Special Edition: Malcolm Kyeyune on Military Parades and Hypersonics Over Tel Aviv
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With protests and riots in multiple American cities,

The MAGA coalition under increasing strain, political assassination, a deficit busting budget bill about to pass through the Congress. War in the Middle East has broken out again with something akin to a battle of the cities as both Israel and Iran lob bombs and missiles at each other causing who knows what damage.

To discuss this today, we do not have Philip Pilkington, who is currently away on assignment, but we do have Tink Sorg, Malcolm Chayuni, The Return, The Prodigal Son Has Returned. Somebody whose views on these are both erudite and absolutely fascinating.

certainly they're not of the mainstream. So this episode is not sponsored by Coinbase, but we are going to parade through these issues of the Middle East and the breakdown of American socio-political economy, I suppose you might say. Malcolm, welcome back. It's an absolute pleasure. What on earth is happening, sir?

Yeah, I mean, I thought I should ask you. I mean, you're a good old British boy, and you people have all of these fancy parades. I can't even remember the names of them, the changing of the whatever or else. So you, as a sort of connoisseur for these things, I'm just assuming that based on a racist stereotype, but...

Even so, you as a knower of these things, what do you think about the American military parade? Yeah, I mean, I've only seen clips on Twitter, which I'm assuming pick the choicest of moments. But yeah, I mean, it wasn't the trooping the color, as we call it. And it didn't even look much like the sort of thing that you might see in Red Square, let alone in Pyongyang or Beijing, right?

it was really sloppy i you know i i didn't quite i didn't quite understand what they were trying to achieve i mean i saw what looked like a company of uh of soldiers wandering through washington i mean they weren't stepping in time and then and then you know one group had this guy next to them literally just holding up a drone with his hand like a little quadcopter with his hand

A bit like I used to with kind of Spitfires and Jaguars and hurricanes and other stuff. You know, when you're a little boy and you kind of hold these little model planes in your hands and around the room with them pretending they're flying. I mean, that's literally what he was doing. I don't even understand how it's like. And then it was all sponsored. Like the whole thing was plastered with corporate sponsorship. I don't know whether to say that's very American. I mean, like...

Look, the American infantryman, the American soldier is, you know, a fine animal. I don't mean to denigrate them in any way that like there've been many great battles where they've shown tremendous heroism and stoicism and bravery under fire and great competence as well. But, you know, that looked like really slapdash. It looked bad, Malcolm. Yeah.

Yeah, like the interesting thing here, just to give a bit of background to this sort of cold opening here, is just that, so Trump had this idea that he wanted to show off a military parade for the 250th birthday of the US Army. The US Army is slightly more than a year younger than the US itself for, you know, obvious revolutionary reasons.

This was supposed to be a show of strength, to show the world that the US military was, you know, could not be matched. It was its own thing. Rumor has it that Trump got this idea from like visiting France and seeing a parade during Bastille Day and saying like, we should do the same thing. And people inside the Pentagon were initially resistant, but in Trump too, like the second administration, he had a free hand.

Well, we can't really say how this happened. There's gonna be like a book written about this, I'm pretty sure. But like as you pointed out, like the parade itself was kind of a disaster. Like very few people came to it. They had hoped for about 200,000 attendees. I don't even think they got up to 40,000.

And the mood was pretty bleak. The soldiers didn't know how to march. And we're not talking like, you know, the finest North Korean goose-stepping here. Even though, you know, I personally am fond of a bit of goose-stepping now and then. But like this, they did not know how to, you know, march even like, you know, a Finnish conscripts four months into boot camp. Like it, they had no, like, it was clear that this was not really rehearsed.

And as you said, there was even like crypto sponsorships, which is quite insane actually. Like what country actually has a, you know, a commercial sponsorship for this kind of public event? But why is this anything more than like kind of a funny sort of, ha ha, look at those silly Americans? Well, while this parade...

Which again, Trump didn't have this, like this wasn't like the Keystone Cops reunion or anything. Like Trump wanted this parade for a reason, which is to show the world that America was stronger than ever under his leadership and that yeah, you could

Pitter and patter about like American decline, etc, etc on your own free time fine But like that was all nonsense because when push comes to shove as the Americans love to say like in the self congratulatory way there has never been a military as great as the American military and there never will be because the American military is like the greatest invention of humanity

Cameras were zooming in on his facial expression during this parade and he looked mortified and his Secretary of Defense, he was facepalming as the saying goes. He looked scared for his job, actually. While this parade was going on, Iranian hypersonic missiles were landing in Tel Aviv at the same time as those troops marched down near the mall.

And the American military assisting the Israeli military with Patriots and with ship-launched air-to-air missiles, or interceptor missiles, I should say. And even sparing one of the extremely limited THAAD, Theater High Altitude Area Defense batteries. A missile interceptor that basically...

explodes the incoming ballistic missile outside of Earth's atmosphere. A single TAD missile costs roughly $13 million, and there are like seven of those batteries in US service on the entire planet. And the US has made less than a thousand of them in total for all customers. So these are extremely limited.

These were being used in Israel and it didn't really matter. The Iranian hypersonics came down anyway. So you have this very interesting sort of parallel picture here, which is kind of very relevant to sort of the theme of this podcast, Multipolarity, right? Where

You have the West getting weaker in relative terms, but if you look at that military parade, you say, well, this is not just relative terms anymore, is it? And the rest of the world is getting stronger. And this is what creates multipolarity. Well, here we have a very sort of a Hemingway moment in a sense.

