. And I pointed to leaked audio that I obtained from a private session. It was a congressional lobbying session by AIPAC and its new CEO, Elliot Brand, was describing how he had established lifelines, in his own words, inside the administration through the figure of John Ratcliffe, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and Elise Stefanik, who was supposed to be in the administration because the AIPAC had groomed them since before they had even entered Congress, when they were no names. And that he had personally gone down to John Ratcliffe's office when he was a small-time lawyer in suburban Dallas and met with him before he ran, when he just announced his first run for Congress. And from that point on, he said Israel effectively groomed them through its unregistered lobby known as AIPAC. So now we have these lifelines surrounding Trump who have helped siloed, keep him in a silo. So he didn't understand that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed and that he would unleash an economic catastrophe on behalf of Israel. And so to discuss that and his book that really predicted where we are today, uh, I would say this, this is an intellectual victory lap. Uh, we are joined, we will be joined by scholar of international relations, John Mearsheimer. John, welcome to *The Gray Zone*. It's your first time on *The Gray Zone*. It's great to have you here. It's a real honor.

I'm uh thrilled to be here, Max.

Well, everyone's thrilled to hear from you. Um, I guess we'll start by reading, I think this is the first paragraph of Michael Massing's review of *The Israel Lobby* in the *New York Review of Books*. And I'll just get your response. Uh, "Not since *Foreign Affairs* magazine published Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations' in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as *The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy* by professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Published in March 23rd, on in the March 23rd, 2006 issue of the *London Review of Books* and posted as a quote 'working paper' on the Kennedy School's website. The report has been debated in the coffee houses of Cairo and in the editorial offices of *Haaretz*. It's been called 'smelly' by Christopher Hitchens, 'nutty' by Max Boot, 'conspiratorial' by, who else? The Anti-Defamation League, 'oddly amateur-ish,' the *Forward*, and 'brave' Philip Weiss in *The Nation*. It's prompted intense speculation over why the *New York Times* has given it so little attention and why *The Atlantic Monthly*, which originally commissioned the essay, rejected it?" Um, what, what prompted you to write *The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy* with Steven Walt, and looking back, what would you say the legacy of this working paper and subsequent book is?

Well, what happened, Max, was after uh 9/11, the whole question came up of uh, you know, what caused this fiasco. And uh, it was quite clear that the argument that "they hated us because of our values" made no sense. And that the argument that made sense was that "they hated our policies in the Middle East." And our policies in the Middle East were profoundly influenced by Israel. Uh, anybody who spent any time looking at US policy in the broader Middle East quickly understood that Israel uh had an outsized influence on that policy process, and it was aided in great part by the lobby here in the United States. But hardly had any, hardly anybody had written much on that subject. So we felt, Steve and I, that given the events of 9/11 and given how we were focused laser-like on the Middle East at that point, it made sense to write an article on the lobby. Uh, and we decided to do that. And uh, as you said, we were initially in contact with *The Atlantic Monthly*, and they were wildly enthusiastic about the idea at first, but they eventually got cold feet. And uh, it then looked like the lobby, the lobby article that Steve and I wrote was never going to see the light of day. But what happened was that somebody uh at *The Atlantic* slipped a copy of the article to a very prominent historian who knew Mary Kay Wilmers, who was the editor of the *London Review of Books*. And uh, once Mary Kay saw the piece, she knew it was pure gold. And uh, she was willing to publish it, thankfully. So on March 17th, 2006, uh, which is almost uh a year ago, excuse me, 20 years ago, uh, the article uh hit the hit the internet and spread like wildfire, as we anticipated it would.

Well, the reaction was from my side at the time. I mean, obviously, I wasn't as well-established as I am now, but I understood, you know, I'd gone through the whole experience of witnessing the Second Intifada, the Iraq War, the whole post-9/11 War on Terror, and the uh Israeli Second Invasion of Lebanon. And the reaction was, I mean, how, how could the US countenance all this? How could we be engaged in such folly and mass murder? And you had to look to AIPAC to to understand at least part of it, because it just, I mean, it didn't seem to make sense. So I, I, you know, I felt this sigh of relief that someone of your stature and Steven Walt's stature had finally said this. Uh, I know Phil Weiss was one of your big, um, one of the big cheerleaders who had a foothold in media at the time. Uh, but the assault that you faced was so overblown and ridiculous. Jeffrey Goldberg, day after day, calling you an anti-Semite. Um, you know, Max Boot, all these figures. Uh, what did, I mean, what were the consequences that you faced? It was a very different time than now. And I remember Phil Weiss saying, "Stephen Walt could have, you know, been an Assistant Secretary of State, Under Secretary of State in the Obama administration if he hadn't written that essay." What kind of price did you pay for stating such obvious truths?

Well, I think that there's no question that we both paid a significant price. Uh, you, you're not going to get invited uh to all sorts of conferences uh after you write a piece like that. You're not going to get invited to write op-eds for the *New York Times* uh after something like that. Uh, and the mainstream, in large part, is going to try and distance itself from you. Uh, now, with regard to Steve, unlike me, Steve was interested in higher administrative positions in academia. And at the time we wrote the lobby article, he was the academic dean at the Kennedy School, and he was a superb academic dean. There was no question about it. He is a superb uh administrator. He's a person of great integrity. And I think there's no question that he could have been a provost or the president of a university. Uh, and I think if you asked Larry Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time the article came out and who had very high regard for Steve, he would confirm what I just said. But once Steve wrote that article, uh, and then the book the following year, remember the book comes out in 2007. The article, as you pointed out, came out in 2006. But once Steve wrote that article, there was no way he was ever going to get a meaningful uh academic appointment. And indeed, he's remained at the Kennedy School over time. But he has, he has never uh even been uh the dean of the Kennedy School, much less the provost or president of a university. And he has never even headed up the Belfer Center uh inside of the Kennedy School, despite the fact that the Belfer Center deals with security issues and Steve is one of the most prominent uh security experts in the entire country. He's never even been the director of the Belfer Center. So he was basically blackballed uh from administrative positions. And had I been interested in administrative positions, I surely would have been blackballed as well. And I think at our universities, Steve at Harvard and me at Chicago, in very important ways, we've become non-persons at the university, in terms of how we're treated, uh, because the university doesn't want to make a big deal about the fact that we're on the faculty because that will hurt donations uh from the Bill Amans of the world. So there's no question that I, I think we paid a, a really significant price. But of course, uh, we also got a lot of attention as a result, and we ended up making friends with people like you and Medea Benjamin and all sorts of other people. And I think that that was a wonderful experience, and I think it's fair to say that both of us feel very good about what we did. Uh, you know, we were charged with being anti-Semites and leveling a blood libel at the Jewish community and so forth and so on. You know, all those charges.

Yeah. This, of course, is pure nonsense. Uh, and what we were doing was telling what we thought was the truth. And I think what we said was truthful. Uh, and time has borne that out. Uh, and I think that both Steve and I feel, you know, that we did our duty. We did the right thing. Uh, we did the hard right rather than the easy wrong. Uh, and uh, I think that's sort of the bottom line here.

Yeah. Again, I think that's the point of of real scholarship and critical inquiry. Uh, but yeah, obviously it doesn't always bring in the funding or get you where Samantha Power has gone, where today she's called out, called out for doing, basically not doing what she condemned Clinton-era officials for doing, for for not doing in the face of genocide. Uh, so maybe you, maybe Stephen Walt actually saved his reputation in a way by not going into an administration like the Obama administration. But, uh, let me ask you, just a more basic question. What is the Israel lobby in your view? And has your view of what the Israel lobby is changed since you first published *The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy*?

Yeah, those are great questions. Let me just start by talking about what the lobby is. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations. You were talking about the influence of AIPAC, and I think there's no question that AIPAC is usually influential, but there are all sorts of other groups that wield a lot of power, and there are a lot of individuals uh who wield enormous power. Alan Dershowitz, for example. Uh, Bill Aman, for example. I could go on and on. So it's, it's individuals and organizations who work together in a very loose way uh to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally.

Now, it's very important to understand that it is not a Jewish lobby. And that there are a significant number of Jews who find what the lobby is doing to be reprehensible. Uh, I often point out that almost all of our defenders when we wrote the lobby article and then wrote the lobby book were Jews. They weren't the goy. The goy had their head down in the foxhole. We were defended by Jews. That included people like you, people like Glenn Greenwald, especially Tony Judt, and especially, especially Phil Weiss. Uh, so it's not a Jewish lobby, but there's no question that there are a large number of Jews in that lobby who wield enormous influence. Furthermore, there are Christians or non-Jews who are powerful players in the lobby. Uh, and I would include Mike Huckabee in that category, or the Reverend John Hagee. Uh, these are very influential people who are basically Christian evangelicals who are profoundly committed to Israel. And in some cases, those Christian evangelicals are more supercharged about supporting Israel than Jews in the lobby are. It's really quite remarkable, and you see that when you listen to Mike Huckabee talk. So the lobby um is this loose coalition of individuals um and organizations that is very effective at influencing US foreign policy. There's just nothing like it. And that's why Steve and I like to say that, uh, if you look at the historical record, there is simply no other case that even comes close to this one. And what I mean by that is because of the lobby, the United States effectively supports Israel unconditionally. No matter what Israel does, we support it. This is truly remarkable. This tiny country has this outsized influence in the United States. But moreover, even if it was a big country, we can't find a big country that's ever had this kind of influence in the United States. You just don't see it happen. And then the $64,000 question is, why does it happen? And people in the lobby like to argue it's because Israel is a strategic asset. The fact is, as you well know, uh, Israel is, if anything, a strategic liability. And then when that argument fails, people will say, "We're doing it for moral reasons." That's an almost impossible argument to make today. And it was an almost impossible argument to make when we made the argument uh in 2006 and 2007. It's not for moral reasons or strategic reasons that we have this unparalleled relationship. It is in large part because of the power of the lobby, which is truly remarkable. Uh, so that's the answer to your first question. The answer to your second question, which is a fascinating question, is how does the situation today compare to the situation when we wrote the book? Uh, you know, we made all these arguments, and how have they worn with the passage of time? Well, the first point I would make, Max, is that when we wrote the book, I, it was, you know, uh, the arguments that we were making were arguments that few people had made and very few people had heard. So, in a very important way, uh, we cut the corridor. We, we opened this whole subject up to debate. And there was never any question that we were really going to get uh a lot of mud on us because we were cutting the corridor and people in the lobby would go to enormous lengths to smear us. But I think that with the passage of time, uh, I think it's quite clear that if anything, all we exposed was the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah. I think if we had really had access uh to how these people operate uh in the lobby and how the organizations operate, uh, we would have needed maybe four volumes to tell the story. And I think, by the way, Max, you see this in the Epstein papers, because Steve and I come up in the Epstein papers, and what you see is that Alan Dershowitz, uh, who was one of our principal adversaries soon after the article came out in the LRB, uh, was working with Jeffrey Epstein uh to smear us and to do great damage to our reputation. We had no idea that was the case. I'm not sure we even knew who Jeffrey Epstein was uh when the lobby article came out in 2006. But nevertheless, you see the lobby at work uh with regard to our situation and all sorts of other situations inside the Epstein papers. So I'm just saying that if you know, you look at what we wrote uh in 2006, 2007, that's the tip of the iceberg. Uh, and uh, I think at this point in time, our argument is just not that controversial, and we are less controversial because of what we said back then than we were at the time.

Yeah, I think today it might have passed without notice. Um, you had *The Israel Lobby*, or the the lobby documentary series that was produced for Al Jazeera, which I think proved everything you were saying through a hidden camera investigation by the reporter James Kleinfeld. I actually played a role as a consultant on that, kind of helped conceive the idea, and, you know, James Kleinfeld posing as Tony Just did the rest and inserted himself into the Israel Project in Washington, which has folded as a result of this investigation. But the wildest thing about that was that, um, Qatar was under siege by Saudi Arabia at the time, the the state parent of Al Jazeera. And so in order to get themselves out from under this embargo or siege, they started paying people close to Donald Trump, and those people started turning the screws and said, "Well, you have this lobby production that's really upsetting Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein and other people close to Trump. Um, why don't you nuke that film?" And so the Amir declared it a national security threat to publish the film and, you know, leaked. So in nuking that film and suppressing it, it proved that the power of the Israel lobby and its preponderance of force was so extreme it could actually influence a Gulf Sunni monarchy to suppress a film about it. I mean, they weren't even just, you know, they actually had power over Al Jazeera. That's how powerful it was. But I would say updating my own perception of what the Israel lobby is from the time when I first picked picked up your book is that it really is a Zionist. It's a Zionist movement. It's a movement, it's an ideological movement that can't be defined by organizations and is often represented by individuals who obtain influential positions, like Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law. I mean, they're key reasons why this war is taking place. Or Tony Blinken in the uh Biden administration, who comes from sort of the liberal world of the Zionist movement, and whose family was, you know, comes from a line of Israel lobbyists. So, what would, what do you think about that concept that it's actually the Zionist movement and not an actual lobby like the National Rifle Association or, you know, the AARP?

I would call it the Zionist lobby if you don't want to call it the Israel lobby. But I don't think there's a lot of daylight between you and me. And the best example I can use to illustrate that is if you go back to the Clinton administration, uh, when, uh, the Clinton administration was, uh, negotiating, uh, with, uh, uh, the Israelis, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, you remember that at Camp David, uh, in Clinton's last year, uh, as president. Uh, he had two key advisers, Clinton did. Aaron David Miller and, uh, uh, Dennis Ross. And Aaron David Miller quite remarkably later described himself and Ross as Israel's lawyers. Uh, and this is when they were involved in the negotiating process. These were Americans who were working for Clinton, uh, who were trying to negotiate a deal between Arafat and Barak, uh, and they were acting, according to one of them, as Israel's lawyers. This is truly remarkable that Aaron David Miller would say that, and kudos to him for saying it. But I would say to you that if you look at Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, they're Israel's lawyers.

