Jeffrey Sachs: Ukraine/Russia Dangerous New Escalation, & the Dark Forces Pushing for War With Iran
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And for the past seven months, he's been trying to do just that. We're getting a lot closer, but we're not quite there. Why? Well, says Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who has been watching carefully and speaking to many people involved, because the intel agencies aren't on board at all. So almost three years ago, you got bounced off of Morning Joe after many years, basically shunned by the entire world that you occupied and had occupied for decades.

simply for saying hey maybe the war in Ukraine is not a good idea so it's been a number of years since that happened and I wonder if you have thought about or answered the question why is the Ukraine war so central to the people in charge of our society like what is it about that um that creates this very intense attachment they like exile you for disagreeing over it

Well, let me start with the basic point. The war is not a good idea and it could have ended differently.

Three years ago, this is yet another of the tragedies of the Ukraine war. On April 15th, 2022, there was a draft agreement between Ukraine and Russia to end the war. The United States swooped in, told the Ukrainians, don't do it, keep fighting.

And three years on, Ukraine has lost perhaps more than a million young people to death and serious injury. It has lost territory. It has had the country destroyed. It has had its economy brought to ruins. Nothing of the last three years has been any help whatsoever to Ukraine.

So when I said three years ago, I also said it five years ago and before even Russia's invasion in February 2022, that there didn't have to be a war, that the war could easily be avoided. When I said in March and April of 2022, you could stop right now and end the war, I

Not only was that right, it was, if I could put it this way, pro-Ukraine. Of course, it was attacked at the time as being anti-Ukraine. This is the craziest thing. The friends of Ukraine, so-called, are the ones that are completely destroying Ukraine. The friends of Ukraine, so-called, are the ones that tell Ukraine to fight on, to fight on. It's like...

being, I guess, the coach in a boxing match, and your guy is being bloodied and being hit and being destroyed in the battle, and you say, go, I'm on your side, go out there and hit him again until they get smashed one more time, and they're brought to their side of the ring, and again, you tell them, go out and fight because I'm your buddy.

This is the disaster that the so-called friends of Ukraine, whether it is all that we saw during the Biden administration or that we hear every day from Starmer, the prime minister of UK, or Mertz, the new chancellor of Germany, or Macron from France, and of course from Zelensky, who is now running a

I'm sorry to put it this way, but a little dictatorship because he runs by martial law. He doesn't run by public support, but they're all the ones telling their young people, go out to the front lines, go get killed. And this has been going on for years. So the question you ask is why? This isn't for Ukraine. This is destroying Ukraine. So what is it for? Well, I think it's quite obvious and it's been obvious for many years that

The American...

push to Ukraine to fight on, don't accept neutrality and so forth. This has been a project of the American deep state of the military industrial complex dating back decades. And the target has nothing to do with Ukraine at all. It's destroying Ukraine. The target is to, quote, weaken Russia. This is the point. But why would you want to?

To weaken Russia? That's an even longer story. I mean, no one wants to weaken India. Yeah, it's a very good point. And someday when India succeeds, we will want to weaken India. Probably sooner rather than later. It's actually quite interesting. Maybe you'll make me digress right at the start.

In the early years of this century, in 2000, 2001, 2002, the U.S. relationship with China was just kind of normal, even keel. We had good business with China and China.

One of my dear friends with whom I somewhat disagree on some things and agree vociferously on other things, John Mearsheimer, the great political scientist, wrote a famous book called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. This is his magnum opus. And in it, he says at the beginning of the book in around 2000, he said the relations with China are

Quiet now, but when China gains power, we will go into conflict with China. And so this is to answer your question. Why would John Mearsheimer say that? Not because of anything China would have done, but because a big power will generate a reaction from the United States. That's his theory that we're on an almost inevitable collision course. The great powers, right?

I'm not so pessimistic, although I'd say Mearsheimer is empirically more right in a way. So he somewhat accurately describes things. But he also labeled his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And I don't want tragedy all the time. No, exactly. I'd like a little comedy, actually a little normal relations. So to answer your question, what do we have against Russia?

The fact of the matter is Russia is big. Russia is powerful. And for that reason and that reason alone or sufficiently, the U.S. would oppose Russia just like the U.S. opposes China. Now, of course, maybe people listening to this or say, that's crazy. We oppose China because of all the terrible things they do. Or we oppose Russia because of all of the terrible things they do. I would...

take a different view of this, which is we make up stories about why we oppose big powers. But the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big. They are an affront to our desire for what the political scientists in a fancy word call primacy or call hegemony or call full spectrum dominance. In other words, Russia is an affront to

to our ability to dictate circumstances. China certainly is an affront to the U.S. ability to dictate circumstances in Asia. For that reason alone, we, we, for me, it's fine. You know, I understand there are many powers in the world. That's how the world is. But for the powers that be in Washington,

That's completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance or primacy. In other words, our purpose is.

stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex, is we must be the unrivaled number one. So if you ask why do we hate Russia, because Russia stands in the way of us being the unrivaled number one. Now you could say, well, it's because of all the terrible things that they do.

But it's a little more complicated than that. During the Cold War from 1945 to 1991, we hated Russia because it was communist. Yes.

Okay, I happened to be quite deeply involved at the end of that period as an economic advisor when they were trying to get out of that horrible system. And I advised President Gorbachev in 1990-91, and I advised President Yeltsin in 1992-93. Yeltsin said, we don't want any of this communism anymore. We want to be a normal country. So,

So the United States came up with other reasons to hate Russia. So I watched with my own eyes that the reason that had been given was not the real reason. It was maybe the believed reason, but it was the narrative reason. We hate Russia because it is a godless communist country. Now it is a Russian Orthodox non-communist country and we still hate Russia. Same deal.

And by the way, what's absolutely fascinating is if you go back to 180 years ago, and I'm not kidding, to 1840, our precursor as world hegemon, that was the British Empire, they hated Russia too. And why? Why?

For no reason. It was a little before the Bolshevik Revolution, by the way. It was before any ostensible reason. But the British elite hated Russia. Okay. And it shows an interesting answer to your question. A historian named Gleason in 1950 tried to answer the question, how did Britain come to hate Russia?

Why is it that by 1840, the British hated the Russians so much that 13 years later in 1853, the British went to war against Russia, a war of choice in the Crimean War. So this historian...

Did an amazing job because it was before AI and being able to ask all these good questions. He went through all the archives. He went through all the speeches by British leaders, all the speeches in the House of Commons, all the articles written in the intellectual magazines from 1850 onward.

And he posed the question, he said, we were allies of Russia in 1815 in defeating Napoleon. Yes. We were allies. Then just 25 years later, we're enemies. What happened? So he goes through all of the speeches, everything. His conclusion in the end is remarkable.

Nothing happened. There was no reason why Britain came to hate Russia, except Russia was big and therefore was an affront to the British Empire. And of course, the British concocted an idea, which was a completely bizarre idea.

And that was that the czar was going to invade British India through the Khyber Pass. This became known as the Great Game afterwards.

This was a crazy idea. The thought never even crossed the minds of these czars. To march across Afghanistan?

came to view Russia as the great threat to the British Empire, the threat to India, the crown jewel of the empire. So much so that by 1840, Britain was rabidly Russophobic. And then by 1853, Lord Palmerston totally concocted a pretext to go to war with Russia. The

the Crimean War. Charge of the Light Brigade. Yeah, yeah, Charge of the Light Brigade. And the Crimean War was a concocted showdown between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, concocted because the Russians said, we don't want to fight you. You know, they had challenged, the Russians had challenged the Ottoman Turks,

and put some troops in Wallachia at the mouth of the Danube because the Ottomans had given some privileges to France that the Russians thought belonged to them. And then the British and the French threatened the Russians, and the Russians retreated. This is the prelude to the Crimean War. The Russians retreated. And then when the Russians retreated,

The British said, we now fight on. In other words, the pretext was gone, but they wanted that war. Why did they want the war? They wanted the war because the British idea was to banish Russia from the Black Sea region. Remember, the Black Sea is black.

warm water port till today, by the way. It was created as a warm water port in 1783 by the Empress Catherine the Great. And it has been Russia's warm water port since then. Crimea. Palmerston in Crimea, in Sevastopol, precisely, which was besieged by the British and the French during the Crimean War. It

The Russians eventually surrendered. And in the Treaty of Paris in 1856, the Russians agreed to scrap their Black Sea fleet. It remained scrapped for about 20 years, actually. And then, as history always shows, the French went running back to the Russians and

ally with us because the Germans are rising in power. And so suddenly the enemy became the friend because you needed a new friend to fight the new enemy and so on. It's kind of crazy European politics. But the idea of Lord Palmerston was banish Russia from the Black Sea and you reduce Russia to a third rate power.

Now, all of this is fascinating because, first of all, the Russophobia was a concocted hatred. Second, the war between Britain and France on one side and Russia in 1853 was concocted. But third, we're replaying that.

Almost to the same script today and almost with exactly the same plot line, which is so weird, but true. And why I say that is the United States, quote, or the inside deep state, quote,

The CIA and its apparatus and the rest of the military industrial complexes hated the Soviet Union since 1945, even though they were our ally in defeating Hitler. It turned to preparing for war against our ally within a few months of the end of World War II. This is by itself a very important point.

