➡ The U.S. and Israel are reportedly planning to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and potentially instigate a regime change. This could lead to instability and retaliation from Iran, which is more advanced and better led than Iraq was in 2003. The situation is further complicated by Iran’s ties to Russia and China, with China relying heavily on Iran for energy. There are concerns that this could also create an opportunity for China to invade Taiwan while U.S. forces are focused on the Middle East.

➡ The text discusses the potential for conflict between the U.S. and Iran, and how Russia and Turkey might benefit from such a situation. It suggests that Russia might prefer to maintain the status quo, but could also benefit from increased oil prices if conflict arises. The text also raises concerns about Turkey’s increasing influence in the Middle East and its potential to become a dominant power if Iran’s regime collapses. It ends by questioning the immediate aftermath of a potential strike on Iran, and the possible responses from different countries.

➡ The text discusses the potential consequences of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the possibility of conflict with the U.S. It suggests that Iran’s actions may lead to its own downfall, as it could provoke a conflict that would end in the destruction of the Iranian regime. The text also explores the idea that the U.S. could benefit from such a conflict, as it could lead to increased domestic oil and natural gas production. However, it warns of potential unintended consequences, such as the derailment of domestic political agendas, similar to what happened with the Iraq war and Vietnam war.

➡ The text discusses the potential threat of Iran’s military actions, including its possible nuclear capabilities and its history of attacking U.S. bases. It suggests that Iran could potentially use a dirty bomb in retaliation to U.S. strikes, and that it has been shipping nuclear material globally. The text also mentions Iran’s connections with terrorist groups and the possibility of these groups being used to deliver attacks. Lastly, it questions the accuracy of U.S. intelligence regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

➡ The speaker believes that the U.S. is underestimating Iran’s capabilities and that an attack on Iran could lead to serious consequences. They suggest that the U.S. is preparing for a potential conflict, possibly by creating a false sense of security for Iran. The speaker also questions the political support for a war with Iran, noting that President Trump ran as an anti-war candidate. They express concern that a conflict with Iran could destabilize global politics and potentially lead to a larger war.

➡ The text discusses the complex political dynamics between the US, Russia, and Ukraine. It suggests that Russia’s actions in Ukraine are driven by a desire to create defensive buffer zones, not to wage war on Europe. The text also criticizes the US for breaking promises made to Russia and for pushing NATO expansion, which it suggests has contributed to the current conflict. The author believes that the US and Europe have misrepresented Russia’s intentions, causing further tension.

➡ Russia’s desire for a buffer zone in Ukraine is due to its historical significance and strategic location. The U.S. and NATO’s attempts to include Ukraine in their alliance have been seen as a threat by Russia, leading to increased tensions. The U.S. is trying to maintain its credibility while managing its commitments to Ukraine and other global issues. The future of this situation depends on the strategies of the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine’s own political dynamics.

➡ The text discusses the potential for Ukraine to use various tactics, including false flag operations and the use of bio and chemical weapons, to involve the United States more deeply in their conflict. It also highlights the role of European countries in conflicts around the world, often driven by resource needs. The text suggests that the U.S. should reconsider its involvement in these conflicts, as they often benefit other countries more than the U.S. itself.

They’re coming to quote the end game on Iran. Those B2s are a big move. That, for me, was the red flag. This is not just about knocking out the Houthis. That’s probably step one. We’re seeing the displays of underground missile facilities with thousands and thousands of missiles. I have many contacts in D.C. and elsewhere. What I’m hearing is that they absolutely will strike US Bases all throughout the region and they could probably do a lot of damage one way or the other. With Trump in office, the Iranian regime is not going to last. China buy something like 80% of Iran’s natural gas and oil.

We’re talking about knocking out a significant portion of their energy profile. They’re not going to just take it lying down. Whatever we’re going to do, there’s a window of opportunity now for China to go for broke on Taiwan in the next 30 days. For those people who are telling me that Trump’s going to avoid a war, I don’t think that’s the case. They seem very dead set on starting a war with Iran. The Russians know, hey, if there’s a major war in the Middle east, those resources are spoken for now. They’re not going to Zelensky. This could be a very, very, very bad situation erupting.

World War three is already happening. This is a house of cars and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. Hi, folks. Canadian prepper here. Today we have on the channel Brandon Weickert, who’s a geopolitical analyst, a author and a founder of the Weikert Report, with a background in national security affairs and experience as a former congressional staffer. His expertise encompasses global strategic issues, including the geopolitical dynamics of the Ukraine conflict, tensions between China and Iran, and Iran’s regional ambitions. He’s the author of several books, including the Shadow Iran’s Quest for Supremacy, as well as A Disaster of Our Own Making, how the West Lost Ukraine.

I’m hoping to get Brandon’s high level analysis of where we sit with the three main theaters of conflict and perhaps get a sense of how all these things inter, interrelate and what the historical context is for a lot of these things. A lot of my viewers by now, I think, are fairly well apprised of the various narratives, most of them conflicting with respect to, you know, the origins of these conflicts. Let’s start in the Middle east, because I think as we were discussing Beforehan, and that is probably one of the theaters that is going to flare up in the near term.

What are your thoughts on the Iranian situation? Well, thank you for having me. And yeah, the Shadow Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. My second book that came out is all about this. It came out just so your honesty understands. I turned in the manuscript for that book on May 2022, and it predicted the October 7th attacks. So a year before, a year and a half before they actually happen, my book was predicting this. And also another key component of that book is that everybody talking about World War 3, it’s not going to come from the Ukraine war, it’s not going to come from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

It’s going to start in the Middle east with Iran. You know, that’s just to cut you off there. That’s so interesting because I think the last three guests I’ve interviewed, each person has said that it’s going to originate in one of those three, and it’s all been different. So I’m really interested in hearing your perspective. And, and can you maybe, before you get going here, shed a bit more light on this prediction you had about October 7th? Yeah, no, I was looking at. So what I do, when you’re an analyst. Well, really, what you’re, what you are is you’re looking at patterns.

You know, you’re, you’re analyzing patterns and you’re bringing in, in my case, I bring in what I know about history, I bring in what I know about the people in the area, the political systems, the economies, what are the press. You sort of fold that into the whole and the analytical kind of package. And in this case, the analytical package was my book. And I was looking at, I started writing the book in 2021 came out and, you know, I public, I handed in the manuscript in 2022. It was published, I think, six months after that.

But, you know, I was looking at what was going on at that time. And all of the warning indicators were such that we were primed for a major, major conflict erupting in the Middle east and that that conflict would be between the groups arrayed against Israel. All of those groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, even Fatah to some degree, which is in the west bank, all those groups are in some way either indirectly or directly controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, notably Hezbo. And so I was looking at this and I was seeing what, at the time, the Biden administration was doing or not doing.

And it all just indicated to me that the Iranians were getting ready to let loose, because for Them that time period was a window of strategic opportunity that they were going to exploit. It’s in their quest for supremacy, as the subtitle of the book highlights. And the Iranians have basically been let loose from the containment that they were put in after the Revolution in 1979. They were let loose by George W. Bush, Bush who decided to invade Iraq. And we actually, people don’t realize this, we actually had to partner with the Iranians for several different combat operations in the early phases of that war.

And the Iranians were more than happy to oblige because what that meant was we were getting rid of their number one competitor in the region, Saddam Hussein, and we were replacing him with nothing. And they were going to be able to go in and exploit the religious and ethnic alliance because, remember, majority of Iraq, Iraq is Shiite Muslim. And of course, Iran is the dominant Shiite Muslim power in the region there. That’s why they’re at war with Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim. And so they were able to exploit that. And ever since 03, the Iranians have been building a silent empire across what this call what is known as the Shiite Crescent.

And what you have happening now in the region is since Trump was elected or in November, beginning around November of last year, you had the Israelis and the CIA authorizing the Turkish Intelligence Service to utilize their ISIS and Al Qaeda proxy, which is now called Hat Tarir Al Sham hts, to push Bashar Assad out of Syria. And what that did was it basically cut Iran’s empire in half that they’d been building. That was that, you know, from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. That was the land bridge allowing for Iran to, to, to. To. To empower Hamas and Hezbollah and Fatah and Islamic Jihad against Israel.