Yep.

There's no difference between them. Uh, and Miller and, uh, Ross. I mean, obviously, they all occupy different positions. Uh, Ross and, uh, Miller had formal positions in the government, and, uh, Kushner and Bannon don't. But in effect, there's just no difference. So I think that the situation you're describing today is the same as the one that we were describing in the book.

Right.

I think what's different today, uh, Max, is I think the context today is very different. And I can say a few words about that. I think how the lobby operates today is fundamentally different, and I think the consequences for the United States are different, and indeed they're worse. But just a couple of words on context, and then you can tell me what you think. I think that since we wrote the book in 2006, Israel has moved in quite profound ways to the right. It has become a much more racist, much more right-wing government. And furthermore, its foreign policy behavior is much more reprehensible now than it was then. And this obviously is reflected in the genocide in Gaza. But, uh, Israel is a much less attractive place today than it was in 2007, 2006, 2007, and therefore it's a harder sell.

What's also happened in the United States is that all sorts of Americans now understand that Israel is not a noble David up against Goliath. Uh, and they understand that Israel has been engaged in a genocide and Israel often does terrible things. So the US political scene, where support for Israel used to be almost axiomatic uh in the public, has diminished. And the situation in Israel itself has changed. And then to add to this context, I think the internet today is just a much more powerful tool for all people than it was in 2006, 2007. So the lobby is operating in a world where it has a very difficult client to defend, which is Israel, and it's dealing with the fact that public opinion in very important ways has shifted against Israel, and it's dealing with the fact that it's much harder to control the discourse today because of the internet than it was back in the day. I mean, the internet was there when we wrote, but it was just coming of age back then. Uh, and the *New York Times*, the *Washington Post*, the *Wall Street Journal*, they held sway in very important ways then, uh, in ways that they don't now. So, it's just a very different world uh that the lobby operates in. And when you look at how the lobby actually operates today compared to how it operated back in 2006, 2007, it's now out in the open in ways that it wasn't then. Lobbies don't want to advertise what they do. They want to work in the back rooms. They want to work quietly. Whether you're the National Rifle Association, the AFL-CIO, or the Israel lobby. Yeah.

The Israel lobby has been forced to operate out in the open in large part because we cut the corridor, and then people like you have come in behind us, and all sorts of other people, and it's just out in the open so people can see what they're doing. And very importantly, they've been forced to engage in smashmouth politics. You can see just how ruthless and mean-spirited the lobby is today. Uh, and that really hurts. Uh, you have to ask yourself how long can they go on behaving like this, especially since they find it almost impossible to silence people like you and people like me. We continue to talk. We have access on platforms like this, and this is just a huge problem for them. Uh, so they have to engage in public fights, and again, they have to engage in smashmouth politics, and that does not work to their advantage. So, it's just a very different situation today uh than the one that existed uh back when we wrote the original article in '06 and then the book in '07.

Yeah, I think it's all too obvious to everyone. When the book came out, there was still a peace process, all this discussion about peace and where will the Israeli state be, and you had all these peace processors going back and forth. And it fueled the false perception that Israel actually sought to establish borders and that that it was not this anachronistic settler-colonial apartheid state, which Palestinians had always told us it was. Now it's very clear there's a, a clownish board of peace which is focused first on how they Gaza concentration camp will be established and who will profit, like Larry Ellison's data centers will come in, where, where will they be? That's the discussion, not where Israel's borders will will be. Greater Israel is now out in the open, whether it's Mike Huckabee saying it, or it's Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, who just last week called for bombing Iran's oil infrastructure, has also said Greater Israel is a biblical area, and while he doesn't believe in the Bible or God, it's where is wherever Israel wants it to be. So that affects the way the lobby functions in the United States. They're not relying as much on consent or duping people through husband support them. I think support for this war on Iran is below 10% according to a new Ipsos poll that I saw among Democrats. So, it's all, they're just operating through pure force and stealth packs and censorship and control over Donald Trump. And I think that makes it so much more obvious. Yet, still there is a perception that the United States is the dog and Israel is the tail. I mean, that was something that was an argument that was pushed by Walter Russell Mead against you, the conservative historian, when he argued that Americans just love Israel. There's no need for a lobby. Americans just love Israel. But now we can see they no longer love Israel. Um, but, you know, I still hear this sometimes from some more like doctrinaire Marxists on the left that Israel is just an extension of American empire. It's little more than an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States, and that it's the United States that's setting the agenda. What do you say to that argument in 2026 as the US wages war with Israel on Iran?

Well, I would note that, uh, my good friend Norman Finkelstein did a podcast the other day that I listened to when I was cooking dinner. And Norman uh was one of those people who believed I was wrong, or Steve and I were wrong in 2006 when we said that uh Israel uh was one of the main driving forces behind uh the.

I've argued with him in public about that as well. Yeah.

And but anyway, he was saying in effect that we might have been wrong then, but he believes we're not wrong with regard to Iran. Uh, and that it's quite clear that uh that the lobby and Israel itself played a critically important role in getting us into the war that we're now in. It's very important to emphasize, Max, that when you talk about the factors that drove the United States into the Iraq war uh back in 2003, or you talk about what factors drove us into this war against Iran, it's obvious that there are a variety of factors that mattered. The question is which factors mattered the most. Uh, and if you go back just to the Iraq war, uh, the basic argument that Steve and I made was that if there had not been pressure from the lobby and from Israel itself, and it's very important to emphasize, there was enormous pressure from Israel to attack Iran, and there was enormous pressure from the lobby, especially from the neoconservatives inside and outside of the lobby, our argument is that the war would not have happened.

And I believe that that's true. And lots of people in effect said that at the time. But of course, once the war went south, the lobby went to enormous lengths to distance itself and to distance Israel from the causes of the war. And here in 2026, it's going to be much more difficult to do that because again, the lobby is out in the open. What's going on with Israel and the United States is out in the open, and it's so obvious that Israel and the lobby played a key role in pushing us into this war. And Norman Finkelstein was in effect saying exactly that uh about what's happening now. Now I want to directly address the question that you raise uh, which is how do I deal with people who say that Israel does our bidding? This is not a case of the tail wagging the dog. The dog gets the tail to do what it wants. Okay. My simple response to that is that if that were true, you would not need a lobby. You would not need this incredibly powerful group of individuals and organizations working overtime to influence American foreign policy. If Israel was such a strategic and moral asset, the government would just axiomatically support Israel, and you wouldn't need a lobby. The reason that you need the lobby is because Israel is a strategic liability and it is a moral liability, and therefore the lobby has to work to get the United States to support Israel. It is the tail that wags the dog.

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, place, I mean, address the the war on the war on Iran. I mean, I think that's the the current context that I think really vindicates your entire thesis. Here's Lindsey Graham.

I go back to South Carolina. I'm asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Mid East. I go back to South Carolina. I'm asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Mid East. I mean, he's been making comment after comment like that. He was trading places with Netanyahu, advising Netanyahu.

Yeah. I mean, it's amazing, Max. He admits that he was advising Netanyahu on how to convince President Trump to attack Iran. This is truly remarkable. And by the way, Lindsey Graham is certainly a member of the lobby, right? It's just important to emphasize that he's like Mike Huckabee.

Yeah.

He's profoundly committed to defending Israel and he's profoundly committed to Prime Minister Netanyahu. And he helped Prime Minister Netanyahu bamboozle President Trump into launching this remarkably foolish attack on Iran. You know, if you look at this case, it, what's really interesting is there's no evidence that anybody inside the administration was pushing for this war except maybe Kushner and Bannon, which of course would support our argument, right? But there's no evidence that Vance was pushing for it. Uh, that even Rubio was pushing for it. He was too busy worrying about colonizing Latin America uh to get involved in a in the decision-making process involving Iran. Uh, so there was no pressure from below. And in fact, uh, General Keane warned him that there was no military option. The National Intelligence Council said, in effect, this is not going to work. So there was real resistance coming from inside the administration and no real proponents that I can see. But who were the proponents inside the United States? All you had to do is read the *Wall Street Journal*, which was a cheerleader for the war.

Yeah.

Brett Stevens, who was a cheerleader for the war. Uh, Lindsey Graham, who was not only a cheerleader for the war but was working carefully with Netanyahu. Right. And then Netanyahu himself. This man has been deeply committed to getting us involved in a war against Iran for decades. The evidence here is just overwhelming.

Yeah.

But you know what's going to happen, Max? What's going to happen is the war is going to go south, or the war has already gone south, and it will steadily go further south. And what will happen is that the lobby will go to enormous lengths to say that Israel and the lobby here in the United States had nothing to do with causing this war. And

Don't tell me that Donald Trump is not an independent variable who can make up his own decision, make his own decisions, because that's what happened here. Trump's responsible, not Israel, not the lobby. But of course, you and I know better, and the evidence is overwhelming in the other direction. And I think their arguments this time will not convince many people.

Yeah. They'll, they'll hone in on Trump's uh demented personality, his claims that he's, which are probably accurate, that he's profiting from high oil prices, his corruption, personalize the entire thing. Oh, maybe according to Rachel Maddow, uh, the, the UAE made in Saudi Arabia made him do it. I don't know. Maybe Russia made him do it. You know, it's anything to muddy the waters, but I think at this point, it's just too obvious. You have even Joe Rogan saying, "Why are we doing this? It seems like Israel dragged us into the war." I mean, it's all just. And actually, going back to that Ipsos poll, a vast majority of Democrats stated that they believe Trump is attending to Netanyahu's interests more than those of the American people, and that this is a war for Israel, whereas most Republicans just simply don't believe that because they're Trump cultists. Uh, Netanyahu made some very revealing comments as well that I think support your thesis in a way that we've never seen before. "This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I proposed, and this is what we shall do." So what I've pledged to do for for attempted to do for 40 years, what is Netanyahu referring to with this 40-year plan, which which Trump is enacting through what Netanyahu calls a coalition? And, you know, is he referencing something like the *Clean Break* document there?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's no question that this, uh, this vision that Netanyahu has is completely consistent with the *Clean Break* doctrine of the uh mid-1990s. I mean, what's going on here, uh, Max, in my opinion, is that Israel is number one interested in creating a greater Israel. Exactly where those borders are, we don't know. But it certainly includes the West Bank and Gaza. Uh, I would argue parts of southern Lebanon and parts of southern Syria as well, and maybe even parts of Jordan and the Sinai. But the Israelis are interested in expanding their borders, number one. And number two, they're very interested in expelling the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and creating an almost purely Jewish state. And then their third objective is to make sure that all of the states in the region are either beholden to the United States. This would include countries like Jordan and Egypt, as you know well. And then the more powerful, the bigger states, the more threatening states are broken up or destroyed. Uh, and what they want to do, the Israelis ultimately in Iran, is do what they did in Syria, which is break Syria apart, wreck Syria. Uh, what they're doing in Lebanon is trying to wreck Lebanon. And I think they've sent messages to the Turks that in the final analysis, they'd like to greatly weaken Turkey, as well as weaken Iran. Uh, and the idea here is that you will then have a benign threat environment or a benign security environment. So often times I will say that Israel's goal and America's goal in Iran is regime change. And people will sometimes correct me and say, "That may be America's goal, but that's not really Israel's ultimate goal. Israel's ultimate goal is to wreck Iran, not simply to get regime change." And they are right. Of course, I focus on regime change because we focus, we, the United States, focus on regime change. And the Israelis talk about that. But their ultimate goal is to wreck Iran, to do to Iran what was done to Syria. And I believe they'd ultimately like to do that to Turkey as well. So that's really what's going on here. That's that's the grand scheme. And Netanyahu has had that blueprint firmly emblazoned in his brain, probably since his father first started educating him, uh, when he was a little boy. And there's nothing that moves him away from that blueprint.

Absolutely. Uh, and I'm glad you also brought up Netanyahu's father, who was sort of a, you know, leading light of Zionist intellectuals arguing that simply there is no place for Jews anywhere in the gentile world and that Israel had to be established, and that there could be no negotiation from that point. It's it's almost like there's, once you establish a state, it's a point of no return towards perpetual war, according to the views of Benjamin Netanyahu's father, who focused on the Spanish Inquisition. Um, so there's a, there's a really, really deep ideological component here to Netanyahu's 40-year plan, which is, uh, it leaves no possibility of peace without total Israeli domination of the region and of Western governments through its lobby. Um, and then I want to bring in Aaron Mate, who's been backstage and is my co-host here at *The Gray Zone*. Aaron has a question for you, Professor Mearsheimer. Hello, Aaron.

Hey, John. Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Um, I wanted to bring in the other major, uh, conflict that the US is fueling, which is the proxy war in Ukraine. And I was curious to get your response to these two clips, which I think are very revealing. So, just, uh, a week or two before Trump launched this regime change war in Iran alongside Israel, the Secretary General of, uh, NATO, Mark Rutte, uh, said this about the purpose of of NATO. "This is exactly, uh, why NATO is there. NATO is there to protect us collectively against any adversary, be it Russia or whoever, or terrorism, but also it is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage." So there's Rutte, the head of NATO, saying that the goal of NATO, yeah, sure, it's about defending us, but it's also about, uh, it's also for the purpose of helping the US project power on the world stage. So the goal of NATO, according to Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, is for the US to project power. And then in hearing from the Trump administration's rationale for trying to, uh, regime change Iran, we've heard all these lies that don't even, we don't have to get into because they've been so incoherent. Nuclear weapons, missiles threatening the US. Everyone knows that's not true. But finally, just yesterday, I think we got an actual assertion of some truth. And this comes from Admiral Brad Cooper, who's the military commander of the war on Iran. And this is what he said about what the purpose of this regime change war is.