And then from 1945 to 1991, we had the Cold War ostensibly against communism and against international communism. Then in December 1991, the Soviet Union ended war.

I don't know if I've mentioned it to you before. I was in the Kremlin that day, literally that hour sitting next in front of Boris Yeltsin or I was in front of him. And he said to me and to my colleagues, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over. I heard it.

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And Yeltsin said at the time, I want us to be a normal country. We want a normal economy, Mr. Sachs. We want a normal democratic political system. We want to be friends with the United States. And I said,

In my naivete, he said to him, President Yeltsin, I can assure you the American people will want to partner with Russia to have a future of peace and economic cooperation. And I was completely convinced of it. I thought this is the most historic moment imaginable. I was pinching myself. Can you believe you're sitting in the Kremlin hearing this?

from the president of Russia, the end of the Soviet Union. And I had that blessing. It was unbelievable. I was wrong because as soon as the Soviet Union ended, what did the deep state say?

Well, they said, this is great. Now we need to dismember Russia too. Just like the Soviet Union broke apart on its ethnic lines, Russia is fragile. Maybe, as Big Brzezinski opined, maybe it'll be three different parts. Maybe there'll be a European part, a Siberian part, and a Far East part. The arrogance, the hubris is unbearable.

on the American side. But the idea was Cold War over?

It's ridiculous. Now we go on to surround Russia. Now we go on to chip apart Russia. One of the favorite phrases in Washington used to be to decolonize Russia. It meant that we can break away different regions of Russia, Chechnya or this region or that region. Why? It's a big power. We're the only big power that should be on the planet.

And incidentally, in 1992, I can absolutely assure you,

No one had China on the radar screen in Washington at all. China was rice growing villages, maybe, you know, a counterpoint to help weaken Russia or as it was used in this triangulation to weaken the Soviet Union. But it wasn't on anybody's radar screen as potentially a competitor or a threat or anything else.

So the focus was on Russia and it remained on Russia. And we know that the U.S. deep state. And again, by that, I don't mean just a figment of our imagination or metaphor. I mean, the CIA. I mean, the rest of the intelligence agencies. I mean, the Pentagon. I mean, the armed services committees of the Congress. I mean, the military contractors, the CIA.

They already, by 1992, had the idea of unchallenged primacy of the United States. And this became called neoconservatism afterwards. But it was...

But it was early on. And of course, Cheney was our defense secretary in 1992 and Wolfowitz was his deputy. And all of the familiar figures that we came to know in the Iraq war and afterwards were on the scene. This was the end of Bush senior. And they already concocted the idea of U.S. military.

unipolarity or primacy or full spectrum dominance or hegemony, whatever term one wants to use. Then comes Clinton into office and Clinton's a, he's a kind of inconsequential, inexperienced, I think,

just not a serious person and didn't become one, unfortunately, during his presidency. And the deep state explains to him this is the way it is. And he also hears from Central Europe, countries that I was advising, but not advising on this for sure. Oh, we need NATO.

Why do you need NATO? NATO was supposed to protect you against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. Russia is not threatening anybody. It's barely surviving the financial crisis, but it doesn't have its eyes on Prague or on Warsaw or on Budapest, nothing of the sort.

But the idea of unipolarity is we need to put our bases on every part of the board. This is the game of risk. We need to put our pieces everywhere. And so the idea of NATO enlargement is worked out in 1993. And there's bureaucratic opposition inside by smart diplomats who say, why are we doing this? The Cold War is over.

But to the deep state, the Cold War was not over. It was just revving up because we got to get rid of Russia in its current form as well. So by the beginning of 1994, President Clinton, already in a speech in January 1994, endorses the eastward expansion of NATO. And if I could just put a parenthesis around that,

The U.S. had promised unequivocally to the Soviet Union in the context of German reunification as of February 2000, February, sorry, 1996.

1990, excuse me, yes, that NATO would not move one inch eastward. This remains, by the way, highly contested to this day. But if anyone wants the information, you go on something called the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can read the dozens and dozens of statements and all of the archival material there.

making completely, absolutely, unequivocally clear that the United States and Germany promised that NATO would not move one inch eastward.

So the record is absolutely clear. But Clinton being Clinton in the way that he governed was told by the deep state. Now we start moving eastward. And Clinton thought that was good domestic politics also with the Polish American vote, Czech American vote and so forth.

And he was also told by friends like Václav Havel in Czech Republic and so forth, this is a good idea. So he starts the NATO enlargement eastward. And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski explains basically the Lord Palmerston strategy. We will surround Russia in the Black Sea region.

And we will render Russia a third-rate power. And why not? It's so low-cost. We're so powerful. What could stop us? We're unchallenged anyway. They're weak. They depend on us. So there was no—it wasn't even heatedly debated. But Brzezinski's absolutely clear about this.

And like so many learned volumes, I must say, his book, The Grand Chessboard, is very well written and fundamentally wrong. And fundamentally wrong in that he has a whole essentially chapter, long chapter saying NATO will move eastward.

Europe, meaning the European Union, will move eastward. And what will Russia be able to do about it? And he goes into a long analysis saying, could Russia turn to China? No, never. Could Russia turn to Iran? No, never. Russia's only vocation is the European vocation. So Russia's going to have to swallow hard and accept this.

The point, Tucker, is what we're witnessing is not short-term decisions of presidents. We're watching a long-term decision.

consistent strategy, of course, built into the mindsets of senators and congressmen and more than the mindsets built into their campaign contributions as well. So this is built into the Armed Services Committee. This is built into the intelligence committee.

committee. This is why Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal stand up every day saying we must fight the Russians and so on. This is not short term claims based on current politics. This is a project that dates back more than 30 years.

It's a stupid project. Well, the verdict is in, though. So, I mean, so interesting. Ultimately, the project reaches its inevitable conclusion, which is including Russia's largest and most important neighbor, Ukraine, in NATO.

They announced that in February at the Munich Security Conference of 2022 and then almost immediately after Russia rolls across into Ukraine and then the war commences and it's a disaster for everybody, especially the United States, I would argue. And it does what Brzezinski said it wouldn't do, which is drive Russia right into China into what's now a permanent alliance. So it's a disaster. Right. Right.

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And seven months later, it's still not fixed, despite his, I think, sincere efforts to fix it. I agree with you. So what, why isn't this fixed? Let me just say in terms of chronology, one more piece to add, just to add to the historical note, the decision to invite Ukraine and Ukraine.

Even more crazy, by the way, the country of Georgia, which is in the South Caucasus, people should take out a map and look at this region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and ask themselves a question. Is that the North Atlantic? Because NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Or is that the soft underbelly of Russia in the Caucasus mountains? This is insane.

It's more Asian than European in some ways. Well, it's literally Asia because the European demarcation is the crest line of the Grand Caucuses. So we're inviting an Asian country.

into NATO. Stalin's home nation. And fascinating, why Georgia? Because look at the map also, not only is it Asia, not only is it not the North Atlantic, but it completes the encirclement of Russia in the Black Sea. So it's not a random choice. It's Palmerston, 1853, Brazilians,

brought to life by Brzezinski 1997 and lived out by George Bush Jr. in 2008. They announced this. Putin says, no, this is not going to be. This is craziness. In the meantime, also remember that in this

Incredible hubris of the United States, this mad arrogance. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. So the U.S. destabilized the nuclear industry.

arms control framework fundamentally in 2002. This is not sufficiently appreciated because from Russia's point of view until today and literally on a strike on strategic bombers last week, Russia believes that the United States has killed the nuclear arms framework. So we're talking about not vague national security concerns. We're talking about fundamental security

national and world survival terms, because from Russia's point of view, and understandably so, the United States doesn't want to play by any single rules whatsoever. So I just want to say that this Project Ukraine not only goes back to the 1990s, but the invitation was in 2008. The Russians said no. So in 2010, a pro-neutral President Viktor Yanukovych said,

is elected. He comes to power on the basis of no NATO enlargement because he knows how dangerous that is for his country being between East and West. He says, stay away to both sides and we will keep calm. In February,

2014, the United States conspires in a coup that overthrows Yanukovych. And that was a coup in which the U.S. was deeply engaged. My colleague at Columbia University, my colleague now, Victoria Newland, was the point person on the ground. Jeffrey Piat, who was a senior official

for Biden back in 2014. He was ambassador, in fact, to Ukraine and then became a senior State Department official in the Biden administration. Afterwards, Senators Lindsey Graham, he was out there, John McCain. This was a typical U.S. regime change operation. What do I mean by that? It means Yanukovych is in the way of our plan.

We need to get him out of the way because we need to expand NATO. And so Yanukovych is overthrown on February 22nd, 2014, violently within a nanosecond rather than saying, hey, the president should come back. A violent group overtook the government buildings violently.

