Transcription
The undeclared war on Iran, which the Secretary of State has himself, in an unguarded moment, said was initiated because "we have to protect Israel." Will this bring about the demise of the Netanyahu government?
If the Netanyahu government falls, nothing better is going to replace it. I think Netanyahu, one way or another, is probably reaching his end. He's one of the great disasters of politics of the last 30 years. He's done what Trump actually said about him a few weeks ago, which is, "Everybody hates you." Uh, Trump told Netanyahu, "And everybody hates Israel." That's pretty accurate. Israel behaves despicably. Uh, it's the worst of the worst around the world. Netanyahu is a thug leading a thuggish regime that has multiple arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, which, of course, the United States then sanctions the court rather than respecting the fact that Israel is led by genocidaires, the people who commit genocide, with our complete complicity.
Will Netanyahu finally fall? Yeah, probably. Will the replacement be any better? It doesn't look like it. I don't hear anything in Israeli politics that says, "Hey, we shouldn't commit genocide. Hey, there are 8 million Palestinian people. We should live together in peace with them. Hey, maybe it isn't the right idea to go assassinate the leader of Iran." I, I don't hear a word like that anywhere.
Nor do I hear anything much in Washington either about, I mean, we have opposition in Washington to some of this, so I don't want to denigrate the people who are speaking out, but basically, the war machine continues in the United States because, as has been true for decades, our politics are controlled by the military-industrial complex. The presidents come and go, but the underlying idea that we need to feed the war machine so that America can kick the ass of any country in the world and thereby enrich, and I should have emphasized this, the ultimate goal is the enrichment of Wall Street, the enrichment of big oil, the enrichment of Silicon Valley, the enrichment of our billionaire class. It's pretty straightforward and pretty basic, but the point is, it's so deep-seated that, you know, we had, uh, uh, Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic Party senator from, uh, New Hampshire. I, I saw a clip. I, I, I hope I'm not misquoting her, but she was complaining that Zelenskyy fired, uh, particular, uh, defense minister, Fedorov. First of all, what is an American senator, uh, doing intervening in the choice of the defense minister? Well, it's obvious. Shaheen sits on the Armed Services Committee. She's deeply funded by the military industrial complex. That's American corruption up the wazoo, and that's how this whole system works. It's just too big a business, and Wall Street depends on these prerogatives. Big Oil depends on these prerogatives. The military industry itself depends on these prerogatives. Silicon Valley and its financial bubble that it is living on depends on the image of America being able to take on anybody and defeat anybody, and it's a complete hubristic delusion that we're living in right now, and it just gets more and more murderous and more and more dangerous because it's so mistaken and wrong-headed.
And maybe I'll stop the, the rant by just saying none of these wars has [clears throat] any deep reason. None of them involves American security in the least. None of them is impervious to solution through straightforward diplomacy. We don't want peace. Washington doesn't want peace. It wants dominance. That it can't have. But it could have peace, and the American people could have security, and we could actually save some trillions of dollars that we have squandered and continue to waste if we had just a modicum of understanding and transparency and accountability of our rogue government.
Last question is the greater Israel project collapsing?
Yes, in the sense that the American primacy project is collapsing. Israel, uh, claims that it controls 8 million Palestinians, that it can kill them, uh, with impunity, uh, that it can ethnically cleanse them, uh, right now. These, uh, absolute, uh, uh, murderers in the West Bank in Israel are going in, and they're, uh, they're burning down, uh, Palestinian homes, uh, they're, uh, killing, uh, uh, flocks of, uh, animals of Palestinian farmers. They're acting with complete impunity, and the United States is, "Yeah, Israel, that's great. What a democracy, so forth." And Israel thinks that it can get away with operating the world's most fascistic government right now, the most murderous, uh, and blatantly, uh, illegal from the point of view of every international standard of, of any government. But it depends entirely on the United States, entirely. Israel can't do this one day on its own. And Israel has had the stalwart support of the American public for decades, but it's lost that. Now, the American public is sick of what Israel's doing. Uh, that's both Jewish public and non-Jewish public, it's across the board, especially the young people in America. They're really disgusted with American support for this kind of murderous state. And the United States can't back Israel in this. That's proved by the complete failure and debacle of this war on Iran, which Trump will continue because he's too much of a...
Because he's, because he's weak to the pressures imposed upon him by the, by the oligarchs who fund him.