"And we remain centered on very clear military objectives in eliminating Iran's ability to project power against Americans and against its neighbors."

So I just thought that's such a revealing contrast. According to Mark Rutte, the goal of NATO, and therefore the Ukraine proxy war, is to help the US project power. And the goal of the war on Iran, according to the commander heading it, is to stop Iran from projecting power in its neighborhood. So we can have military alliances, proxy wars to project power. Other countries like Iran cannot even project power in their own region. And I just, I'm curious your your thoughts on that contrast.

Well, I think that, uh, what's going on here, just with regard to NATO, is that NATO is desperate to find a rationale for its existence. Uh, I think that NATO leaders like Mark Rutte fully understand that the United States would like to pivot out of Europe and pivot to East Asia. And furthermore, the United States is really more concerned about Israel in the Middle East than it is about Europe. So what Mark Rutte is saying is, in effect, that, uh, Europe is a giant aircraft carrier that the United States can use to project power into the Middle East. And I would note that Israel and its supporters fully understand this. It's important to emphasize, and this point is rarely brought up in public discourse about Israel and the lobby, that Israel and the lobby are deeply committed to the United States being militarily involved all over the planet and having a military that is a cocked pistol, because Israel and its supporters want that military to be ready if Israel gets into trouble. The last thing they want is a policy of restraint where the American military comes back to the Western Hemisphere in large part and is not engaging in wars here, there, and everywhere, because then you don't have the cocked pistol, and if Israel gets in trouble, what are they going to do? So it's very important to understand that Israel and the lobby are very aggressive. They are very aggressive in their ambitions, and this includes towards NATO. So Israel is perfectly fine with the idea of NATO expansion, perfectly fine with the idea that the United States uses Europe as a platform, as an aircraft carrier. And Mark Rutte understands this. Mark Rutte understands the power of the lobby in the United States. There's nobody you talk to in any area of the world who doesn't understand that. Uh, in fact, I've talked to some people from the Gulf States who say that if you want to have influence in Washington, you go through the lobby. So, anyway, that's what's going on with Rutte. And with regard to Brad Cooper, who's the CENTCOM commander, he of course understands full well that he has to do Israel's bidding, that he has to understand that Israel's interests and America's interests are synonymous. And therefore, if Iran is a threat to Israel, it's a threat to the United States. People like us like to argue all the time that Iran does not represent a threat to us. It's not a threat to the American national interest. Our vital interests are not at stake here. But you can't say that. You have to equate our interests with Israel's interests. Therefore, we have a vested interest in making sure that Iran is defanged and has no power projection capability whatsoever in the Middle East. This is why the present war is a nightmare for us because it demonstrates that Iran has actually significant power projection capability, and it's tying us into knots. This is bad news. This is not the way the world is supposed to work. The way the world is supposed to work is that no country in the Middle East except for Israel is

allowed to have power projection capability. And any areas of the world like Europe or NATO that have power projection capability can have that as long as that power projection capability supports American and Israeli interests together. And of course, again, for the lobby and, uh, for many Americans at this point in time, uh, there's no daylight between Israel's interests and America's interests.

Just my final point on this. If you're Brad Cooper or you're any American policymaker and you try to put daylight between Israel's interests and America's interests, you're either going to be fired immediately or fired in a week. Uh, that's the only interesting question. You just can't make those kinds of arguments. You have to tow the line. And towing the line means saying that Israel's interests are synonymous with America's interests.

Yeah. Uh, or or or, uh, supersede America's interests. This is Bradley Cooper's predecessor, Michael Carrilla. Uh, in the add-on owned Israel Hyome, Korilla forged unbreakable military bonds that proved decisive in Iran confrontation and regional defense operations. My mother always told me that my support for Israel, that for my support for Israel, God will repay me, he once said. And they called Carrilla Israel's favorite general. He recently spoke, I think, at the, uh, Israel American Council run by Miriam Add. So it's like the head of Sencom basically bowing before this tiny little apartheid colony 6,000 miles away is a Bradley Cooper has to follow in his footsteps.

I want, I wanted to ask you though, uh, about your broader theory, uh, before you wrote The Israel Lobby, that, you know, you, you, that helps inform your understanding of the Ukraine proxy war and so many other conflicts, the US relations with China, which is sort of great power competition, that the relationships between powerful states defines international relations. How does that influence your understanding of the actions the US is taking toward Iran right now, visa v Israel?

Well, you know, when Steve and I, who are card-carrying realists, wrote The Israel Lobby article and The Israel Lobby book, uh, a number of, uh, our colleagues in the field said, "Do you realize that the thesis in your book on The Israel Lobby contradicts your realist theory?" And they expected us to say no, it doesn't. And we would say, it absolutely contradicts our theory. Right? Our theory is that the United States should behave in strategically smart ways on the world stage, and it's great power to great power relations that matter the most. And there's no way the United States should let a minor power like Israel get in the way of behaving in strategically smart ways. But if you think about it, the argument that Steve and I are making is that our relationship with Israel is not in our strategic interest. Remember, I said before, Israel is an albatross around our neck. That contradicts the basic thesis of my book and my writings more generally on great power politics, and Steve's as well. But it just goes to show you how enormously powerful the lobby is.

I mean, just Max and Aaron, just think about the fact that the United States recognizes that if it has a peer competitor in the international system that it should worry about, it's China, right? And this is why Hillary Clinton enunciated in 2011 that we were going to pivot to Asia. China is seen as the most important threat to the United States inside of the national security community. Well, if you look at these various wars that we're fighting, uh, in the Middle East, and the first one of course was the 12-day war last June, and now you look at this conflict, it is seriously eroding our capability to contain China in East Asia. We're pulling THAADs and Patriots out of South Korea and Japan. This is truly remarkable. We have been shortchanging East Asia. We have been shortchanging our containment policy in East Asia for quite a while now because of Israel. And the situation is now only getting worse. From a strategic point of view, from a realist point of view, which of course is what Steve and I, uh, purvey in our writings, this makes no sense at all. So our relationship with Israel is a really cockamamie relationship that is not in the American national interest.

Yeah. I, I, if I were an imperialist from a realist perspective, I would be furious right now about what the US is doing because it looks like the US is on the precipice of losing its foothold in the Persian Gulf and losing all of its forward position bases that encircle Iran.

You know who, you know who the person who reflects this dissatisfaction with what's going on is Elbridge Colby.

Yeah. Because Elbridge Colby is someone who wants to contain China. Elbridge Colby has no interest in remaining in Europe and keeping, uh, Europe as a giant aircraft carrier, and he certainly has no interest in fighting wars against Iran. He understands this is counterproductive if you're interested in containing China. But you notice, good article could be written on this. The lobby has gone to great lengths to go after Elbridge Colby, just as they've gone to great lengths to go after JD Vance, because the lobby understands that Vance and Colby are two people who think that it's not in the American national interest to support Israel. Hook, line, and sinker.

And we should mention in this connection that when Tulsi Gabbard tried to bring on Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, uh, who you know, John, um, yes, as her top advisor, the lobby essentially blocked his candidacy.

Oh, yeah. The, I think the best case of this going back, uh, to when we wrote the book, uh, is Chas Freeman.

Yeah.

Uh, I mean, Barack Obama was going to make Chas Freeman, I think, head of the National Intelligence Council, if my memory is correct.

Correct.

Uh, and they went to enormous lengths, uh, to prevent that, and Chas, uh, withdrew his name as a result. I mean, Chas is a remarkably smart man, uh, remarkably experienced. He's a person of great integrity. He and I, by the way, disagree completely on the whole issue of containing China. So, it's not like I agree with him on every issue, but man, when you start talking about the kind of people you would want to have at the highest level positions in any administration, Chas Freeman would be at the top of my list. Uh, but the lobby killed him, uh, in the early days of the Obama administration. Uh, and, uh, you know, they do this sort of thing all the time. Uh, and

Well, yeah, now, now they're sort of trying to retrench their position through Mom Donnie, and they're attacking Mom Donnie's wife for liking comments around October 7th that were not necessarily celebrating it, but they're framing it as a celebration of the worst terror attack in history. And what they're trying to do is get, you know, get a casualty in the New York mayor's office that will demonstrate that no US public official should, even if they win, dare to criticize Israel or, or harshly condemn Israel, because they're afraid of what's to come. So, I think they've, they've lost a lot of ground, but they're still fighting this fight to take out anyone associated with any public official who, who, you know, remotely edges towards our, you know, audience's position. Uh, and they're trying to make an example of them. So, it just seems like it seems endless. They will never ever accept defeat. Uh, I, how, how, I guess my question is, how can this, how can the, how can, how can we, um, solve the, this problem of the Israel lobby? Is it simply by registering AIPAC as a foreign agent? Like, what is the remedy?

Well, just very quickly, the two words I would use to describe the lobby, which I think fit nicely with what you were just saying, Max, uh, those two words are relentless and ruthless.

Yeah.

Those are the two words that always pop into my mind.

And rich. Endless money.

Yeah. Yeah. Money really matters here. Uh, look, the truth is that there is going to be a huge battle over the lobby and over the US-Israeli relationship moving forward. How it all plays out, I think, is very hard to say, but it's all out in the open now. And what's happening in the Iran war, as we described it, is recognized by all sorts of people. And, you know, it's not just the three of us who are out there now exposing what the lobby's up to and how it's not in America's strategic or moral interest. People like Tucker Carlson.

Yeah.

Megan Kelly are now involved. And, you know, I like to refer to people who cross the Rubicon. Uh, there are a lot of people who will lightly criticize the lobby or lightly criticize Israel, but they won't do more than put an ankle in the water. Uh, and then there is that actually quite large body of people who've now crossed the Rubicon. Uh, and that includes almost everybody who appears on the judge's show weekly, and of course, that's the three of us plus a lot of others.

Yeah. Uh, but it also includes someone like Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly. And I think once you cross the Rubicon, you can't go back over to the other side. And for example, we've all crossed the Rubicon. We're committed on this issue. And, uh, and I think more and more people will cross the Rubicon. You know, it'll be interesting to see what happens with people like Joe Rogan over time. Uh, and, uh, and

And the Democratic Party as well, where supporting Israel is becoming increasingly untenable if you want to be an elected politician.

Yeah. I mean, look at Gavin Newsom. It's kind of hard to believe what he's been saying. You know, going back to the top of the show when we were talking about the differences between when Steve and I wrote the article and the book and now, uh, I think you see there's a world of difference in terms of the context. And I think the Gavin Newsom business is evidence of that. Uh, and I think so I think this fight's going to take place over time and how it plays out is just very difficult to say. I, I would note that if the Iran war goes south, this will be terrible news for the lobby. Uh, because the lobby, uh, has played a key role in pushing this war forward. It's been the lobby and Prime Minister Netanyahu, as we said before, who have been the two principal forces driving this war, uh, and convincing Trump to do it. And if it turns into a fiasco, that's going to be a huge problem for the lobby. Uh, and, uh, so I don't know how it's going to play itself out, but I think it's imperative that all of us and others, uh, who have crossed the Rubicon continue to focus on this, on this issue, pay a lot of attention to it, and tell the American people as loudly and clearly as we can what's going on.

You know, I just want to make one other quick point here that I don't want to lose sight of, and that is that we talk about the strategic consequences of this. You know, getting involved in wars like the Iraq war and the Iran war and the genocide and so forth and so on. But it's also just very important to emphasize that what the lobby is doing, uh, threatens to undermine liberal values here in the United States. Just take the whole issue of free speech. I think a very important argument could be made that the greatest threat to free speech in the United States today, certainly on university and college campuses, is the Israel lobby. Uh, because the lobby goes to enormous lengths to shut down discourse on Israel. Uh, anybody who is critical of Israel today, uh, is likely to be smeared and have his or her career ruined. The lobby will go to great lengths to do that. So people self-censor. It's really quite remarkable. Shibli Talami, uh, at the University of Maryland, has done surveys of academics that show that, you know, around 80% of academics self, uh, self, uh, they, uh, silence themselves. They, uh, on the issue of Israel, they're just afraid to speak up. It's really quite remarkable, and this situation is only likely to get worse because the lobby has to engage in smashmouth politics more and more, and this is going to undermine, uh, liberal values at home.

I've always said that the Israel lobby is the greatest threat to free speech in the US because while there might be, there may be, you know, Christian conservative forces that want to ban certain books in red states, they always face a very strong challenge when they do so. When the Israel lobby does it, it's everyone, you know, even liberals are afraid to speak up. And, you know, the, the challenge to the deportation of the deportation orders and arrest of Mahmud Khalil, or, um, the woman from Tufts University who co-authored an op-ed criticizing Israel, uh, what's her name, Rasha Ozurk? I mean, you didn't see a very strong challenge from the liberal class to this obvious assault on free speech, where people were actually being arrested for what they said and ordered out of the country when they had green cards and visas. Now, it's more, you know, you're starting to see, you know, attacks on it in the New York Review of Books. As Trump weakens and it's becoming more of a partisan issue, but they have just run through, they have just shredded the Constitution without a challenge. And so, yeah, I think the, the most important factor now is whether the liberal establishment is willing to recognize this, because it's the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights that has granted them their, uh, ability to project power around the world behind the aegis of the US as a shining city on the hill. And Trump has shredded that. You're going to see the Democrats try to come back and, you know, remake America's image and declare that we have rights again so that we can continue to arm Ukraine. I mean, will that even be possible after what we're witnessing now?

I just want to make an additional point to what you were saying, uh, and talk about the genocide in Gaza. University campuses, college campuses are filled with, uh, human rights advocates. Universities and colleges, the political center of gravity in colleges and universities is far to the left of center.

Uh, and, uh, as a realist, I can tell you, I have, uh, been criticized over the years by all sorts of human rights activists.

