Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show The Key Points of Trump’s Iran Peace Deal, Israel’s Nightmare Scenario and What to Expect Next About this episode Trita Parsi has a rational, pro-American view of the Iran war, so naturally Bari Weiss tried to get him deported.
(00:00) The Key Points of Trump’s Iran Peace Deal
(05:36) Israel’s Move to Sabotage the Peace Deal
(11:00) Why Both the US and Iran Need Peace
(38:34) Why Are There Us Bases in the Middle East?
(45:18) Parsi’s Shocking Conversation With the Former Head of Mossad
(1:05:02) Tom Cotton’s Plot to Merge CIA With Mossad
Trita Parsi is an award-winning foreign policy expert and author specializing in U. S.–Iran relations and Middle East diplomacy. He is the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award and has written several acclaimed books, including Treacherous Alliance and Losing an Enemy, on U. S. foreign policy and Iran. He co-founded and serves as Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
Find Parsi here: https://tritaparsi.substack.com/
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Transcript 19,114 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:35 Tucker Carlson? Thanks for doing this.
0:35 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
0:37 Tucker Carlson? Um, is this deal real?
0:38 Speaker 02 I think so. I think this is a significant achievement, but nothing is fully real until they manage to get to the final agreement. And we already have a precedent in which we also see that when there was a final agreement, which there was in 2015 that Obama struck, it didn't mean that it necessarily would last because Trump walked out of that deal. So if this is something we want, we have to work at it. We have to work to keep it. These things are not part of the background that you can keep without putting any effort into it. And right now, we're not even halfway to the distance, but this is an important development.
1:11 Tucker Carlson? So what are the key deal points as they're emerging, to the extent we know now?
1:15 Speaker 02 First of all, we don't know enough because at the end of the day, there's been just so many different versions that have been floating around.
1:21 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:22 Speaker 02 And some of them frankly do seem to be sabotage efforts. There's some of the hardline media in Iran that has been sending out these versions of the deal that I think deliberately were trying to raise people's expectations in order to make the final deal look bad. And they're doing it because they're trying to sabotage. The Padi faction in Iran, super hardliners, are dead set against it. In fact, there were protests that they organized, not huge ones in any way, shape, or form, particularly for a city of 10 million or plus in Tehran. But they were protesting outside of the Iranian Foreign Ministry and calling for the death of the Foreign Minister and the Speaker of the Parliament who've been negotiating this deal. So we should not for a second forget that there's a faction in Iran that is really against this.
2:04 Speaker 02 But based on what it seems likely to have included, there's going to be an opening of the straits. It's going to take some time. You know, they have to do some demining, et cetera, to be able to fully make it safe. The US is going to lift its blockade of the blockade, which I think ultimately complicated this matter much more so than helped the US. I think there will be some release of funds, but it will be done in a manner in which Trump can say that he never released the funds. And Iranians can say they got some of their money back. And it's going to be something that some of the GCC countries do in the middle to make sure that there's some money going to the Iranians while they're waiting for the actual Iranian money to be released. And it's very important to keep this in mind. This is Iran's own money.
2:46 Speaker 02 They had about 120 to 150 billion dollars in various banks around the world. That's how you do international trade. You have the money there. And if you buy food or whatever from there, you use that money. These were frozen by US sanctions. So the Iranians could not access it.
3:02 Tucker Carlson? For how long have they been frozen?
3:03 Speaker 02 Well, they were frozen first under the Obama era until they struck a deal and then it was unfrozen. And then, once Trump walked out of the deal in 2018, it was refrozen. So since 2018, almost 10 years, a lot of Iran's money has been in these banks and they've not been able to access it. Out of that 120 to 150, the Iranian demand has been that for the MOU, they should get 12, roughly 8 to 10% released at the outset, and another 12 released by the time that the MOU is concluded.
3:34 Tucker Carlson? And this is their money, just to...
3:36 Speaker 02 This is their money. So this is different. You know the story about how Obama released 1.7 billion dollars when he signed a JCPOA?
3:45 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, he sent pallets of cash.
3:47 Speaker 02 Pallets of cash. That is true, but that was very different. That was not frozen money. That was because there was a lawsuit between the United States and Iran since the beginning of the revolution. Because during the time of the Shah, we're talking about 1977, the Shah had ordered American weaponry. I don't remember if it was airplanes or tanks or whatever, but he was the biggest purchaser of American weaponry back in the 1970s. But between him paying for it and they're supposed to be delivered, the Iranians had a revolution. They took 52 American diplomats hostage. So the US, clearly and understandably, never delivered the weapons, but also never returned the money. So the Iranians took the US to court in the Hague International Court of Arbitration.
4:30 Speaker 02 And the US was about to lose that fight. So the Obama administration chose to settle it as part of the JCPOA. It was only supposed to be 400 million, but because of interest, it added up to 1.7. Here was the problem. How do you transfer the money to the Iranians when you have sanctioned every Iranian bank? Because of US sanctions, they actually had to put it on an airplane as cash and fly it to Switzerland, where another plane was on the tarmac, taking the money into that plane. Had there not been for the US sanctions, there could have just been a wire transfer.
5:03 Tucker Carlson? But that was also Iranian money.
5:05 Speaker 02 That was, well, it is Iranian money, plus the interest, because the US had kept it for so long. There is no deal in which the US will pay Iran, any American money. There wasn't in the JCPOA, and I don't believe that that will be the case with the Trump deal either.
5:20 Tucker Carlson? So Strait gets reopened. That takes, well, how long, do you think, if both sides decide they want it?
5:27 Speaker 02 I, you know, it will be gradual, but I think you will start seeing ships going through the straits in larger and larger numbers already from five days from now. But you have to remember, there's a large number of ships that are stuck in the straits. And they're not in great shape by now, because they've been standing still in extremely warm water right now. So as soon as they get out of the straits and get to their home, wherever they're supposed to go, they have to go in for a significant cleaning, and that's going to create another problem when it comes to the flow of oil, because there's just not going to be enough tankers on the seas.
6:01 Tucker Carlson? Straits open, some of Iran's cash gets unfrozen. What else in the deal?
6:07 Speaker 02 And then, of course, after that, the real stuff begins in terms of the negotiations over the nuclear issue. But one other thing that will happen before that is what the Iranians have insisted on, and I think the administration correctly agreed to, which is that there has to be a regional ceasefire. For this to be an end to the war, it cannot allow for other wars to continue in the region that can drag the US and Iran back into it. And this is where also the biggest weakness or vulnerability of this deal is, because it means that the United States has to constrain Israel, and the Iranians are going to have to constrain Hezbollah. And we saw just hours before the announcement of the deal that the Israelis did everything they could to sabotage the deal by attacking southern Beirut,
6:50 Speaker 02 which they knew was a red line for the US and a red line for the Iranians.
6:55 Tucker Carlson? Tell us about those attacks.
6:57 Speaker 02 So, there had been exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel prior to that. But the Israelis were striking southern Lebanon. Hezbollah was striking both at Israel itself as well as Israeli forces inside of Lebanon, because the Israelis are inside of Lebanon right now.
7:15 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, they invaded it.
7:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, they invaded it. But it was not at a level that justified an escalation from the Israeli side to strike at Beirut itself, particularly after what happened about 10 or so days ago, in which they did strike Beirut, knowing very well that there had been a warning both from Trump and by the Iranians. And this time around, the Iranians did strike back at the Israelis, which is a very important development, because for the first time, the Iranians were striking at Israel for Israel striking Lebanon, not because Israel had struck Tehran, which was an attempt by the Iranians to essentially, after having established their own deterrence or reestablished their own deterrence, they were now going to extend that deterrence to Lebanon.