Well, the loss of Assad basically threw that in, you know, out the window. And then the Russians were forced to abandon, however, temporarily, their naval base in Tartus, Syria. And that has allowed for the Turkish element to kind of take over the whole, the whole country outside of these pockets of resistance like the Drews and the, the, the, the. But what basically has happened is the Iranians are now put on the back foot at the beginning of the Trump administration. And Trump has come in and he surrounded himself by a bunch of Iran hawks, notably at the Defense Department.

And now you see this buildup occurring. I said on other programs on election night. I was on, I was on national TV on election night, and I said, trump wins. We’re going to try to knock out the Houthis first. We’re going to do to them what Trump did to ISIS in that first term and then we’re going to ramp up and go at Iran hard. And I, I said to people, I’ve been saying, and I’m not saying I’m an advocate of regime change, I’m not an advocate of regime change. You know, I do think we need to contain and deter Iran like we did the Soviet Union, but I don’t think we need to be going into another Middle east war.

But what I’ve been saying is one way or the other, with Trump in office, the Iranian regime is not going to last. And I’m, I’m, I’ve been proven right so far. And what you’re seeing with this buildup is we’ve moved about six or seven of the B2 Spirit long range nuclear bombers. There’s only 19 in our arsenal of those bombers. And so that accounts for about 35, 37% of the B2 fleet is now in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. We’ve got two aircraft carriers operating off the coast of Yemen. The Israelis were given at the start of the Trump administration.

He gave them a handful of Moabs. Those are the largest non nuclear bombs in our arsenal. And now because Syria Assad is out and it’s kind of chaos right now, the Israelis have been able to establish a, an air corridor linking Israeli territory with Iranian territory. They can now safely fly their planes over Syria and Iraq, northern Iraq, into northern and eastern Iran. And we, it is my contention that this is all part a larger geopolitical move by the United States and Israel to effectively clear open a pathway for the bombers to begin initiating strikes on those hardened underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

Remember Donald Trump said three weeks ago from the White House he was signing executive orders, he said that hey, he goes, they’re coming to quote the end game on Iran. He then began moving all these forces into the region. And so, and we know that the Pentagon know, we know Pete Heth is a hawk on, on Iran. We know that Mike Waltz, based on these signal thread leaks, we know that Mike Waltz is a hawk on Iran. Everybody but J.D. vance in the administration seems to be relatively hawkish about hitting Iran. We know that if they can knock out the Houthis, they now have this the straight of Bab El Mandeb, which is a major waterway.

They now have cleared that open which they can then move larger U.S. warships off the coast of Iran. They can move around the Bab Al Mandeb into the Strait of Hormuz right now a Complicating factor for our ships movements toward Iran is the fact that the Houthis in Yemen have these very sophisticated anti ship ballistic missiles and they’ve got them in abundance. In fact, these anti ship ballistic missiles. There’s a reason that the USS Harry S. Truman, the carrier right now is, is stationed right outside the range of those missiles because contrary to what the Pentagon is saying, those missiles have come very close to hitting our carriers and doing severe damage to them.

So you have this buildup going on on the American side to the south and to the, to the west of Iran and then in the Israeli side you’ve got this air corridor now that they can hold and pass through. It is my belief what’s going to happen and I think it’s going to happen the next month. What’s going to happen is you’re going to have Israeli Air force jets fly through that air corridor over Syria into Iran and they’re going to penetrate and try to blast apart the Russian built air defense systems around facilities, notably the Fordo uranium enrichment facility.

Once those air defenses are suppressed, you’re going to have Israeli C130 planes loaded with those MOABs. The mother of all bombs of what it’s nicknamed, its official name is the massive ordinance Air Blast. Those bombs are going to then be deployed from the AC130 30s or the C130s rather, and they’re going to be dropped on Fordo and they’re going to penetrate deeply and they’re going to try to knock out that uranium enrichment facility from the south, I suspect from the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia, you will have similar strikes conducted by those B2 Spirit planes directed notably against military facilities in Iran, likely naval bases as well as other nuclear weapons facilities.

All of this is designed to degrade and destroy the ability of Iran to conduct either, either, you know, regular warfare or irregular warfare, which is what they prefer to do throughout the region. And that will then I think this is what I’m concerned about, the Israelis. Since August of last year, Netanyahu has been talking about using the Shah’s grandson who lives in Washington D.C. using him, sending him into Iran to try to take over the country. You’ve been seeing on social media this outpouring of support suddenly for returning the Shah’s grandson to the THR. Remember the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollahs in 1979.

That was the whole hostage crisis and everything. What I think is happening is an inorganic movement by US and Israeli intelligence to basically not only get rid of Those nuclear facilities, which Trump himself has said as a red line. But you’ve also had, there’s, there’s this longer running plan for regime change which, which is going to involve Shah’s grandson being flown in or moved into Iran to try to take over. That’s the part that’s really most disturbing because I don’t think, I don’t know if he has enough support to get that done. And furthermore, there’s still going to be a lot of elements that are loyal to the current regime.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps are fanatics. It’s like the ss, you know, they, they’re not going to just give up because we blow up some of their facilities. And so you have here. And by the way, Iran is a proxy of Russia. Iran is a proxy of China. China buys something like 80% of Iran’s natural gas and oil, oil right now. So we’re talking about knocking out the Chinese a significant portion of their energy profile because we’re not going to let any regime that replaces the current one in Iran sell to China. So this is a significant complicating factor for China as well.

And also there’s also creates a window of opportunity for China in the Pacific because we’ve only got one carrier, it’s the old Nimitz that’s about to be decommissioned. We’ve got one carrier in the Indo Pacific right now. And April is, there’s only two months in the year where the Chinese could reliably, because of weather, invade Taiwan. One is April and one is October. And now all of our forces are being directed for a protracted period of time to the Middle East. There’s a window of opportunity now for China to go for broke on Taiwan in the next 30 days.

And so this is how the, the, you know, the two things are affecting one another. As for Russia, Russia’s been handing off increasingly advanced systems to Iran to protect themselves. Not only S300, but the talk is that they’ve sold S400 air defenses. And the rumor mill says they might have even sold some of the really advanced S500 that could potentially knock out F35, fifth generation warplanes. They’ve also sold the SU35 warplane. They’re also, last month they flew an SU57, which is the most advanced Russian warplane. It’s the equivalent of our F35 or F22 for the Russians.

They flew it to Tehran and the suspicion was that they were demonstrating for the mullahs and trying to get them to buy the SU57. Which could seriously complicate any US or Israeli airstrike in the long run. Which is why I think there’s a big move by Washington and Jerusalem to strike now within the next 30 to 45 days. Alright guys, so as some of you know, Canadian Prepper is a fully independent channel. We don’t have sponsors and we’re beholden to nobody. You can help support us by supporting yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com I know that in an emergency having the right gear can make all the difference.

This is why I’ve tested and curated the best preparedness products on the market so that you can be confident and ready for whatever comes your way. Way. Now back to the video. Wow. Well, that was very comprehensive. Just to go back a little bit to what you were saying about the Iranian power vacuum that would likely ensue because of course they don’t have the ability to put boots on the ground in Iran. So if they were to do these massive airstrikes, it’s going to create a lot of instability. What do you think that’s going to look like in terms of, of how Iran is going to respond? I know they have their besieged militia which is comprised of somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 million.

What are your thoughts with respect to what’s going to happen in the aftermath of such an attack? And are we going to see the long anticipated Operation True Promise 3? Oh, they have been long stating that they were going to, to do another operation. It was going to be a serious one. Is that where they’re going to counterattack? Is it going to be US bases in the region, critical infrastructure with US allies? What are your thoughts on that? This is the thing is that Iran is not Iraq. Iran is a little bit more advanced and they’re a little bit better led than the Iraqis were in 03.