President Obama recognizes the new government within a nanosecond because this is a U.S. game. This is the whole point. If you were a serious country that believed in democracy, President Obama would have said, we don't accept mobs entering our buildings and overthrowing our government. President

President Yanukovych is the elected president and he is the one we recognize. No, within a nanosecond, Obama recognized the new post-coup regime, the one that Zelensky leads today. And amazingly, you know, according to script, honest to God,

One of the first things that this new regime, this regime brought to power by an American participation in a coup, not only Americans, there were Ukrainian right wing forces also, but America played its active role.

What is one of the first things they say? They say, we think Russia should exit from Crimea. What does that mean? We think the Russian military base needs to leave Crimea. Now, it's interesting under Yanukovych's term.

Yanukovych and Putin had negotiated not a territorial annexation of Crimea, but rather a 25-year lease. Thank you very much that Russia will keep its naval base in Crimean Sevastopol.

But immediately the post-coup regime reads the script and says, we don't think Russia should be in Crimea. In other words, subscript, NATO is going to take over the military base in the Black Sea. That's when Russia immediately organizes a referendum and Crimea is taken into Russian hands. This wasn't an innocent attempt.

This was part of the playbook of the United States. The war started in February 2014. It didn't start with the invasion by Russia in February 2022. That was a major escalation. But the war started in February 2014.

It escalated. The U.S. built up the Ukrainian military to be the largest standing army of Europe. In fact, by 2021, when Biden came into office, Putin tried one more time. Would you commit or we call on you to commit to not enlarge NATO to Ukraine? And we've talked about it. I

Begged Jake Sullivan in a phone call in December 2021, Jake, take the agreement. Are you kidding? Avoid the war.

no, no, we can't do that. NATO, open door, so-called. In other words, we're determined to move NATO into Ukraine. And Jeff, don't worry, there won't be a war. Another brilliant utterance of Professor Jake Sullivan. You got everything wrong from beginning to end, as far as I'm concerned. So then Russia intervened.

invaded on February 24th, 2022. And what was the point of that invasion? In our hopeless mainstream media, which is, again, New York Times, I'll use as a reference point, phony from morning till night, it was to take over Ukraine. No, it was not to take over Ukraine. It was to push Ukraine to accept neutrality.

This was the point of the invasion. And it was absolutely clear because within seven days, Zelensky said, okay, okay, okay, okay, we can be neutral. And within a couple of weeks,

The Ukrainians had submitted a paper to the Russians to say, why don't we just have neutrality? And the Russians took that paper to President Putin. And Putin said, OK, look, let's negotiate and we can find a resolution of this. And that's when the so-called Istanbul process began. The Turkish government said we will be a mediator.

I went and talked at length to the Turkish negotiators to understand all the details about this. But the fact of the matter is in March 2022, as I was saying earlier, there were very rapid advances of a peace agreement. By March 28, 2022...

There was actually a joint communique between Russia and Ukraine saying we have reached a framework for peace. This is forgotten completely today. Then just two weeks later,

specifically April 15th, there was a draft agreement on the table. Not everything was agreed. There were some important points, but basically there was an agreement and serious negotiators would have completed the work. That's when the United States told the Ukrainians, no, no, you fight. Now, this comes to your question. Why did the U.S. say that then?

And why does the war continue now, even though clearly President Trump wants this war to end? Well, it continued then because it was undoubtedly the deep state idea. And I spoke to U.S. government officials. A few of them still spoke to me at the time. I knew senior officials. They absolutely believed that.

that the economic sanctions would bring Russia to its knees, for example. There was once upon a time that cutting Russia out from SWIFT was called the nuclear option. Kind of a mind-boggling ignorance and delusion that America runs everything, so if we...

put sanctions on Russia, that will crush the Russian economy. They didn't factor in the fact that Russia happens to sell...

commodities that are easily fungible and that not so hard to direct to India, by the way, which then can resell to Europe. So it's a little bit more costly. It's stupid. It's scratching your left ear with your right arm. You know, it's not the most direct way to do things. We make everything more expensive, less efficient, but Europe still buys all this stuff. The

The Indians are middlemen. Of course, they buy a lot of oil for their own refining. China buys gas and oil and so forth. So Russia isn't brought to its knees, but they believed it then. Okay, fast- Well, not only is Russia brought to its knees-

Would you rather have the Russian economy or the American economy right now? That's an interesting question. Let me come to that in a moment because I want to address the question why this persists. Okay. So they really believed...

that there would be victory in short order. And if it wasn't the nuclear option, God, I hate the term because we're close to nuclear war. But if it weren't the nuclear option, so-called, of cutting Russia out of the swift banking system, it would be the HIMARS, it would be the ATAKAMS. Or it was the idea that...

Putin will never mobilize because that would be so unpopular, it would bring him down. Or it was the idea that there would be an internal coup, progosion, or some other concocted event, and so on. Okay, this was delusion morning till night, very typical of American foreign policy. In comes President Trump. President Trump understands clearly that

This is really screwed up. This is not helping Ukraine. Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield. More war means more deaths by the hundreds of thousands, more, not less, loss of territory. And the whole idea, what are we fighting over? This NATO enlargement.

I'm not interested. This is President Trump's very accurate view of the situation. And I think he gets it. This is a stupid war. This is an unnecessary war. This is a costly war. This diverts American attention. This costs tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, depending on how long this goes on. And so he says the war should end. Completely right. And

He enunciates an absolutely basic point clearly, which is NATO should not expand. This is stupid. This is the cause of this whole thing. That is the basis for ending this war. We're not far from it. But here's the sad fact. Waging peace.

actually is as complicated as waging war. And that is a paradox. It seems not right. Why doesn't peace just come when you say you don't want to fight? And the reason is that the forces that want war are really powerful. Yeah, overwhelming. They don't just stop. They don't stop because the president opines that the war should end. The war has a lot of supporters.

Why? Because from the American point of view, the project continues. We can defeat Russia. And why not have more war? The war is good on many, many counts. It weakens Russia. We get to test our weapon systems as a threat.

I can't even stand it. But as many of our senators from Blumenthal and Romney and others have vulgarly said, this is great. No Americans are dying as if as as if more than a million Ukrainian casualties means nothing and nothing.

According to our politicians, to them, to American politicians, it means absolutely nothing. It doesn't mean anything. You never hear them. You hear them talk about their bravery. You don't hear them talk about the kinds of emails that I receive, including one that I just received from

Somebody who said, Mr. Sachs, they're about to send me off to die. Someone from Ukraine who just found my email publicly and he said, I'm 48 years old and they're sending me to the front line. 48 years old? Yes. So I'm sending a message that I know I'm about to die. And it's true. They send these messages.

Middle-aged people, disabled people, kids grabbed off the streets, delivery boys off of bicycles grabbed by these so-called recruiters who are thugs who pull them into vans. And then they're sent off to the front lines and they're dying under the drones. So for the American deep state,

They don't care. They don't count that. They the war is OK. Then in Europe, we brought in the CIA has, of course, created a European wide initiative.

system largely out of view, but whatever the CIA does here, think of the MI6 in Britain operating in the same way, even more disastrously. Think of BND in Germany, as

actually, which if you go back to 1945, not to go into too many details, has its Nazi roots. But the CIA created it after 1945 with the former Nazi intelligence agents to fight against the Soviet Union, taking them straight out of Hitler's intelligence into U.S. intelligence back in 1945, so-called Galen operation. Anyway, we have this whole network

And this network is still going. So the reason you have to wage peace is the president. He's just the president after all. He faces justice.

Throughout the U.S. government, he faces the Lindsey Grahams and the Richard Blumenthal's. He faces the CIA operations. He faces these pathetic politicians. They're pathetic because they don't represent their national interests at all. They represent this deep state approach, Starmer, who...

seems to do nothing more than parrot MI6 lines, Macron in France, Mertz in Germany. They're all warmongers. And Zelensky, who is Zelensky? Zelensky was put in by, he's part of a regime put in by a coup. He won an election, but an election in this post-coup regime. He is

way over his due date from his electoral mandate, as everybody knows. He rules by martial law. He's surrounded by complete hardliners. And I've been told, I don't know if it's true or not, but the

senior people in Ukraine have said, well, he has no choice. He'll get knocked off by his own side if he could be completely true. But he's not representing the Ukrainian people who he's killing. He's representing a clique that's in power right now. So this is actually Trump's world to to bring the war to a close.

requires a lot of coordinated activity. It requires an absolutely unified team

But remember, in Washington, everyone's partly bought out by someone else, by the military-industrial complex. And so you hear lots of cacophony. You hear lots of confusion. You hear lots of ultimatums given. But President Trump's really trying to bring about peace. Now, what has happened is...

Trump has said, I want peace.

He's faced this mountain of deep state or this chorus of deep state and European and Zelensky opposition. No, no, we want war. We want war. We don't want peace. We'll never give in. And he has, President Trump has usefully tried to maneuver both sides to the negotiating table. And that

We should give him all our support and all credit for doing that. But the system is not tamped down in any way because just before the recent round of this one-hour second meeting of the Russians and Ukrainians,

The Ukrainian SBU, the secret, the intelligence agency, launched two attacks deep inside Russia. One, a straightforward terrorist attack, blowing up a civilian railroad, killing a large number of children and people going off for holidays by blowing up a railroad and a railroad bridge.