8:01 Speaker 02 They do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is, of course, that if the Israelis are allowed to just continue to bomb Lebanon and Gaza, etc., that war, that fighting, will spill over into an Israeli-Iranian war at some point, and that will likely drag the US into it again. That's exactly what already has happened twice since October 7th. So if you want to have a deal with the US, and the US wants to have a deal with Iran that ends this war in a durable fashion, then you cannot allow the Israelis to continue to be able to restart that war. So, on the one hand, the Iranians wanted to establish that deterrence in order to make sure that the Israelis didn't do this. On the other hand, it is also a longer guarantee for the Iranians, what they call their forward
8:45 Speaker 02 defense, meaning that they want to have this presence or this support in Lebanon as a deterrent against the Israelis attacking Iran, period, because this is what they had before Assad fell, before Hezbollah was really weakened by the Pajer attacks. Let me give you a quick story. In 2006, as you recall, you were there. When Israel and Hezbollah went at each other. In the midst of that, I ran into Ephraim Sner, who was at the time Deputy Defense Minister of Israel. I had interviewed him several occasions before. And he told me very explicitly that Lebanon and Hezbollah is just a pit stop.
9:29 Speaker 02 The war with Iran is inevitable, but they have to essentially finish off Hezbollah first before they take the war to Iran. But precisely because the Israelis never managed to defeat Hezbollah, in fact, the Israelis were defeated in that war, the war with Iran didn't start in 2006. This was a manifestation of the efficiency of Iran's forward defense. By being able to have Hezbollah there, they stopped the Israelis from taking the war to Iranian territory. And the Iranians are now trying to re-establish that, which of course the Israelis are going to fight tooth and nail against, so that the Israelis will not be able to attack Iran again without knowing that they will have a very, very tough time with the Lebanese right on their own border.
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13:23 Tucker Carlson? So why would Donald Trump? I mean, this does not sound like a win for the United States relative to where we were in mid-February.
13:34 Tucker Carlson? Explain the pressures on both Trump and the Iranians that got them to this point. What's motivating Trump? What's motivating them?
13:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, look, I think this war was a mistake from the outset.
13:45 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, you think?
13:45 Speaker 02 I told the administration at the time, this should not have been done.
13:48 Tucker Carlson? Craziest thing any president's ever done?
13:50 Speaker 02 And I specifically told them that you are misreading Iran. You think that Iranians are much weaker than they are. I'm not saying that they were strong. In fact, I didn't think that they're going to be as successful as they frankly ended up being. But they were never as weak as the administration thought they were, or as the Israelis were telling the administration. But also, there was another major mistake, I think, in the administration's outlook on Iran. They thought that Iranians feared war more than they feared capitulation and surrender. And Trump thought that by just taking one-third of the US's navy there, all of this mobilization, the Iranians would realize that war was real and as a result, they would surrender. It was a complete misread. The Iranians feared surrender far more than they feared war.
14:36 Speaker 02 They believed that they could survive war, perhaps even come out on top in that war, which I think they have in some ways. Surrender would be the end of the Islamic Republic. They would never surrender. Their system is incapable of surrendering. Their system...
14:49 Tucker Carlson? Who would ever surrender? Who would ever offer an unconditional surrender?
14:54 Speaker 02 Well, from Trump's perspective, having just gone through Venezuela, he probably thought that the Iranians would be no different, but they were very, very different. It's very important to understand right now, the difficulty they have had in getting their system to agree to this deal, and as I mentioned, some of the ultra-hardliners are dead-set against this. A surrender would require a full consensus, and there's no way they could ever get that in that system. Particularly if you don't have a strong supreme leader that can actually push it through. And the new supreme leader is just weeks into his job and was not really necessarily expecting to get that job, particularly not in this way, manner. So surrender was never in the cards. Now, I try to make the case to them that this is going to lead to you, if you think you're bluffing,
15:38 Speaker 02 but they are going to fall for your bluff, you're going to actually actualize this bluff, and it's not going to work out the way you thought at all. So I do think that obviously we're worse off.
15:47 Tucker Carlson? So you gave that advice, I think you said that in public as well.
15:50 Speaker 02 I did, yeah.
15:51 Tucker Carlson? What kind of response did you get?
15:53 Speaker 02 Very little.
15:55 Speaker 02 I mean, they were taking note, but nevertheless, never got a real response. And it seemed to me, of course, I didn't have access to Trump himself, that his mind was set and that it was really difficult for anyone on the inside to be able to change his mind. Why he had reached that position.
16:09 Tucker Carlson? That's clearly true.
16:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. Why he had reached that position, I have less insight into. But I think over time, that perception he had of Iranian weakness had been reconfirmed over and over again, because Iranians did not respond as harshly as they could have against the attack on Fordo, for instance. I mean, the Pentagon called it a polite response. They gave a heads up, all of these different things.
16:33 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, they took the Americans off the airbase in Qatar.
16:36 Speaker 02 Exactly. All of this just reinforced the idea that Iranians don't have what it takes to actually face the United States. And I think it created this overconfidence. There was another thing in my view as well that reinforced this in Trump's mind, and this is speculative on my end, but I do think there's some truth in it. The Iranians committed a huge mistake before this war, which is they never agreed to talk directly to Trump himself.
17:03 Speaker 02 And from their standpoint, they thought that by refusing this, which they did for a variety of reasons, but nevertheless, by refusing this, they showed strength. They showed that they're willing to say no to the superpower of the world. But I think from Trump's perspective, it was the opposite, because Trump came in as president and said, I'll talk to anyone. I'll talk to Kim Jong-un, I'll hang out with the former founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, you know. I'm capable of talking to everyone because I am strong, because I am stronger than all previous presidents.
17:37 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, he had Tim Cook from Apple to the White House.
17:39 Speaker 02 Exactly. But the inverse of that, of course, is that if someone else is not talking to you and are unwilling to talk directly to you, that's not a sign of their strength, that's a sign of their weakness.
17:50 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
17:51 Speaker 02 Because Trump again believes that talking to other people is a show of strength. So inadvertently, I think the Iranians actually reinforced Trump's own view of them as being weak by refusing to talk to him. And obviously, there's no guarantee that the war could have been avoided had they done so. But I think that if there was anyone who could have actually convinced them, convinced Trump, this is going to be a war. They're not going to capitulate. You might want to rethink this. And you might want to rethink the entire idea that you're going to get them to surrender at the negotiating table or anywhere else. The only ones that ultimately could have done this would be the Iranians themselves. And they stood up that opportunity. They had plenty of opportunities. And I think that, again, it reinforced Trump's view that they're weak and as a result,
18:36 Speaker 02 he thought that he could have this war over with.
18:38 Tucker Carlson? Well, one of the problems is Iran is not a dictatorship. I mean, there's a very complex series of power-sharing agreements going on inside the country, like who runs the country? Two outsiders, me, anyway. I made a good faith effort to figure it out. I couldn't.
18:52 Speaker 02 It's deliberately opaque. Back in the...
18:56 Tucker Carlson? That's on purpose.
18:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. Back in the 2000s, the Iranians had a deliberate policy that they called simulated irrationality, in which they want...
19:06 Tucker Carlson? Simulated irrationality?