Yeah. Uh, in the academic world. So here you have a genocide in Gaza after October 7th. What's truly remarkable is hardly any of these advocates of human rights, these human rights advocates speak out against the genocide. And the paramount example of that is Samantha Power, who wrote this very important book on genocide and lamented the fact that, you know, Americans had not moved to shut down various genocides or post various genocides in the past, and how this was unconscionable, unthinkable, and should never happen again. And here she is in the Biden administration, which is complicit in a genocide, and she is, in effect, complicit in the genocide. Truly remarkable. And it's realists like me and Steve Walt who are actually speaking out about the horrors of the genocide and criticizing the Israelis for what they're doing and criticizing the American government for being complicit. Truly remarkable.

Yeah. What's going on here is that people are afraid of the lobby. They're afraid to criticize Israel. If Samantha Power were to criticize Israel, say that it's conducting a genocide, or if she didn't believe it was a genocide, if she believed that it was close to being a genocide, if she criticized Israel, she'd never be Secretary of State someday. She'd never get promoted. She'd probably be fired from the administration. And it's this set of incentives that cause people not to criticize Israel when you would expect them to criticize Israel. Again, I, I'm truly amazed at how little criticism there was of the genocide.

Yeah. This is the crime of all crimes. Here I am surrounded by all these liberal IR theorists who believe that we should purvey human rights around the world. Fine, but when you see a genocide, you should be first in line to criticize it. Shouldn't be people like me and Steve Walt who are first in line. No, I think the, the Samantha P's presence in the institutions discredits them along with the genocide that they just, they supported. Watching the EU leadership refuse to condemn the bombing of the girls' school in Minab, Iran, but condemning Iran, it's just like Kalis and Vanderlayan, it's just too obvious now that they have no credibility left and they never will retain it. And I remember going back to, uh, when Samantha Power was vying to become US Ambassador to the UN, she enlisted Shmooli Bautia as her fixer because she had previously criticized Israel a few times and she needed to get on the good side of the Israel lobby and the Zionist movement. So Shmoolie was the guy who would appear with her everywhere when she would go meet with senators and say, "I pledge to do what I won't, I won't preach human rights on Israel. I'm going to be Israel's slave at the UN." And now here, here she is again. I mean, it should have been so discrediting for her, but you are the one who's paid the price along with Steven Walt for, you know, being out ahead of the pack and stating the obvious fact that the Israel lobby existed, that there even was an Israel lobby, that it was powerful, and that it, that the United States does have interests, and the Israel lobby's own objectives contravened those interests.

Uh, I know we've, uh, we've kept you for about an hour. I said it was going to be a half hour, so I want to be mindful of your time, but Aaron, if you have any, if you want to ask any last question or final comments.

I wanted to tell a quick anecdote about Samantha Power. She was just recently speaking at the University of Notre Dame, and somebody in the audience asked her about her silence on the Gaza genocide, and she said, "Well, you know, uh, when you're serving a president, unfortunately, you don't make foreign policy." And that was her excuse, that, you know, she was just, she was just following orders, essentially, that there's limits on what she could do as the head of USAID. Then the same answer, though, a few minutes later, she was reflecting on her time in the Obama administration when there were allegations, uh, of a chemical attack by the Assad government in Syria, which I think based on the evidence was a false flag. But that aside, and, um, Samantha Power said that at the time she was lobbying Obama to bomb Syria over that allegation. So, I thought that was such a revealing answer. When there's a genocide going on, Samantha Power's excuse is, well, I'm not the president, so I can't do anything. When there's the possibility of bombing a foreign country, then she's actively lobbying the president to carry out a strike. So, in fact, when you are in government, you can do something if you want to. You can, uh, advocate policy. She just chose to advocate military strikes, not, not stopping a genocide in Gaza.

You know, Aaron, just to make, uh, her case even worse, I bet that she did not even go to Biden and plead with him to stop the genocide. In other words, she didn't resign. Okay. Uh, but did she go to Biden and say, "This is a genocide, or it's approaching a genocide, and we have to stop it," and he overruled her? Did that happen? I bet that didn't happen. And I think that's even more damning. That's additional damning evidence about her behavior. Now, I may be wrong. We may find out that she went and protested, but I think if she went and protested, she would tell us that.

Yeah.

In fact, she's not telling us that. Tells us that she didn't go and protest. This is, I think the word I would use to describe it is reprehensible. Yeah. And we also know that experts at her agency wrote reports saying that Israel was deliberately starving the people of Gaza, blocking aid, and Anthony Blinken essentially kept those reports from being made public. I never heard Samantha Power advocating for her own staffers and the evidence that they marshaled.

She's really a representative of that whole class of liberal IR people, uh, the humanitarian interventionists. And, uh, they're, they're, they're discredited at this point. I don't know who else there could be who could come into a Democratic administration, though, and that's the issue. But John, uh, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. Um, we'll, we'll, we'll let you go unless there's anything you want to add.

Just make one final point, Max. And

Yeah, please.

That is that, you know, a lot of people said, "Wow, this is terrific research. You really, uh, uh, found something that nobody knew about and so forth and so on." I, I think in a very important way, we were just stating the obvious facts. There was no great research involved here. It was easy to figure out what the lobby was doing. Uh, and, uh, what we did was we actually told the story, whereas others had been unwilling to tell the story up until that point, or most others had been unwilling to tell the story. But the story was right there. The facts were right there. Uh, you didn't have to be a genius to figure out what was going on. Uh, and, uh, it was just a case of being willing to step up to the plate, and, and, and we did that. And, and thankfully, I think it, you know, opened a crack, and all sorts of other people, you two included, have poured through that crack, and, uh, uh, and hopefully more people will pour through that crack, or to use the words I used before, cross the Rubicon.

Well, you, you definitely stepped up to the plate and delivered, and, uh, 20 years later, the book is a classic. I think it's, it, it's above criticism, while so many other books by your critics have just, they just fall flat today. They look discredited. So, thank you for your service, Professor John Mearsheimer, and thanks for joining us at The Gray Zone. We would love to have you back, uh, in the very near future.

Thank you for having me, Max and Aaron. And, uh, I look forward to talking to you many more times, uh, in the years ahead.

All the best.

All the best to you.

Good seeing you.

See you, John.

Bye.

All right. That was great. That was epic. Uh, March 23rd, I believe, is the anniversary of the publication of The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books, after it was spiked by The Atlantic after initial interest from its editors, who are very different from the Atlantic editors today. Actually, not even as, uh, rigidly pro-Israel as they are today. It's run by Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli prison guard. It's now editor-in-chief. The Atlantic is essentially a pro, like, an Israeli propaganda waritzer.

Yeah. That's why I don't refer to it as The Atlantic. I call it the IDF Prison Guard Gazette.

Yeah. The, uh, I don't know. Yeah, it has some of that transatlantic smug opinion mixed in with

Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, please. It's the epitome of, uh, transatlantic smugness. It's got everybody who represents that, uh, sort of NATO-worshipping elite liberal class, you know, and Applebaum at the helm and many more.

Yeah.

Their readership doesn't really support Israel anymore. Like, boomer libs are against this war. It's just too odious and too obvious. Trump has destroyed all this. War is, uh, almost like a final blow, and we're just getting started. And I would say, going back to the Israel Lobby thesis, I think you could, uh, if, if you were smart enough, you could project forward and imagine an event like October 7th happening, because the Israel Lobby prevented any possibility, and it existed to prevent any possibility for Palestinian sovereignty, for Palestinian state, which would require the indefinite occupation, uh, ethnic cleansing, and besieging of the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza, where the majority of them were refugees, and they're not just going to sit there and take it. And what October 7th did was it unleashed a historic turning point, which exposed Israel for what it truly was, a genocidal apartheid entity that had no interest in peace or establishing borders. It destroyed Israel's propaganda. Uh, it, it exposed Israel in this, in the social media, extremely online era, and it also rendered inevitable a war with Iran. Yaha Senior actually believed that, I, I think part of his calculus was that there would be a regional war. And I think the question lingers, would it have been, from the perspective of the Axis of Resistance, a wiser move to have initiated what's taking place right now at that time when Israel was caught on its back foot? And I think, you know, historians will debate that. I think it, from the Iranian perspective, it really took launching several true promise operations to understand how to effectively confront Israel and establish parity. And from the point of view of Hezbollah, uh, they were put in a very difficult quandry by the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Hassan Nasrallah sought to avoid escalation that would draw in the entire Lebanese state, but would, but also sought to take pressure off of Hamas and Gaza and wound up paying with his own life. And now we see a new generation rise in Hezbollah and within the Iranian, and particularly IRGC command structure, that has learned these lessons and is now waging war with the gloves off. They obviously don't have the military strength of Israel and the US, just the sheer firepower. But where we are right now is at a historic pivot point, an inflection point. And Iran has the strategic advantage and the political advantage and the economic advantage right now, and I think has been vastly underestimated and misunderstood by its adversaries. Uh, and that's, and that's something that, uh, I mean, where we are right now, I think, is going to shape the next 10 or 20 years of great power relations. What do you think, Aaron?

Yeah, Iran is fighting for its existence, whereas the US and Israel are just fighting for domination, for hegemony. So,

Yeah.

When you have different motives like that, um, Iran will have thought this through, I think, a lot more carefully than the US and Israel did, which are just drunk on their own supremacy. Iran's obviously prepared for this. Um, you know, your comment about October 7th, that's what I never understood about Hamas's decision is that, you know, why do this at a time when they didn't have buy-in from Hezbollah or Iran? But I guess Hamas might have thought that that, that day would never come. Although, if I understood Nasrallah, he always understood that there would be a time, uh, to have the sort of final battle with Israel. He just didn't think that they were ready. Um, but yeah, I mean, on the issue of Iran, Iran's fighting for its existence, and they've thought out for a long time how to do that because they knew that this day was coming. Uh, they, you know, like all this talk from Israel and the US that Iran's been an imminent threat for 47 years. No, the US and Israel have been thinking about how to destroy Iran for 47 years, and Iran's had 47 years to think about how to respond to that. And now you're seeing it now. And one of their ways of, um, pushing back, of resisting, is, as you said, despite their military disadvantages, they do have economic leverage. We're seeing that now with the, with the Strait of Hormuz. Uh, Iran is now, uh, exporting more oil than they did before Trump launched this war, whereas, uh, uh, the US is paying the price, or the US is paying, is suffering consequences economically with higher energy prices. And, um, that's the question for me is, you know, I agree with you, economically, politically, strategically, Iran is winning. Will that be enough to overcome their military disadvantages, which is all essentially the US and Israel have? Is their just pathological commitment to aggression? They have all the money and all the firepower in the world.

Well, I think Iran is attacking the two vulnerabilities of US empire. And we'll, we'll cover this. We'll sort of section this out and cover it in a series of segments. First, it's attacking the forward position US military bases, the bases that have encircled it. And it, in turn, it's, it's sort of a strategic jiu-jitsu. Those bases are running out of interceptors, and they're being hit day after day with Shahed drones, uh, and ballistic missiles, and they're causing US casualties. They're forcing evacuations. US diplomatic personnel are being evacuated. Iran is hitting residential towers. They have the intelligence and the reconnaissance to be able to determine where US personnel, diplomats, CIA spooks, and soldiers are staying, and they're hitting them with relative precision. Uh, they said they would do this, but the US launched this war anyway. And now the US is in retreat, which is why a third aircraft carrier is being introduced into the theater of conflict because it's difficult to launch planes from airstrips that are under attack. The US Fifth Fleet naval base in Bahrain is getting hammered day after day. And then the second vulnerability is the US economy, the global economy, which is the basis for US hegemony, and the Strait of Hormuz is the choke point for causing an economic catastrophe globally. And the Trump administration has no answer for this at all. No answer.

Here's Donald Trump being asked about the Strait of Hormuz, if I can load this. And, you know, you, you should, it's worth paying attention to his comments about Hormuz and the comments by his energy secretary, Chris Wright, because they're delusional.

Riding free range over that country. And now we're going to look very strongly at the Straits. The Straits are in great shape. We've knocked out all of their boats. They have some missiles, but not very many. I think we're in very good. We're in very good shape. The main thing is we have to win this thing. Win it quickly, but win it. And there are many people. I'm just watching, uh, some of the news. Most people say it's already been won. It's just a question of when, when do we stop. We don't want to let it regrow, and ideally would like to see somebody in there that knows what they're doing. In other words, they can build a country.

I mean, it's absolutely delusional. We have control over the Straits. Uh, you know, and he's still talking about a Venezuela scenario. He's falling back on the, uh, original talking points and the mentality that he went in with, which have already dissolved. And here's the reality inside the, uh, in the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, this was a US tanker yesterday. Boom. Up in flames. Oh, we took out the Iran's navy. Trump was joking about blowing up a

Iranian frigate that was coming back from naval exercises in India with no weapons, killing over 100 sailors, refusing to pick them up as they drowned. He thinks taking out naval ships,

The answer to the Strait of Hormuz when Iran has drone boats. I mean, drone, it has drones. It has torpedoes of its own. It has

Uh, it has up to 5,000 naval mines.

Yeah.

Including like limpet mines and smart mines that can actually be moved.

Yeah.

That are impossible to de-mine.

And mobile rocket launchers that it can fire from its shores because it's right there. Which are

Fire mines. They can launch mines into the Strait of

Hormuz. So, so Trump is bragging cuz he blew up some unarmed Iranian Navy ship, uh, off the coast of India, as if that's going to impact Iran's ability to control the Straits of Hormuz. It's completely clueless. And just, I also have to say, there's a last, he talks about someone who can help rebuild the country as he's destroying it, as he's, as him and Israel have targeted more than 17,000 civilian sites.

Yeah. So far, at least according to the Financial Times.