Saturday the 14th was really kind of a tipping point in a lot of ways because as Hemingway described his own bankruptcy rights, how did it happen? Well, it happened gradually and then very suddenly by then. That's how these multipolar shifts occur as well. You have people like us doing podcasts saying,

If you recall, we did one during the Operation True Promise 2, I think it was, where they did this limited strike on Israel. And people were trying to bury the story and say that like, oh, yeah, the Iranians didn't hit anything and the missiles didn't really work. And we did an episode saying, oh, well, you know, I think this missile technology is not just a scam. It probably exists. It's probably real. And that was the gradual part. Because again, like you could ignore it.

But now we have dozens of videos of these missiles carrying, you know, 3,000 pound warheads coming in faster than the speed of sound, like totally defeating all American and Israeli air defense. And there's really nothing that can be done about it.

So, I mean, you saw those videos, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I saw the videos of the hypersonic missiles crashing into like Haifa and I think Tel Aviv as well. I suppose the

The flip side to that, Malcolm, the kind of the devil's advocate position would be to say, look, it was only two or three days ago, two or three evenings ago when Israel undertook a really bravura and it seems effective attack on Iran. Like they knocked out four or five very senior Iranian military and intelligence officials. They killed some nuclear scientists.

They also seem to sabotage or destroy a really large number, percentage of Iran's air defense. It seems even now that the Israeli fighter jets are able to operate over Iran, which is really dangerous because they can target much more dynamically than missiles, I would have thought, or at least than the Israeli missiles.

Israel gains air superiority and perhaps even air supremacy and starts degrading the Iranian economy and the Iranian ability to fight back, you know, eventually they grind down the opponent. You know, this is all Western tech. Israeli is a kind of Western and inverted commas country. Although I do think it's fair to say it has far better intelligence and far more effective air force than most Western countries, if not all of them, actually.

So what's the problem here? They're going to knock out Iran. Iran's going to be ground down over the next few weeks. They're going to knock out Iran. Maybe Iran will break apart or maybe the government will fall. And how does that indicate any multipolarity? I mean, China and Russia aren't doing anything about it. If China buys 15% of its oil from Iran, it's crucial for the Chinese economy.

Russia has defense arrangements with the country. It's transactional. We'll buy and you buy. But still, Iran is an ally of these two countries. If this was an American ally, there would be hell to pay. The Americans would be doing something about it. Surely this indicates that multipolarity is not here, right? This indicates that

It's not happening. What would you say to that position? I would ask a question. Have you used a modern compound bow? Bow and arrow, right? Like in the modern variant. I mean, no, I have not, no. They're actually pretty nifty. They're using sort of fiberglass. They're using like...

materials that are less than 100 years old and they have all of these fancy pulleys, like sometimes they're like electrically motor assisted and so on. Meaning that if you use a bow and arrow today, you can, even if you're pretty weak, because you know, archery is all about upper body strength, even if you're pretty weak, you can actually achieve like a draw strength far beyond like what your muscles would allow.

using, you know, the wonders of modern technology. Having said that, what would we say about a military using bows and arrows today? Like the most high technology bows and arrows that humankind has ever seen. We would probably say, you know, that's really... that's really cute. But, like, why?

That is the problem when you say, sure, the Israelis are using all of these fancy planes. Yes. And these are 40-year-old planes in some cases that have been continuously upgraded.

But if you think about the logistics of, or sort of the practicalities of an air war between Iran and, let's say, America on the other side of the Persian Gulf, because they have all of these huge bases and airfields in the Gulf countries. If you want to do an aerial operation inside the Iranian interior,

You have to plan that out, coordinate like your strike package, and you have to coordinate that with like the sort of sensor planes as well as aerial refueling because particularly carrier aircraft, but even land-based aircraft have fairly short ranges compared to the distances involved here. Iran is a country almost like 4.6 times bigger than Germany. It's a very large country.

And the travel times involved are very long and these planes are super expensive. Like they are really, really expensive. If you look at the airframe, the cost of pilot training, the cost of all the maintenance technicians, the cost of the people maintaining the weapons, the cost of the people flying the tanker planes and so on. And like the travel times involved are significant. So, I mean, it might take...

Several hours of planning, two hours in the air or whatever for the US to launch a Nasr-rike against Iran. Maybe only like 60 minutes. If the Iranians launch a hypersonic, and this hypersonic missile can carry a warhead that is far bigger than what you can put on most American planes. Like if you have a heavy bomber, that's one thing. But if you have like a F-15 or whatever, these hypersonics use 3,000 pound warheads.

So that's the equivalent to a Russian FAB 1500. One hypersonic launch from Iran can reach the American base in maybe 90 seconds, depending on launch location. 90 seconds. I'm not saying that it's going to like 90 seconds from when you hear the alarm when you're sitting in the American base in the mess hall. You know the missile is going to strike. I'm saying 90 seconds after the missile is launched.

it's gonna hit the mess hall. So you have to fold in like the detection, like the identification, the sort of warning to the guy eating his dinner in the mess hall, like get to safety and maybe he has like, you know, after all that's done he has 30 seconds or whatever to get to safety. And again, like yes, we can say we're using the bow and arrow to beat up back these fancy Iranians. But the problem is

This is a new technology that the West doesn't have access to, or at least hasn't invested in. We haven't figured out hypersonics, and we're not going to because it's going to cost too much and the US is broke. But this technology did not exist when the Cold War jet plane, manned fighter aircraft technology stack was adopted.

If these things existed back then, I don't think there's any sort of case where people would use manned aircraft in their stead. Like, why would you launch an airstrike against Iran that takes you, you know, like 90 minutes of transit time just to get into a launching position, where the Iranians can reach you from Iran in six minutes? And like, there's no cost savings involved, because in fact, the airstrike is much more expensive.

Well, I suppose the answer to that would be, in theory, would be accuracy and flexibility. You know, if you're dropping a bomb on a bridge from, you know, like a laser guided or GPS guided bomb on a bridge from, you know, even 30,000 foot above it, the theory is that that is going to be more accurate than a missile, you know, fired from two and a half thousand kilometers away.