19:08 Speaker 02 It's essentially their version of madman theory, in which they, on the one hand, wanted to make sure that they were seen as somewhat irrational, because if you're irrational, the other side has a greater difficulty calculating what your next move is. This is, again, what Nixon did. But they called it simulated irrationality. At the core of it, they're extremely calculating and extremely rational. But there was also another problem. Their experience in the 1800s, particularly with the British interference in Iran, is that the British never really had to spend much money collecting intelligence in Iran. The Iranians were just volunteering it all the time. It had enabled the Brits to really manipulate the system and manipulate Iran. They didn't even have to colonize the country.
19:52 Speaker 02 They got exactly what they wanted from Iran without formally colonizing it. A counter to that, a reaction to that, has been for them to try to create as opaque of a system as possible, because that opacity makes it much more difficult for outside countries to be able to interfere, manipulate, or use factions within the Iranian system. But it's also a negative for them at the end of the day, because the more opaque you are, the more untrustworthy you will be in the eyes of other countries. You can't really trust a country whose system you don't understand, whose processes. So whereas it may give them a degree of security in a very bad situation, in the long run, it doesn't provide you with peace and security
20:35 Speaker 02 if everyone around you believe that you're untrustworthy because they don't understand your system. So the Iranians at some point, hopefully, will transition away from that. But I don't think they will as long as this enmity between the United States and Iran is as intense as existential as it has been in the last couple of years.
20:54 Tucker Carlson? So again, what do you think drove both sides to this?
20:59 Speaker 02 I think at the end of the day, both of them absolutely need this deal.
21:03 Tucker Carlson? Why, I understand, I think, why Trump needs it, because the economy is going to fall apart if it's not resolved quickly. Why do the Iranians need it?
21:14 Speaker 02 Look, the Iranians ultimately both need it because of sanctions relief. Their economy was in a terrible shape before this war. That's before $300 billion of damage was inflicted on them as a result of this war, beyond the loss of human life. But you're also talking about infrastructure, their steel industry, the petrochemical industry have taken huge hits. So this is going to be very difficult for them. So they need sanctions relief. Look, the Israelis pushed the United States to sanction Iran already in the early 1990s because they saw Iran emerging as a rival to Israel in the region. Prior to that, they had actually had a long history of collaborating with Iranians and having a tacit partnership and alliance.
21:59 Speaker 02 But if you want to destroy and weaken a country, you can do so by bombing them, which is what we saw here. And you can also do so by having decades of sanctions on them that slowly but surely suffocate them, destroy their industries, et cetera. And this is what we saw in Iraq. This is what we're seeing in Cuba right now. So that type of a sanction, even though the Iranians have managed to resist it, even as the Russians currently are resisting a lot of these different sanctions, over time, it destroys this fabric of society. In Iraq, there was actually a study by the State Department, I think from 2004. As the US discovered how difficult it is to govern that country. And they did a study to try to better understand where the roots of the problems were.
22:44 Speaker 02 And one of the chapters dealt with the years of sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq. And it pointed out that Iraq's economy under Saddam Hussein and the sanctions had shrunk to no more than 16 billion dollars.
22:57 Tucker Carlson? Total?
22:58 Speaker 02 Total. And as a result, you had a situation in which the incentive structure for ordinary people to even send girls to schools was no longer there. What was the point of educating the children when there is no economy? So you had a plummeting of literacy in Iraq, particularly amongst the female population. So you tell me, how can you actually transition a country towards democracy when you have rising illiteracy? And this is Iraq, a country that historically has been the center of education and literacy in the Arab world. Fifty percent of all books in Arabic used to be printed in Iraq. It's a long, long history that even precedes the arrival of Islam in Iraq. So sanctions slowly but surely destroys these countries.
23:43 Tucker Carlson? Why did the US remind us? What were the pressures that pushed the US Congress to impose sanctions on Iraq?
23:52 Speaker 02 On Iraq?
23:52 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
23:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, this is because of Saddam Hussein's attack on Kuwait. And then later on, the suspicions of his nuclear weapons program. And so you had UN sanctions, you had the Food for All program. I was working at the UN at the time in the Security Council. Iraq was part of my portfolio. This is when I was working for the Swedish Foreign Ministry. And I remember those meetings, you know, where I remember the Brits objected to toilet paper and lipstick as a dual technology.
24:20 Tucker Carlson? Dual use.
24:20 Speaker 02 Dual use. Could not send it into Iraq. I mean, it was, it is the suffocation of a country. And the Iranians need sanctions lifted. And from their standpoint, their best moment for the last couple of decades to actually have a real negotiation with the United States in which they do have leverage as a result of this mistaken war. To be able to get a deal that actually really lifts the sanctions, not the way it did in the JCWA, but actually it also takes away primary sanctions, they've never been in a better position to do so. Now, they may not entirely see it that way. Certainly, some of the hardliners are opposed to it. They think the US is gonna betray the deal, etc. But nevertheless, it is a strong position for them to have that negotiation.
25:05 Speaker 02 So I certainly think that they should. And I think they also recognize that at the end of the day, they cannot sustain this situation, the closure of the strait, etc., for a very long time without creating problems with other countries such as Russia and China and others who do matter to the Americans.
25:20 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, and all of Asia. I mean, South Korea and the world needs it open. Cost of living is already making it hard to live here, and it's not getting any better. Unfortunately, it's likely to get worse, and a lot of Americans fill the gap with credit cards, not just for fancy dinners, but to cover things like groceries and bills. That is a disaster. It's understandable, but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect, a survival tax of 20% interest or more. Why would you do that? Why would you hand money to the big banks when you can keep it for your family? Our friends at American Financing have a better way. If you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one, they're helping Americans achieve the dream of homeownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives.
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26:47 Speaker 02 The biggest risk of derailment, of course, is from the Israelis. I mean Netanyahu has been pushing the United States to go to war with Iran for more than 25 years. He finally got his wish, but it just didn't end up the way he thought it would. But he's not going to give up. And there's plenty of opportunities for the Israelis to derail this, particularly by restarting a war with Lebanon.
27:11 Speaker 02 You know, at the end of the day, you just need a couple of successful attacks and, you know, the whole thing can fall apart. So if Trump wants to keep this, and I hope he does, and I do think that he's serious, because as you pointed out, he needs to get out of this as well. It is not sufficient to just have an angry phone call with Netanyahu every once in a while, or to do so in reaction to Netanyahu actually violating some of the US's red lines. There needs to be consistent pressure on the Israelis to make sure that they don't do this, and I would go one step further. Part of the reason why the Israelis would do this is because they believe that if they restart the war, the US has no choice to re-enter the war on Israel's side.
27:56 Speaker 02 If the United States makes it very clear to the Israelis that that equation is over, if the Israelis start a war against not only a deal that Trump has struck, but what I think he hopes becomes part of his legacy, then the US is out. And the Israelis are going to have to deal with Iranians on their own, which I don't think they can do. Without all of the support of the US, particularly the defensive support in terms of shooting down Iran in missiles that are heading towards Israel, the Israelis cannot tolerate a war with Iran for very long. So if they know that they cannot drag the US in, their incentives for sabotaging the deal will also diminish, because the outcome that they're looking for is no longer secured in any way, shape or form. So I think Trump has that ability, and I think proactively, he should make it very clear.
28:42 Speaker 02 If Israel restarts another war with Iran, regardless of how it starts, the US is out.
28:48 Tucker Carlson? What do you think the chances are the United States would allow Israel to lose a war against Iran? I'm just going to say zero.
28:56 Speaker 02 All depends. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. We've seen it so far that the US, you know, there will be a tremendous amount of pressure domestically to support it, but I think also things are changing. I mean, right now, the standing of Israel has plummeted amongst the American public in almost every demographic, except for boomer Republicans that watch.