That is the point. The oligarch and this deep state. He's inconsequential. He, he loves to dominate, but he doesn't dominate anything. He goes along and he fights the wars of the geopolitical pivots that have been set in train decades ago, and he doesn't know how to stop any of this, but none of it's working. None of it can work. You know, when does it end? Well, unfortunately, and we just have to acknowledge this, in a world of nuclear weapons, it's just always possible that this imbecility ends up with something far more catastrophic and horrific than we can really fathom in our normal conversations and normal life. Any of this could escalate by accident, by mistake, by depravity, to something completely catastrophic for humanity. That's the main reason why we should stop it all today. But even aside from the catastrophic possibilities, none of this works. Israel is not going to be, quote, "greater Israel." Israel is not going to rule over millions of Palestinian people in some kind of genocidal state. This is coming to an end because the publics in the United States hate this. The European publics, where their leaders are complicit as well, they're disgusted. You look at what's happening in politics in Germany right now, the so-called far-right AFD, uh, they're saying every day, "We need to stop the war now." That's the far-right. Mhm. Where, you know, this is what is happening all through Europe. It's what's happening in American politics. The military-industrial complex calls the shots, the intelligence agencies continue the wars, the presidents and the prime ministers continue their theatrics. But the publics are completely disgusted with all of this. And so, to my mind, I don't know how and when and who's going to come and change this, but this is not sustainable. Uh, the bubble's going to burst. I hope not through catastrophe, but through, uh, somehow normal decency and understanding finally prevailing on this corrupted political system of ours and stopping these undeclared wars. The money-making from the wars, the involvement of Big Tech, Palantir and all the rest in all of the drone warfare of, uh, Ukraine and, uh, and in Gaza, and the AI systems that Silicon Valley's selling to the Pentagon, and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent in our name that we have no say about, and that's adding to this massive debt. This is all continuing. Doesn't really matter who's president. Every president, I've said in the last decades, "God, they're the worst." And then the next one along, "They're the worst." Then the next one comes along.
And all of this will be paid for by...
This will be paid for by generations as yet unborn.
What's, what's happening, by the way? It's not only is it debt stacked up on debt stacked up on debt, but what we've done in this kind of info war is we've also created probably the biggest financial bubble in history. Our stock market is so inflated right now in value. These big tech companies, all of which, you know, drink from the trough of the Pentagon among other things, are so wildly overvalued. Our exaggeration of American dominance is so weird. You know, I'm, as you know, on a long trip through Europe and Asia in recent weeks. Today I was at a major Chinese company at one of their advanced factories that is really unbelievable. We have no sense of how the rest of the world is moving on, building things, deepening their infrastructure, improving their technologies, where we're fighting these wars and bragging how great we are and how this stock market boom proves everything. What we're setting up is a phenomenal financial crisis in the future. I don't know when. I've, nobody can predict such things, but we're way out on a limb in all these wars that we can't win. Trump didn't stop anyway. It would take an extraordinary president of great capacity to actually end, uh, these wars, and Trump is obviously not the, a person of any capacity. Uh, he is, uh, uh, as I say, he's the perfect channeling of the greed and corruption of the military-industrial complex. So, he's, in, in a way, the perfect emblem of all of this. Um, and we're just building up a massive bubble, uh, a massive, uh, amount of debt, uh, unwinnable wars, and, um, no sense and truth about what's happening because, exactly as your opening says, these are undeclared wars. They are, we don't, we are not told anything about the motivations that have, uh, contributed to this for 30 years. And this is where we are, Judge. It's, uh, it's quite remarkable.
We proved the, the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, his famous quip, which is a tragic truth, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. And so, in Ukraine, we pushed, we pushed, we backed a coup that would bring in a government that didn't want neutrality, but agreed with the American idea of NATO membership because Ukraine was deeply divided. The president back in 2010 to 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, said, "We should be neutral. This is very dangerous. We're, look where we are geographically. We're right next to Russia. We're between Russia and Europe. We got the United States meddling. We just want to be neutral." But, of course, the United States doesn't believe in that. This is a geopolitical pivot. We need to take Ukraine. So, we sent all of these minions, my current colleague Victoria Nuland at Columbia University, to hand out cookies in the demonstrations, but she handed out vast sums of money to the Ukrainian, uh, uh, backers of a coup, which took place on February 22nd, 2014. And the idea is, "Okay, we're going to bring Ukraine, uh, into the American power projection." That's what Brzezinski tells us. And he tells us that America can't resist this. I mean, I'm sorry, that Russia can't resist this. America's all-powerful. We have the technological dominance. No one can resist us. We have the biggest economy in the world. We have the biggest financial system in the world. We are so powerful that Russia will have no choice but to give in to these American demands. He writes that in a whole chapter. And what he also says is, "We're going to annoy the hell out of Russia, out of Iran, out of China, but no American is going to be, no American president, no American government's going to be so stupid to allow those three to get together." Okay. Brzezinski was wrong on every single thing he wrote. Of course, Russia has resisted, and it resisted to the extent of war. Same with Iran, it doesn't just give in in one day because the United States bombs it and kills its leadership. And China did not collapse and succumb to all the trade wars of Trump 1 and Biden and now Trump 2 and all the threats and so many things that were on a checklist that was written 10 years ago by another former colleague of mine, Robert Blackwell, in an article also for the Council on Foreign Relations, who explained, "Here's how we bother China, how we weaken China, how we contain China." Well, none of it has worked. But in the process, of course, the United States has created enemies everywhere. And none of it's going to work. But what is the point that I'm making is that this is so deeply seated. Our government is so corrupt top to bottom.