People forget that in 03 we went into Iraq. The Saddam Hussein Iraqi army was a shell of its former self. The Iranians today, it’s a harder territory to hit, it’s a larger territory to conquer. They have more ballistic missiles than Iraq ever did. They have this ideological, you know, this Islamist fervor where they have a, you know, very melanarian view of, of, of the world and they’re not going to just take it lying down, whatever we’re going to do. So the question that I’ve been asking for the last year and a half, I, I, you know, I also occasionally write for the Washington Times and my, one of my last articles for them in the last year was why is Iran holding back? And I have received because I have a lot of contacts and a lot of countries around the world.

One of those countries is Russia. I have, I have heard from my Russian contacts that Putin has been restraining the Iranians. That behind the scenes Putin, because he’s so focused on Ukraine, the last thing he wants is to see the Iranians go so far with retaliation that basically it forces the Americans to go to war with Iran and then the, the Iranian regime is lost and a anti Russian regime replaces them, them. And so for the Russians, kind of keeping things and the status quo is preferable than seeing a US war erupt with Iran because Iran goes too far with Israel.

On the same, on the same token. Sorry to interrupt you just. Do you think the Russians stand to gain somewhat from a managed conflict in Iran in the sense that they can exploit the increased oil price? Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think there’s, there’s absolutely something to that. And this is why I’m saying right now your question about true promise three, the longer this goes on, it actually might end up, the Russians might say, you know what, it’s actually in our benefit now to let this. Because, because my understanding is Putin is the only reason the Iranians haven’t actually tried to seriously retaliate once Putin’s resistance is gone.

And I think this is part of why Putin has been flooding Iran with all these advanced defensive systems because he’s trying to help them build a comprehensive layered air defense network that could reliably rebuff whatever the Americans and the, the Israelis are going to throw at Iran in the next month. So it might get to a point where, yeah, Putin is like, you know what, I’m just, just let her rip, Good luck, have at it. Because in a way then that also helps him in Ukraine because then we’re really fixated on Iran and we can’t really help the Ukrainians.

And like I said with China, that gives them a window of opportunity in the near term. And so there’s, there’s a lot of kind of moving pieces here. But the question that has dogged me is why hasn’t Iran followed through on these promises? Is it because they really don’t have the tech and they’re bluffing their way, which could be. Or is it. Because what I’m hearing is that there’s diplomatic pressure behind the scenes and they’re waiting for the, the, for a more opportune time to strike. There’s no more opportune time to retaliate than when it looks like all the chips are down.

And, you know, Israel and America are coming hard for, for Iran. And in fact, I think you’re starting to see some buildup toward that. The, the personal letter that Trump wrote to the Ayatollah in the last week has been rebuffed soundly by, by the Ayatollah. He claimed that the language in it was too hostile and it was offensive. You know, we’re seeing the displays of underground missile facilities with thousands and thousands of missiles. Now, maybe that’s propaganda, but we know that the Iranians do have a pretty significant precision guided munitions capability that is getting more advanced with every iteration.

And so, you know, at some point, the Iranians are not going to let this just keep going the way it is, because if they do, they know they’re definitely going to die. The regime, in terms of the. The Shah’s grandson, you know, you mentioned boots on the ground. My, my concern is this, is that we knock out those facilities, we degrade the Iranian regime enough where, because there is a sizable, if not unorganized, there is a sizable opposition to the Ayatollahs. People in Iran, particularly young people, do not like where the country’s going. They’re not having children, partly because they don’t like the religious rule.

They don’t agree with it, and they want to have better relations with the West. So there is this group of young people in particular who, if given the opportunity, probably would try to overthrow the regime. But the issue is who would they put to replace it? How would you know? And what would the west do in the ensuing chaos? Because until some new regime popped up, up, Iran would become an abs. It would become Balkanized. It would become an absolute chaos pit. And we’ve seen throughout the world, US Policymakers can’t leave well enough alone when they see unstable countries.

The first thing they want to do is deploy, you know, peacekeepers and get us in the middle of another. Of another campaign where we’ve got guys on the ground loafing around the place, getting shot at. And so that is a concern of mine. Another concern of mine in, in this regard is Turkey has been moving increasingly into the Middle East. The Turkish leader Erdogan, he seems to be under pressure right now at home. He’s arrested his Social Democrat opponent, who’s the mayor of Istanbul. There’s these riots breaking out. One million man, you know, riots against Erdogan.

I don’t know how that’s going to end. But what I do know is until last week or two weeks ago, when this started, started, erdogan was steadily executing his neo Ottomanist agenda, which is basically to rebuild the Ottoman Empire that collapsed in 1923 in the middle east with himself as this new sultan. And that’s the move into Turkey as part of that. More importantly, though, you’re seeing Turkey wanting to move beyond Syria and wanting to move into parts of Iraq and into Azerbaijan, into that kind of net, that area of the world, so they can surround the Shiites of Iran.

Furthermore, the Turks have been very consistent that they want to destroy the State of Israel. And so, and, and in fact, rumor mill is that 4, 000 Turks have been killed fighting for Hamas, that they snuck into the country. They’re Turkish military trained officers and they were fighting incognito wearing Hamas, you know, outfits and whatnot. But in fact, they’re Turkish commandos fighting Israeli commandos. So you’re already seeing the beginnings of more than just a war with Iran. We collapse Iran, we’re going to have a bigger problem now because Turkey is going to move in force into the region and try to become the new dominant Muslim power.

Turkey has a greater defense industrial base than Iran ever will. Turkey is, is much more advanced on its own. Not to mention the fact that Turkey is a beneficiary as a NATO member. You know, this could be a very, very, very bad situation erupting. We knock out Iran, think all is well. Even if it doesn’t trigger a wider war, which I think it will, we’re still going to then have to contend with the fact we’ve got a NATO ally supposedly in Turkey, trying to destroy another American ally in Israel. How is that going to work out? I mean, there’s, these are sort of second and third order effects, but this is where the conflict is moving.

I think the Trump administration has decided, and you’re seeing that with this build up in Diego Garcia, not only are they going to hit the Houthis, but they’re going to hit hard Iran. I mean, my only thoughts on Turkey would be that perhaps Erdogan is just telling people what they want to hear. I mean, he’s been rather duplicitous up until this point, saying one thing and doing the other in terms of trade with Israel. He’s basically been fairly impotent in terms of his actual, you know, enforcement of anything along that front. So he’s saying a lot in order to appease his own population, but it doesn’t appear as there’s anything really there to back it up.

And when you have nuclear weapons in Turkey that are belong to belong to the United States, you know, I, I find it hard to believe that they’ll ever really, in any meaningful way, go up against Israel. But I mean, you never know. I mean, anything. But I think, yeah, those nuclear weapons are, yes, owned by the United States, but they are in a warehouse surrounded by Turkish military. And so the, the. On. The on said factor here with that is if Turkey really wanted to claim those nukes, they could. Now, they don’t have the launch codes, but you can hack launch codes.

So I’m. The B61 nuclear weapons is what, what are housed in Turkey. And I think there’s a sizable number of them. And so it would, in my, in my view, it would not be outside the realm of possibility that the Turks, if they really decided to go full bore, they could claim those nukes, grab them, and do whatever they needed to do to try to make those systems, you know, work for them. Man, talk about a standoff. I mean, there’s a Mexican standoff and then there’s a Middle Eastern standoff, which is even more nebulous. Now, I think what you’re saying with respect to the Turks potentially moving their military, which is the biggest in Europe, they’re really the ones, only the ones who are positioned to actually put boots on the ground, if any, in any capacity inside Iran, because I don’t think the United States States has that capacity, at least not right now.

I know Pete Hegseth is putting on this GI Joe Persona to try to get more recruits. I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but it might. You know, let’s talk a little bit about the immediate aftermath of a strike like this, because I think it cannot be understated what their potential options even are. I mean, they could close the straight of her moves. Is that going to really benefit them in any meaningful way? What does that even, even look like? I mean, have you thought it’s one of the only plays they have, so it doesn’t really matter if it benefits them if, if they.