29:15 Tucker Carlson? Genocide hurts your reputation.
29:16 Speaker 02 It does. Well, who would have thought, right? And also, I think on the Republican side or the conservative side, I think it's become very clear, particularly to the younger demographics there, that Israel is a key factor as to why the United States has been involved in so many different wars. And since the anti-
29:34 Tucker Carlson? A key factor in the decline of the United States.
29:36 Speaker 02 And since so many of these young folks have completely turned against these endless wars, et cetera, it's always been a bit of an issue, I think, for some of the younger Republicans on the sense of being against the forever wars, being against overextended the United States, all of these bases around the world, while at the same time trying to stay neutral or positive on Israel. And that cognitive dissonance worked for a while. It doesn't work any longer because it's just so crystal clear.
30:02 Tucker Carlson? I've experienced it firsthand for many years. Yeah, you don't want to fight about Israel. People are hysterical, totally hysterical and ruthless. It's just not worth it. But when you see that relationship destroying your country, I mean, you have to say something.
30:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. And again, you know, it's going to take a while before that really impacts the politics of this. But I think it's going to become increasingly clear. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the midterm elections, both on the Republican and the Democratic side on this issue. It will still take a couple of more years and it will be a couple of more years needed in order to produce foreign policy thinkers on both sides of the aisle that have broken free from this conventional thinking about what the US's role in the world should be, what the US's role in the Middle East should be, and what the US's relationship, not just with Israel, but any type of a special relationship, whether those should be kept or not.
30:54 Tucker Carlson? I don't understand what Netanyahu's plan is. What's Israel's plan? So they want to keep the war going. Okay, so what does victory look like?
31:02 Speaker 02 This is a really good point because everyone else is looking at this. Every other country is like, okay, what's the win here?
31:09 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. Best case, how does this turn out?
31:11 Speaker 02 Exactly. And I think on the Israeli side, there's just been a transition to a completely different type of a security thinking. This happened a long time ago, but it's just become more blatant. I remember it was actually David Ivory, the legendary Air Force general in Israel, who was actually the lead pilot that struck the Osirak reactors in Iraq in 1981, who explained this to me. He said, look, on the Israeli side, all of the countries, they define a threat as being a combination of intent and capability. On the Israeli side, we assume that intent to destroy us is always there.
31:51 Speaker 02 So we only focus on capability, which means that regardless of whether a country is disposed negatively towards Israel or not, Israel's only way of surviving in the region is to always outgun everyone in the region and every other combination of countries in the region, keeping them weak, keeping them at a much lower level.
32:14 Tucker Carlson? That's deranged.
32:15 Speaker 02 It's military hegemony on crack.
32:18 Tucker Carlson? But it's also that worldview that like everyone hates us by definition. That's just not true.
32:25 Speaker 02 It's not true.
32:26 Tucker Carlson? People's view of you is determined mostly by your behavior. That's just a fact of life that applies not just to Israel, but to you and me and every other living person. And but if you go into any scenario, if you go to a cocktail party imagining everyone at the party wants to kill you.
32:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're not gonna have a good time.
32:42 Tucker Carlson? You're crazy. That's crazy.
32:45 Speaker 02 So, look, there's been an experience that they've had that I think has contributed to it. I agree with you that I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's good. And also historically, I don't think we can see any examples of any country, particularly a small country, being able to pursue that doctrine successfully for a very long time.
33:02 Tucker Carlson? Right.
33:02 Speaker 02 It's not a good survival strategy now. They think it is the only way to survive. But what this has done, and this goes back to your earlier question, I remember speaking to another Israeli. Veltro official, this is 2004. So this is 22 years ago. And he was very worried about Israel's future. He said that when I fought in 67, when I fought in 73, I genuinely believed, we genuinely believed, that if we won this war against the Arabs, the Arabs would eventually realize they cannot defeat us militarily, so they will have to sue for peace. So the military victory, the best-case scenario, as you asked, was a transition to peace. But he said to me, I look at the Israeli youth now,
33:47 Speaker 02 2004, 22 years ago, and I don't see any belief in peace. They believe that we're going to be in constant warfare all the time and that this is just normal, that there is no such thing as a victory. You just have to constantly fight. And that's the only way for Israel to survive. And he said that this worries me because this is not sustainable and this is going to change Israeli society in a profound and very negative way. And I think he was proven absolutely right. So when it comes to your question of what is Netanyahu looking for, looking for, he thinks that Israel is going to always be in an endless state of war. And as a result, you just constantly have to fight that battle and make sure that you have the tactical advantage.
34:29 Tucker Carlson? But baked into that assumption is endless, literally limitless, American support.
34:33 Speaker 02 That's the thing. This is all presuming because Israel could never do this without this constant support, not for a week, from the United States. So they've structured their entire approach based on the idea that, you know, the US is some sort of a cash cow or intelligence cow or weapons cow that will just constantly end up giving. And that is one of the most important things that has now changed in the last five or so years and will change even further. So this is a strategy that simply does not work.
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36:25 Tucker Carlson? So from the, because I think it's important to understand other people's perspective. It's essential. We didn't understand Iran's perspective going into this and we lost. So it's important to understand Israel's perspective going forward.
36:37 Tucker Carlson? Americans, unconditional American support for Israel's regional projects is the centerpiece of their security strategy. Like they can't exist as a nation without that support. Is that correct?
36:53 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
36:53 Tucker Carlson? And they know that. And that means that anyone who threatens that
36:59 Tucker Carlson? is like, what wouldn't you do? It's a literally an existential problem if somebody threatens that.
37:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. And this is part of the reason why they're so aggressive against anyone who questions that relationship. And again, you can question that relationship. I would, for instance, never argue in favor of having a negative relationship with, between the United States and Israel, or between the United States or Saudi Arabia. I want the United States to have. A sound and healthy relationship with as many countries as possible. But this is not sound, this is not healthy. And I would say a lot of this is also our own fault. At the end of the day.
37:34 Tucker Carlson? Well, it's all our own fault.
37:35 Speaker 02 When we're giving endless support without questioning, without any restraint on it, it actually fuels the worst instincts of any country. Israel is no exception in this. I would point to how Saudi Arabia was conducting itself up until 2017 to 2019. MBS came in and was extremely reckless. And he constantly thought that whatever he would do, the US would come in and bail him out. And then there was these attacks by the Iranians against Saudi oil fields in 2019 over a dispute and, you know, with the effort that the Trump administration was doing to stop the Iranians from selling their oil. And the Saudis were stunned to see that Trump said this was not an attack on the US. This was an attack on Saudi Arabia.
38:18 Speaker 02 And I'm not going to go to war with Iran over Saudi Arabia. This was a betrayal of the Carter Doctrine that essentially said that the US would do this. But Trump, of course, being a non-conventional thinker and probably didn't even know about the Carter Doctrine, was like, no, I'm not going to do this. This was stunning for the Saudis and for everyone else in the region. And what happened? The conventional thinking in Washington would be that if we are abandoning our allies, there will be more chaos in the region. There will be more war. The opposite happened. Once the Saudis realized that the US was not going to bail them out from every war that they would start or any reckless behavior they did, guess what they did? They secretly reached out to the Iranians and began a secret negotiation process
39:03 Speaker 02 that eventually led to, years later, the normalization of their relationship through the help of Oman, Iraq, and ultimately China as well. They opted for diplomacy when they could no longer hide behind American military power. And if we do the same thing with Israelis, eventually they will also come to that conclusion that they're going to have to find a way to manage threats, manage relationships, rather than thinking that domination is the only way for them to be secure.