Major Democratic Party strategist...
...is in the title, am I right?
His, his book in 1997's called The Grand Chessboard. And the idea is, uh, riffing on the great game, uh, that Britain and Russia supposedly played in Central Asia in the 19th century. But the idea is the world's a game. It's, it's like a video game. You bomb here, you slap there, you send your drones here. Uh, none of these leaders is at risk. They don't tell the public what all of this is about. They don't actually ask us to pay any taxes to fund these wars, 'cause the public's completely against them. And so, uh, no one asks. It all goes into the debt. But Brzezinski in 1997, in a kind of didactic textbook that he says he wrote for his students, explains what this grand chessboard looks like from the point of view of Washington. And the idea of the book is very simple. Little crazy, except, you know, if you're playing a board game, it would make sense, but it's about American primacy. So the idea is that the United States has to be the biggest and baddest and toughest and can beat anybody in the world anywhere. And that's the idea that there should be no resistance to American demands anywhere. And that the United States should basically be intervening everywhere in order to prevent any other countries from getting powerful enough or aligning so that they can resist American demands. America as number one bully of the world. And Brzezinski lays out how this should be done. Remember in the 1990s, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and the idea was everywhere in Clinton's mouth and in Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State's words, that the US is the indispensable nation that looks farther than any other nation in the world. And we had the Project for the New American Century, which is basically, "We'll beat the out of anyone that opposes the United States." So we had it called the end of history, we had it called the unipolar moment. And what Brzezinski explains is how we're going to play this chessboard, this worldwide chessboard. And the most fascinating aspect of Brzezinski's analysis is he's like a chess teacher explaining how to move the pieces. And he has a concept which is very important for everybody to understand how crazy our government is. And the concept is a geopolitical pivot state. What is a geopolitical pivot state? Brzezinski tells us it's a place we don't care about except that it can annoy the hell out of another major power. In other words, it's a place we can use. And Brzezinski's core idea in this book is the United States needs to achieve its primacy and maintain its primacy being the biggest and the baddest in Eurasia, the great land mass of Europe and Asia that it joins together into really one supercontinent where about 70% of the world's population lives and about 70% of the world economy. And of course, it includes China, it includes Russia, it includes India, it includes Europe. And the United States needs to dominate all of this. And Brzezinski nicely tells us that Europe, well, they're vassal states. We're the empire, they're vassals, they'll do what we say. Pretty much true. And then there are the pivot states, the geopolitical pivots. Number one geopolitical pivot he tells us in 1997 is Ukraine. If we control Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a major power because Russia's blocked from its entry into the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia can't project its power. And so, Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot state. And in 1997, in this book and in another article Brzezinski writes called "A Grand Strategy for Eurasia" for Foreign Affairs. And Brzezinski's not just some run-of-the-mill guy. He's one of the major strategists of our country telling us how it works and how Washington thinks. He says, "We need to control Ukraine. So, we need to push NATO to Ukraine and push American power to the Russian border." Incidentally, uh, Mark Rutte, who is the Secretary General of NATO, and a really despicable character, by the way, and maybe that just goes with the turf of being Secretary General of NATO, said a few days ago that NATO's purpose is, it's not defense against the Soviet Union. It's the projection of American power. Basically, or I should say, exactly what Brzezinski was telling us in 1997. And what Brzezinski says is, "We need to take Ukraine. We need to take the other geopolitical pivots." Ah, what's number two on his list? Iran. Oh, fancy that. Cool. What a coincidence. We need to bother China in East Asia, uh, by bulking up the military in Korea, where we have been for 80 years, for God's sake, 80 years stationed there since the Korean War. And bulking up the military in Japan and bothering China in every other possible way because these are the geopolitical pivots. We need to use these places to annoy, to weaken, to divide, to subvert, maybe even to overthrow the governments of our big adversaries. And Brzezinski writes it all out in a long tome. And basically, everything he says is wrong except that it explains everything that we have done and continue to do until now. Because until today, whether it's Clinton or Bush or Obama or Trump 1 or Biden or Trump 2, doesn't matter. The name of the game in Washington is, "We're number one." The military-industrial complex will be fed fully, gluttonously, to the maximum extent to keep that dominant power, that primacy, and will fight anyone, will subvert any government, will use any geopolitical pivot to do that. And we get all these countries into horrific trouble.