You know, even if the missile has a CEP, like a circular error probability of like 10 meters or whatever, it's going to be a harder hit than that bomb. And the other thing is, in theory, fighter jets offer more flexibility. They can dynamically target in a way that perhaps you can't with missiles because of that kind of reconnaissance, you know, targeting strike capability.

process, right? I mean... This is funny because this is exactly the argument against the adoption of gunpowder weapons back in the day, like compared to, you know, the Welsh longbow man. When the Welsh longbow man said, like, my weapon system is superior, those were the exact arguments used. Accuracy, accuracy,

effective damage on target, etc. etc. And I mean, it was true back then, I mean, it's certainly not true now. The problem is that like these, first of all, like, even back in the early 16th century,

Gunpowder weapons had a lot of other things to recommend them. They were easy to use, they were cheap to manufacture, they required very little training, and they could deliver the strength, the kinetic energy in a rifle bullet had nothing to do with the upper body strength of the archer. So even back then when we were talking about smoothbore flintlocks,

There were a lot of good things. Accuracy was not among them. But as, you know, everyone knows, we've kind of solved that. The defense of sort of 60-year-old technology at this point is, well, you know...

Sure, it might be a lot more expensive, but this newfangled technology that did not exist 60 years ago, it still has these inherent limitations like accuracy. It's just that the Iranians and the Russians and the Chinese are working on solving them. And if you look at the videos from Israel, they're doing a pretty good job.

I think the point here is not to get so bogged down in sort of the details. It's just that at one point in the West's history, I don't think it's very controversial to point out that if someone offered us a new technology, let's say gunpowder weapons instead of, you know, longbows, we would be all over that stuff in the West. We would look at the new thing and say, wow, there's a lot of potential here. We should explore it.

Which is exactly what the Hussites did fighting the German knights during the Hussite war. They looked at a new, unproven technology and said, "We can probably do some cool stuff with this if we experiment." That is no longer the West, right? The West today says, "Upshaw!" Like, you know, gunpowder, it's just a fad, it will never catch on, bro. The bow and arrow, it was good enough in my grandpappy's time. We don't need any new stuff that doesn't work.

And the reason that, you know, June 14th was important was that this was the first time where the ability to say that stuff really started falling apart. Because again, what is a F-15 Strike Eagle?

It's a fancy machine that delivers explosive material to a target far away. That's it. That's the entire point of an F-15. And now there are new fancy machines that deliver, you know, 3,000 pounds of high-grade explosives to a destination even farther away, much faster and even cheaper. And at this point we in the West say "Ah pshaw, we don't need that newfangled stuff anyway."

But you're starting to see a real dissonance build up where the Americans watching this are now realizing that they have no counter to this. All of these bases in the Middle East, they have no protection against this sort of weaponry. None at all. And so the sort of self-conceit of the West, which is,

We're the guys with the fancy modern technology and we use it to sort of bomb enemies that are powerless to do anything about it. Like we bombed them from 10,000 feet. What are the Taliban in their flip-flops and with the rusty AKs, what are they gonna do about a predator drone, right? Well, that's the Americans on the air bases now. They literally have no counter.

If the hypersonic missile is aimed at them and then fired, the only remedy the US Army or the US Air Force offers is a widow's pension. That's their solution. That is not congruent with our conception of ourselves as sort of the masters of the universe. But again,

And this is why the military parade is important. Trump went into this thing having a very sort of specific view of what the US Army is, which is it's this most powerful, disciplined fighting force in the world. And what he saw was an army that was in the process of falling apart. And a funny sort of sidebar to this.

The same day as that parade was going on, and you had these huge protests and like political assassinations of sort of state lawmakers by some guy, like not a criminal, not like some adult like mentally ill junkie or whatever, but like a guy who had worked for the state governor who seemed to do this out of some sort of weird political motivation.

But at the same time, you had like an active shooter on a military base that they had to cancel their own sort of commemorative parade because one of the soldiers went berserk and started shooting people. So you kind of see this buildup of like a narrative that is no longer like sufficient to describe what's going on around us. I think one thing that struck me, Malcolm, has been...

since Israel attacked Iran and after Trump kind of bragged that American weapons were being used in the attack and wasn't it all very impressive on that first night several pretty big MAGA social media and media influences like Tucker Carlson and like is it Mike Cernovich? Anyway Cernovich

came out and signaled like serious displeasure at what was going on, especially given that Trump had recently caved on the illegal migrant issue as well. And it seems from afar that, you know, Philip and I spoke about it last week, that the Trump movement was very much a coalition movement. Yes. You know, it's a bit like in Britain, like in Europe, right?

you guys have elections and then after the elections all of the parties get together and build a coalition to decide who governs based on who had votes and the proportion of seats that you have in parliament.

Whereas in Britain and the US, what we do is we build coalitions before the election and then that coalition will run for an election, right? And the Trump coalition, Philip and I were saying last week, is basically a kind of a trident of the Silicon Valley tech bro venture capital folks who want to...

deregulate and re-regulate America to make it much more efficient, much more entrepreneurial, much more dynamic, to encourage the development of all this kind of tech whiz-banger-y. And their idea is, I mean, first of all, I guess it'll make them fabulously rich, but they believe it'll also make America a richer and more powerful country by doing that. On the other side, you've got these...

MAGA America First crowd, people like Tucker Carlson, people like Steve Bannon. They're kind of a throwback to a much more old-fashioned conservatism, what I would call a kind of a patriarchal conservatism.