39:30 Tucker Carlson? It's hard if you've got a country of nine million with no resources. And not actually a real economy, just an economy based on spy software. It's kind of hard to maintain a dominance posture for very long.
39:43 Speaker 02 It's a completely fake domination. I mean, the talk, clearly, there is a perception in the region that Israel is trying to become the military hegemon. And their attack against Doha, you saw how a lot of the GCC countries explicitly started to talking about Israel's attempt of establishing hegemony. But I think we have to be very frank, Israel doesn't have the capacity to do so. This is a fake hegemony. This is the tip of the spear of someone else's hegemony. It's the US's hegemony. But the difference is the US has grown tired of being the hegemon of the region because it's not particularly fruitful. In fact, I would not wish hegemony over the Middle East on my worst enemy.
40:21 Tucker Carlson? No, of course not.
40:22 Speaker 02 But it's the worst benefit of it. You know, we're not in the 1950s or 60s, et cetera, in which the geopolitical circumstances were different. So the US has grown tired of it. We have four or so presidents in a row promising the American people to bring troops home from the Middle East. There were even a moment in which the Biden administration was considering, as you remember, there was that forced posture review in the first year or so.
40:46 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
40:46 Speaker 02 They were considering closing down 17 out of 19 bases. They ended up not doing so. And the main argument against it was, well, if we close these bases, the Chinese are going to come in and replace us. The Chinese would never be so stupid to take on that role. There's no benefit in it. They have completely benefited from the fact that we have taken on that stupid role and they have been free riders on this. And they will never do anything like that. But nevertheless, that was part of the reason why the Biden administration didn't do what they, at least at one point, were seriously considering.
41:21 Tucker Carlson? And now it's been done for us.
41:25 Tucker Carlson? So when, right, when this is resolved, however long that takes, the United States will not have.
41:33 Tucker Carlson? You know, almost 20 bases in the region. Is that fair to say?
41:36 Speaker 02 I find it extremely unlikely that 10 years from now, we're going to have that many bases there. Because you have to also ask yourself, first of all, what was the use of these bases? Every time the United States attacked Iran, it emptied those bases. Because they knew that the Iranians have the capacity of striking all of those bases. And in order to minimize any casualties, bases were emptied. The material was even, the equipment was taken out. So if you can't use the bases in a war, what's the bases there for? And from the GCC standpoint, they thought that these bases were going to be a deterrent against Iran. It turned out that they were a magnet, the reason why they were being attacked. Now, American weaponry was very useful for the GCC states, but the bases were not.
42:21 Speaker 02 So I suspect that going forward, you're going to see a scenario in which they will continue to buy and probably even buy more American weaponry. But they're not going to invest in the bases. And again, many of these bases have been destroyed. Who's going to pay for them being rebuilt? I don't think the US will. And I'm not so sure that the GCC states will do either. So if no one is paying for them, they're just going to sail into the sunset one way or another. I suspect at least with most of them, that will be the case. Here's an opportunity. If the region now understands there is no such thing as an external security guarantor for them. Similar to what I mentioned with the Saudis realized that the US is not going to come in and support them. They're going to have to deal with their security issues on their own. They're going to have to, through diplomacy,
43:06 Speaker 02 see if they can build a security architecture that intensifies economic integration and other things, perhaps transitions towards collective security thinking in order to create stability. That, I think, is a blessing for the United States. Because it actually enables the US to also extract itself, finally, from the Middle East. While supporting an effort by the region itself to create its security architecture. So we're not leaving chaos or anything like that. It won't be Afghanistan 2021. But it will be stable and is no longer on the shoulders of the United States. I think that would be very popular with the American public and strategically it would be very, very good for the United States.
43:46 Tucker Carlson? But it's a nightmare for Israel. It's the nightmare.
43:50 Speaker 02 Yeah. Because again, as you said, nine million or whatever, the only way you can actually not forget about hegemony, but just have this type of extended maneuverability in the region is to have the United States artificially put its finger on the scales and tilt the balance in the favor of the Israelis. And if the US leaves, then Israel is going to be faced with a completely different scenario. Now, I don't think Israel will get destroyed at all, but Israel is going to have to deal with the region in a completely different manner, not based on domination or, you know, creating all of this chaos that they have helped fuel in order to keep everyone else weak.
44:28 Tucker Carlson? The goal of the war was not to, in my view, was not to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, that was not the main goal. The main goal was to eliminate rivals to regional hegemony.
44:40 Speaker 02 Absolutely. From the very beginning, this has been the case.
44:43 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, including, I would argue, the United States. I do think there's deep resentment toward the United States in Israel. They like Trump, I guess, or have liked Trump, but I know they don't like the United States. Why would they, in the same way that teenagers resent their parents? But the opposite happened. So now you've got Arab states, which have really deeply resented, hated Iran for a long time, now making overtures toward Iran after getting bombed by Iran?
45:12 Speaker 02 Look, what did the Europeans do after World War II? They realized that the effort to contain and isolate Germany after World War I only led the way, paved the way for World War II.
45:24 Tucker Carlson? Exactly.
45:24 Speaker 02 So they shifted towards the European Union, the steel and coal union, et cetera, in order to increase economic independence between themselves, to create as many buffers as possible for another war, making it as costly as possible for the states to go to war.
45:39 Tucker Carlson? And Germany became more central even in Europe than it was before the war.
45:44 Speaker 02 Absolutely. It took some time, of course, but it emerged as a major power and a force for stability in Europe as well. And, you know, I grew up in Europe. When I grew up, it was completely inconceivable that France and Germany would ever go to war with each other again. And that's still, despite the fact that 50 years ago, they were butchering each other that made Middle Easterners look good. That transition is a remarkable transition. And it is because they transitioned to collective security and recognizing that any country's security is based on everyone else's security.
46:15 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
46:16 Speaker 02 And the region, I think, it's gonna be very difficult. I don't wanna in any way, shape or form, put forward some sort of a naive picture. But I think they've had a close encounter with death. And that tends to sharpen your mind.
46:30 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
46:30 Speaker 02 It tends to make you a bit more mature. And despite the fact that there is a lot of anger, a lot of anger in Kuwait and on the GCC side, there's a lot of anger on the Iranian side as well. Because they believe that there is plenty of evidence, and some evidence has been verified by independent actors. France 24 showed, for instance, that there were a lot of attacks on Iranian soil from the US, from Kuwaiti territory.
46:53 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
46:54 Speaker 02 And Iranians believe that the Emiratis were far more involved in the war than they thought earlier during the war. So nevertheless, there's a lot of common anger.
47:00 Tucker Carlson? And that Israel was using Arab states as staging
47:04 Speaker 02 Yes.
47:04 Tucker Carlson? grounds for attacks on Iran.
47:05 Speaker 02 Exactly. So, and you know, they have two secret bases in Iraq, for instance.
47:10 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, we didn't know that. How did the Israelis get bases in Iraq?
47:13 Speaker 02 I have no idea how that happened. But it makes me wonder how many more bases there may be. Because if it's two that we know of now, how many more may there actually exist? And remember, for years, the Iranians were actually fighting, shooting missiles into Iraqi Kurdistan, saying that they were destroying Mossad houses. I don't think they ever said that they struck a base, but nevertheless. And it was oftentimes dismissed. No clear evidence was provided by the Iranians. But it is unmistakable that the Israelis have had a very long presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. And this goes back before the revolution as well, in which frankly, back in the 60s and the 70s, it was the Iranians and the Israelis, together with the CIA, that established Israel's presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.