Russia. The second operation was profoundly more dangerous. Zelensky probably gave it the name afterwards of Operation Spiderweb, which should tell you a lot. And that was a drone attack on several military bases, hundreds or thousands of kilometers inside Russia's territory on Russia's

strategic bomber fleet, meaning the air force that carries nuclear weapons. I'm sorry. This is no joke. This is no small matter to attack. Could the Ukrainians have done that without Western intelligence? Of course not. Remember in 2020 when CNN told you the George Floyd riots were mostly peaceful, even as flames rose in the background? No.

It was ridiculous, but it was also a metaphor for the way our leaders run this country. They're constantly telling you, everything is fine. Everything is fine. Don't worry. Everything's under control. Nothing to see here. Move along and obey. No one believes that. Crime is not going away. Supply chains remain fragile. It does feel like some kind of global conflict could break out at any time. So the question is, if things went south tomorrow, would you be ready to

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First of all, the CIA does not tell this White House a lot of things, no doubt. Well, how can that be? Because partly it is... CIA works for the president. Partly it is a tradition of deniability. So the CIA for decades and decades has done very, very dangerous things, not telling the president on the grounds that, well, better...

Better that the president doesn't quite know this because we need the president to be able to deny this. Partly because it's not just that, but also because the CIA is a self-protecting, self-reliant.

operating organization that has not had accountability for 50 years. And so it is an out of control organization, in my opinion. Well, how can you have a democracy if you've got a paramilitary intelligence gathering force that has no civilian control?

Our democracy is a democracy in form, but not in substance on many, many points. Obviously, our foreign policy is not democratically determined. Most of what the United States does is never explained or justified or voted by the American people. So there's nothing democratic about American foreign policy, especially when we go to war. We go to war nonstop.

either without saying anything to the American people or on the basis of outright lies. And so there's nothing democratic about it at all. Congress doesn't vote the wars. We don't appropriate the funds. It's done on contingency funding that is completely without public scrutiny, without public explanation. Now, on this particular event,

Of course, we've not heard anything except the White House declaring and saying to President Putin, we didn't know about it. The fact of the matter is two alarming points. One is whether or not the White House knew the operation itself is completely reckless and alarming.

Because attacking part of the nuclear triad in this way is a step towards nuclear Armageddon. Absolutely, provocatively, recklessly dangerous. And for the White House to say, we didn't know.

It's horrifying. Either they're lying or they're telling the truth. If they're lying, that's one thing. If they're telling the truth, it's also horrifying. What the hell's going on? Are you kidding? What's the thinking? I mean, an act like that could trigger a nuclear exchange. Absolutely. So why would you do it? Because it's always been the case that desperate regimes...

like the Ukrainian regime, will gamble the world for their own survival. It's our job to understand that American foreign policy is not to support a reckless Ukrainian regime. Given the number of leaders we've taken out, couped, assassinated, overthrown in color revolutions, whatever, same effect regime change, why not do that to Zelensky? What I believe we should do is

is very simple, and that is have a direct, clear, unambiguous negotiation with Russia over security issues. And in the end, we can't control Ukraine, but they can't fight without the United States. And because we have operated in this kind of ambiguous zone in the first months of the Trump administration,

there is the ever-present effort of the deep state to turn the president. And they know the president's turn. They know they can do this if they're persistent enough. They know they can keep up these operations. They know, or they think they know, that eventually the combined voices of Lindsey Graham and other people

war mongers in Congress and the Europeans and Zelensky and pounding this and the New York Times with its idiotic editorializing and all the rest will tell the president, don't be an appeaser, don't give in, fight Russia. You know how evil they are. And so they believe that they'll ultimately win the fight. President Trump

has not put an end to that, I have to say. So, well, I mean, obviously. He can't put an end to people saying it, but he does have the constitutional authority to put an end to it from the point of view of the substance of U.S. foreign policy. And that's the difference. What he's wanted to do is to try to bring

these groups along. He's tried to say, yeah, we'll push the Russians. He turns every couple of weeks against Putin in a post and so forth. It's clear what he wants to do, which is to end the war, to extricate the United States from this. But he's trying to have it both ways. My own personal view is you can't.

President Trump has to understand, I'm sure he does, how deep the deep state is, how far down this goes, how this is not by the way only Biden's losing war. It's also Obama's losing war. It's also Bush Jr. It goes back to Clinton. This is a long story.

And Trump is trying to put an end to the story because it's a failure. And he understands it's a complete failure. And he's completely right when he says they don't have the you know, we don't have the cards or Biden didn't have the cards. He didn't know how to do this. Completely correct. But what he can't do is leave everything ambiguous because the way our system works is that the war machine is.

is revving all the time, all the time. It's a big operation. It's more than a trillion dollars a year, a war machine after all. You know, if you count everything, probably $1.5 trillion, and that's just the U.S. part of it. Then look at all the military contractors in Europe and all the rest that is faced. So President Trump needs to close down that war.

Part by really ending the war and the way to end the war, sad to say it, it's not by negotiations between Ukraine and Russia because we use these terms Ukraine. But what is Ukraine when it negotiates? It's Zelensky and a small number of people.

in military rule. Okay. They have their own personal interests, maybe financial, maybe their heads, maybe they're not Ukraine. So what can president Trump do? He can say clearly unambiguously a few points, sit down with president Putin, because these are the two superpowers involved in this war and say, okay,

We absolutely agree NATO will not enlarge because this is a U.S. military alliance. And we, by treaty, agree that that will stop because that's part of our mutual security arrangement with you. We recognize Crimea and...

as Russian, because we understand that this goes back to 1783. It goes back to 1856. It goes back to 1997. It goes back to 2014. We don't want to play that game anymore.

On this basis, Starmer and Macron and Mertz and Tusk, they can all jump up and down, but they can't do anything anymore. And Lindsey Graham can't do anything anymore on this. The war will stop. This is really—we're close, by the way. It's not far from that. But the point is, what Trump has been saying is, I want the Ukrainians to agree, right?

They have a different agenda and it's not the agenda for Ukraine. President Trump is speaking more for the Ukrainian people than Zelensky is. This is the point. So I think the status quo, as I understand it, as of right now, which is Monday, June 9th, is...

That negotiation, you know, that it's hard to negotiate your way out. And I don't think the president, you know, he didn't start this war. He's frustrated. He doesn't want to take credit for it. He doesn't. So the current view, and I think he said this in public, is, you know, I'm backing off. You guys fight it out. What are the risks in that? I would go further, which is I would say the U.S. and Russia have real security issues. And they became even more dramatic in

After MI6, CIA, SBU attacked the Russian strategic triad. The bomber fleet. The bomber fleet.

So we need to sit down with the Russians and it's just the two of us negotiating. We don't have Starmer there. We don't have Macron there. We don't have Zelensky there. This, after all, is between the two leading nuclear superpowers of the world that we not go any farther than that.

President Trump can say, I'm concerned about what our own intelligence agencies may have been doing. How could it be that for 18 months this was being planned?

And they didn't know if that's the truth. That is a level of incompetence beyond imagining. We have to clean up our shop. Or if they did know and they didn't tell me, that is a level of recklessness that we have to clean up because it's completely unacceptable for the security of the American people. And in the meantime, I and President Putin have some real discussions to do.

What they would come up with would be clear demarcations that would keep the two superpowers from each other's neck, like the Ukrainian attack, which is completely unacceptable, endangers the entire world, and is preventable by the President of the United States. On that basis, then I would say, after that...

If Ukraine wants to continue to fight on without any of our support, any of our weapons, not buying weapons, by the way, not anything, period. OK, they can do so. But we're done being endangered by this recklessness. I resent completely that Zelensky endangered my family last week. I agree.

Completely. But it's not I mean, you're describing a scenario where this war is being run by three intelligence services, but in your description, CIA, MI6 and SBU without Democratic input, without control by elected leaders, including the president of the United States and without the interest of the of the nations at heart.

Can you just define sort of a little more precisely what's going on? And let's start with MI6. What is MI6 and what's their role? Just to say the war is being fought with Ukrainian troops dying and with the flow of armaments that has been in the pipeline.

That pipeline can stop and then the war will stop. So it's not, I don't want to imply that the CIA, MI6, BND, SBU can fight the war on their own. They can't. The pipeline exists because it still is the Biden pipeline. It still is whatever Europe is managing. But that pipeline of armaments and finance exists.

is basically coming to an end, and Trump should end it definitively. And then Ukrainians literally can't fight. Of course, Europe would try little bits here and there, and if they're stupider and more reckless than one can imagine, they might

They may try more stunts like the ones that they did a couple of weeks ago, which endangered the whole world, but they cannot fight a war afterwards. At that point, you know, what would happen? What would happen is either Russia indeed takes over essentially Ukraine in terms of military occupation or a peace is reached. One of the two things happens. But

That's how to stop the war is to stop the pipeline of funding. When I talk about the deep state role, they are the cheerleaders. They are the managers. They are the designers. We're not at a stage where they appropriate their own funds. So I don't want to be misunderstood in that way. They cannot continue the war, but they're very powerful in the U.S. system and in the U.S. system.