So Scott Ritter, of all people, who is a, you know, he’s, he’s a pretty consistent advocate for peace at all costs. Scott Ritter was tweeting and the. It looked like the Iranian. An Iranian official responded to him on Twitter in the last, you know, day or so. He, he basically outlined how the Iranians need to publicly abandon in the quest for nukes, because. And then the Iranian official jumped on and said, well, this is our form of deterrence. This is. We’ve seen what happens when other regimes hostile to America abandon Nukes, they get toppled like Saddam, like Libya, like, you know, and his response I thought was very interesting because he’s definitely not, you know, in favor of, of the striking Iran policy.

His comment was, your deterrence has failed because the Americans are still coming. And so, and if anything, the quest to acquire robust nuclear weapons capabilities by Iran is actually inducing this conflict that will end in the destruction of the Iranian regime. So there, if they are that wrong headed the Iranians in thinking that possessing nukes or claiming that they’re working on nukes or that they have surge capacity is somehow going to dissuade the Americans and Israelis from striking. If they’re that wrong about that, and they are, then they’re probably not thinking clearly on the Strait of Hormuz issue because you’re right, it’s going to affect them negatively.

Their economy depends on flowing oil and natural gas out of their country, usually to Asia, specifically China. You shut that straight down, you’re basically kind of shutting your own part of your own trade down. That’s going to have really negative impacts already on a situation that’s very bad for you. You. I don’t think the Iranians are thinking clearly on this. They’re, they’re thinking we’re just going to stand up and this is, this is the resistance. But even that can be overcome. You know, I was talking to, I was talking to somebody yesterday about this and their point to me was because I said, you know, it’s going to spike the price of oil for the average American if Trump does this.

It’s going to kind of hurt what he’s trying to do at home, isn’t it? And this individual said, well, no, don’t you understand? America is an, as an energy producer, it can just detach itself from the world market if it needs to. And ultimately that would actually serve Trump’s political agenda because he’s been saying he wants to develop American natural gas and oil even more than it already is. So this could be the impetus for that, you know, and, and I mean, I’m sure you maybe responded something to do with a petrodollar. Sure, yes, yes. I mean, if you, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, right? If you give up one, you got to give up the other.

Well, but that’s another thing. Trump has been talking, you know, he’s, he’s not your usual president and when it even comes to the dollar, because on the one hand he’s talking about the dollar dominance and he’s threatening these brics country if you go off the dollar, we’re going to sanction you. But then he’s talking about embracing Bitcoin, and he’s talking about embracing these alternative methods of, of which no other president would ever talk about. It sounds to me like on some level, Trump and his team have some inkling of an understanding that the dollar dominance is not going to last, and they’re looking at alternatives.

Now, another thing to keep in mind. Another. Another colleague of mine this morning said this to me. You know, Trump is very PO’d right now at Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. He’s been saying, you need to lower interest rates, and Powell’s been ignoring him. In fact, the most recent Fed meeting, they didn’t spike. They, they didn’t lower the, the Fed, the Fed rates. Well, one way you can lower Fed rates, you’re already seeing Trump is kind of crashing the stock market. But another way to lower those rates is you trigger an oil war overseas. And they’re going to have to do something to help Trump out.

And so, again, Trump might be looking at the conflict in the Middle east as kind of a blessing, as a business move. You know, we, we force a scissor scenario where the Fed chairman has to act in my favor. And in the end, in the long run, that actually probably ends up financially helping the Americans. It’ll be a lot of pain in the near term. But, you know, so there are these other cogitations that, that the Trump team are going through, and, you know, none of them scream war avoidance. So for those people who are telling me that Trump’s going to avoid a war, I don’t think that’s the case.

And then you also look at the people he’s hired, notably at the Pentagon. I’m not going to name names, but people I know, people I respect, but I just, they seem very dead set on starting a war with Iran. And so, you know, you, you look at all that and you look at the inputs of what Trump is getting, and you look at some of the other factors he’s got to think about knocking out Iran, in his mind, might, might be a. What’s needed to be done. But there are second and third and fourth order effects, I think, that nobody is considering.

And we saw this with Iraq in O3. It was going to be a cakewalk. It was going to be a slam dunk. And indeed, we took out Saddam’s army in a historic time period with a relatively small force. But yet we know what happened thereafter. The unintended consequences, you know, and something similar may be Unfolding, holding. One thing also with the Shah’s grandson, we talk about boots on the ground. Set aside Turkey possibly deploying boots on the ground there. That could very well be a major play. Another thing to consider is how would you move the Shah in? Because there’s still going to be factions opposed, and they’re violently opposed to him.

Well, The Mujahedini Kalk Mek, this is a group that has been in Washington, D.C. lobbying and challenging the status quo for many years. They are a dissident group. Some call them a cult, a religious cult. They are former Marxists. The leader of that group is revered as a God by its followers. But they have many powerful people in D.C. enthralled to them. They’re a lobbying group. They have their own lobbying group there. And so they have guys on the ground, though. They have well organized militias. So it could be that our intelligence services are planning to utilize the MEK as sort of shock troops on the ground as we hit from the air, indigenous forces, you know, under mek, maybe under the Turks and whoever else go in force on the ground to try to mop up the regime.

But I do believe on some level, regime change, regardless of is said in D.C. regime change is very much on the table. And I also think that is a mistake because we should not be in the business of. Of regime change. We’ve done that for 20 years in the Middle east, and it has yielded nothing but negative results. And the same thing will occur in Iran if we try it. I think we should contain and deter. And I actually, in the book, I talk about this, a shadow war. Kushner, in the first term, the Abraham Accords were one of his pet projects.

And, you know, Kushner. Kushner gets a lot of bad rap. And I understand why. And. But on the Abraham Accords, I thought that was a great way to try to kind of split the baby in two. What he said was the Abraham Accords were designed to enhance cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia. Both groups are negatively impacted by Iran’s rise. Both of them do not want to see Iran become a dominant factor. So getting those two groups to work more closely together and on security issues, you could have a kind of NATO of the Middle east arise where they would contain and deter for us, Iran.

And over time, the Iranian regime would simply die the way the Soviet regime did because it is so inherently weak and it is so unpopular with its people, and we don’t ever have to commit ground traffic troops or do airstrikes. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has moved away from that, and they seem very gung ho on, you know, triggering a war there. And it, I think that’s, I think that’s where this is going. And I think there’s going to be a lot of unintended consequences that could end up derailing the Trump administration at home. The way that the Iraq war derailed George W.

Bush’s domestic platform and Vietnam derailed Lyndon Johnson’s domestic platform. Yeah. In terms of unintended consequences, do you think the threat of Iran attacking US Bases in the region is credible? Yes. And what other, what utility would that really serve ultimately, other than to perhaps embolden the United States in whatever sort of propaganda they want to kick up thereafter to. Well, certainly it would play into that about a war, a greater war in the region. Yeah, no, certainly it would play into propaganda. It would only force us to take more military action. But from the Iranian perspective, again, I bring up Scott Ritter and what he was observing with Iran, there’s clearly a disconnect in their strategic thinking between what they can achieve by acting the way that they are and what they can avoid.

And the fact of the matter is they’re. They. Yes, they absolutely will strike U. S. Bases all throughout the region, and they could probably do a lot of damage. People don’t realize how many injuries and how many casualties there were after the Suleimani killing. Remember, Trump killed the leader of the IRGC in 2020, and the Iranians responded with a pretty comprehensive missile barrage against Iraq bases in northern Iraq, Iraq, and it did a lot of damage to US Service. I actually know somebody who was very grievously wounded in that attack. And this is not widely reported, but they did do a lot of damage to us there.