They love the country, but you know, they're also very interested in working-class issues, you know, like protecting blue-collar workers from the icy winds of the global of global competition and the vagaries of

economic cycles and and also the the ruthlessness of the robber barons or in this day and age the tech bros right so there's a certain conflict between those two groups when it comes to economic matters and as i said last week i think that was best encapsulated by a discussion between tucker carlson and ben shapiro when they were talking about self-driving vehicle technology

And Tucker Carlson said he would ban that in a heartbeat if he could. He would just ban it.

Because, you know, like driving vehicles, whether it be trucks or taxis or cars or delivery vans or whatever, like for UPS, are one of the biggest jobs that provide, you know, decent wages for working class American men, right? Like he said that needs to be protected. Whereas, you know, Elon Musk would, I'm sure, or Mark Andresen or Larry Ellison would be aghast by...

at that concept that such technology could be suppressed because, you know, to protect workers. And then at the kind of the point of the triangle, you've got the establishment Republicans. And I think that economically, they have quite a lot in common with the tech bros. They also would like to see deregulation. They would like to see much lower taxes for the plutocrat class, for example. They've tended to act, in fact, as a legislative engine for the plutocrat class in America.

And that really seems to be breaking apart now. You know, you had after these riots in California, Trump very rapidly backed down on illegal immigration. He said, look, I'm going to go gentle on illegal immigration. I'm not going to push it when it comes to the food industry, like farming and food production.

and also hospitality. Well, I don't know about America, but if America is anything like Britain, that's where all of the illegal migrants go. They all go into farming, food production or hospitality. So if you're going to go easy on those industries...

You're just not going to bother with this illegal migration thing anymore. And hot on the heels of that, hot on the heels of that, it looked as if Israel had managed to bounce him into a foreign war, which was the very thing back in 2015, 2016, that he built his whole reputation on. So, like, you know, you're seeing really the potential for a breakdown in that coalition.

And I think if that coalition breaks down, it could release, like, really destructive forces. Oh, yeah. Because Trump channeled those forces. And I think people who say, oh, that would be great, you know, finally the Trump movement would be broken up and we could go back to... No, you wouldn't go back to business as usual. Like, those forces had been channeled into regular politics. Now they would be loosened, a bit like...

you know, Yugoslavia, right? Like Tito kept the lid on those forces. And when he was gone, they were released. There's something I need to point out here, because when people think about sort of civil war, especially in America, they think about the American Civil War, which was essentially the country, like partitioning itself into two pieces that were, you know, relatively like equally big. And then those two pieces immediately declaring war on each other.

That is not what usually happens. But there is another period in history that's probably far more close to what looks likely to happen in the US, actually, which is the Japanese warring states period, the Sengoku Jidai.

played out, it depends on when you start counting, but like mainly during the 17th century, so or 16th century I should say, so from like 1500 something, like some start at like 1540 to 1600 is the Battle of Sekigahara and then like it's really over about 10 years later. But like this, this is sometimes called a civil war, like a Japanese civil war, but it's not actually that at all.

What instead the Sengoku Jidai is, is essentially that you have this old political system, like the Ashikaga Shogunate, which is controlled from the capital of Japan, Kyoto, at that point. And the Ashikaga Shoguns, they just stop being able to govern because of sort of, you know, decadence and this string of bad luck and so on.

And so what happens is that you have like the... basically Japan divides into factions and those factions start fighting each other inside the capital. But these factions, they're basically, you know, like allies of the Shogun that are like butting heads with each other. And they fight each other so fiercely that by the end there is no winner because everyone has exhausted everyone else.

And at that point, if you're living out in like a Japanese province, it's like you're picking up the phone and there's nobody there to answer. Like the political center is so exhausted from infighting that you're just on your own outside of the capital. And so all of these sort of

rinkeding clans that aren't important at all suddenly become big names because there's no one else. There used to be political order and it's been replaced by nothing. Zero. A vacuum. And then eventually it's filled, but it's filled by like... In some cases like random itinerant like oil merchants become like samurai lords. Why? Because there's no one else. There's literally no one else.

And what are you seeing in the US today? You're seeing this vicious infighting between like different factions now inside of the MAGA coalition, but also vicious infighting between like

the Democrats and the Republicans, and you have these power plays where Trump is taking away the National Guard from the governor of California and sending them to patrol the streets against the governor's wishes, which is incredibly irregular for the US. That last happened 60 years ago during desegregation. It's almost never done because it's just not done in the US. That's not how you do things.

But now it is being done and everything is polarizing and sort of falling apart. They can't even pass a budget in Washington. They have given up on trying to forestall some sort of fiscal, like sovereign debt collapse. They're not even trying anymore. They gave up and they instead basically accelerated that. And when the war between Israel and Iran started...

If this was 10 years ago, what would have happened is that US bond yields would have gone down. Because in times of uncertainty, people used to flood to sort of US treasuries because they were the safest asset. Well, now, if there's a crisis these days, like yields actually rise. People sell off American treasuries because they don't want to be the guy standing, holding the bag. If there's some sort of like...

de facto, like default or haircut on the debt. And so you don't actually need people to sort of gather around like red or white or black banners and say, well, we're going to fight like the Russian Civil War or the American Civil War. You can just have a sort of a political system that just gets consumed in sort of auto-cannibalism.

To the point where things stop working. And that's where the US is at right now. Like it's going on right now. So that's one danger. But the other danger is Trump appeared in the Atlantic this morning, actually, like on the day we're recording the 15th.

And it's actually quite, I recommend reading it because what Trump says, because he's asked about sort of all of these tensions within his coalition, because people really don't want to go to war in the Middle East again. And again, the US military is much weaker relatively, and even absolutely, like in absolute terms, it's much weaker than it was during the Iraq invasion.