This war has not been an unpopular war for the U.S. It's been a deep state project for more than 30 years. And the idea was to shield the American people from it, mainly secret.

once in a while, like we had the story about how the CIA was operating all over Ukraine that the New York Times ran one day. You hear bits and pieces, but the idea is to shield the American people from these wars. The main way we do it is that we don't have our boots on the ground. Just lack of information. It's the Ukrainians dying. And so there's no body bags coming home to us. The body bags, if they go back at all, they go back to Ukraine. So the idea is

Not that they are the ones that can make the war happen. They are the main lobbyists for the war. They are the main protagonists. They are the deep strategists of what should be done. Of course, there's a military component also, not only the intelligence system, but both are playing their role.

The president can stop this. All I'm saying is that it's a lot of political effort to stop it. And he is facing a wall of this deep state opposition. And the way out of that is actually not

tactic that he's been pursuing of getting the Ukrainians to agree, because from the Ukrainian option, the better thing is run around to the CIA, to MI6, to all the other agencies, run around to the European leaders, run to everyone to try to turn Donald Trump. And I'm saying what

President Trump has two things. One is he has constitutional authority. And the second, he and he alone has the direct line to President Putin.

And the two superpowers are the protagonists in this fundamentally. That's right. And they can end the war between the two of them, not to stop the Ukrainians from fighting, but to stop Ukraine from having the means to fight. Right. The Ukrainians can't fight one day without U.S. intelligence, by the way, not just the armaments, but without the intelligence. But if President Trump gave that order earlier,

Would it be affected? I mean, who was the last president to control the CIA? The last U.S. president who had actual control over CIA? No one had actual control over the CIA. Ever? Ever, because most of the time, with one pertinent, horrible example, presidents have gone along with the CIA. Of course, the one horrible, shocking example

disgusting example is John F. Kennedy, who famously said that he would like to take the CIA and tear it into a thousand pieces. And maybe those were his last words, in essence. So if you look big picture at the United States, you don't have a real country as long as the CIA. I mean, everything since November of 63 has been post-coup.

I believe that we have not brought this absolutely dangerous part of our government under any effective control whatsoever.

for a half century. The last time that there was any slight measure of control and accountability was 1975, 50 years ago, with the church committee. Frank Church from Idaho, uniquely in the whole history of the CIA since 1947,

did a real investigation. Of course, as soon as they looked under the covers, it was horrifying. Horrifying what they found. They found recklessness, assassinations, coups, regime change operations, MKUltra, the shocking death

CIA attempts to create assassins and Manchurian candidates, so-called, and experimentation with hallucinogens for the sake of intelligence operations. Really vulgar, disgusting, awful stuff. That was 1975.

That's the last time there has been an actual accounting of what the CIA has done. Let me give just the most pertinent example of what we're talking about. What actually happened in the so-called Maidan, in the coup in 2014?

Do we know every point? I happen to know certain things just because I saw certain things with my own eyes. I was told certain things. But has anything been explained in a single day once? Has the New York Times ever run an honest story? Of course not. Has the government ever been called to account even once?

Of course not. Has there been a public hearing in the Senate even once of an event that affects our security absolutely fundamentally? Of course not.

And I could go on with 50 examples like this where the deep state is unaccountable, where there are no answers, where nothing is heard. Yesterday, we heard about Area 51. You know, we heard about.

How the U.S. military concocted phony stories which lived for decades in order to hide secret weapons development programs. Our government lies every day, the security state. And the danger of that is that don't call that national security. This is national insecurity.

We have never been more endangered than we are today. It's so weird. We should be the safest country in the history of the world. And we would be if it were not for the risk of nuclear war.

And yet we're closer to that than at any time because of the stupidity, I have to say, of these deep state, unexamined, unaccountable strategies of going up against other major powers in the most reckless ways. And I use the language because we're just a few days after an absolutely disgusting, unacceptable,

intelligence agency operation attacking strategic bombers deep inside Russia. Well, how long before there's like an attack that Russia can't ignore and that does lead? I mean, it seems like all the incentives are in place for the Ukrainians working with MI6 and CIA to push us into Russia.

A global conflict with Russia. Absolutely. And if it's not Ukraine, it's Israel or someone else. There's so many. Our foreign policy is so suborned, so much not in America's interest, so much used.

by the military industrial state or particular lobbies in favor of particular places, we could be yanked into war for absolutely no consequential reasons whatsoever when we should be enjoying the height of our national security. And in 1991, I witnessed it with my own eyes. We had everything we could have ever dreamt

Our erstwhile foe, and that's another long story why they were the foe, but our erstwhile foe of the Cold War said, we don't want to be an enemy. We want to be friends. We want to open up. We want to reform. We want to be with you. In fact, of course, famously, Putin said, we want to be part of NATO. He did. And it's no joke. And

When Putin came in, by the way, he was completely pro-American and pro-European. I know. Completely.

He still is the most pro-Western leader that country will ever have again. Yeah. No, it's unbelievable. We can't accept peace for an answer. But that's why the president of the United States has to stop the war machine. So no matter how you feel about Donald Trump, it's hard to deny that his second term has been a whirlwind. It's amazing how fast this administration is advancing its agenda, reporting illegal aliens, slashing government waste, an entirely new trade strategy. No.

No one has ever seen anything like it. They are not messing around. Now, many people are thrilled by this fast start, but it's going to take a lot more than this to achieve the ultimate goal. And that's why our friends at the Heritage Foundation are mobilizing supporters, patriots across the country to support this administration and the broader conservative movement. And they need your help to do that.

You can go to heritage.org slash survey to complete their national survey on Donald Trump's second term agenda. What you tell them will help their team work with the White House to make the president's campaign promises a reality.

I used to work at Heritage 35 years ago. Gave me my first job. I've always been grateful for that. Heritage is not like every other think tank in D.C., almost all of which are part of the problem. Heritage is fighting the problem. I can say that. Go to heritage.org slash survey to help them fill out the survey. Heritage.org slash survey. To the second conflict raging that, as you just said,

has the potential to engulf the world, and then that's Iran, which is obviously connected to a bunch of other conflicts around that region. Where are we in averting a war with Iran right now? Good news, of course, is that President Trump is negotiating. He's resisting Netanyahu's

constant call for the U.S. to go to war with Iran. And that call by Bibi for yet another war in the Middle East is yet another of these long-term deep state projects. This is an Israeli project primarily, but the U.S. has been a party to Netanyahu's wars going back essentially 30 years. Netanyahu came to

office as prime minister of Israel first in 1996. He did it with the backing of U.S. political advisors, many of whom became senior U.S. officials. And he did it on the basis of a strategy, a political strategy called Clean Break, which

back in 1996. And what clean break meant was a clean break with the idea of

the two-state solution. So the two-state solution means that there should be a state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side. That goes back to the United Nations 1947 partition plan idea. Netanyahu leads a political party, the Likud, and a political alliance which holds that Israel should dominate Israel

of the lands of that region, including Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, but also into Lebanon and Syria and borders undefined, but a very expansive view of what Israel's rule should be. That's quite interesting.

a outlandish and outrageous idea to most of the world. And I would say to most Americans who say, look, just make peace and get on with it. And the Palestinians who are 8 million people should have their place. And the Israelis who are 8 million people should have their place. And

Get on with it. But this idea of the clean break is, no, we don't want to get on with it. We want to control everything. And Netanyahu's philosophy or not philosophy, but his strategy, because it isn't just tactics, it's strategy. The strategy is we know everything.

There'll be a lot of resistance, our domination over the Palestinian people, apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing when we can get away with it and so forth. So we're going to face opposition. We will face even militant opposition, Hamas or Hezbollah and so forth.

But Netanyahu pointed out something which is actually correct. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he says these militants basically don't operate on their own. That's true in general of these groups that we fight. They are state backed. And it has been true that...

Hezbollah and Hamas, for example, were backed by Iran for most of this period. And so the idea of Netanyahu is don't make peace. We want to win. We want all the territory. We don't accept two states. We don't accept Palestinian rights and so forth. We will win.

But we don't win by defeating militant groups. We win by destroying the governments that support those groups. And that means war. And it really means endless wars. And the U.S. became the complicit party to this because of the...

The U.S. deep state vision of that Israel is our battleship or aircraft carrier in the Middle East, that it is our strategic asset in the Middle East. And because of the Zionist lobby, which is itself a complicated political concoction in the United States. But in any event, the U.S. completely bought into that.

the Netanyahu idea, which is war after war after war. And it's not well understood, but it should be because we've been told pretty clearly by no less than General Wesley Clark, for example, who was the commander of NATO forces that

The Pentagon has had a list of wars to prosecute that essentially is Netanyahu's list, actually. After 9-11 in particular, that went into overdrive. The U.S., as you know,

wesley clark was told and as he subsequently explained to us and as others have also explained to us uh a uh an air force commander named dennis fritz who wrote a very important book called deadly betrayal in 2024 telling the same story in essence

The Pentagon had a list which the neoconservatives or the deep state of the U.S. would carry out, which was we would take out the regimes in opposition to Israel. And those regimes included – it's a long list –

Of course, not only the Palestinians, that's the point, but also Syria. That was the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was viewed by Netanyahu and by the U.S. deep state as an Iranian client. So Syria would be one. Lebanon would be another. Iraq under Saddam Hussein would be another.