So that they will absolutely try that again. But in that case, it will only induce the Americans and Israelis to double down on destroying the regime. Something to be to consider. And this, this is where we get into a debate between friends of mine in the administration who are anti Iraq Iran war. Tulsi Gabbard is the Director of National Intelligence. I know Tulsi a little bit. I knew her father. She’s great. She said the other day in the Senate intelligence briefing that it is the collective assessment of the intelligence community that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has not been developing them since 2003.

That is categorically wrong. The Iranians have rudimentary nuclear weapons capability. I think they probably have a handful of bombs. I don’t know how many they can build beyond what they Have, I don’t know how sophisticated. I don’t think the bombs they have are very sophisticated. The delivery systems are in question. That’s what everybody needs to be looking at, which is the missile system systems. And Iran has considerably advanced missile systems. The question is, can they marry a nuclear bomb to the top of a missile? I don’t think they’re there yet, but they could. What is the.

But what is the real complication of that? Because it seems like if they could make a nuke, has to do, they could ballistic missile on target, thousands of miles away, then if they are getting good with the Russians, they’re in good with the North Koreans. I mean, sure. Well that, and that’s a great point actually, because I’m only speaking on what I know from U. S. Sources, which, you know, Iran, like China is an intelligence black hole for a lot of our people. So you could be right that they’ve achieved this and we don’t know it.

All I know is the, the, the most recent assessments I, I know of and the people that I know who do these assessments on background tell me, unlike the North Koreans who do have miniaturization and have had miniaturization of nukes since 2013, it is their belief that the Iranians do not have that yet. But of course you’re right. Iran is very close with North Korea and Iran is very close with Russia. And we know the Russians in particular are sharing all kinds of military technology with both Iran and North Korea ever since the Ukraine war started because they’re all partners now.

And so you could be absolutely right. What I was going to bring up though, is the prospect of a dirty bomb. The Iranians could absolutely assemble a dirty bomb. In fact, I had, I was reporting back in 2022 and 2023 at American Greatness and 1945. Com there were these stories coming out that in 2022 a shipment of uranium from Iran was on its way to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and it was intercepted, but it was intercepted by none other than Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There is then another, a year later, another story.

There’s another story in London’s Heathrow airport, in the cargo area of the airport where British authorities intercepted a shipment of uranium that originated from Iran, passed through Oman, Pakistan, and finally made its way to London’s Heathrow airport. It was going to a known Hezbollah warehouse at the airport and they intercepted it and they arrested the people and they stopped it. But Iran for a period of time has been shipping nuclear material all over the world in small amounts. So we know it’s out there right now. And if we caught it in those two instances or the one instance and Al Qaeda got it in the other, if that’s even accurate.

Again, I couldn’t get this sourced but I still talked about it because I think it’s worth noting if they can move this material in small doses. We’ve had a border crisis in the United States for the last several years. We’ve had over a million illegals in last year alone crossing into the United States. 5,000 of them we know for a fact were Iran, were Iranian, were military age males from Iran that were identified and intercepted by cbp. There were many more that got through. We know also this reporter, Steve Emerson, he’s a counterterrorism official OR expert for 25 years, has reported Hezbollah has spent since 1982 since the Marine barracks bombing.

They have been sending scores of their agents into the United States to lie in wait as a fifth columnist element in the event the United States ever went to war with Iran. So putting all these pieces together and knowing Iran’s love for unconventional warfare and the fact that they do support terrorism around the world, it is not inconceivable that if we initiate these devastating strikes against Iran, they won’t be able to stop us from doing that, but they might be able to make us pay by attacking with dirty bomb one of our major cities either in the United States, Canada or in Europe somewhere.

It is very conceivable. Right now we’re talking about stealth bombers going and dropping massive ordnance penetrators on these Iranian nuclear sites. That’s going to be a major radiological incident in and of itself. Right? Yeah. Are we understating what’s about to happen when you think about. Because this is going to be a, an epochal event really if it actually unfolds. Are we about to perhaps aggravate and provoke the Iranians into using a nuclear weapon of their own? Yeah. As much as you say that you don’t think that they or your are leaning towards. They don’t have the ability to potentially put one of these on a missile.

Not a missile, but they could easily sneak. Look, they have deep connections to these terrorist groups and even if they don’t have the ability to get it into the United States or Europe, they have the ability to get it into Israel. And you know, that is their big bugaboo is the Israelis even more than us, you know, so, you know, they, they want to kill Israel. So, so, you know, and if Israel really is the, the, you know, Israel’s really the instigator here in terms of the Iran, Israeli fight, in terms of bringing us in, Israel wants us in to help them, to help the Israelis fight the Iranians.

So the Iranians, if they can’t get us and they can’t get the Europeans because it’s too far away and they don’t have the delivery systems, they absolutely have agents in Hezbollah, in Hamas, in the west bank that they could conceivably assemble, assemble a dirty bomb and target a major Israeli city as a kind of fu. Like, hey, you may be able to knock us out, but we’re going to take you down with us. Which is very much a mindset of the regime right now in Iran. Yeah. And, and as I was saying with respect to the mixed messaging and the, the Ayatollah’s inconsistent messaging with some of his, some of the, his underlings, I guess you could say, are also claiming that, you know, they could, in fact, make a bomb in 24 hours.

So I guess the question is, you know, where, where are you getting this information? I don’t need a specific source, obviously, but that you think that they already have nuclear weapons. I mean, I’ve heard people say both that they already have, they’re near, they could have them in a day. I’ve, yeah, I’ve studied this issue for most of my career, and I came to that conclusion many years ago. I think the JCPOA helped give the Iranians a degree of wide berth in terms of being able to work on what they already had in peace. Trump came in in 2016, tore up the deal that really complicated it, but by that point, they had a handful of them.

This is my assumption, based on my years of research. I also think the US Intelligence community, their official statements are consistently wrong about capabilities and intentions, notably about a country like Iran. I think that they are underselling what Iran could do. I also, I also, though, have many contacts in D.C. and elsewhere. As I said earlier in the show, many people I speak to, even people who are more towards Scott Ritter’s side of sort of this debate, which is that, hey, we don’t want to. And, and I agree, we don’t want it. We don’t, we don’t want to attack, attack Iran.

I think that’s an overstep on our part. I think a containment and deterrence strategy is the way forward. But even people more toward his end do believe that the Iranians have this capacity. In fact, Scott Ritter was talking. There’s a Clip on you on on Twitter. He was talking with seymour Hirsch in 2006. You can find it. It’s on C Span Book Talk. And he was talking about how if we attack Iran during the Bush administration, his belief was that we’d have to pick which American city we were going to sacrifice because the Iranians were going to then in turn nuke it.

And so it’s not just people like me who tend to be a little bit more hawkish on, on Iran than, say, Scott Ritter. It’s people like Scott Ritter who were warning of this 15, 16, 17 years ago. And so I think that there is a movement of intelligence analysts. They might not not be getting the camera time, but people that I’ve spoken to who really think that we are underestimating just what Iran can and will do if we initiate these strikes, which I think we’re getting ready to do. In terms of Tulsi Gabbard’s statements, a part of me thinks that she is just feigning passivity at this point in time in order to try to get the Iranian to possibly put their guard down because we’re seeing so much mixed messaging right now.

And I know it’s consistent with where she’s been historically on some of these issues to say such a thing. But at the same time, I almost wonder if they’re setting them up for like a Hezbollah, like, decapitation strike. And you would do that by creating the illusion that there is some inroad or pathway towards diplomacy. And, you know, on the one hand, you’re seeing this amassing of stealth bombers, so, you know that there’s inconsistency there. So I guess, I mean, I guess she needs, or somebody at that level needs to say that there are weapons of mass destruction here.

They have to do that whole thing, you know, in order to legitimate an intervention, I would presume, or they’re going to wait for one of these Houthi missiles to hit a US Warship, and that’s going to be enough to justification to say, okay, now we have to go into Iran. But there, it seems like, you know, there’s just one, like, critical ingredient that’s kind of missing in the whole thing to set it all off. Because could Trump, do you think he has the ideological and political support in order to go to war with Iran right now and that it would be not met with such resistance that it would compromise seeing the operation through? Well, I think the first.