Iran is, I don't know, like six or eight times bigger and it has like three or four times the population. So it's incomparable. But people are really worried about that. And Trump's comment is, well, I was the one who invented the term America first. So I get to decide. He literally says this. I get to decide what that term means.

and the people saying "we want peace", sorry, you're not America first. Because Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, that's not peace. And I'm the guy who decides. I think it's an open question in 2025 whether Joe Biden, you know, dying from cancer,

battling old age has more political or more or less political acumen than Donald Trump. Like I'm being a bit fascist, but not a lot actually, because what Trump is doing here is he is killing off MAGA, like the ability for the coalition to continue.

by basically declaring himself almost like a king. I am no longer the sort of representative of the nation. I am the sovereign in my inviolable person. That is going to destroy the coalition. And if he actually tries to force down a war, like down the throats of Americans, where, I don't know, like 90-95%, depending on the poll, don't want this war...

You have to realize it will only take a single mutiny inside the military for the entire sort of political system to come crashing down. Why is that, Malcolm? Explain the mechanics of that and explain why you think it might be likely. This would be a war nobody wants, ordered by a guy who's just stabbed his own voters in the back.

You know, they can't really like pass anything through Congress because they have such razor thin margins. So the system is 100% polarized. Like there are no longer sort of any votes on the issues taking place inside the US political system, which is, you know, like how parliament was supposed to work, where it's like, we all debate, do we want to raise taxes? Like, will this spur business growth or whatever? No, this is like, which team are you on?

That's the only thing that's left. And so almost 50% of the system opposes him no matter what he does. No matter what he does. And the other 50% that's supposed to support him no matter what he does is now already mutinying. Like they're already sort of abandoning ship and calling Trump a traitor and so on. There is a shocking level of like everyday political violence in the US now. Like a guy...

hired, like, working for... I can't remember, like, it's Minnesota, I think, like, where Governor Tim Walz is from. Like, a guy working for the state, no criminal record, just snaps...

acquires a police uniform and starts murdering lawmakers. And you know what happens when this news comes out? That like, okay, a guy working for, you know, the government, he snapped, he got a police uniform, he started executing lawmakers like with their spouses in their homes. How do Americans react?

With shock, with sadness? No, nope, not at all. What the Americans start doing is saying: "This guy was a Democrat." And then a Democrat says: "Oh no no no no, this crazy murderer, he was a Republican." And the Republicans shoot back: "Oh no, he was definitely a Democrat."

Because he murdered two Democrats that were voting along with the Republicans. And this is how you Democrats are, you just murder people for no reason. And it's like, "No, no, no, he was a registered Republican." This is how you Republicans are. This is not how a normal country acts when you have a political assassination. You don't start immediately pointing fingers on factional grounds.

This is a pre-revolutionary country act. This is France in 1789. Actually, I take that back. This is like France in 1790. It's not even the pre-revolution anymore because people would be shocked by these kinds of murders in the French pre-revolution. During the revolution, not so much maybe.

Imagine trying to deal with a mutiny in that case. Let's say you have like an army detachment or whatever, or a National Guard attachment, because this is another thing about the US military today. It is so depleted. Like these bases in the Middle East, they're not manned by like career soldiers. They're manned by people from the National Guard.

If you sign up in the National Guard of like Wyoming because you want to protect America, you want to help with disaster relief in Wyoming, sorry, you're getting sent to Syria or you're getting sent to Jordan or some other base in the Middle East because the US military doesn't have enough people. If one of those detachments say "we're not doing this, like we don't believe in this war"

you know these iranian hypersonics they're really scary man like i don't want to get sent home stateside in a lunchbox what do you do if you're trump what would you do calling wood like i i mean i i mean a mutiny among america's national guard because they don't want to be sent abroad i i'm not sure how i would deal with that but i i can say that if i was you know it was donald trump i would fight tooth and nail to avoid getting involved in this war with iran

Yeah. You know, the problem is, though, at the moment that, I mean, he was on a negotiation. I mean, the problem is actually that the Europeans and the Democrats probably had a pretty good deal with Iran to avoid, you know, nuclear enrichment or, you know, them getting a weapon. Maybe it was about the best they could get. But the Republicans and the Israel lobby were very unhappy about it and they tore it up.

And I'm actually, from a humanitarian perspective, actually, it's one of the few foreign policy issues that I look at from a humanitarian perspective. But also in terms of Britain's national interest, I don't want to see proliferation. I don't want to see proliferation in any country, and that includes Iran, it includes Ukraine, it includes Taiwan, it includes Japan and South Korea,

I don't want to see nuclear proliferation. I think nuclear weapons are unimaginably dangerous and destructive. They have the ability to literally destroy all civilization on Earth. Literally, okay? Not figuratively, literally. So I don't want to see that. But the way to do that was always to provide Iran with pretty strong reassurance that it wasn't under threat.

And by doing that, they could relax and they wouldn't feel the necessity to develop a bomb. Now they obviously feel the necessity. Now they have been put in a position where they have to either mobilize everything that they've got, like every single missile, every hypersonic, every rocket, every proxy that they have in the region, every single bullet they can find and throw it at Israel.

or lose altogether and give up and accept regime change and perhaps even the breakup of their country or develop a nuclear bomb. Like they have those three options. And it could well be that Iran now goes into the North Korean mode where they decide, look, given what's happened, any privation, any hardship is going to be worth it

If we can develop a nuke and then we have that assurance for ourselves. Like that is the calculus now. Or they might just throw everything that they've got at Israel and maybe take down the region's energy infrastructure in the process and, you know, send oil to $240 a barrel and send the world into a global recession. They could do that. Like I would try to avoid...