The Iranian regime would be a fourth. And then, believe it or not, three countries in Africa, which are Islamic countries that supported the Palestinian cause. And that was Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. That was Somalia and the Horn of Africa. And that was Sudan, which was a Sharia state.

in the 1990s. Well, God damn, we've been to war with all of them except Iran. And not by accident. The list is literally endless.

the guide in this case. And again, it's not simple for Americans to connect the dots because these stories are not told. They're not explained. They're not debated. They're not voted. These are presidential actions by and large, one after another. So let's go through them step by step. One,

One is the Iraq War, 2003. We now know not only was it under wrong pretenses, weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, it was under completely phony, concocted, false pretenses. And in 2002, the Pentagon intervened.

actually did a PR analysis of how to sell the war to the American people, a unit by a guy named Abe Shulsky. And he came up with a PR strategy, literally public relations, that the right narrative was weapons of mass destruction. So this is not as it was subsequently told to us, oh, we made a mistake.

We didn't know that Saddam didn't have them. This was a concocted narrative in 2002 to justify a war in 2003 to take away a regime that Netanyahu deemed to be hostile to Israel. Then in 2011, again, something different.

Very basic, but not understood by the American people because, again, the government lies and cheats and doesn't explain. The U.S. went to war in Syria. Now, this was not a declared war. There was never a presidential speech. But the president said, President Obama said, Assad must go.

Okay, every time you hear an American president say some other leader must go, say, oh my gosh, here we go again. And the president signed a presidential finding called Operation Timber Sycamore, assigning the CIA with the task of organizing, training, financing, and arming an insurgency to overthrow Assad. Okay.

came to fruition just in recent months. That's how the new government came in. Yes, in December of 2024. Yes, unfortunately, very much unfortunately, it was after 13 years of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed...

sites in Syria that date back thousands of years. In other words, it was a destruction of one of the heritage sites of humanity because Netanyahu said that guy's too close to Iran. We need to take him out. Then... Wait, can I ask you to pause? Yes. So...

And by the way, and flooded Europe with migrants, too. That's another fascinating story is all these migrants came in and wrecked European politics. Not one politician in Europe said, oh, the United States shouldn't have shouldn't be engaged in an overthrow of Syria. They can't connect the goddamn dots because everything's a lie. All

the narratives are narratives. So when Obama comes out and says Assad must go, which I think in retrospect was a pivot point in modern history...

Because Syria is not Yemen. It's on the Mediterranean. I mean, it's right there. By the way, Syria was viewed, you know, up until then, there's an IMF report, which I like to cite, of 2009, praising the authorities on their growth strategy and reform. This is crazy. This is deciding to overthrow a country without anything.

An iota of public discussion. This is Hillary. But a nice country, a civilized country with lots of doctors and accountants and scientists. It's a real place. And, of course, you paint the dictator to be the worst evil ever and so forth. His wife had just appeared on the cover of Vogue. Right. But whatever one says about Assad and so forth, the United States should not be overthrowing

the government through a CIA operation. Of course not. And hundreds of thousands dead. And it was a domino that led to greater human suffering and the destabilizing of Europe itself. Absolutely. It was a really, really big deal. I just want to go back and linger for a second on why.

Why? Yeah, why? I mean, it was sort of a non sequitur. All of a sudden Obama stands up and says Assad must go. Assad who? Why do we care about Assad? Syria's on the list. It's Iranian influence. We got to take out Assad. So it's purely for Israel, you're saying? I think very substantially. I'll tell you again, Dennis Fritz, very interesting. He's a very smart former Air Force commander who –

strangely enough, resigned from the Air Force in 2003 because he couldn't get a clear explanation of why we were fighting Iraq. And he's a very nice man. And he said, I can't lead my troops if I can't explain. And he was told from above,

Well, because we have the orders to. This order came from the White House. And so he said, I can't lead troops under these circumstances. So he resigned. Then he was called back in 2005 to the Pentagon for a remarkable reason. And that was the Douglas Fythe, who was a senior Pentagon official, a neocon close to Netanyahu, the whole shebang.

said, we want to declassify papers around the Iraq War.

And OK, so Fythe came back because he was an expert on classification and and security issues and so forth. Why did Fythe want to do that? Because he was writing his memoirs. And so he wanted to include documents in his book. So he hired Fythe and Fythe hired Dennis Fritz and Fritz got to read everything.

Where did this war come from? What are all the communications? So he's a little bit like Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Suddenly, he's sitting there in 2005 reading all the files, and he only wrote about this once.

20 years later in this book, Deadly Betrayal. And I got to speak with him at length and interviewed him. He's a wonderful, gentle soul. And he said he was shocked by what he read because he's reading it and he realizes this is Bibi's war. We're going to war because Israel said so. And Fythe was Bibi's man in the Pentagon. But how could Douglas Fythe...

who's an American citizen and an American official at the American Pentagon, do the bidding of a foreign government like that? Well, because America has been doing Israel's bidding for 30 years for because of the Israel lobby, because of the concocted idea that this is U.S. security. But sending young people to die. I mean, that's pretty that's a pretty heavy thing to do.

As long as it's not American people to die. Well, in that case, it was more heavy. But actually, I apologize for that statement because most of the wars, we don't send our own Americans. We send their young people to die. But in the Iraq war, if you ask how we could do it, okay, it's a good question. That war, I can't use the proper word that I would like to use because it's absolutely obscene.

But that war was so phony, so completely unjustified, so reckless. That was a real turning point because it was so brazenly wrongheaded. And who was the great cheerleader of that war in the fall of 2002? And I encourage people go online and watch it on tape. Watch Bibi Netanyahu say how wonderful this war will be.

Because Saddam will fall and that will lead to a chain reaction across the Middle East of bringing down the tyrants. Bibi Netanyahu is full of, and I also won't say it, but this is how he's been for 30 years. And the U.S. has done his bidding. And in that case, and again, I apologize for my slip. Yes, we sent our own to die.

Out of complete phony, phony pretenses, not wrong, not mistaken, not an illusion, not a but because of a PR exercise to fight a war, because we must understand that behind everything we're talking about.

Whether it's expanding NATO, whether it's bringing down Russia, whether it is fighting and bringing down Saddam or Assad or Gaddafi. The arrogance in Washington is the first point of reference. They don't believe anything.

This is hard. They don't believe it's costly. They don't believe it will go wrong. They screw up every time.

They fail every time and they get promoted every time. They don't go away when they lose. Look at Lindsey Graham. He's been wrong on every single war, on every single piece of American foreign policy. And he's still standing up there telling us what to do because there's no accountability. But also no shame or inner compass. I mean, you would think... Oh, of course, no shame.

But don't you feel shame when you're wrong, especially when you try to be right? Absolutely. Your bad decisions hurt people. I mean, gosh. Well, we don't have that. We don't have any reflection or accountability. And that is literally the case on all of this. When you go back to bringing down Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore, I think I've checked a couple of times. I think the New York Times, again, I refer to that because it used to be the paper I read.

I think they mentioned it three times from 2012 onward. That's all. So how can the American people understand any of it? And interestingly, amazingly, Russia came into the Syrian conflict in 2015. And what was our reaction? How dare Russia interfere? You know, in other words, the phoniest narrative that there goes Putin again when we have been

inside for four years militarily trying to overthrow the other government. Then came

Just after that, by the way, after Assad must go, then they took out Gaddafi. That was a NATO operation in which the U.S., France and the United States. I'm sorry, Jeff, I'm going to have to stop you right there. It was a NATO operation. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance. That's yes. So why would, right, defending the North Atlantic, why would NATO be killing Gaddafi?

leaders in Africa. Because we needed to have the French, the British, and the Americans together to murder the leader of Libya and overthrow the government. That's why. Did Libya get a lot better? Libya has been in nonstop war since then. Again, profound destruction, massive loss of life, and ongoing civil war.

And since I know many, many leaders around the world, I've asked them repeatedly, why Gaddafi in 2011? And you know what they tell me? The leaders who are as close as can be to this, we don't know. Maybe Sarkozy...

hated him. Maybe Gaddafi funded Sarkozy's campaign. We don't know what this was really about. I've talked to recently an African president very close to the scene, a very senior former African president who said to me, Jeff, I can't give you the answer to that question. I've asked. He's been involved. I'll tell you another thing quite interesting, by the way, about these wars.

In 2012, after the Syrian war broke out because of the United States, by the way, they say, no, it was the Syrian people, the Free Syrian Army and so forth.

Yes, yes, yes. Tell me about it. Who armed them? Who paid for them? Who trained them? Who gave them military bases? Of course, this is a CIA operation. Stop talking romantically about this domestic insurrection. This was a government operation. Okay. After it started, the UN tried to stop the war because...

Failing to stop it, there would be massive death and destruction. And in fact, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths after the fact. So a person I absolutely loved, Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, went as the special envoy of the secretary general to Syria. And he met all the parties. And Kofi Annan was a brilliant personality and a brilliant statesman.