Well, it's really the economy that will decide this. Fertilizer prices are going up by something like 30%, which means US producers are getting hammered. To simply produce farm goods to bring to market is that much more expensive. In Los Angeles, there's one gas station that now is selling regular gas for over $8 a gallon. Gas prices nationally are going up, uh, by, oh, they're they're starting to go up over 50%. The average gas price in Southern, in the Los Angeles, in Los Angeles County is over $5. Um, oil is now $100 a barrel. It could go to $200 a barrel if this continues for another month. And there's no reason to believe it will not. This can cause inflation. The affordability crisis is already hurting Trump. And so I think Trump has just already lost the war politically. He has no solution to this. Chris Wright, his energy secretary, who is a scam artist, as I'll explain momentarily, has said that they'll open up the Strait of Hormuz and ships will start moving in two to three weeks. In two to three weeks, what will oil prices be? And that's not even true. And so here, the talking points have gone out to all of Trump's lackeys, like he's lost Tucker Carlson, he's lost Megan Kelly, Laura Ingram on Fox News is now moving away from Trump and starting to criticize the war. Ann Coulter are slamming the war. Anyone who's remotely independent within the Republican commentariat or the right-wing commentariat is moving away from Trump and moving away from this war, and everybody else is just a paid puppet. And so the paid puppets and the tools and the Trump administration flacks have new talking points. And this is what they're telling the bootlicking MAGA base that is following Trump around the country to see Jake Paul on a national short bus tour.

This is a short-term disruption for the long-term gain.

Short-term pain for the long-term gain.

Short-term pain be for long-term gain. We're going to have some short-term pain, uh, with long-term gain.

Short-term pay for a long-term gain.

Some short-term pain. Yes. But we've got some long-term gain.

Short-term spike for a long-term gain.

Some short-term pain for American consumers. We may have to deal with that in the short term.

Short-term and temporary.

Temporary. Short-term pain.

It's going to suck in the short term.

Some short-term pain. Short-term pain. We have to focus on the short term.

Short-term.

Short-term. Short-term. Short-term. Long-term.

Short-term lift.

Hopefully, this is a short-term pain.

Short-term is highly outweighed of the long-term benefit.

Some short-term pain for the long-term gain.

Short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain.

This is

It kind of reminds me of like flatten the curve from the COVID era, or like stop the spread. Flatten. We will flatten the curve. We need only two more weeks. I'm Anthony Fauci. Yeah. But what is the long-term gain?

Exactly. What's the long-term gain? Uh, Israel gets to steal more Middle Eastern land with less resistance. I mean, that, that's like they can't even explain that because they can't even explain why they went to war. They've offered up the most ridiculous set of excuses I've ever seen, all of which are in contradiction. Trump said Iran was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. His White House press secretary, Karen Levit, said that Trump felt as if Iran was going to attack US troops, and that was based on a conversation with Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, who doesn't even have a government position. And then, and then like Marco Rubio, he tried out the thing, well, Israel was going to attack, so we had to attack. Then he walked that back. And then he said, well, because Iran was building a missile shield to protect itself so it could build a nuclear weapon in the future, which doesn't even make sense because, uh, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, and, B, if they tried to have one, then the US and Israel would just nuke them anyway. So a missile shield wouldn't even protect them. It's so incoherent. And so now they're trying to put forward a long-term gain that they can't even articulate either, because it's all just so transparently for the gain of Israel. The long-term gain was supposed to be, oh, we come in and assassinate the Ayatollah, the Iranian people rise up, another neocon fantasy, and then they get, uh, Iran, the Persian Deli Rodriguez, to negotiate all these deals. That's how stupid they are. Of course, the, the, the lemmings surrounding Trump are much more devious and understood that that would never happen. They just wanted to drag the US into Netanyahu's 40-year plan. But Trump, he's, he clearly believed that he's that stupid. Netanyahu finally found someone stupid enough to do it. He's very, I mean, he's, he's unbelievably stupid. He's possibly stupider than George W. Bush. He's just a lot more amusing. He's like, he'd be like a great guy to, well, you know, Bush was pretty amusing. I'd probably like, you know, you know, if Bush had never been president, he probably would have been more fun to hang out with than Al Gore, like when Bush was drinking or something. But I mean, these are deeply stupid people. And not just that, Trump, the Trump administration is the most corrupt. It just, there's nothing to compare it to. The Trump administration is the most corrupt administration in American history. It's like it makes Hunter Biden look like Ralph Nader.

Oh, for sure.

This is, uh,

It's not even close.

This is, you know, a lot of people don't see the subtext here, but this is the energy secretary, Chris Wright, who of course, he's just an industry guy. He ran some oil service company before he came in. So he's going to go back into the oil industry, and he's milking this war. A post by US energy secretary Chris Wright saying that the US Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz was deleted on Tuesday, minutes after his account had posted it. Why? Why did he do that? And why does he keep saying the Strait of Hormuz would open? Because he brings, he brought oil prices down to $80 a barrel. Again, Brent crude. And then once he deleted his post, it went back up to 100. So we have to assume that Chris Wright and a bunch of administration insiders had placed a put on Brent crude, and were actually profiting from his public messaging, and that they're moving markets through their false, mendacious public messaging to profit from the crisis, the oil crisis, the kind of new Suez crisis that Trump created with his war for Israel.

Donald Trump came out today and confirmed that.

Yeah.

This is wild.

The United States is the large, this is Donald J. Trump. The United States is the largest oil producer in the world by far. So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.

Okay.

Who's we? Who's we here?

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's like how he said he didn't want to lower, you know, didn't want to make homes more affordable to own because it would hurt homeowners.

So, we is, we is the Epstein class. We is the elite crony world of Scrooge McDuck billionaires who paper their homes like, who, who like insulate their homes with bulk-bought books by Donald Trump Jr. Like, we are the people who own poly market. We is this like cretinous class of 0.1 percenters. And the Americans are getting hurt by what I would call the Trump war for Israel tax, or twit. You're going at the pump because Trump waged a war for Israel, and he was paid and bribed to do it by Miriam M. It's like when Joe Biden launched the proxy war in Ukraine, and then energy prices, uh, skyrocketed because he was cutting off Russian energy. He, he started calling it Putin's price hike, right? It didn't land. It didn't land because it was Biden's price hike. And twit. That's great. Trump's war for Israel tax. That's exactly right. Um, people will have to pay the price because Trump decided to do Netanyahu's bidding. This is not even a question. I mean, there's really nothing else you can do at this point but pray. But pray that somehow. Oh, wait. They're praying in the White House.

Pray for your grace and your protection over him.

I pray for your grace and protection over our troops and all of our men.

This is their, uh, strategy meeting in the White House on the war. They're, they're trying to determine what the objective is here. The strength that he needs to lead our great nation as we come back to one nation under indivisible with liberty and

Laying hands on, we pray your heavenly blessings.

A guy who has laid hands on many women.

Maybe against their own wishes. You can see kind of like that's Paula White, who's called for religious holy war, directly laying hands on Trump. But here, to the far right, if you look, like right here, all the way on the right, that, that short little guy, that's Gary Bauer. Uh, he's one of the original architects of Christians United for Israel and the whole Christian Zionist alliance with AIPAC. His campaigns were paid for by pro-Israel billionaires. And, uh, oh, that's sorry, Kianne Pene is laying hands on Trump. Um, yeah, I don't pay as much attention to the Christian right as I used to. But that's, that's that, that's where they're at right now. And meanwhile, Marco Rubio is saying that what, you know, we have to go to war with Iran because they're run by theocrats. We can't even make deals with them because they're just, uh, driven by extreme, uh, Islamism and all that stuff like that. Meanwhile,

Trump's surrounded by people.

Uh, who are driven by evangelical extremism, and they talk openly. I mean, like Lindsey Graham even said before Trump kicked this off, he said that this is a religious war.

I made an error just now. Uh, not Kianne Pene, that that was Paula White, I think. And Kianne Pene is kicked off of the, um, religious commission on religious freedom, which is actually a commission on Zionist control, because she criticized Zionism ahead of this war. Uh, Dan Patrick is the chair of that commission, and he just oversaw a giant donation to TPUSA, uh, which is now edited, uh, refusing to, which is publishing statements by Charlie Kirk supporting the, supporting, uh, US conflict with Iran before he woke up to the whole thing. So TPUSA is basically assassinating the legacy of Charlie Kirk under the influence of this same Christian Zionist right. This is a, this is a force within the Trump administration that helps also explain why this war is taking place. And you, you, you cited something by Marco Rubio, who is fond of quoting biblical verses when he was in the Senate. He declared that the, um, conflict with Iran is a religious war, and that they only aim to bring back the Mahdi, and that we have to stop the Mahdi from coming back through our own form of war, or Islam will take over the world. Uh, I can pull up that clip shortly, but this is the future Secretary of State. So the Secretary of State believes that the US is in a religious war. Lindsey Graham has said the US is in a religious war. And then what kind of messaging do we hear from Iran's foreign minister, Abasaragi, from the Iranian officials, Ali Larijani, uh, Qalibaf, the head of the parliament? What are they saying? They're saying Iran is fighting for sovereignty and international law.

Yeah. Yeah.

That Iran is fighting for its own borders. Iran is fighting for actually material interests, while the US leadership is preaching a doctrine of religious war and apocalypticism. Who are the religious crazies here?

And amazingly, it's even worse because it's not just the Trump camp. You also have people like Chuck Schumer, and we played this clip before when he was speaking before AIPAC, I think in 2018. He said, "The reason that there's not peace in the Middle East is because the Palestinians don't believe in the Torah." So the religious fanaticism, it, it's not even on the Trump side. It's even some people, at least one guy,

One who happens to be the leader of Senate Democrats, happens to share the same religious extremism.

Yeah. And then you have the Third Temple movement in Israel, which increasingly dominates the Israeli government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister, the interior minister, uh, sorry, finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. They believe in destroying the Al-Aqsa compound and replacing it with the Third Temple, inciting religious warfare is their objective.

And I've heard you, I've heard you speculate that that might be something that they might try to do in the coming period. I mean, if I've heard you correctly, that actually.

Well, the architect of the Temple movement, Yra Ariel, the ideological architect, um, who's been an influential figure in the Israeli government, had actually, uh, been arrested for attempting to bomb the Al-Aqsa compound. This is sort of like the godfather of these figures, Ben-Gvir and others. And the Israeli foreign ministry put out a very revealing tweet, don't have it in front of me, showing an Iranian ballistic missile in the distance foreground with the Al-Aqsa compound in the foreground, or it may have been the Western Wall, which sits below it.

They said, you know, Iran is, you know, going to attack these holy sites. Iran, Iran's government itself has warned that Israel will stage a false flag attack on the Alaka compound and blame it on an Iranian attack in order to draw in the Sunni Arab states into conflict with Iran. And they have sought to instigate conflict. I have serious questions about the supposed Iranian drone attack on an Omani oil facility when Oman has played such an important role in attempting to facilitate peace and Iran's own government has said Oman is not a target here.

Yes, it's obvious that Israel is seeking to instigate regional conflict between everyone and Iran. They have sought to draw in Azerbaijan. There was a suspicious attack in Azerbaijan. It sought to draw in the uh British more deeply as Starmer has initially resisted US basing, including at places like Diego Garcia, and there was a suspicious attack in Cyprus. So it's false flag season, and Israel has a long history of false flags. You go back to, you know, the early years of the Zionist state. The Zionists were bombing synagogues in places like Iraq to encourage Jewish migration out of Arab countries into Palestine. And in more recent years, Israel played a key role in the false flag chemical attacks in Syria. They were sort of promoting this idea of a red line, this idea that if there were chemical attacks, then Obama has to bomb. And, you know, there was reporting on this recently at The Greyzone, I think by Wyatt Reed, uh, showing that leaked emails from Samantha Power, um, when she was Obama's UN ambassador, that she was receiving a a series of intelligence claims from Israel trying to argue that Assad was behind those chemical attacks when we know that, of course, those were false flags carried out by US and Israel-backed insurgents.

And here they go again. This is today, Israeli MFA. The Iranian regime is firing missiles at Jerusalem. One of them struck a few hundred meters from the Old City, the Western Wall, Alaka Mosque, and Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Protecting lives and worshippers' safety comes first. This is why prayer at all holy sites has been temporarily suspended. Uh, well, isn't that convenient? And look, it's just like a little puff of, little puff of dust. And Israel, of course, Israel never ever uh stops uh prayer services at at at holy sites for Palestinians who just have free access whenever they want. I'm being sarcastic, obviously.

Um, yeah. No, there couldn't be an ulterior agenda here, but they're making it more and more obvious. And things are happening domestically that we'll talk about that look like scops to me. Uh, increasingly look like scops. Let's stay focused on the the dynamics regionally. Trump has lost the war politically. He's, and and and that's because Iran has uh successfully attacked the main vulnerability of US empire, which is the Strait of Hormuz and its economic, its control over the global economy. And this will continue to play out over the next several weeks. In fact, uh, IRGC commander has announced, this is reported by Press TV, that Iran would allow any ship to pass through the Strait of Hormuz if it could be escorted by a US destroyer. So, they're basically saying, "Bring, bring it on, US." Uh, that, you know, the US exposes its own navy to a major vulnerability by attempting to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And this would seem to preage a US ground invasion or some attempted special forces landings to try to soften up Iran. I don't know what they're going to do. Trump is either going to have to find an off-ramp or the pain will seemingly increase.

But then you have, you know, US military bases in the Gulf States. If you've been watching anything by any, like, interview with Muhammad Morandi, who, you know, is in Iran, understands the thinking of the Islamic Republic leadership and system and how they would respond. He said this would take place if Trump launched a war on Iran. And now it's happening. And it's happening now. Uh, satellite images of US bases damaged by Iran. This is the US Naval Support Facility at the Fifth Fleet, the o, the major, most useful US military base in Manama, Bahrain. Uh, Al Udeid Air Base, home to CENTCOM's forward headquarters, where the US has its major uh radar system, which has been taken out. A billion-dollar radar system. And the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. Boom. Boom. Boom. This was early last week. It's only gotten worse there. There were at least seven soldiers killed at the Ali Al Salem Air Base and over a hundred wounded. Uh, dozens badly wounded had to be medevaced out. I think those bases have been effectively abandoned.