47:58 Tucker Carlson? One of the reasons that the Kurds get such great coverage in the United States. Everyone loves the Kurds in the United States. Except Trump. Trump doesn't like the Kurds for some reason. But everyone else, the American media loves the Kurds, the brave Kurds.
48:10 Speaker 02 By the way, on that issue that you mentioned that is never about enrichment. I was at a track two meeting. This must have been 2012, I think. And, and I wrote about it in one of my books.
48:24 Speaker 02 It was a remarkable moment because you had several Iranian officials, some of them former, some of them actual nuclear negotiators. Together with a couple of American military folks and then five people from the Israeli side, all military except one who was a top intelligence person. In fact, it was the former head of Mossad.
48:45 Speaker 02 At one moment, he just laid it out. He said, this was never about enrichment.
48:52 Speaker 02 This was about preventing Israel becoming free. Let me see, remember exactly how he put it. He said, Israel will not tolerate the United States making friends with Iran unless Iran first makes friend with Israel. It was not going to allow the United States to resolve its tensions with Iran because the Israeli fear, and this is a very legitimate fear. If the US manages to resolve its tensions with Iran, one of the things that would happen, which is also what the administration is talking about now, we would potentially start leaving the region as we should.
49:24 Speaker 02 The threat of Iran has been a key reason for justifying all of these bases, et cetera, et cetera. And the Israelis then asked themselves a very valid question. If the United States reduces its tensions with Iran, does that mean that there will be a proportionate reduction in Israeli Iranian tensions? And they conclude, I think erroneously, but nevertheless, they conclude, no, the Iranian Israeli tension will remain. But now the Israelis will have lost the support of the United States. And this is what they call the fear of abandonment. They need to keep the US in the region, prevent it from making friends with these different countries. Because if it does make friends with these different countries, it will exit the region. The Israelis will have to deal with them alone.
50:06 Tucker Carlson? This is a very sick relationship. You can only have one friend. We're your only friend. Yeah, this is like, this is like seventh grade girls locker room stuff. Um, but it's diseased. So, but from the Israeli perspective, because I think this really matters. What's happening right now and what's almost certain to happen, whatever happens to this MOU or this particular set of negotiations, but like ultimately it's really clear that Iran is going to emerge as a major world power.
50:36 Tucker Carlson? Like, how could it not?
50:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:37 Tucker Carlson? Because it has de facto control over one of the most important pieces of geography on the planet. So like, that alone.
50:43 Speaker 02 It's a very important development for them. And however yet it ends, even if there's no, there's not going to be any toll. But what potentially will be there, I suspect will be there is some sort of a environmental management fee. Uh, and whether that is handled just by Iran and Oman, or if it's regionalized, nevertheless, something will be there. But the important thing to understand is that their control of the strait is not because they have mine sweepers or that they have a couple of islands there. That was the case 20 years ago. In all of the war games that the US did back then, the Iranians would close the strait by mining the strait.
51:20 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
51:20 Speaker 02 And it would take the US about two weeks to reopen it. What happened now is because of technology, the Iranians can shoot missiles and drones from anywhere of their 1,500 kilometer shoreline at any of these ships. And just the risk of being hit is enough.
51:36 Tucker Carlson? You can't insure them.
51:37 Speaker 02 To insure them. So it's a completely different scenario. That capacity does not go away.
51:44 Tucker Carlson? That's what I'm saying.
51:45 Speaker 02 So it will still be there. So this is a very, very important development.
51:49 Tucker Carlson? Even if.
51:49 Speaker 02 But without sanctions relief, I don't see the Iranians being able to fully live up to their potential. And on top of that, I have to say, their political system is a huge inhibitor of their own potential. It is not a free system. It is not a dictatorship like Saddam or Gaddafi's or Assad's systems in Syria and Libya and Iraq. It is a weird system. It has democratic elements, but most importantly, the power is dispersed throughout a system. It's not a family. This is not you kill. This is what I think Trump was sold. You kill Khamenei, the supreme leader, the whole system implode. Not at all. This is not Saddam in which you take him out and his kids out and the dynasty is over.
52:32 Speaker 02 This is a system that was designed specifically to be able to survive a counter-revolution. Because it was itself a revolutionary system.
52:42 Tucker Carlson? And it's also assassination proof.
52:44 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. I mean, one hundred thirty-five or so senior officials have been killed. Immediately replaced, immediately replaced. In fact, replaced by more hardline people most times.
52:55 Tucker Carlson? Boy, that's a durable system.
52:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:56 Tucker Carlson? But even if you were to take out the entire infrastructure of government in Iran, even if you were to nuke Iran, you still couldn't return to February twenty-seven status quo on Hormuz. Because it could be closed by piracy.
53:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:13 Tucker Carlson? So you have to have a powerful central government in Iran. The world needs that in order to keep the strait open.
53:20 Speaker 02 Look, bottom line, we need, it's a very bad scenario if we have a weak central government.
53:25 Tucker Carlson? That's what I'm saying.
53:26 Speaker 02 It's terrible.
53:27 Tucker Carlson? Exactly.
53:28 Speaker 02 Recipe for instability. It's a recipe for a country turning into Lebanon. In which the state is so weak that you could have non-state actors performing the duties of a state.
53:39 Tucker Carlson? But even if it were to turn into Lebanon, or Syria, or Somalia, which would be a disaster for the people of that country and for the region. It would, that's a massive threat to the global economy.
53:50 Speaker 02 Definitely.
53:51 Tucker Carlson? That's the difference.
53:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And by the way, we had what, twenty-five to thirty percent of the Syrian population becoming external refugees as a result of that civil war.
54:03 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
54:04 Speaker 02 And a country of whatever twenty, thirty million people. So, and that profoundly changed the politics of Europe.
54:10 Tucker Carlson? Right. So what if that happened to a country of almost a hundred million?
54:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. It would be an absolute disaster.
54:15 Tucker Carlson? I said this to Trump before it started. You, the migrations could be just like, really, really, really a big deal. And I think he understood, he did it anyway. But I guess what I'm saying is I don't see a way that this is not the nightmare scenario for Israel.
54:33 Speaker 02 Totally is.
54:34 Tucker Carlson? No matter what.
54:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. And they can, you know, from the Israeli side, there will be, I mean, Netanyahu will keep on insisting that they set back Iran a decade or two. And absolutely, they really have damaged Iran's infrastructure tremendously. There is no doubt about that. That can be rebuilt, however. What they have done that is really difficult to undo is that, I'm not saying that the system in Iran has necessarily gained popularity. I don't think the actual support base of that system is more than 15 to 20%. And then you have 60 or so percent.
55:10 Tucker Carlson? 15 to 20?
55:11 Speaker 02 15 to 20.
55:12 Tucker Carlson? Oh, it's that unpopular?
55:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. 60 or so percent of the population that absolutely would like to see a different type of a government, but they're not willing to risk war or revolution over it. They want to see gradual change. And then perhaps 20 or so percent of the population that are just so fed up with how this system has been so repressive, so corrupt, so incompetent in many different ways, mismanaging the economy, that they've gone so desperate that they're willing to try almost everything, right? But what has happened because of this war, which always happens in these types of wars, is that you have a rallying around the flag phenomenon. It's not necessarily made a system more popular, but the performance of the Iranian military in all of this
55:56 Speaker 02 has made the confidence of the 15 to 20% of the population that do support the system absolutely skyrocket. It has made them think that, you know, they themselves had question marks about the viability of the system. It faced so many problems, so many of them self-inflicted. Many of them also, of course, absolutely a result of the sanctions. But there was actually a very low confidence in that system in December, in January, January of this year. That has just completely shifted. Because now they feel that, as you said, they have become. A global power, they have managed to not only resist the attack of two nuclear powers, one of them is superpower,
56:38 Speaker 02 but in some ways they may have come out on top and strategically inflicted a defeat on them. And this is just really just boosted their confidence. And that is going to make the Islamic Republic much stronger, at least temporarily, than it was before February.