And he told me just before resigning in the spring of 2012, Jeff, there was a negotiated agreement. Peace could have come, but there was one party that said no. And that was the United States. And, uh,

I asked, why did the United States block the peace agreement? He said, because the United States insisted that the only agreement it would sign would be one in which Assad would leave the first day. And Kofi Annan said to me, when I tried to say to the Americans that, well, there will be a process and under the agreement, there will be elections and so forth. So there'll be a process. Said, no, no.

We will only agree if it's the first day.

So this is how American arrogance works, how you end up with 500,000 dead, how you end up with whatever this regime is in Syria right now. It took 14 years. It didn't come out of the blue. It was an American operation from the start. It then morphed in several ways, but this is a long-term story. And ultimately,

And all of this is to say, and I mentioned not just Libya, but also Somalia, also Sudan, where the United States, it did an absolutely amazing thing. It supported an insurgency in South Sudan, what was then Southern Sudan, to break apart Sudan because Sudan was an Islamist state supporting Palestine, blah, blah, blah. So we had to destroy Sudan.

And they funded an insurgency for a long time. And then the United States, quote, brokered a peace to give independence to South Sudan. Okay.

The American geniuses have created an instability so great that we not only have two Sudans, Sudan and South Sudan, we have civil wars in both Sudans. So this is ongoing, nonstop, massive deaths through another concoction of clean break, BB, the deep state, and

This is a disaster. But it all goes back to the same root. And the last country on that list, as you said at the outset, is Iran. That's it. We were hearing this week that Iran is just weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. And so we need to take out the nuclear sites. We need to affect regime change in Iran. Right.

I feel like I've been hearing that Iran is weeks away from nuclear weapon for at least 25 years. Yes, verbatim at least a decade and for longer in substance, yes. Is Iran weeks away from building a nuclear weapon? Does Iran want a nuclear weapon? Will Iran get a nuclear weapon? What is the truth about Iran?

Iran does not want a nuclear weapon. Iran's neighbors like the Saudis and others in the Gulf do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Iran's major ally, Russia, does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And Iran doesn't want a nuclear weapon. But Iran does not want to be defeated militarily by Israel.

does not want to be bombed to hell by Israel, and does not want to be sanctioned to death economically by the United States, which the U.S. has been doing now for endless years. So Iran has said for 10 years...

11 years, 12 years, unequivocally, we don't want a nuclear weapon. We want an agreement with you. We want you to lift sanctions and we want a no nuclear system and with all verifications and monitoring and safety as well. We want to have the

our nuclear power plants. We want our own military. We're not going to disarm in a region where Israel attacks every country in the region. And by the way, where we have other enemies as well. So we are not going to unilaterally disarm in our region, but we do not want a nuclear weapon. The truth is that has been known for a dozen years now.

In detail at the highest levels. So what's the problem? That seems like a pretty good basis for an agreement. The problem, there is no problem in reaching a sound agreement. And by the way, with the nuclear power plants, which are in dozens of countries...

The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, can and has and has successfully monitored and set up absolutely rigorous monitoring. And Iran is open to that and has said so repeatedly and has said it would work with the neighbors on the fuel supply chains and all the rest. There is no obstacle to this.

What and I think we're close to an agreement with Iran, in fact, thanks to President Trump, because Netanyahu says, no, we need to bomb the hell out of them. We need to defeat them like we defeated Saddam and Assad and Gaddafi. We need to take out this evil regime. That's his line. So it's not about nukes, what you're saying.

You're saying it's not about nukes, it's about regime change. I think for sure. And that's been true all along. So why not just say that? Why lie? Why does Fox News tell me every single, not that I have a TV, but I hear Fox News is telling everyone every day they're moments away from a nuclear. We cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

day after day after day why not just say i think by the way that's true and iran would agree with that okay yes that's what we're saying so but if you went on television right now if you were back on your old perch and morning joe and you said actually iran doesn't want a nuclear weapon they would accuse you immediately of being an agent of iran they might because maybe someone would tell them in their little earpiece to say that because that's how it works

But you're saying that's true. I mean, you're acting like that's like a non-controversial statement. Iran doesn't want to bomb. They've said they don't. They just don't want to get attacked. They have said for years, remove our sanctions, normalize relations, stop trying to overthrow us. Tell your bulldog Israel to stop threatening us with war. And we can have perfectly normal relations and we don't want a nuclear weapon.

It's a much bigger headache than we want. We don't want it. That is not the story that any American news channel tells ever. I'm shocked. We live in the world of narratives. You know, for many years, I...

For many years, the Iranians were asking, how do we reach the Biden White House? How do we want to open up channels? We want to negotiate. Of course, they wouldn't talk to them. It was we know the president now. I mean, we knew then, but now it's confirmed president wasn't in any shape to talk to anybody. And the administration was the biggest foreign policy failure of one one can imagine. But now.

The Iranians have been saying all along, we want to negotiate. And as soon as President Trump was elected, at least I got inquiries. Do you know anyone in the White House? Do you know anyone in the president's team? How can we make contact? That's not the behavior you make if you're relentlessly trying to go to a nuclear bomb. So what about the story that you hear endlessly that Iran is planning to nuke the United States, that that's on their agenda? Yeah.

Huh? Yeah. Right. So you consider that like insane? I consider that so bewildering if a grown-up says that we need to have a long, hard talk about a lot of facts. But that is simply the most absurd imaginable idea. Iran, by the way, is a civilization of, by usual count,

5,200 years. Persia is the usual name given for Iran. Oldest continuous in the world, I think. Yes, it's arguably the longest continuous civilization, though many jump up and say, no, we are maybe the Georgians say it or the Egyptians say it, so I won't get into arguments among my friends. Except this is actually...

a great civilization that has lasted for 5,000 years, they're not going to bring it to an end by bombing the United States and having Persia or Iran disappear from the world map literally physically by atom by atom by such an attack. So it's not... So why are we going through all this? I mean, the attention, the full attention of huge parts of the U.S. government

billions and billions and billions and trillions over the years of American tax dollars have gone to responding to this threat. We have bases all around the region, all focused on Iran, which we maintain, including a huge one in Qatar, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of this effort by the United States focused on this Iranian threat that you claim doesn't exist. Remember that Iran was, first of all, Iran was a democratic country.

In 1953, the prime minister at the time named Mossadegh had this absolutely outlandish idea, which was that the oil under their ground belonged to Iranians. This was a very weird idea because the British knew it belonged to the British. The Americans expected that it belonged to the Americans in the new age.

And so CIA and MI6 overthrew the Iranian democracy. Then we installed a police state known as the Shah of Iran and SAVAK, its supposed intelligence and enforcement authority from Iran.

from 1953 to 1978 when the Shah was dying of...

and he was a hated figure in Iran. Jimmy Carter was talked into taking him into the United States, and that provoked the reaction and the taking of American hostages in Iran. And the Iranian revolution was taken seriously.

badly by the United States, but Iran had been our fortress. And why Iran? Because this was part of our anti-Soviet effort. This was part of our Cold War effort. So Iran turned from a police state ally to America's foe and Israel's foe. And by the way, in 1980,

The United States, and 1981 in particular, the United States armed Saddam Hussein massively

to go kill Iranians. So we told Iraq, go invade Iran. And we supported an absolutely bloody, disastrous war between Iraq and Iran. We loved it. It was the two scorpions fighting in the battle, killing each other. Fought in part by children. Yeah, on the American dime. So

Our position towards Iran has been an aggression since 1953, actually. Remember, the American deep state doesn't care about any other people at all.

at all, whatever happens to him. It doesn't care about the Ukrainian people. It doesn't care about the people we're, quote, saving. It cares about whatever fight it's in. The fight might be against Russia, in which case the Ukrainians are used. The fight might be for Israel in

which case some other jihadists are used, whatever. Or the Kurds. The Kurds or whoever is convenient at the time. So Iran is kind of amazingly incurring this for 75 years and for the last dozen years saying, peace, come on, make peace.

President Trump is close to it right now. Again, as in all the other cases we have been discussing, the deep state narrative is deep. It's longstanding. It's not shallow.

It's pretty much empty. It's pretty much concocted, but it's deep. And so in order to overcome the deep state, in this case, it's the Israel or Zionist lobby because it's got a pretty complicated domestic situation.

heritage and base in order to overcome what has been 20 years of wars of choice in the middle east and to stop them it requires a lot of political capital and attention by president trump in just like in ukraine he's absolutely on the right track

But he's getting attacked by everybody for being on the right track. And he's trying to express America's real interest. America cannot have a war with Iran, by the way. It would lead to a regional war. It would be costly, bloody, threatening. And on January 17th of this year,

Iran signed a security agreement with Russia, so it would just open up another front of potential nuclear war. President Trump's smart. He's trying to avoid this. Everyone's shouting at him, don't avoid it, go to war. And for the president to prevail, he has all the authority he needs. But this noise is incessant and the arrogance of Trump

Lindsey Graham or the American Congress that thinks we can do whatever we want, wherever we want and win whenever we want, when everything has been trillions of dollars of cost in one disaster after another, that arrogance actually continues until today. It's not fear. It's arrogance. That's the fundamental drive in the face of I mean, they haven't won a war in 80 years. So the U.S. military has not won a war in 80 years.