Putting Iran in that kind of backing them into that kind of corner I would try to avoid getting the US involved in this because quite apart from anything else after everything they've given Ukraine everything that they then gave Israel in the war against Hezbollah and Hamas recently

and everything that they then used against the Houthis in Prosperity Guardian and then Trump's follow-up to Prosperity Guardian which was even more profligate in its deployment of US missiles and precision bombs and bunker busters. After all of that, if you're now going to get into a war with Iran, even if it's just an aerial bombardment where you have air superiority,

What do you have left to defend Taiwan? What do you have left to hold the line in the Western Pacific on the first island chain? Nothing. But here's the thing. People need to realize, I kind of quibble with the sort of terms you use, not to be apparent or anything, but if we talk in terms of

Iran being desperate and throwing everything against the wall and, you know, like playing sort of all of these like back to the wall gambits and so on. I think we're taking the situation we ourselves are in not seriously enough here. Because think about Taiwan, for example, and think about World War II. So the American industrial advantage compared to the Japanese advantage.

was something to the order of like it was less than 10 to 1 and this kind of varies by category but like it's a good shorthand like 10 to 1 that's in the ballpark and so the Japanese looked at that because they weren't stupid and they realized that 10 to 1 that's a really that's that's not a good situation if you're going to war but they said well the Pacific Ocean it's really big and

What we can do, and they had reason to think this because they had done so before against the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima, what we can do against the Americans is we can achieve local force superiority by leveraging the vast distances of the Pacific. So even if the Americans have five times more ships than we do, in one particular place close to our own home ports, we can reach parity.

in numbers. And then our ships are better and our crews are more experienced and better trained. So we can mop the floor, they send even more ships, trudge along the Pacific and then we achieve local superiority again and maybe then the Americans will sort of figure "Ah, this isn't worth it. Let's just let them have the Philippines or whatever they want."

This was a desperate plan from the Japanese. The Americans today have a shipbuilding disadvantage of around 250 to 1. Not 10 to 1, 250 to 1. They depend on the Chinese, who are the sole supplier in the entire world.

for the materials used for high-performance magnets, radar systems, missile guidance system, and so on. If the Chinese don't sell it, there's no seller whatsoever. And the American state is completely broke. So it can't actually, you know, print the money to create that infrastructure inside the US without triggering like a sovereign debt default and hyperinflation. And in fact, hyperinflation is already...

screwing over, or not hyperinflation, but normal inflation is already basically wrecking the military industrial complex inside the US. Because if you accept a fixed price contract to build a plane, unit price like $200 million or something per plane, you can't do that because in four years, it's going to cost like $240 million to build that plane. And suddenly you're losing money.

So big contractors like Boeing are already walking away from the opportunity to build stuff for the Pentagon because with this inflation and the dollar being devalued de facto, we can't do it. We'll go broke if we build weapons. So not only is the disadvantage 250 to 1 instead of 10 to 1, not only is the American military industrial complex dependent on China

The US plan, it's not to fight outside San Diego, it's to fight in the Chinese backyard. That's the plan. Like, the tyranny of distance is still as real today as it was back then, but now the Chinese are getting to enjoy it on top of their 250:1

handicap. And it's an open secret inside Washington that the US currently can't supply fighting forces inside the Pacific theater with fuel.

So yes, even if they have planes over there, they can't actually supply them with fuel. Planes without fuel are glorified paperweights, sorry. But there are no ships that the US has available, and they close down the Red Hill base, the big fuel base they have facing the Pacific on Hawaii. Why? Because it was old and it was contaminating the groundwater because they didn't have money to maintain the base.

And now they have no replacement. No replacement even in the pipeline. So I say all of this, like this might seem like a tedious litany of details, but it's important to have the details in mind because once you put them together you realize this isn't about warfare at all. Like any American war planner from the 1940s, like the Americans that fought and won World War II,

If you brought them back today and you show them the plans in the Pentagon, they would say like, "You've gone out of your minds. We need to lock you up in a mental asylum. You're gonna fight 250 to 1 against an enemy you need permission from to manufacture weapons." And you admit yourselves that you have no way to supply your forces with fuel and that you're not even working on fixing that.

You are not actually planning for a war. You're doing something else. You're doing some sort of ideological kabuki theater. And that is kind of the problem when we discuss these things on their own premises of, like, this is... We in the West are not just planning military engagements. In fact, we're really not. Look, I suppose the counter-argument to that would be to go back to...

1985 or 1986. Then you had a situation where the Soviet Union was clearly rotten. I mean, it wasn't clear at the time, but now historians realize that the Soviet Union was rotting from the inside. Corruption was rife. Dispiritedness and disheartenedness was kind of rife within society and probably within the military as well. You had these situations where soldiers were being

who were frontline soldiers for their two-year conscription were instead being diverted to build dachas for their colonels and generals or other corrupt schemes to varying degrees. At the same time, you had the US, which was going through this, well on the way to completing this kind of revolution in military affairs, which we saw just four or five years later in Desert Storm. You had the development of stealth,

You also had a range of new weapons platforms coming online like the F-15, the F-16 and the F-18. You also had the M1 Abrams tank.

You had the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, you know, you had a range of anti-tank missiles both in Europe and the US from the Javelin to the Milan. You had all these new weapon systems coming online. You also had this revolution in reconnaissance target strike capacity and very beginning of mass precision strike.

which was probably finally the thing that made air-land battle, as the 60s and 70s planners conceived it, possible. And then you had all these F-117 Nighthawks, the first stealth fighters, right? So the US was going through this process. It now had a fully professional military. It was awesomely powerful. I mean, one of the problems in the Gulf War was

was the feint through Kuwait that was meant to just fix the Iraqi forces. It was so effective in cutting through them, they had to be slowed down to allow the big left hook to catch up and to corner everybody.