56:54 Tucker Carlson? It seems so obvious.
56:56 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
56:57 Tucker Carlson? And the rest of the world sees that, and the rest of the world is, to some extent, dependent on Iran. Like, that's what we all learned.
57:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. Oh, absolutely. They have the ability.
57:05 Tucker Carlson? Like, South Korea needs Iran. Japan needs Iran. These are real countries with huge economies, like...
57:12 Speaker 02 And even if they try to reduce their dependency, at the... First of all, then, they were not dependent on Iranian oil. They stopped buying Iranian oil 10 years ago because of the US sanctions. So they were not buying a thing from Iran. South Korea has been in the Iranian market for so long. It's only during this last 10 years that they were completely chased out by US sanctions. Samsung was so massive.
57:34 Tucker Carlson? Oh, no, no, no. I mean, they need Iran because Iran controls the outlet to the Persian Gulf.
57:39 Speaker 02 Exactly. So now you don't have to have any dependence on Iranian goods.
57:42 Tucker Carlson? Exactly.
57:42 Speaker 02 But you still need Iran.
57:44 Tucker Carlson? Because it's a question of geography.
57:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:47 Tucker Carlson? Only in America, I, as an American, I hate to say this, but only our policymakers are so stupid, they don't look at maps. No, I'm serious. They're so caught up in this ideology, rogue state, terrorist state, Hitler, Chamberlain, Churchill. It's like they're all in this weird fantasy world where no one consults Google Maps, it's like, hey, hey, guys, they could, like, shut down a fifth of the world's commodities, but...
58:11 Speaker 02 And I remember, I was in some meetings where not formal government, but several people who were in and out, essentially. And this question came up, and I was actually quite stunned. The degree to which a lot of people actually thought Iranians would not close the strait. They thought that that would be a suicidal move by them. And I had to remind them that they will see this as an existential threat. So all of the patterns we've seen in the past, in which they responded politely, they didn't even respond to certain attacks, you have to set that aside, because if they're actually faced with an existential threat, their behavior will likely be very different.
58:47 Tucker Carlson? We framed it as an existential threat. The President of the United States demanded in the first days, and I'm quoting, unconditional surrender.
58:55 Tucker Carlson? Once you say that, it couldn't be clearer. You're fighting for your life. What wouldn't you do?
59:01 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly. One of the things I think is also very interesting, and I don't know the answer to it exactly what happened. But the Israelis were remarkably successful in penetrating Iran intelligence-wise.
59:15 Tucker Carlson? How did they do that?
59:17 Speaker 02 Over the course of years, they had recruited a lot of Iranians. They had flipped them essentially. And this is something the Islamic Republic absolutely needs to understand. That game is a game of numbers. If you have a lot of options, a lot of candidates that you could turn into a spy or to turn against their own country, to work for the Mossad, you will get a larger number of them successfully flipped. What determines if there's a large number of candidates? Well, part of it is the repression of the Islamic Republic itself. Because it was so repressive, it actually created a very large pool of people that the Israelis could turn to and try to see which ones of them could they flip. Three days before the war,
1:00:02 Speaker 02 those people started to stay. They had been extracted out of Iran, trained. Three days before the war, they went back into Iran. And they were conducting attacks from inside of Iranian territory, similar to the way that the Ukrainians have done it in Russia. In fact, the methodology seems to be identical. In this war, we saw none of that. Whatever happened, either they expended all of their Mossad assets inside the country or something else happened because we just did not see that same repeat of a pattern in this war. And again, I don't know the answer to it, but it is a very, very big question mark. Exactly what happened? How were they so successful in June and apparently achieve nothing in this war
1:00:45 Speaker 02 in terms of penetrating Iran?
1:00:49 Tucker Carlson? Well, the Iranians rounded up a bunch of...
1:00:51 Speaker 02 They certainly did.
1:00:52 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:00:52 Speaker 02 And I'm sure they also rounded up a large number of innocent people that were executed. But again, I don't know if that's the full answer.
1:01:00 Tucker Carlson? Well, attitudes change immediately during war.
1:01:04 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely. But those people were not... It takes much more than six months to be able to recruit them and train them. So they would have to be recruited and trained for a much longer period of time.
1:01:15 Tucker Carlson? So what does Israel do in the face of this?
1:01:21 Tucker Carlson? Because just with the stipulation that this is, they're always talking about existential threats. Everything's an existential threat. This feels like an actual existential threat to Israel.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 I don't think it is an existential threat. I think Israel's own security doctrine is the real existential threat to Israel.
1:01:35 Tucker Carlson? Of course, I agree with you completely. I mean, if Israeli assumptions about it's that country's place in the world, its own place in the world, remain unchanged, this is an existential threat to them. Like, they have to change or else...
1:01:49 Speaker 02 They have to change. I agree with that, absolutely.
1:01:52 Tucker Carlson? Will they?
1:01:53 Speaker 02 And I want to point out one thing. This whole idea that Iran is or was an existential threat was a talking point.
1:02:01 Tucker Carlson? I'm aware of that, yes.
1:02:02 Speaker 02 It is a talking point that they always use in the United States because it was necessary to try to get the United States to make Iran its top national security threat, which in and of itself is absurd. Not to say that Iran is not a challenge, but to be the top national security threat. Go back to some of these...
1:02:22 Tucker Carlson? When the drug cartels control New Mexico? Are big, which they do. And so are in parts of Texas and Arizona and like our own countries collapsing, the biggest threat is Iran?
1:02:33 Speaker 02 Look at the debates in 2012. I think it was between Obama and Romney, or was it the vice? But I think it was Obama and Romney. And the ABC anchor asked him, "Iran is the top US national security threat." And I was like, "How is this just accepted as fact?"
1:02:47 Tucker Carlson? You just keep repeating a lie and people just start nodding.
1:02:49 Speaker 02 But this is something the Israelis had been pushing for since 1994 or so. But the Israelis themselves internally were not necessarily saying this. Ephraim Halevi, Pardo, Mayor Dagan, three consecutive heads of the Mossad openly said, "Iran is not an existential threat. Iran is a threat, but it's not an existential threat." Ehud Barak, former prime minister, defense minister, already back then said, "To say that Iran is an existential threat is to diminish Israel's own power." But it was a very effective talking point to push the United States towards believing that the United States needs to attack Iran or sanction Iran or just treat it as a top national security threat because it is an existential threat. And in New York Times and all of these papers...
1:03:35 Speaker 02 It's just as religion repeated that the Israelis view Iran as an existential threat. Never question as to whether that is really how they see it.
1:03:44 Tucker Carlson? Well, what's never questioned is why that would be our problem, true or false.
1:03:47 Speaker 02 That's an even deeper question that would never occur.
1:03:49 Tucker Carlson? Okay, I'm sorry that you don't get along with one of your neighbors and you feel deeply threatened. I, you know, good luck resolving that. What do we have to do with that?