I'm not attacking anyone. I say that with sadness, but I don't understand on what basis this optimism arises. The optimism is misplaced, let us say, because these people have gotten us into one debacle after another. And if, you know, when Lindsey, I'm going to pick on Lindsey Graham again, because he's been the biggest warmonger in the Senate. If, uh,

When he speaks, if there were little logos on the screen, Iraq war supporter, this was... If people understood, okay, this guy's told you the wrong thing five wars in a row, then, okay, then we let him speak and let everyone understand this guy gets it wrong every single time. And that's true of most of these warmongers. But I think, you know, just to say...

This will continue, unfortunately, as long as we don't have peace a little bit further to the west of Iran. And that is we need Israel and Palestine, two states living in peace and not this plan that is the clean break that is breaking us.

That goes back 30 years. In other words, the harder work even than avoiding the war with Iran is the United States finally telling Israel, come on, there's a limit. You reached it. You exceeded it. Those words need to be uttered. And they haven't been uttered to this day. 53 million deaths.

of women and children and everyone else, the United States needs to say, you crossed the line. Say that to the prime minister of Israel. Says that to the Israeli people and to the prime minister. We no longer support this. And that's hard in American politics. Why? It's hard again, because the narrative for decades has been the opposite. It's,

because Americans don't understand how much we have paid for these terrible, absurd, deadly, Israeli-led or provoked or desired wars, and because there are deep beliefs and misunderstandings about the region that are just reproduced and replicated over time. Again, just like

Iran. I deal every day with diplomats from around the world. It's my privilege and good luck that I speak with leaders all over the Middle East, for example, in Egypt, in Saudi, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Iran, all over the Middle East.

They have said to me for years and years and years, if there is a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, we normalize relations with Israel. We, of course, support the mutual security of the two states. We do business. We do everything.

And they have said that not only privately to me at length explaining the situation, but publicly in what's called the Arab Peace Initiative, which goes back to 2002. So it's been 23 years where the Arab states have been saying clearly when Israel says there's no one to talk to.

There's everyone to talk to. Everyone wants peace, quiet, and economic development. Believe it or not, they want to live their lives. They want their children to grow up. They actually want to have building, construction. They're worried about

their physical lives, their jobs, everything. And they want peace. And they know that there can't be economic development unless there's peace. So if you ask why is it, there is no deep reason why there isn't two states living peacefully side by side. The idea that Hamas, Hamas, this is a narrative. This is a gimmick. This is a lie.

Hamas would go the first day if the United States said, yes, we support a Palestinian state, but it's got to be peaceful. It's got to be disarmed. That's fine. Everyone agrees with this. No one disagrees with this. What we don't hear and get an explanation of, and this is what people need to understand, Netanyahu's completely uninterested in that, totally, totally uninterested in that.

He doesn't say, oh, we need to defeat Hamas. Then there can be a Palestinian state. No, of course not, because that's fundamentally not the idea. Fundamentally, the idea is we defeat Hamas.

We rule. Of course we rule. This is ours. But the problem is, leaving aside who's right, who's wrong, the philosophical and moral justifications for this or that policy, you have millions of people living there. Well, but that's the point. Exactly. Right. So as a practical matter, what do you do with them? I mean, even people get caught up in like 1947 and, you know, settlers from Eastern Europe that are mad about this.

You could ignore all history and just pretend the world started January 1st, 2025, and you've got millions of people living there. What are you going to do with them? I don't understand. You are so correct. There are 8 million Jews. There are 8 million Palestinian Arabs. So what's the plan? I just want to know what the plan is.

The plan. You can't get to the plan. The second you ask, it's like, oh, you're working for Qatar. The answer is simple. The plan is something else. The answer is simple. Two places, one for the Palestinians, one for the Israelis. That's simple. And it's not even hard. And I've had generals from Israel recently telling me, no, it's not even a security issue. And here's how the borders go and all the rest.

The plan is how do you overcome the remaining U.S. complete intransigence on this? That's the issue. But why do we care? It's in our interest. So that's what's confusing. We don't have an inherent national interest there. There's no oil there, for example. It's not like it's an energy concern for us. So why do we care? And what are the options? What do you do with 8 million people? You can't...

send them somewhere? Like, I don't like what you, what are they thinking? You said the magic word. And I hope that president Trump gets this because it's his core philosophy. Peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is America's interest. Again, not even on moral grounds, just the most practical grounds. Keep us out of nuclear war. Keep us out of regional war.

Have economic development, build, have business, everything. No more 9-11s. Normalizations. Osama bin Laden said that he...

Plan 9-11 in part because of what was happening between Israel and the Palestinians and America's support for Israel. Now, no one wanted to hear that. That's called you names if you said it. I'm not on Osama bin Laden's side. Obviously, I totally disapprove of Osama bin Laden. But that's a fact. So, like, why would we want to expose ourselves to more of that? Like, why not try and get this fixed? This is the key to every issue we're talking about. What is America's national interest in?

In the context of Ukraine and Russia, is it for Ukraine to be blowing up Russian strategic bombers or is it for Ukraine to be a neutral country without NATO? It's the second. What is America's strategy?

national interest vis-a-vis Iran. It is no nuclear weapons in Iran and peace, no war. What is America's interest in Israel and Palestine? It is 8 million Palestinians for Palestine and 8 million Israelis living in Israel in peace. And please,

If I could say it this way, shut up a little bit. No more wars that we're dragged into. You guys just live. That's America's real interest. So if the president...

follows through on America's national interest, not on the grandiosity that we can do anything we want, anywhere we want, because we are the United States of America and our mission is to defeat Russia or our mission is to defeat Iran or our mission is greater Israel. If we follow the American national interest, it's

absolutely straightforward what to do. It is no war with Iran and negotiated treaty. It is two states, Israel and Palestine. It is a neutral Ukraine. President Trump has all of that close, close at hand, but everyone requires his attention. This is hard because every one of them confronts

A narrative that's 30 years old or 50 years old that is deeply entrenched, that is fundamentally based on the premise that America can do what it wants anywhere in the world because it's all powerful. At the core of everything, Tucker, is a kind of arrogance of power that has been proved to be wrong forever.

from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq. It's not that we're hopeless and helpless, and I'm not defeatist in that way. I'm saying that

If you choose the wrong battles, you can't win those battles. If you choose battles that are not in America's interest, you'll go away because they're not. Afghanistan wasn't fundamentally in America's interest or Iraq wasn't fundamentally in America's interest or Ukraine wasn't fundamentally in America's interest. And by the way, that's also not isolationism. That's just being smart, prudent, normal, and also recognizing that

Don't be so afraid. Our only risk in the United States, honestly,

Now we know it's not the UFOs. That was a concocted thing of the Air Force. Our only risk is a nuclear war. Stay clear of a nuclear war. Please stay clear of these ultimate confrontations. Don't fight Russia to the end. It's a great power. You can live side by side with it. Same with China. Confrontation.

Come on, just be normal and we can have secure, prosperous lives for all of us. When you overstate your power, your power evaporates. The U.S. is so much less powerful than it was before

We are at so much more risk objectively than we were before. And anyone that measures risk, I often refer to this doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which says we're closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before in human history. This is crazy. We should be as far away. I was there, as I said, in the Kremlin in December 1991. The doomsday clock was 17 minutes away from midnight because...

Because we have peace. Now we're 89 seconds to midnight. Are you kidding? How did we squander this? Because we did so many Israeli-provoked wars because we had to expand NATO to Russia's border, blah, blah, blah. None of this is for America's interest. And it's objectively the case. Let me ask you one last question. You said that most of the storylines, the narratives are 30 years old. And I think that's exactly right. It does feel like...

It could be 1995 again. But there is one new one, and that is that Qatar, Qatar, Q-A-T-A-R, very small Gulf state wholly within Saudi, I think the largest natural gas field in the world, biggest American air base in the region.

That that country is like a powerful enemy of the United States and is controlling America's media, controlling America's higher education system, and that most bad things and all bad opinions come from Qatar and Qatari propaganda. Are you familiar with this argument? Not quite, but I am familiar with Qatar. Yeah. So what do you assess Qatar's role?

In the United States. Are they controlling our media, do you think? I don't lose sleep over it. To tell you the truth, I haven't heard it put exactly that way. You've got to get on the internet for it, Joe. I know. I've been going to Qatar for a while. They gave the president a nice plane. And it's not a danger to the American people, you know.

If we were to calm down a little bit, we actually could have all the safety in the world we want. This is really, this is actually the truth. If we drop our angst on big bad Russia,

Actually, we didn't have a chance to talk about it this time. Maybe another time. Big bad China, which is also not going to invade the United States, not going to threaten us, not going to go to war with us. They got their they're trying to deal with aging and they've got their declining population and many other things. Not that they're falling apart. It's it's a very impressive civilization. But again,

They're not a threat to the United States, honestly. And Iran is not a threat. And now I'll add another country that's not a threat, Qatar. And by the way, there are 193 UN member states, and I would say 192 of them are not threats to the United States if we just behave with some prudence and don't get ourselves edging towards nuclear war.

Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much. Great to be with you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.