But despite all of that, the Soviet group of forces in Germany was still an awesomely formidable fighting force. Like, they had, like, a lot of divisions. They had a lot of armor. They had effective, you know, generals and military planners. Like, they had a lot of legacy stuff. They had a full suite nuclear deterrents, including...

you know, right from artillery up to city killer megaton range ICBMs. They had the most complete chemical warfare weapons platform in the world. Like, they could wreak a whole range of damage to...

you know, Western Europe and the United States. And I think maybe it's a similar position now with the US. Like, the US Navy is still quite a formidable force. Like, the US still has pretty considerable expeditionary capacity. Its air force is still ginormous, to use the official terminology for it. Like, it can still do all of these things, despite the fact that it has fallen behind in hypersonics.

It looks like it's now falling behind in satellite location to the Chinese. Like the GPS system is really old and the Chinese are in the process of deploying something that's much more advanced. But, you know, the U.S. has still got like advantages in things like submarine technology and sonar technology. But bro, bro, I have to stop you here. Okay, okay. If you can't transport fuel or not just fuel, but like any sort of supplies like to the Pacific...

What are you even doing, man? I'm not saying like some sort of "I heard this from my uncle who works at the Pentagon." You can Google these things and you can find like open source articles and like inside the Beltway discussions, we have no ability to provide our troops or our ships or our planes with fuel, ammo, food in case of a war. Are we working on that? No.

Will we start working on that? No. And then the trick here is that nobody ever asked the question, so okay, you can't use a plane without fuel. And everyone says, no you can't, like that's obvious. And we have no capacity to provide our planes with fuel. Yep, that's how it is. So that means if there's a war with China we won't be able to use our planes. And then everyone gets really uncomfortable.

You're allowed to, like, look at the problems, but you're never allowed to piece them together to a conclusion. And so you end up with sort of what you said. Well, you know, the U.S. military is, like, still really powerful. No, sorry. Like, a plane without fuel is a paperweight. Well, I mean, even, like, Britain, you know, even the Royal Navy, which has, you know, far fewer resources than the U.S., managed to get...

I don't know, 10, 12,000 soldiers and troops, literally the length of the Atlantic, the height of the Atlantic, like some 12,000 miles or whatever it was, from Portsmouth to the Falkland Islands and disembark them and fight a war. And okay, we had to use passenger cruisers

to do it. We had to use some container ships to do it, but we did it. And we lost some of those ships as well. And we lost some of the merchant marine ships which weren't well defended, but we did it. And I guess the argument would be that the US would do it in extremis in the same way. They would simply like take,

DHL, airplanes, and other cargo-carrying airplanes, container ships and other cargo carriers. They would take crews and they would put them in a convoy across the Pacific and try to protect them with submarines and frigate and destroyer outriders and get them into the theater. And that's just how it would work, right? Well, that's not actually how these things are discussed inside the Beltway.

If the discussion was the one that you pointed out here, well, we have all of these sort of MacGyver solutions. I guess the point of criticism at that point would be, well, I don't think these MacGyver solutions are very realistic. Like, I think they're kind of fanciful. And that might be right or it might be wrong. What I'm telling you, comrade, is that inside the Pentagon, inside the sort of Greater Beltway, they're not talking like that.

They're saying, "There's nothing. We aren't going to transport fuel. We have no capacity and we're not really planning on fixing that." And you said, "Oh, we're going to try to protect the ships." The Navy's official position regarding that is, if there's a war, there will be no escorts. Why? Because the Navy doesn't have enough ships.

So what I'm trying to point out here, it's not like that I'm some sort of Grinch saying, oh, well, you know, I think the US sucks. I think the US can't do anything right. What I'm saying is America today is these institutions are filled with people who have given up. Like they straight up do not care anymore. In the same way that people inside the Soviet Union in 1990...

They didn't care. They had no fancy plans to reform the Red Army or whatever. They were there to collect the paycheck. The system was falling apart, everyone could see it. And so they were just sitting out their time, essentially. The US is very much like that, which is what you saw a very sort of in-your-face demonstration of during that military parade they just had.

But when I was in Washington for this sort of Elliott School educational program, I was holding a talk together with Colonel Wilkerson, the chief of staff of Colin Powell back in the day.

And during lunch, I was talking to an army colonel in charge of a signals unit. So like this unit would be in charge of, you know, radio communication, stuff like that, like communication coordination in case of war.

That colonel just point blank told me that 60% of his job was just basically falsifying records at this point in order to present a picture that like my unit is ready to go if there's a war. Because that was his job, falsifying records. Like 60% of his equipment was either missing or broken. But if you take out the parts from a functioning radio and put it in this

like broken radio, swap out the parts and you turn it on, then you can say, well, this radio works too. And then you take out the parts. It's past the qualifications, like you can just include it in the working equipment. It's stuff like that. And if he doesn't want to do that, he can just quit because that's his job. That is literally...

what his job is about. He can either give green reports, and the US Army has all of these slangs for essentially lying. I heard several. It's like giving command what they want to hear was one term some people use. Massaging the stats was another. Turning the slide green was popular in another army unit.

There was a lot of turning the slide green in 1910 Qing Dynasty China. A lot of turning the slide green. Like that's all you did if you were a state employee. And if you didn't do that, if you didn't lie and falsify reports, sorry, we'll find someone else who can do that job.

This is an old problem, but it's really, really bad inside the US. And again, like, if you look at these things like war in the Pacific, and you look at like, these people are actually, actually like working towards like winning a war in the Pacific. Like you're being taken for a ride, my friend. What they're actually doing is turning the slide green.