Let’s start out the end there. I think you’re right to bring up the political support If Trump were to initiate these strikes against Iran, and I think JD said something similar about striking the Houthis. I think we should probably strike the Houthis because they’re, they’re a headache. But in terms of striking Iran, I think JD’s thoughts about if we strike the Houthis, this is against maga. I think that applies even more so to, to direct strikes on Iran, that this is not really what the President campaigned on and this is not what made him so popular and what won him the election.

He ran, remember, as a pretty consistently anti war, particularly anti Middle east war guy. And yeah, he ran consistently on. He didn’t like the deal with Iran and I didn’t either. But he, he did run as an anti war guy. And so it’s just, unfortunately, he has surrounded himself, and I don’t really understand why, but he has surrounded himself with a group of very significant warhawks on Iran, specifically Iran. These other people that are around him have no problem doing deals with Russia. They’re even open to maybe doing a deal on some issue with, with China.

But on Iran, it is inflexibility. It is, we must take out this regime. Again, I hate the regime too. And I think we should, you know, do what we did to the Soviet Union, we should do to that regime. We never went to direct war with the Soviet Union, though, and I don’t think we need to go to direct war with Iran. But, but Trump is surrounded by people and he has put people in power in his administration who are pretty consistent ideologically about wanting to take out the Iranian regime. And so I think that that becomes, and then we know also the DC crew, everybody in Congress, the majority in Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, are very pro going to war with Iran.

You know, the military establishment is fine with it. There is some debate in the intel community. And in fact, the interesting thing about, about Tulsi’s comments, Tulsi was not voicing her personal opinion. She was voicing the, the, the honest to God collective opinion of all 17 intelligence agencies. They were saying they don’t think that Iran has nuclear weapons capability, but they do have an unprecedented amount of uranium and other fissile material that would allow for them to achieve what’s known as surge capacity in about 24 hours. Now, you know, this is all kind of, you know, gobbledygook at that point.

I think that they do have these systems. This is another reason I say they already have them, because it doesn’t. That’s a distinction with no difference what they’re saying in the intel community. But the point is, is that the majority of people in power are open and fine with going after Iran. And President Trump himself, since getting elected, has consistently stated his desire to end the Iran threat. Now, I’ll just say did have a conversation this afternoon with somebody who said this could be the art of the deal. Right? This could be Trump being the madman.

You know, the mad bomber theory. Like Nixon, you ratchet tensions up so high, it forces the other guy, who’s intractable, to come to the table because the alternative is he’s going to die. And you saw that kind of play out with Kim Jong Un in the first term. But. But Iran’s a little bit of a different animal than North Korea. North Korea is ultimately. It’s a cult of personality, leadership, and it’s a materialist ideology there, the zoosh ideology, which is a derivation of communism. It’s very materialistic. There is a wing of very powerful Iranians who are not just Islamists, but they’re extreme Twelver Shiites who really do believe in this kind of apocalyptic worldview.

So you have to bear that in mind when you’re trying to get them to the table. Not all of the Iranian leaders are operating in the same moral universe that we are. And so there’s that issue he has to contend with as well. But I, I concede, I think it’s a slim chance in this specific instance that the art of the deal is at play. But I, and I would hope that is what this is. This is just the art of the deal. But of course, there can be severe miscalculations from that, because if the other side guy isn’t playing that game that you are, they think you’re being serious.

That might cause them to do something absolutely irrational and crazy. And the Iranians would not be the first regime to do something utterly irrational and crazy that triggers a wider war that could have been avoided. Yeah, it seems like we’re inexorably hurtling towards a conflict, because I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario where Iran makes concessions at this point. And I don’t think you. You forward position. So many stealth bombers. That’s right. Just as those B2s are a big move. That, that is. That for me, was the red flag. I was like, okay, this is probably because you got to remember, it’s not just the stealth bombers.

It’s all the refueling tankers. It’s all the heavy lift capacity. This is something very real. And it isn’t just about the Houthis. This is not just about knocking out the Houthis. That’s probably step one. But this is something more. This is a bigger conflict we’re seeing shape up. And in terms of the political support for Trump, I mean, going into this, I actually think that there’s a lot of people who voted for him who probably would be more okay with a war with Iran than they would be with, with Russian Ukraine mistaking mistakenly, mistakenly because they think that it’s not going to lead to World War iii.

But you know, this could be a linchpin that just, you know, completely destabilizes all other geopolitical and exactly right. And exactly right. And you’re seeing this, this is why I brought up earlier China. And you know, this could be a window of opportunity for them. They love when we get into these Middle east wars because it gives them them years to do whatever the heck they want in their own realm. And with Russia, I am for negotiating with Russia I am for basically telling, I’ve been saying just tell Putin to do whatever you have to do to Ukraine because Ukrainians are nuts.

You know, so this actually works in that, in that favor because the Russians know, hey, if the Americans are, are doing this in Iran, this is a, this is a long term and project. They can’t be helping the, they’re already struggling getting resources to the Ukrainians if there’s a major war in the Middle east that those resources are spoken for now they’re not going to Zielinski. So for Russia, this actually, this actually helps them, the Chinese and the Russians benefit to some degree. So yeah, this could trigger something wider. And also, by the way, this also sets up the opportunity for Russia to get a little revenge on us.

Right. Like if we go into a major conflict conflict with the Iranians, the Russians might then decide, hey, we’ll start pouring resources into helping the Iranians to prolong the war the way the Americans were prolonging the war in Ukraine. Because let’s face it, without US Aid, specifically, not just NATO but US Aid, the Russians would have been in Kiev within probably 96 hours. And so, you know, we have all kinds of guests on this channel, a plethora of, of conflicting opinions and you know, just to, I’m sure there’s going to be some members of the audience that would love to hear your thoughts on the Ukraine Russia situation as well.

It sounds that you perhaps sympathize with the Russian grievances with respect to some of what Ukraine’s doing. Is. Is that correct? Yeah. So basically my most recent Book A Disaster of Our Own Making, how the West Lost Ukraine. It’s been described as a revisionist history, which I’m fine with. Basically, I go back to the end of the Cold War and I show exactly what was going on between Russia, Ukraine and the United States. And what you find is that promises were made by the United States to Russia, one of them being not an inch eastward. And that’s a reference to NATO expansion.

We told that them, hey, Gorbachev, if you willingly unilaterally withdraw from west, from East Germany and allow it to link up with West Germany, NATO won’t ever expand an inch eastward. Well, that was almost immediately proven to be a lie. The Russians couldn’t stop it. Then the Russians told us, hey, as long as Ukraine never goes into NATO and remains neutral, we will honor, for the first time, really, we will honor Ukrainian sovereignty. We took that deal. But then we almost immediately started working behind the scenes to make Ukraine part of NATO in the eu, if not directly, then indirectly.

There was a series of other crises that occurred. For instance, the Balkan Wars. The Russians said, hey, look, you know, don’t get involved in this. They’re fellow slobs. You’re coming down on the wrong side. The Americans basically said, we don’t even care about your opinion. So that set the Russians off. There’s a whole history there. And I get into the gory details about what was going on in Russia at the time, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin, and, and how Putin actually came to power. He came to power on a platform of, if you’ll pardon me, making Russia great again.

Because when Putin took over, Russia was at its breaking point. And everybody in Russia said they were at their breaking point because of what America and NATO were doing to them, them. And so there, there is this sort of slow roll toward the Ukraine war. And a lot of it is the fault of America’s push to expand NATO endlessly into Russia’s backyard. I found, I found research papers from major think tanks from the 90s and early 2000s where they were talking about using NATO to basically, via Ukraine, collapse the Russian Federation into three or four smaller countries so they could basically get Western multinational firms to take the resources, which is something like $11 trillion worth of rare earth minerals, natural gas and oil in Russia to exploit those resources better by collapsing the central state of Russia.