Uh, let's take a look at the radar systems that the US has lost. These are its eyes and ears across the region. And some of them actually go into the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia. That, that's the radar system at Al Udeid. Two AN/TPY-2 radars in Bahrain. Uh, Kuwait, the the RF John Air Base lost radars. AN/TPY-2 THAAD radar. The THAAD system was hit in the UAE. Another THAAD system hit in Jordan, in Qatar. Eight building structures related to satellite communications, and on and on. This is why when you see ballistic missiles heading into Israel, the warning time is now a minute, less than one minute. Sometimes there was a missile, a hit in Herzliya yesterday. There was no warning system at all there. No siren went off at all. And so while Iran has not fired as many missiles as in their initial salvos on March 1st, where you saw like dozens and dozens and dozens of ballistic missiles going in, it doesn't have to to keep Israel on lockdown to actually uh shake the will of Israeli Jewish Israeli society because what you don't know when the next missile's coming. So you basically have to center your life around a bomb shelter indefinitely. And your government isn't looking for peace or or an off-ramp here. Your government in Netanyahu and his opposition with Yair Lapid calling for destroying Iranian oil infrastructure. They're looking for a massive, endless regional war because they got the US to buy in. So you're screwed.

I had a friend write me who works in finance today, banking, um, works with a number of uh Israelis. And they, you know, his company has affiliates in Israel. And he said that almost everyone just quit their jobs at the Israeli banking affiliate. These are not like recent immigrants to Israel. These are like long-term Israeli citizens. They quit. They're leaving the country, are flocking to Miami. I mean, just when you thought that, you know, Miami couldn't get any worse, it's getting filled up with Israelis who don't want to be there anymore. And so, you know, this, this is this is a huge factor. Then you have um this there's a cover-up taking place over the destruction of US military bases. Planet Labs, which is a major Pentagon contractor, had suspended its release of images for four days. It increased it again by two weeks. It's an indefinite cover-up, a 14-day delay to the release of imagery in the Middle East. "As we continue to balance operational security needs in our transparency mission, Planet has decided to take additional proactive measures to ensure our imagery is not tactically leveraged by adversarial actors to target allied and NATO partner personnel and civilians." I mean, Iran has its own satellites. They don't need that. It's because they're trying to hide the damage. And the damage is extensive.

Uh, here's one of the wildest hits. Uh, it's not, and it's not just to bases again. Iran has the intelligence and reconnaissance capability to target US troops, diplomatic personnel, CIA, where they are. A CIA base was hit at the uh US consulate in Baghdad, and they had to evacuate. This is Bahrain. Bahrain, the home of the Fifth Fleet and the hated Al Khalifa family. Watch this. This is a Shahed drone. These towers are just sitting ducks right now. And they, they are, I mean, it's it's un, it's unfortunate. I don't want Americans to get killed. A lot of these soldiers are just being, you know, they joined because they wanted to uh pay for college. They're working-class grunts. Uh, but you have personnel being put in those towers, and now they're sitting ducks. And there's no air defense. Iran rules the skies over Ba, over Bahrain. >> And they're especially vulnerable in Bahrain because you have a population there that's very sympathetic to Iran. That's majority Shia. They were put down when they tried to uh revolt in 2011 during the Arab Spring. >> Their, their uprising was crushed by Saudi Arabia and the US because they wanted to keep Bahrain as a client state. But the resentment from that lingers. And that's why, you know, there was some video footage at least of people, locals cheering on the Iranian drone attacks. >> Yeah. >> Targeting US forces inside their own country.

>> No, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, there, there are two things happening at once. US bases are being evacuated. They're getting hammered. They're unable to defend themselves. And so, again, from a US imperial perspective, I would be furious that Trump launched this war for Israel and allowed this to happen because many of those bases may not be coming back. Uh, the countries, these Arab vassal states, family dictatorship-run Gulf monarchies are going to have to realize that US bases are a liability and that they should no longer pay for this oil protection racket to a US military that prioritizes Israel. That's number one. The other thing that's happening is, as Aaron pointed out, they're being destabilized, particularly in Bahrain, which is, you know, up to 60% Shia, where 80% of the population, according to pollsters, opposes the Epstein Accords, or what's officially known as the Abraham Accords, normalization with Israel, where much of the population lives in poverty while the hated Al Khalifa family and its cronies live in uh compounds in Manama in wealth, where there were protests that were brutally repressed during the so-called Arab Spring. And this is what's happening presently. Um, this, this is Bahrain today.

>> So, we were told that, you know, decapitating Iran's leadership and murdering Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would bring regime change in Iran. Instead, it's triggered a rally around the flag effect. And Bahrain faces regime change. That's a small protest. There have been huge protests there. And you can see Saudi troops and other troops from the dictatorial, hated GCC alliance are actually coming in to repress those protests, just as they did in 2011. You can see >> here they come. >> Look at that. Those are, you know, armored trucks provided, by the way, by the West to crush protests for democracy in Bahrain. Nobody cares about them. They were like, "Oh, the Iranian protesters who are burning down police stations and burning government buildings and killing security guards and killing cops." They only care about them. No one talks about Bahrain, but that's what's happening. The whole system of family dictatorship-run uh backed by Britain and the US is being discredited right now.

>> And from the point of view of these Gulf monarchies, they're also seeing Trump not care about them and their security. He's certainly, certainly not nearly as much as he cares about Israel. So Israel gets all the air defense uh it wants. These countries don't. In fact, they've been told that the US doesn't have that much for them. So they're also being reminded that from the point of view of the US, uh, their needs are, you know, like just not a top priority. They're expedient, they're they're expendable, uh, because Israel is the only priority here. And it's Israel that they can launch a war for. And once they do that, these countries don't even get protection from a war that the US and Israel start. So I wonder, and and we've seen some prominent elites in the Gulf monarchies raise some criticisms. And I wonder, you know, how far that will go, getting them to rethink what's what's in their own interests here. Is it to continue to be a US client, have these military bases that are there to threaten Iran? And given that the US won't even protect the Gulf monarchies in a war that the US starts, perhaps that will lead to a rethinking of uh of their priorities when it comes to whether they want to be US client states.

Now, >> they know they're next, too. I mean, Saudi Arabia might. Turkey certainly knows it's next. >> Yeah. >> And Turkey is hosting a major NATO US listening station directed against Iran, which could come under attack. The US attempted, floated the Kurdish invasion of Iran. How would Erdogan feel about that? >> Yeah. >> The former prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, has said Turkey is next. They're they're openly saying it. They have a massive Muslim population that supports Palestine. I, I don't know how, what, what Erdogan can continue to export all of this energy to Israel when his population sees what's happening. Yeah. >> They know. They know they're next. >> Mike Huckabee recently said, just shortly before Trump launched this war, Mike Huckabee said that Israel can take all the land in the Middle East that it wants. So that's how Washington sees them, is totally expendable. And uh, maybe that will lead to to a change. And yeah, Turkey, it's amazing. Turkey can be openly threatened by a high-level Israeli, the former prime minister, even though Turkey's been supplying Israel with energy throughout this genocide. All while Erdogan's taken a pose of talking tough, but really his actions said otherwise. But even though he's essentially been a partner of Israel, not just during the genocide, but also in the dirty war in Syria, he still gets targeted by Bennett. Bennett. That's how Israel sees everybody is just uh land to take, land to steal.

>> Or or al-Sisi, who constantly bombs Damascus. Israel, when he's giving them the Golan, >> he's agreeing to fight Hezbollah. He's arresting Palestinian leadership. The sellout rebranded al-Qaeda president, Ahmed al-Sisi, but they still attack him. Uh, there's no avoiding it. Israel will come for you next. And so Israel isn't getting the buy-in that they had hoped for from these Arab states against Iran because they know they're next on the target board.

>> By the way, quick point too on the issue of Syria. For Trump to claim that one of the reasons why he has to go after Iran is because they've killed US soldiers. Like that's one of his main talking points now. They've, you know, he, he says something about how you have soldiers walking around with no legs, which of course is an oxymoron if you're, you can't walk around with no legs. But the point is he's saying that he has to go destroy Iran because Iran has helped kill US soldiers. Okay. Well, first of all, the number of US soldiers hurt and killed by Iran has been massively overblown. Scott Horton's done work on this. And then you have the fact that, you know, Iran supported insurgencies inside Iraq after the US invaded Iraq and was threatening to go on to Iran after Iraq. So what's Iran going to do if you're invading their neighbor and promising to go to you next? You're going to try to stop the US inside Iraq. But more, but on top of all that, you have Trump pow-wowing around with the founding leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, whose forces killed and injured way more US forces than anybody tied to Iran did inside of Iraq, which just shows you again the complete fallacy of yet another one of Trump's arguments.

The uh, another issue uh related to Iran's deterrence is its ability to strike critical energy infrastructure, including that controlled by the US. We saw footage earlier of a US-owned tanker burning. But the uh, Bradley Cooper has floated the idea of kind of like a Morganthau plan for Iran, where the US attacked Iran's energy infrastructure and to bring the country to its knees, as it did, according to the plan of Henry Morgenthau under uh uh FDR against Nazi Germany. The problem for the US is Iran can retaliate and can continue to drive energy prices through the roof. So, Israel blew up an oil depot outside Tehran, shrouding the city of Tehran in toxic diesel smoke. It's one of the worst chemical attacks we've ever witnessed. It was a terrorist attack. And Lindsey Graham came out and criticized it because we have to win over the hearts and minds of the Iranian people, he said. But I really think it's the fear that Iran will retaliate and start blowing up energy infrastructure in the Gulf States, in Iraq, and elsewhere. Uh, an Iranian desalination plant was attacked. Trump was asked about that. He said, "I don't know about any des, I can't do it." Trump desalinization plant. He called it desaliniza. But, you know, they're afraid to take credit for this because of what Iran can do because it's so economically ruinous.

But here's Iran. Um, this is an Iranian attack on a Halliburton facility in Basra. Drone strikes. And this is, you know, one of the largest military oil contractors and oil service companies on earth, attacking Dick Cheney's profits. I mean, they can do that all day. So, it seems like a disastrous plan for the US to start attacking, doing what they did to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, because of the price that US consumers and the US economy will pay. And then you have all of these companies. Shell declaring force majeure. Um, Kuwait, um, Qatar suspending LNG deliveries. This is so damaging to US economic hegemony. And when Qatar suspends LNG deliveries, even when they announce that they are re, when they, they are restarting deliveries, it will take another two weeks to get the infrastructure back online. So this means at least a one-month delay in LNG, which totally screws Europe, which allowed Ukraine and the CIA to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.

>> Yeah. >> And the European leadership is welcoming it again. They're like, "We support you in everything you do." Kajakawis, oh, Iran must not attack us. Iran is the enemy. Ursula von der Leyen hasn't said a single thing about uh the the slaughter of school children in Iran, the bombing of apartment buildings. She said nothing about that. And they're welcoming an energy crisis in Europe where they will have to turn either turn back to Russia or start rationing their own population and initiate a new Great Reset where everyone will be kept in like 20-minute cities.

>> There's I don't think they're going to turn back to Russia because they've just gone so far out the deep end in cutting off Russia, which means their only source of energy will be US LNG, which has to be shipped across the Atlantic. It's so expensive already. >> In exchange for Greenland. >> Yeah. On on top of the Exactly. So Trump is going to leverage all this to uh to get Greenland. And of course, uh US producers, LNG will make even more money off of the of the money. They're already uh ripping Iran, Europe off already. Europe was already complaining that after they cut off Russian gas, that US LNG, the price was just way too high for them. They were already complaining about that. Now it's about to get even worse. And and Trump, you know, thinks that this is a big victory for him as he's just ripping everybody off. And and Europe is going along with it as you said, because of their hatred for Russia. Trump has initiated the largest release of strategic oil reserves in US history, which I don't know how, what will that last a week or two in order in order to lower oil prices, which raises certain questions about the timeline of this war for the US. Maybe when the strategic oil reserve runs out, Trump will have to find an off-ramp. He said that they've run out of targets in Iran, which won't stop them from killing ordinary people.

Yeah. >> Maybe he's seeking to find an off-ramp, but uh it's it's not going to work. And there, that this also will lead to a relaxing of sanctions on Russia. Russia's clearly played its cards right here. Although uh not vetoing the Bahraini resolution at the UN was disgraceful, along with China.

>> Which one was that? The, because not the board of peace, but a newer one.

>> Yeah. To condemn Iran.

>> Oh, right. Okay. Yes. To to condemn Iran for attacking US military bases.

>> Yeah. >> Okay. Yeah.

>> When it was Iran that came under attack.

>> Yeah. Right. Yeah.

>> After the board of peace resolution.

>> Yeah. Yeah. But uh, again, a disaster for US empire in the making. And Israel continues to get rocked. Remember, Israel's bonds were downgraded several times during its war, its genocide in Gaza. How will its economy withstand this? Well, we're just going to have to keep propping it up for what?