So, I mean, if the Beltway and the Pentagon are essentially populated by Qing Dynasty eunuchs, what is going to happen next? Like, you know, we have a war in the Middle East, which Israel clearly wants to drag the U.S. into, but that would have dire consequences for the Trump brand and his ability to hold his coalition together.

especially given some of the issues with the economy at the moment and the imbroglio in cities related to the behavior of the ICE agency and with regard to migration in general.

what's going to happen from here, Malcolm? Like, where will the US go? And can we expect a kind of a further fragmentation and dissolution? Or can we see something else like the capital taking a grip of the whole country and moving away from the federal model? I mean, how do you see things playing out from here? Well, I mean, again, you can use the Sengoku Jidai and like the late Muromachi period in Japan as sort of

A good example, but you see the same, it's just like a variant of what you saw in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union, in China during the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. Like, when you have these very large countries that are relatively centralized, what can often happen, like the way they sort of fail, is that, as the African proverb goes, the fish rots from the head. The central node stops working.

And so there are some attempts in the US, if you think about like a lot of the stuff that Trump is trying to do, he's basically trying to do an end run around like the federal, like the old sort of division of labor between the executive, judiciary and the legislature. And the legislature has just stopped working. Like the legislature in the US has collapsed. It can barely like even pass a budget. And in fact, it can't pass an ordinary budget at all.

Like they're doing like these reconciliations and stuff. You have high school marching bands that could have put up like better marching than these people from like the 7th Infantry Division or whatever in Washington. But that's not because Americans are like incapable of marching. No, like high school kids in America can march. It's just that the institution is so broken that they can't implement anything. Well,

Once that happens, again, think about what happened in Russia. You had a period which was like Wild West, sort of a devolution to warlords. And in Russia they were called oligarchs, and in Japan they were called daimyo, which just means big name. In China they were called warlords, and I guess in the US they'll probably be called state governors.

But you have a devolution to a lower level, and then someone like, you know, a Tokugawa or a Mao Zedong or a Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin eventually comes along and sort of unites the country, building on, like, co-opting, defeating, bribing, recruiting...

assimilating all of these various sort of power structures that have sort of sprung up and that are more effective than the old broken sort of central model. So if we're just talking big picture stuff like what's going to happen in the US in the next like 20-30 years? Well, it's gonna be a process just like in Russia. First there's a period of like political crisis and we're living through that period now. The late Gorbachev years.

And then there's the Yeltsin years where everything just falls apart. And then eventually there's a period where things get put back together again. This is a common pattern throughout history. But I don't think there's any sort of hope of, you know, Trump suddenly rolling out of bed one day and just becoming another person. Like, he's a bit too old for that at this point. Like, he just turned 79. That is a pretty advanced age.

And you tend to be stuck in your ways when you're 79. And unfortunately those ways right now are basically leading the US down the primrose path, like into massive polarization and sort of infighting and a breakdown of the political coalition and so on. And that's probably gonna hit a crescendo pretty soon.

Because these things, when they happen, it's like Ernst Hemingway's bankruptcy. They happen gradually, and then they happen suddenly. So, I brought up the case of like a mutiny earlier. Like, you know, a National Guard from Tennessee or whatever saying like, we don't want to fight against Iran, and you can't make us. Well, in theory, the military can make them. Like, they can put them in prison or whatever, and they can like...

Probably even sort of apply harsh corporal punishment if you refuse a direct lawful order. But, I mean, these sorts of things have actually brought down monarchies before. Like in Spain specifically, they fought this really unpopular war to keep the New World colonies under the Spanish crown.

And then eventually, like, they sent a new batch of soldiers, or were planning to send a new batch of soldiers, to the killing fields in Venezuela. And after, you know, all the soldiers they had sent previously had just died. And the soldiers find that out, and they say, like, we're not going. The king at that point was so unpopular that, like, these soldiers saying, we're not going. This is called the Mutiny of Cadiz, by the way. Cadiz is sort of the...

Spanish port city where these soldiers were billeted. But the mutiny of Cadiz triggered a nationwide revolution because the king didn't have enough Jews to actually send in other soldiers to just force them to fight in this really unpopular war. And that is an exceedingly likely scenario if the US actually enters the war against Iran.

Because those bases in the Middle East, they are just completely open to these Iranian missiles. Which is why we spent so long in the West saying "These missiles aren't real, there's no way a gunpowder weapon could ever beat the good old bow and arrow. These newfangled technology made by foreigners, it doesn't work." Well now it does work and we have no answer to it. And again,

The soldiers being sent over, they're just gonna be sacrificed. I know it kind of sounds sort of like when you talk about these things, there's all this normalcy bias that's packed into human beings where it's like,

Oh, well, that could never happen, except the time it did. We don't have revolutions anymore, except for Ukraine 2014 or Georgia or other places where they have revolutions. But apart from that, we don't have revolutions anymore. And we don't have big imperial collapses apart from the times when we do, like the collapse of the

the Austrian Empire, or the collapse of Yugoslavia, or the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the collapse of Tsarist Russia, or the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. But apart from that, we don't have that anymore. And then you look at America and like, okay, well that's never gonna happen here. And then, okay, America, incredibly polarized.

Fighting, you know, various riots breaking out across major cities. They're sending in the National Guard right now to try to contain them and the uniformed military.

The political ruling coalition is just falling apart into acrimony. They can no longer pass a budget. They're fighting three different wars, or two wars, or three, depending on how you count. And they plan to fight another one against the biggest country in the world with a hilariously huge advantage in manufacturing.

and they're going broke and they have no plan to fix that. And they have all of these natural disasters that they can't deal with and at the same time they're cutting FEMA. And now state functionaries are just going berserk putting on police uniforms and assassinating lawmakers and the only reaction is "Well sorry, that guy belonged to your party and not mine."

Not like, what the hell is happening in the country? Like, why are these functionaries going berserk? I'm sorry, but this is a textbook example of a country about to collapse. This is not normal. And the moment, the sooner you get over the normalcy bias of empires don't collapse, except for all of the ones we had in the year 1900 have collapsed by this point.

And then some have been born and then collapsed in that span of time. But apart from that, like, nothing changes. Like, the moment, the faster you get over that, like, the easier it will be in the years ahead, I think.