And so, you know, Putin is aware of this. So it isn’t just like Putin woke up and invaded, you know, Ukraine, because he’s just such an angry guy. I mean, there’s some of that. Okay, he’s an angry guy, but he’s angry for a reason, you know, And a lot of the reason is our fault. And so that is sort of the context that we have to keep in mind when we talk about Russia and Ukraine. Now, I do, I think Russia should have invaded. No, I don’t think they should have invaded. Do I think we were right to try to help the Ukrainians protect that Western part of Ukraine which has always been pro American, pro Europe? Fine.

But, but that should have ended very early on in the war. We know for a fact, we know for a fact that in 2022, the Russians were surrounding the capital of Kiev. And the story is that the, the plucky Ukrainians stopped the invasion of Kiev. Okay, fine. Another story is that Putin ordered his troops to stand down. Why? Because the Ishtan Bull conference was happening in which Turkey was trying to serve as a middleman in getting Ukraine and Russia to agree to a ceasefire. And it was Boris Johnson of, of Britain, who was the Prime Minister then, and Joe Biden’s team in Washington D.C.

who got on the phone with Zelensky and said, you are never effing doing that. You are not stopping the war. You’re going to now go on the offensive. So why do you think, why do you think Europe is so persistent about this? I mean, I think it. My intuition is that it has something to do with the fact that Europe is in a position where they don’t have any natural resources. Yes. And they must. I mean, they’re looking at the Middle east, which is basically, you know, it’s a roll of the dice at best. You can’t really rely on that.

You can’t even rely on safe passageway through the waterways. So. So is this really about trying to Balkanize Russia and, you know, take the resources, or is there actually any legitimacy to the threat, in your opinion, that Russia is going to continue to advance? I mean, on the one hand, I’ve heard theories that once you kind of go into the extent of war economy that Russia is currently in, it’s very hard to reverse. Sure. And thus they might need to, to continue slowly eroding that Western front. Well, what is your perspective on. So if you’re sitting in Poland and I’ve.

You did a lot of work with the previous Polish government, I completely understand why people in Eastern Europe think this, notably the polls, and I don’t begrudge them that at all. And what I always advise them to do is, hey, okay, if you’re that Concerned about it, you need to take defensive action to make your country of porcupine. You know, make it where the, the Russians, if they do decide to keep going, they can’t possibly swallow you up because to do so would be to destroy them. And it sounds like the polls are starting to do that, but a lot of the other Eastern European countries aren’t.

But if you’re sitting in Paris or Berlin and you honestly think the Russians are going to march into, you know, into Paris or into Berlin, I got some swamp land out here in Florida that you could buy because is, that is completely. They can’t do it. The fact of the matter is, and I was on with Steve Bannon in the first week of the war and we went back and forth on this because at that time, like everybody, I thought, well, surely this is just the beginnings of, you know, Putin’s march on Europe. Within about a seven day period, though, watching that war and talking to people that I know, it became very clear to me that actually I don’t think that’s what Putin is doing.

And I write this in the book. Putin was. What Putin is doing is he is. And this is Angelo Kotavia said this to me before he died. Great guy. Highly recommend your audience look him up and C O D E V I L L A is his last name. He’s wonderful. But he said to me, he said, Brandon, he said, I don’t believe Russia is interested in going to war with wider Europe. What they’re trying to do is create defensive buffers zones and Ukraine happens to be a key component of that buffer zone. And so that’s very different from what the Europeans and the Americans have been telling their people that, oh, this is, this is Hitler 2.0.

He’s coming for the whole kit and caboodle. First of all, I don’t think the Russians have the capability to do that. Second of all, I don’t believe that’s what Putin wants. I think Putin wants at the very least the Russian speaking components of, of Ukraine. And remember, it’s about geostrategy. The Russians going back to Peter the Great want warm water ports. And Sevastopol on the Black Sea has always been one of Russia’s historic warm water ports. And NATO tried to push them out. In 2010, they tried to push them out. John McCain was part of this.

I have it in my book. The lease was up for renewal in 2010, 2011, and the Americans tried to pressure the Ukrainian government to deny that release renewal, which created a whole diplomatic crisis with the Russians and Putin never forgot that. And a few years later, of course, there was then the Maidan revolution, which was entirely CIA backed. And Putin knew this. And so this isn’t really about going wider against Europe. I think this is about creating a buffer zone with Ukraine as the neutral zone separating Russian power from Western power in Europe. And so if you look at it that way, could the Russians march on Poland? Yeah, maybe.

Could they march beyond that? Probably not. And I don’t even think they want Poland. I think what they want is this buffer zone. And the reason they want it is because for 30 years they’ve been telling us, us don’t go into Ukraine and try to make it part of NATO. And we were doing that. In fact, the year of the invasion, there was the big Black Sea NATO exercise. And I’d highlight this in the book. There was this huge NATO exercise. I think it was the largest Black Sea NATO exercise since the end of the Cold War.

And who did they put as the command of that war game? They put the Ukrainians. Now, Ukraine’s not a member of NATO. So Putin was sitting there going, why the F are you guys doing this? Unless this is some backdoor attempt to absorb Ukraine. And that was about three or four months before he invaded. And that was this, that was the last straw is when he saw that happen, he’s got the Biden people telling him, no, no, no, no, no, this isn’t, we’re not taking Ukraine. And then he sees this, he said, well then why are you making the hub of this exercise? Why are you making it a Ukrainian exercise with NATO elements? That doesn’t make any sense unless this is some backdoor attempt.

And so I think that from the Russian perspective now, I don’t know if they’re right. I don’t know ultimately if we would have ever fully made. Because the Germans and the French, this came up in 08 with George W. Bush and at the last minute the Germans and the French said, we don’t want Ukraine as part of NATO. So maybe ultimately we wouldn’t have absorbed them into NATO officially. But all of the, the back door maneuvers for 30 years were that Ukraine was basically becoming part of NATO, if not in name that in practice. And we know Ukraine is up for European Union membership.

And the Russians have said they don’t care about the EU stuff, which that indicates to you where the Russian mindset is. They don’t believe us that this is not a threat directed against them. This, the NATO going into Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, they’re almost more useful as a non, you know, de jure NATO member, because you can do a lot of other things in terms of what’s going to come of these ceasefire talks. It seems as though, on the one hand, and I mean, I think Trump probably could have called it quits after that Oval Office, based on the Oval Office spat that happened, I think that the support seemed to be there, especially from maga.

Okay, just walk away and let Russia do what thou wilt. Right. Unfortunately, they persisted and then they just turned it back on all of a sudden, almost as if, if Zelensky apologized. And was this really just about, you know, Trump, Trump’s wounded ego, or was there something more here? It seems as though, on the one hand, the Trump administration is doing a lot of things that are strategically antagonistic towards Russia, while tactically they’re being conciliatory and diplomatic, whereas the Biden administration, I’ve always thought was more tactical, tactically aggressive. But strategically, they were rather, you know, I mean, they weren’t elevating the DEFCON level.

They weren’t doing a lot of things that were posturing aggressively strategically, like this whole Greenland heist, you know, and trying to militarize the Arctic and the Golden Dome. And there’s a lot of things that Trump is doing that, you know, J.D. vance yesterday, he came out and he gave this one minute spiel about how he’s going to Greenland because our enemies are, you know, it’s a national security threat, but he didn’t specify who that enemy was. Right. And that enemy is Russia. That enemy is the Russians and the Chinese. So on the one hand, they’re like, you know, pretending that they’re, you know, potentially sympathetic to the Russian cause.

On the other hand, they’re, you know, hardening the grid and they’re, you know, backing out of INF treaties and they’re doing these things which are. And now they’re, they’re sending the weapons again, I guess. Is this all going to come down to whether or not, you know, once the Biden weapon commitments end, is. Is it going to come down to what they do next? Because eventually those commitments are going to run out. So, I mean, what is your, what is your read on all this, where it’s going in terms of the. I think it’s the art of the deal in this case.