Um, this here, and I want to address the politics of Iran quickly. Iran, Trump has lost politically. And Israel, and and Israel, I think, expected some sort of uh uprising in Iran. There, there, there elements in the Israeli military intelligence apparatus that expected an uprising in Iran following these decapitation strikes. At least that's what the Israeli public was told. We talked before, and we reported on this at The Greyzone, that StratCom, the private CIA, assessed that while the two days of rioting, foreign-backed rioting in Iran on January 8th and 9th made it more likely that the US would attack Iran, that any US-Israeli attack on Iran would end any possible protest activity. And what it's done instead is caused a major backlash inside Iran. Something unprecedented that wasn't even seen during the Iran-Iraq war, of patriotic rallies not just supporting the Islamic Republic, but supporting Iran's integrity as a state. And what I'd been hearing, uh, you can turn to our interview with Satara Sati, who is a professor at the University of Tehran, to understand the mentality in Iran right now, the backlash against this war. Um, and she, she made the point that you, of course, many people who, who loved Sayyid Ali Khamenei are out in the streets every night, filling town squares, um, you know, showing their defiance and showing their support for their leadership. That many people who are critics, that she knew, that she knows of the Islamic Republic are out as well and were offended by this. And you can see there's, you know, footage of women without hijab declaring their defiance because they're simply proud Iranian nationalists.

Here's one. >> I will stand by my homeland until my last drop of blood. And these interviews are all over the place. This is not, you know, someone living the bas lifestyle. Um, you can see >> here is Yeah, go ahead. >> Well, here is an Air Force general testifying today. I believe he's also the head of US European Command. And uh, this is, this is what he said just today to Congress. >> In the war. Um, and the uh, what, what I've observed over the course of studying air power in history is that anytime you attack a civilian population, you usually uh end up finding that it just hardens their resolve. We take this all the way back to the the London Blitz in World War II. Uh, the Brits just had a stiff upper lip and and kept on fighting. And I think that's what we've seen in Ukraine as well.

>> Well, so he's talking about Ukraine, but he just said anytime you attack a civilian population with air power, it hardens their resolve and they rally around the flag. That also can apply to Iran as well, as we're seeing.

>> Yeah. There, there's not going to be regime change through an air war on Iran. Quite the opposite. And uh, you know, you didn't need to listen to us to know that, although you, you know, we, we said that again and again. Um, US intelligence said that before the war. I mean, it's the same, same thing with, similar to Iraq. Um, there was this General Shinseki who said that in order to uh to to control Iraq and prevent an insurgency, you would need a force of well over 250,000. And he was fired. To control Iran, you would need a ground force of possibly 1 million. In order to get Trump's uh, Deli person, Persian Deli Rodriguez. But there was a pre-war intelligence assessment that determined, I mean, this is an Associated Press intervention in Iran wasn't likely to change leadership. US intelligence assessment completed shortly before the US and Israel launched a war in Iran determined that the US intervention was not likely to change the lead to regime change in the Islamic Republic. It was the National Intelligence Council assessment in February. And there's assessment after assessment coming to that conclusion.

>> Yes. And which is why, you know, I never make predictions, but I'm confident making one here. Uh, Trump is not going to send in ground troops for the reasons you just identified. The Kurdish force idea, that's not working out either. That was floated. I think that was just floated as an act of some sort of intimidation tactic, trying to get like uh people inside Iran to do what Trump can't accomplish himself. Of course, that didn't work. So, I think Trump, Trump will find an exit ramp uh sooner rather than later. That's my prediction, just based on the fact that he's not going to send in US ground troops because, you know, that they'd also meet very fierce resistance. That's so clear now, if it wasn't already. It would be wild if he did, politically, if Trump sent in the Goyim.

>> Oh, no, this now we're gonna This is going to cause another ZOG controversy that you.

>> It's I think we're like past that. Like ZOG is going mainstream. Goyim is like the word of the year. It's pretty funny to see like Gentiles find out about this word. They're like, "Goyim are mad and we're not going to take it anymore." You can see Lindsey Graham's in there like, "You got to send the Goyim to to Car Island. That they they can't be exporting oil." The Israelis are telling me, and it would be horrible. There would be so many deaths of working-class Americans in a war that was clearly launched for Israel. There's this idiotic idea being floated that they'll seize Car Island, which is the base for Iranian oil export. And you're bringing troops within the immediate range of Iranian mobile artillery, where they they're just going to be fodder, sitting ducks, uh, as well as Iranian standoff capacity. And you will also, as I said, trigger uh reciprocity, reciprocal Iranian attacks on oil infrastructure across the region. This was floated as something that needed to be done. It was a no-brainer, said Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute, one of the neocon brains behind war on US war on Iran. I mean, this guy is so dis, looking so discredited right now, but whatever. That's what the AEI, American Enterprise Institute is there for. But it would be politically even more calamitous for Trump. That's when I think, you know, he would start losing his base of MAGA bootlickers, is when American troops would die in a ground invasion.

So, the the best option they have is some sort of special forces operation, but that could lead to troops potentially being captured. Iran is a much larger place than Venezuela, which is accessible through the Caribbean. I mean, it's sort of from the perspective, American imperial perspective, is the US backyard. Remember Operation Eagle Claw that Carter launched to rescue the American hostages at the embassy in 1979?

>> Yeah. >> American Delta Force soldiers landed in the desert of Tabas. Sands were whipped up through a massive sandstorm, and the helicopters crashed, and the operation completely failed before it even began. Uh,

>> And Venezuela, which obviously Trump felt very emboldened by, US forces were a lot closer to Venezuela than they are to Iran for this, you know, because Iran can actually hit US forces. So, they've had to position these US um, you know, groups way farther away from Iran than they would to Venezuela. Yeah. So, who, who really like believes in this anymore? Uh, you know, the, you don't see the Goyim in the streets like you did after 9/11. I remember I was, uh, I went to an anti-war protest in LA outside the Oscars, outside the Academy Awards when Bush was about to, that was when Michael Moore got up and denounced the war, and a lot of people in the audience were booing him.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> It was seen as like crazy, like this radical act by Michael Moore.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> And there were huge pro-war rallies outside the Academy Awards. Uh, people waving American flags, and they were chanting at us like, uh, like, "Get a job," and like, go to, like, anti-hippie stuff left over from the '60s. It was pathetic. Um, you, you don't see that. You see, you know, some really, uh, low IQ Persian Gusanos in Westwood coming out and dancing YMCA for Trump assassinating Iranian leadership and celebrating the bombing of schools. K. Pritsker did a great piece for us interviewing them. They're like, "Yeah, bombing that girls' school in Minab was worth it. It's all worth it." You see them, and there aren't like Zionist rallies, although they wave Israeli flags at these Persian Gusano rallies. So, like, you have them, and then you just have like media Zionists like Jake Tapper who support the war. And that's pretty much it. Like, there isn't, no one's excited for this in Middle America.

Here's Jake Tapper interviewing an actual, bringing on an actual confessed Israeli spy who says she's working with Unit 8200 veterans to infiltrate Iran. Emily Schrader.

>> Emily, you've been talking to Iranians on the ground about the strikes and about Iranian leadership going forward. Uh, how do the Iranians you're talking to, how do they see the future unfolding in Iran? Of course, there's a lot of uncertainty, and there's a lot of problems with the internet still being shut off, although there is some limited use with Starlink and and limited other options. But by and large, the responses from Iranians that I've spoken to has been overwhelmingly in favor of the United States and Israeli action on the ground. Uh, they're very happy that regime.

>> Emily, you've been >> Uh, so they love being bombed. Iranians on the ground. Actions on the ground.

>> How fitting, by the way, that another person on that screen is sitting behind a bunch of Gulf oil logos. You notice that? So, you have an Israeli speaking for Iranians about how much they love to get bombed. And you have, I don't know who that guy was, but he's sitting before >> Yeah. >> a bunch of Gulf oil logos. >> That's American corporate TV in a nutshell. Oil companies and Israelis representing Iranian voices, pretending to represent Iranian voices and claim that they want to get bombed. Like, what a, I mean, Jake, I mean, Barry Weiss is supposed to take over CNN as well, but what difference would it make if you had people like Jake Tapper already there doing activism every single day on behalf of the Israeli government?

>> Yeah, I mean, you don't even need a Larry Ellison takeover or David Ellison takeover with him there. But I think like the looming takeover is making Jake Tapper more uh feel more emboldened to wave his Zionist freak flag.

>> Yes. Yes. >> Like I'm getting ready to, because he was he was get, he wasn't really like getting ratings, and he was losing his status as the prime-time anchor. Nobody likes him. Nobody watches him anymore. But it won't matter once David Ellison comes in. So, I mean, there's there's very little domestic constituency outside of Fox News or like Westwood, and it's a very tiny, you know, ethnic immigrant interest group that Trump is catering to. They're not like a voting block that matters, has swing votes like the Cuban Americans in South Florida. So, there isn't, you know, strong foundation here for maintaining the war. That would lead me to believe that a ground invasion would be less likely. But uh

>> I'm shocked. I'm shocked that he launched the war in the first place in a way. I mean, it was such a foolhardy move and unleashed >> Iranian military power that should have been, it should have been predictable what the result would be. But he is lost politically, economically, strategically.

Well, and staying on the on the politics for a second, like I wonder what's going through JD Vance's head right now. He's been pretty quiet, along with Tulsi Gabbard. But just thinking, I mean, forget having any principles, because he doesn't, obviously. But he's the guy who went before the public and said, "If you don't want a military draft, if you don't want a war with Iran, vote for Trump." And of course, Trump's not only Trump has not only launched a war with Iran, but he's even said we could have a military draft. So, if, if you're JD Vance thinking about your own political future, Trump's not going to be on the scene forever. Like, is JD Vance thinking about, like, okay, like what does this mean for my political chances that I'm tethered to this guy that I put all my chips on him, and he's launched this disastrous war? And whether it's Vance or someone else in that world, are they going to think, just for their own pure self-interest, political future, that they have to jump off of this train? Uh, I just don't see how, especially with the economic consequences, everybody can stay so loyal to the cult leader Donald Trump.

>> JD Vance possibly would have been better off if he had stayed in the Senate.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> If he, if he were were he a critic of this? Well, it's, it's, it's tough because Trump still owns the GOP. And if you watch, if you look at polling on the war, whether it's Reuters Ipsos or this new Drop Site poll, the Republican base is still supportive of the war. I mean, their support might not be that deep, but they're supporting it because it's Trump's war. So if JD Vance had stayed in the Senate and was leading the charge, he would be more popular nationally and respected like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie. These are figures who are just respected regardless of what party you come from. They're sort of like, they're becoming like folk heroes. But within the GOP, would it be possible to move forward and the donor base would bolt? Who's, who are JD Vance's donors? Peter Thiel. He's an Israel guy. Palantir stands with Israel. There's a new Palantir ad, "Standing with Israel," out, full page.

>> I wouldn't be surprised if Palantir had some sort of role in the.

>> Oh, for sure. Maven is used. Palantir's Maven is the main targeting system being used in Iran, and they're combining it with Claude.

>> Yeah. >> And it looks like this was what led to the targeting of the girls' school in >> Minab. Yeah. >> So that's blood on Peter Thiel's hands. Uh, and I guess Peter Thiel, I mean, his only disappointment there might have been that he couldn't actually uh inject the blood of those children into his veins in his quest to live forever as a perverted transhumanist member of the Epstein class, but certainly blood on his hands. Anthropic has protested their use by the the War Department, but they're using Claude anyway. They're rolling out targets faster than they can even vet them. That's why in Tehran, there's a park. There's like a public park there called Police Park, and it was bombed, and it's probably because the Maven Claude AI system just ran police into its system and then said, "Hit that," without even understanding what it was. But anyway, yeah, back to JD Vance. He's got Thiel. He's got Rebecca Mercer. I don't know where the Mercers are on Israel, but yeah, I, I just don't, I don't know if there's a, there's a path forward for him nationally after this. It's personally embarrassing to him because he was an opponent of the Iran war. I don't know how he'll own it. And then he's going to go up against Marco Rubio. The predictive markets have Rubio surging as a potential presidential candidate. But for me, it's more, it looks more like a crisis for the GOP because they've gone back to being the GOP of Jeb and George Bush that Donald Trump humiliated.

>> Yes. >> On the debate stage, except it's Donald Trump.

>> Yeah. And it's worse, you could argue. I mean,

>> Worse because he has a cult following, unlike Bush or Nikki Haley.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> More dangerous.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I, I did this whole deep dive on the Trump assassination plots and how the FBI and Netanyahu himself tried to convince Trump that Iran was seeking to assassinate him to make him want to exact revenge by initiating this war and assassinating the Ayatollah. Trump said after killing Khamenei, "I got him before he got me." Um, I think, you know, there's a psychological dimension to Trump's decision-making here. But if you go back to Butler, PA, uh, it's a very weird event. There was a lot of stonewalling around that uh investigation. They say just this lone wolf, Thomas Crooks, did it. I mean, he may have been an American. He clearly had no relationship to Iran. I still have a lot of questions about it. But let's say he got Trump, uh, that he hadn't missed Trump by a millimeter, then who would have been the candidate? I guess it probably would have been Nikki Haley, right? I mean, she was the uh, she was running against Trump in the primary, and she had a lot of donor class support. And at the same time, the FBI was running this operation where they had a confidential informant running a Pakistani guy named Asaf Mant around the country who was led into the US on a special visa despite showing up on a watch list because he had gone to Iran and had an Iranian wife. And they were leading him into a trap where he was basically being given money to pay to supposed hitmen to kill Trump. It was never going to work. The guy said he was under duress and didn't even want to do it. Anyway, it was an FBI manufactured plot, just like the kidnap, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. He was arrested the day before Butler, PA, on July 13th, 2024. Arrested the day before, and immediately after Butler takes place and Crooks misses Trump and Crooks is killed, the FBI sends a team into Asaf Mant's jail cell to interrogate him to determine if there was an Iranian role. Now, if they had been able to determine that there was an Iranian role, it would have been war on Iran right then and there. So what was the whole point of running Asaf Mant at the same time, and like, and the, and all of the unusual chronology, was it synchronized with Butler in some way? I have these questions. But regardless, if Nikki Haley had been the nominee, she may have taken the opportunity to blur the Asaf Mant plot together with Butler in order to blame Iran then and there and make herself the war with Iran candidate to avenge Donald Trump's death with the support of the GOP base. That never happened. And instead, it took a little bit more work to get Trump into place to bomb Iran, believing that Iran wanted to kill him and so forth, paying Donald Trump de facto bribes through Miriam Addall, that. But here we are with someone who is more respected and popular with a cult-like following among the GOP base, unlike Nikki Haley. That makes Donald Trump more dangerous than any of the neocons, as the greatest dream that the neoconservative movement could have ever had. They have someone who campaigned against the neocons on the basis of America First, stealing Pat Buchanan's mantra, his slogan, and using it to stomp on Pat Buchanan's grave. JD Vance will have to inherit that legacy.