I don’t think that’s the case in the Middle East. I think in this case, it’s the art of the deal. I think that Trump has decided one way or the other, we are going to draw down from Ukraine now, whether that means the Europeans step up, maybe, but I don’t think this is a long term commitment the way it was for Biden. I think he’s trying to find an exit. Trump is. And that’s especially so if we do go into Iran, there’s no way we will be able to sustain the war weapons flows into Ukraine. At the same time, we’re going into Iran and we’re trying to deter China from kidding.

Taiwan and the Russians know all this. And so it really comes down to a question of what is the exit strategy going to look like. And the complicating factor in this case is not the Russians, it’s not even the Europeans, it’s the Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are doing everything in their power to, to block the exits for us. Because Zelensky has made it clear he doesn’t want peace, which is why now the Trump administration is meeting with Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, as well as Yulia Timonoshenko, who was an opposition leader throughout that time, the last 10 years.

These are both political opponents to Volodymyr Zelinsky. And so I believe that the Trump administration is working on a track two approach where they remove Zelensky, either, you know, by pressuring him or, you know, maybe they just whack him, I don’t know. And they, they, they get an opposition leader to take, to take power so that negotiations can begin in earnest. But I think right now, could they just walk away? But what would be something that I said to you at the beginning is that my, my personal opinion is after that Oval Office meeting, that should have been it.

Trump should have called up Putin and been like, look, I’m cutting them off. I really don’t care what happens now. Just, just to be clear, I’m not, I’m not personally advocating that. I’m just saying, yeah, you know, if, if we’re in this, this universe of ideas, couldn’t they just. Basically, yeah, they should have. And I don’t, Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really. There must be a reason why they’re not doing well. I think it’s because I think on some level they’re trying to maintain credibility. They’re trying to maintain the credibility of U.S. commitments. There’s, there’s a lot of talk in D.C.

about the credibility of our commitments not being at what they once were. They’re trying to also send a signal to China, don’t try this. Don’t try what Russia tried with Ukraine, don’t try it with Taiwan. And I keep telling people in D.C. please stop linking. Linking these two fights. This, stop linking that only actually feeds China. Don’t link these two fights. They’re two very different things. Yes, they’re territorial, but there’s a lot more, there’s a lot of difference there. But ultimately I think this is about maintaining American credibility. But I actually think this is. I’ve always had problems with the credibility argument in general because really international relations is about power.

Who has power and who can use that power effectively. And you know, if you have power and you demonstrate you’re competent at using it, the rest of the world will follow you. Well, I mean, it seems, it seems like no matter how many times, you know, from Saigon to Afghanistan, no matter how many times they cut and run, people still. That’s right. Fall for it anyways. So it’s like, you know, it’s not like the Taiwanese are going to be like, we don’t trust you anymore because, you know, maybe it’s fresher in their memories. Yeah, so what, what could the Ukrainians do to sabotage this? Because I think that’s.

Is there some element that they’re worried that the Ukrainians can actually do some damage here that. Well, they could launch, they could, yeah, they could launch a, you know, the rumor is they might have bio and chemical weapons. They could do a biological or chemical weapons attack. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but I do know there have a lot been a lot of reports about these bioweapons labs in Ukraine. They could potentially detonate a nuclear reactor. Right. We’re seeing all these fights erupting over nuclear reactors. People don’t realize this. Ukraine is home. I think it’s outside of Zaporizhzhia.

Ukraine is home to Europe’s largest nuclear reactor. And there’s already in the last week been shootouts near that, that. And so the Ukrainians could easily blow up and create a nuclear crisis and blame it on the Russians to try to force the Americans to stay in. Because that would be something that would probably force us to stay in. Remember two, three years ago as the war was going on, the Ukrainians fired off a Russian made air defense missile that was supposed to knock out an incoming Russian missile near Lav in the western part of Ukraine. And it was an old Soviet missile.

So it went way off course and ended up crashing in nearby Poland. And immediately Zelensky said, it’s the Russians. They, they purposely launched a missile at you. You’ve got it. This is article 5n Poland’s been attacked and now NATO has to automatically come in. And the Polish government at the time, which was a right wing government, the Polish government said, you know what, hold up, let’s investigate this. And within about four weeks they found out, no, that was a missile fired by Ukraine at the Russian missile that was targeting Ukrainian territory. And that Ukrainian missile went off course because it was an old Soviet system and it crashed into nearby Poland.

It was not a Russian escalation against us. And so it was a hair’s breadth, though, you know, in this new government led by Tusk, who’s a globalist in Poland, Poland, if it had happened under him, I’m convinced that he would have said, yes, you’re right, Zelensky, it’s article five time. So, you know, we, the Ukrainians, could conduct a false flag to try to force the United States to take a greater role militarily. And so that’s why I think that now is the time Trump needs to just call up Zelensky and be like, look, if you don’t take a deal like now, we’re out.

And you can, you know, know, good luck on your own, because ultimately the Europeans are not going to be able to sustain the Ukrainian warfront. And you said something earlier, and I’m going to have to wrap it up, but you said something earlier about why would Europe care so much about Ukraine. And you mentioned the natural resources. You’re 100% right. People don’t realize. Before that famous Oval Office, Oval Office meeting, if I can speak with, with Zelensky and Trump, Zelensky was trying to entice Trump by saying, hey, Ukraine has a lot of rare earth minerals. And if you help me, I can make sure you get the bulk of these, America gets the bulk of these rare earth minerals to pay down the however many, however much money we’ve given them now, I’ve lost count.

Well, people don’t realize in January, a month and a half before that meeting, Zelensky had already made that deal with Keir Starmer of England. He had already made that exact same deal with the British. And so he went in to the Oval Office on a lie saying, oh, yeah, I’ll give you all of our rare earth minerals. How could that be when 80% were already promised to the British? And so yet again we see European countries are benefiting from these wars. Why did we topple Gaddafi? It wasn’t for us. We did it because the French, the, the Italians and the British wanted the oil from Libya.

And Gaddafi wasn’t giving it to them. And that’s when the conflict started. Okay, why, why did the Syrian civil war happen the way it did? Because the Europeans wanted access to cheap energy flows coming out of the Middle east and they didn’t want to have to rely on Iran to do it. And so the Turks came forward and said, we’ll build a pipeline and it’ll exit out, out of Syria and go into Turkish territory and we’ll control the flow. And then Assad said no, because he wasn’t, he was, he was aligned with Iran. And so we went to war in Syria to help the Europeans out.

So here we are again involved in Ukraine on some level to help the Europeans with their, with their, their resource needs. And it’s got to stop. Even Yemen, I mean, you saw that in the Signal act app. JD Vance had pointed this out about striking the Houthis. Hey, 3% of our GDP less than comes from that waterway. You’re talking about bombing. 40% of European GDP depends on that waterway being open. Why aren’t the Europeans sending their navies to go open this up? This is all about resources. And frankly, we don’t need to be involved. In fact, I don’t even think Trump should care about the rare earth minerals because here’s another thing, thing.

The Russians control the part of Ukraine with most of those rare earths. Yeah. So it’s not coming to us. Any way you look at it, it’s not going to the British either. Well, some, some might say that the Faustian bargain is that we’ll control the waterways and then we get the global reserve currency and reap all the benefits of that. So I think the Europeans and many have relied on the United States ability to, to protect maritime power. And the trade off has been, you know, we’ll give you stuff for dollars. But that’s another conversation for another day.

I want to thank you for coming on. Thank you. This has been a wealth of information and I would encourage people to go and check out your YouTube channel, which you’re not uploading to right now. But I hope that changes because I think you have a lot to upload offer in terms of current events analysis. And you should, you should do more. And also at the National Interest is where. Yeah, national interest.org you can find me. I’m a senior national security editor there. You can find me at Popular Mechanics. You can find my work also. I mean, obviously my, I have four books, so you can find me Amazon.com target.com anywhere books are sold.

I mean, I’m at Barnes and Noble. Yeah. So those are some. And on Twitter. Twitter @we the Brandon is my handle. Awesome. Well, I look forward to having you back on the channel to the aftermath of whatever’s going to happen here. So thanks a lot for coming out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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