>> I think Pat Buchanan is still alive, by the way. I mean, his political grace.

>> Sorry, we don't, he's not in public anymore. So, I.

>> Sorry for, my apologies to Pat Buchanan for that. Uh, so, so okay, the American public doesn't support the war. It's the least popular war at its onset in American history, I think, or recent American history. I guess we couldn't like poll the War of 1812. But, uh, it's very unpopular. There was no catastrophic or or catalyzing event. Those were, uh, that was a phrase that Paul Wolfowitz used, I think, at the Army College of War, or is like at the West Point graduation ceremony three weeks before 9/11. He said, "Short of any catastrophic or catalyzing event, the United States will not uh be able to wage war in the Middle East and reassert its dominance over the region where it faces all these threats." 9/11 happened. Bam. So the Iraq war was naturally going to be popular. You know, a whole segment of the American heartland believed there was little difference between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. They're united by Satan. Well, you don't have that now. I think on the low, there's a segment of the American public that's rooting for Iran because they see them as fighting the Epstein class. Like people who never thought they would ever think like that. They're starting to see that there's a difference between the average US service member and the slime bags sending them to war. They're starting to think like Smedley Butler did when he realized he was just an economic hitman leading all of those Marine invasions in the during the Banana Wars. So the wheels are coming off. What can they do? They, being the architects of this war, the national security state, the Israel lobby, to hold off a mass US rebellion against the war, or at least keep the US public uh interested in it, or even raise US support. Scops. I mean, the same thing the FBI did throughout the War on Terror to make people believe that ISIS was operating domestically. You go recruit some mentally disturbed 17-year-old Muslim man who, uh, you know, give them some some fireworks and tell them to carry out a bombing plot. They did that again and again. Now we're witnessing uh a new SCAP play out right before our eyes, which is uh this threat of Iranian drones in California. I mean, this is utterly absurd.

>> Possible Iranian drone attacks on our homeland. A new alert reviewed by ABC News revealing Iran's aspirations to conduct a surprise attack specifically against unspecified targets in California. The FBI saying it's warned police departments across the state. Now,

>> Did she say specifically against unspecified targets?

>> Hold on.

>> Against unspecified targets.

>> She said that, and she's just reading a prompter like the producer wrote that in.

>> That reminds me of when, uh, when Bernie Sanders was running in the primary, and he was doing, he was he was doing well. This is right before the Nevada primary. This is in 2020. And they, they charted out some new Russiagate thing to try to undermine him, saying that Russia is backing Bernie Sanders. And I remember the New York Times saying that Russia is supporting Bernie Sanders through a playbook of as yet undetectable methods. So if they're undetectable, then how do you know that Russia is supporting him? But anyway, it didn't matter because it's for propaganda purposes, as is the case here.

>> We have reviewed a report.

>> We just reviewed a report. California. The FBI saying it's warned police departments across the Golden State now of strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles or drones as tensions rise in the Middle East. Let's get straight to our chief investigative correspondent Aaron Kucik. Aaron, what are you learning? We've reviewed an alert that came within the last couple of weeks, Kira, just recently, from the FBI to law enforcement agencies up and down the California coastline, warning that Iran is aspiring now to perhaps launch some kind of a retaliatory attack on the US mainland using drones on the West Coast. The alert that we reviewed said an uncorroborated report suggested that unidentified Mexican cartel leaders had authorized attacks using drones carrying explosives. So, they know that capability exists. And uh, the this.

>> So, they're not even able to link it to cartels or say there's a threat from cartels working with Iran. They're just saying that cartels use drones, but they, they use drones for reconnaissance so they can ship drugs. These aren't even like, it's ridiculous.

>> Separate alert that we've reviewed, Kira, says that Iran has those same kinds of aspirations. So the US has broadly known for some time that drones could be deployed uh against the homeland. We know that Iran has been using drones significantly in this 12-day old war with the United States. That's what killed the first six US service members in this war. Oh, yeah. Those six service members, they were just like chilling in California. They were at Coachella with ironic t-shirts on, watching uh, you know, rising indie bands play when an Iranian drone hit them. That's what happened. And why do they single out California? Like, is that, that's a that state is pretty far out of Shahed drone range. So there's going to be an Iranian mothership going through the Pacific to hit California. Well, amazingly, the White House came out and attacked ABC News for the story, even though they're the ones that have been fueling this fear-mongering. I think they did this because they realize that by starting this war, people will justifiably blame them for any ensuing threats that that arise. So the White House felt compelled to say that this is totally not.

>> So, this is the White House press secretary Karen Jean-Pierre on Twitter just a few hours ago. Uh, this post and story >> should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people. They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based.

on unverified intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story. Why?

To be clear, no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists and it never did. That's a pretty strong statement, but it raises the question, if no threat from Iran to the homeland exists, why are you at war with Iran? And have you not practiced the exact same methods as you're accusing ABC of doing by putting out their unverified claims as they have multiple times about Iran when they've lied through their teeth and saying that Iran wasn't going to build nuclear weapons or was going to attack US forces. So, funnily enough, they've done exactly what they're accusing ABC News of doing. And in fact, they fueled the ABC News story to begin with by starting this war on Iran.

>> Yeah. Well, yeah. the the the the if I were in the Trump administration, on the one hand, I would want the American public to be afraid of Iran, but on the other hand, I wouldn't want the American public to be blaming me for blowback. Iran is not al-Qaeda. The IRGC is not al-Qaeda. The IRGC does do foreign operations. It also understands that it would undermine its regional strength by attacking ordinary Americans through adventurous terrorism. This is not in their playbook. Their strength right now is hitting US military bases that are within range and which threaten them, not threatening California. It's weird that they singled out California, too. Gavin Newsome's home state to put him on the spot about this a week after he called Israel an apartheid state.

And then uh yeah, there's mixed messaging from the Trump administration feeling there's I'm just getting the feeling like we're in the post 911 era without the post 911 shock. This was a flight redirected to Atlanta for pretty much no reason.

>> Here comes everybody. >> Stand up. >> Stand up. So they diverted an entire flight because a Muslim man's prayer alarm went off on his phone. And in this atmosphere, someone must have determined that he was a security threat. That reminds me so much of the post 911 see something, say something era. and uh troops come on and lock him up. The uh entire airport, the Kansas City International Airport was evacuated because of strange threats. And we saw what happened in Australia where waves of uh bomb threats were phoned into uh Jewish institutions throughout 2017. They turned out to be traced to Israel, to an Israeli teen whose identity was covered up from for a long time by Israel. And then uh last year, waves of threats uh strange fires set outside Jewish community institutions, a synagogue in Melbourne, all traced uh to criminal elements who were apolitical being paid by crypto from abroad for unspecified reasons. And then AIO, the Australian intelligence organization, receives a tip, a tip from Israel and they blame Iran, kick out the Iranian ambassador and sort of set the stage for the uh Australian government's support for this war on Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to blame the Bondi Beach shooting carried out by two ISIS sympathizers on Iran. And then one month before this war, Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, the genocidal Israeli president, travels to Australia, sets off uh massive protests through his presence and has it turns out he held a secret meeting with the chief of AIO, the intelligence chief. What was he talking about? So I mean, in what foreign state would stand to gain from those threats against Jewish institutions and the belief that there's this rise in anti-semitism? who might be paying those criminal actors and local scoff laws with crypto. It wouldn't serve Iranian interests. There's only one country that stands to gain. It's Israel. So, I really worry about an attempt to fan the flames of fear and religious warfare inside the United States and civil strife in order to cultivate support for this unpopular, insane, evil, murderous war for Israel that Donald Trump has launched.

I don't know if there's anything more to add there.

>> The one thing I just want to make sure we talk about before we go is Lebanon.

>> Yeah.

>> Where uh Israel is doing one of its periodic massacres, hitting a beach where displaced people who were who were ordered to flee their neighborhoods uh in the south were taking refuge and Israel bombed their tents. They've killed two Lebanese academics today. They've killed a family or a father and a young baby and the mother is in critical condition. And hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon uh under fear of Israel enacting the Dhaka doctrine which is the destruction of civilian neighborhoods uh which is coined after a previous Israeli bombardment of Lebanon back in 2006. So I just want to make sure we we acknowledge that.

I mean this is the Cornesh in uh Beirut which is like if you know Beirut this is like the center of the city and uh it looks like a drone strike. So to understand what's happening there, Israel uh has been pushing people out of da dah as you said, which is the southern Shia majority district in Beirut. And they have nowhere to go. Like tens and tens of thousands of people have nowhere to go. So they often sleep on the Cornishian tents. And now Israel is doing what they've done in the tents in Gaza, targeting people for assassination, killing people in the center of Beirut. Today, Israel issued a evacuation order for everyone south of the Leani River. This is the area that Israel invaded in 1982 and it sought to move all the way up to the Lethani, which by the way Israel seeks to capture as part of its greater Israel project because it needs fresh water. Uh, you know, Israel has the intention to destroy all of southern Lebanon and occupy it. They're they're telegraphing that intention here. And this is catastrophic as Hezbollah demonstrates that it's not dead, that it actually has the capacity to clear out Israel's northern settlements and to confront Israel directly in the field. It has fended off several landing attempts by Israeli special forces. Um, you know, they thought it was at 20% strength or less. Hezbollah is a lot stronger than Israel thought it was.

So, it's invading southern Lebanon and they're threatening the Lebanese government, its pathetic government, Michelle Aun in company, and telling them if you do not act against Hezbollah and join the war with us, join this regional war with us against Iran, then we will bomb you and we will flatten all of Beirut. They've taken the Dahi doctrine and turned it into the Beirut doctrine, the Lebanon doctrine. We'll just blow up your entire country unless you do what we want. So you we have a gun to your back and you must march forward against Hezbollah. That that's the Israeli that's the Israeli um solution. that's what everyone will have to live under throughout the region when Israel establishes itself as a hegeimon and uh that you know and so it's Lebanon is in a in a very tragic finding finding itself in I mean it's it's criminal andah is fighting a war for its very existence the gloves are off uh you know Hassan Nasra was assassinated and he will seem to Israelis like a force of moderation at this point. Hezbollah has nothing to lose. There's no reason for them to avoid escalation at this point.

>> And because of the dirty war on Syria and the successful regime change there, now Hezbollah has to deal with a hostile state right next door on top of Israel. Not just Israel but also Syria as well which is run by the former leader of al-Qaeda who Hezbollah fought and tried to prevent from coming to power. Yes. So all eyes on Lebanon. This is a regional war. Uh will Congress ultimately be the one to ones to decide if boots hits the ground? No, they won't. they had the uh the failed vote on the authorization of the war in in the Senate and that's it. So, it's up to us.

>> Yeah. And and the question for Congress is you have some Democrats not ruling out giving Trump supplemental funding if he comes to ask for talk about $50 billion uh in money being sought by Trump for Israel's war on Iran. And you have some Democrats like Alyssa Slackin saying, "Yeah, um well, we're we're already in this." So that's a quite real possibility. So you might see people like Chuck Schumer,

>> Cory Booker,

>> Cory Booker voting to give Trump tens of billions of additional dollars to prosecute this war. CIA Slotkin um 50 billion. They don't have the money. It's costing 1.8 billion a day in six days of Six Days of War I think cost 11 billion dollars. That's the official cost, but it doesn't factor in VA veterans affairs costs for wounded soldiers, uh, paying, you know, combat pay. It doesn't factor in the cost of oil, this the oil price spike for Israel. So, the real cost is much higher. And then they're going to ask for a $50 billion dollar supplemental to continue to destroy the US economy and the world economy and to slaughter average Iranians. According to the Iranian Committee on the Red Cross, over 17,000 residential structures have been hit by the USIsrael Epstein coalition. It's a war of terror. That's a vast majority of targets. And we are going to have to pay 50 billion. And some of the Democrats are talking about agreeing to this. Chuck Schumer, has he said no?

>> No. Hakeim Jeff hasn't said no either. Hakeim Jeffree said, "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

>> The only Democrat who I believe has said no is Chris Murphy, uh, who I think even though he's so wishy-washy and his critique includes saying that, well, our regime change hasn't even been successful, therefore it's a failure. But at least he has the political sense to recognize that this isn't popular. So he said he won't support supplemental war funding. So that's something.

>> Well, you know, if there's an anti-war movement in this country, it's it's time to be out in the streets and it's time to mobilize. This is this is this is the moment if it exists.

>> I gotta go. I don't know if there's anything you want to add.

>> Great stream. Uh, I look forward to catching the full interview with John Mirshimer. Uh, what what what I heard was great. And, uh, thanks everybody for tuning in.

>> It was an honor to host John Mirshimer's victory lap for the Israel lobby. Unfortunately, he and Steven Walt have been proven right by this war. Uh, yeah. Thank you all for your support. Subscribe to The Gray Zone, on YouTube, on Patreon. and get all of our original investigative reporting in your email boxes for free or, you know, if you want to support us, donate there at Patreon. Um, yeah, and we will be back at some point in the future with another stream and more interviews, and we have a lot more content coming for you soon. Thanks a lot, Aaron, for being here. Peace, everybody.

>> Peace.