1:03:56 Speaker 02 I, you know, I wrote my dissertation on Iran and Israeli relations. And I spent some time in Iran and in Israel interviewing top officials about this issue. I wanted to get to the heart of the matter, so I didn't want to rely on secondary documents. And I couldn't get access to the primary documents, of course, they don't have that type of transparency. So I needed to sit down with them. And one thing that always came through with my interviews with Israelis. I had been in Iran a couple of weeks earlier, so I, almost every door in Israel was open for me. Because in my email or letter, I told them, I just came from Iran. I spent time interviewing top officials about Israel. Do you have time to chat? And they almost all did, including very senior people, including people in the intelligence and community. Some of the most valuable things I got from those interviews were not my questions of them.
1:04:39 Speaker 02 Is that they almost always kept me for another 30 minutes, another 60 minutes interviewing me, trying to see what I had found out. And government officials, they always know how to conceal their true motives, etc., when you ask them a question. When they ask a question.
1:04:54 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:04:54 Speaker 02 They reveal what they're actually looking for.
1:04:56 Tucker Carlson? I've noticed.
1:04:57 Speaker 02 And there you could clearly see the premise was not that Iran is an existential threat. The premise was not that Iran is irrational or that it is suicidal. It was exactly the opposite, that they were dealing with an adversary that was far more cautious, calculating and rational. But in order to get the United States on your side, you have to portray a completely different image, that Iran was suicidal, that it was irrational. Because if they're irrational and suicidal, it means diplomacy doesn't work.
1:05:30 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:05:31 Speaker 02 Deterrence doesn't work. And because they're suicidal, the only thing that will work is to take preemptive military action.
1:05:38 Tucker Carlson? Killing them before they kill themselves and you, yeah.
1:05:43 Tucker Carlson? But again, I just have to keep asking the same question. What option, I mean, in real life, this leaves Israel in a, you know, manufactured hysteria and hyperbole and lying and propaganda. Leave that aside. It's easy to be mesmerized by that and all of Israel's many agents in the United States are all hair on fire all the time. But like in real life, I do think this is a major problem for Israel.
1:06:09 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:06:09 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, oh, yeah, for real. Like biggest, biggest problem since 73, I would say.
1:06:14 Speaker 02 And I worried that by now, they just don't have the creativity to think in a different manner and adjust.
1:06:24 Tucker Carlson? Meaning if it's not an assassination, it doesn't even seem like a real solution to them?
1:06:28 Speaker 02 I think, look, they have a track record of successfully not only preventing diplomacy between the US and Iran, sabotaging talks when they were happening. Even when a deal was struck, fight tooth and nail against it in Congress. And even when they lost, two years later convinced the next American president to walk out of it. I remember I sat down with some folks from AIPAC after the JCPI. I was very involved in that fight. And I thought I was going to come there and kind of see, okay, how are they going to adjust to this new reality? Iran had been a cash cow for AIPAC since 1994.
1:07:10 Speaker 02 In my first book, Treasure is a Lie, I spent a lot of time interviewing the AIPAC folks as well on how they started just becoming so anti-Iran and become the leading force pushing for sanctions, et cetera, although they never said that they pushed for war. It was very clear that they were. And they said that, you know, once 1993, the Oslo process started, AIPAC was having an existential crisis. How are they going to raise money if their cash cow, Yasser Arafat, no longer was a terrorist, but a peace partner?
1:07:40 Tucker Carlson? Exactly.
1:07:41 Speaker 02 And I have it quoted from an AIPAC official saying that Iran was what saved them. Because now suddenly all of the focus was shifted towards Iran. It saved AIPAC. It became a boon for fundraising, particularly once Ahmadinejad became president and started questioning the Holocaust, et cetera. It was massively helpful for them. So I thought that once we were going to get there, I would see an AIPAC that was starting to have questions about how they were going to adjust to this situation. And I walked away realizing. They're gonna fight tooth and nail to destroy this deal even once it's been achieved, even once it's starting to be implemented. And I would suspect that the Israelis can't think of other options than to do exactly that if there is a final deal.
1:08:23 Tucker Carlson? I don't see how that works because the last reservoir of support for unconditional, you know, love of Israel and the United States is Trump loyalists. And Trump is now, you know, on the record attacking Netanyahu, on the record endorsing this deal. How do the Israelis blow that up? Everyone's gonna know. If the deal falls apart, the Israelis did it.
1:08:45 Speaker 02 Well, at this point, Israelis are not trying to hide their fingerprints in any way, shape or form.
1:08:49 Tucker Carlson? Okay.
1:08:50 Speaker 02 Very different from 20 years ago.
1:08:51 Tucker Carlson? But basically, they're now on a course for conflict with Trump, open conflict with Trump.
1:08:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:57 Tucker Carlson? But their only supporters of the United States are Trump voters.
1:08:59 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:09:00 Tucker Carlson? Well, look. So, I mean, I don't, you know.
1:09:02 Speaker 02 It's a very different environment.
1:09:05 Tucker Carlson? And they've played the last card.
1:09:06 Speaker 02 Unless, I mean, look, they still have Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham in the Senate.
1:09:11 Tucker Carlson? Okay, they got all.
1:09:12 Speaker 02 And Tom Cotton just introduced this bill or this amendment that would essentially more or less merge US intelligence and Israeli intelligence by making it mandated for the United States.
1:09:23 Tucker Carlson? And he's the chairman of the Senate Intel Committee.
1:09:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09:25 Tucker Carlson? One of the most evil things that's ever come out of our Congress. It's one of the most anti-American, you know, anyway.
1:09:32 Speaker 02 I encourage everyone, go to Responsible State Craft.
1:09:35 Tucker Carlson? What is that? What is the Tom Cotton story?
1:09:37 Speaker 02 I don't know the story. I don't know exactly why he ended up. I mean, he was a protege of Bill Kristol and served in Iraq if I'm not mistaken. I'm not really sure exactly how deep his ideological commitment to this is or if it's other reasons. But Paul Pilar, former CIA legend in many ways, someone who really stood up against manipulation of intelligence during the Bush years, trying to get us into that Iraq war, has a fantastic piece laying out exactly what this is on Responsible State Craft and showing that this is an extremely dangerous situation and what they're trying to do, not only with that, but also with 224.
1:10:18 Speaker 02 Is to, in which they're trying to take away the aid, because the aid is public, it's scrutinized, etc. They're all trying to do it in some sort of a procurement, accounting exercise. So it will continue to happen, probably even more money for Israel, but it will all be hidden in the bureaucracy with no congressional oversight. So they're recognizing exactly what is happening. They're losing the American public, but they can use some of their last juice that they have in Washington to go push through these different reforms. And it will become a structural impediment towards the type of healthy break, healthy detachment.
1:10:58 Tucker Carlson? They should be in prison, all of these people.
1:11:00 Speaker 02 This is happening right now. So when you're saying that, look, they're losing Trump, you know, yes, you're absolutely right, but they're doing other things that will make it very difficult for future presidents and members of Congress to be able to break free from some of these things.
1:11:11 Tucker Carlson? What? So where is this process?
1:11:16 Speaker 02 It is right now in the NDAs and Senate's going to be voted for, if I'm not mistaken. Some parts of it has already been voted for and that's going to go to a final vote. And this is happening in front of the American-
1:11:26 Tucker Carlson? And it's going to pass?
1:11:27 Speaker 02 Most likely it will pass.
1:11:28 Tucker Carlson? And what is it, can you just summarize what it will mean?
1:11:31 Speaker 02 Well, the intelligence part is really devastating because essentially it means that it is mandated for the US to share significant amount of intelligence with the Israelis. And it can only be prevented if the president himself goes in and stops certain things. The president does not have the time, should not have the time, to micromanage the intelligence relationship.
1:11:54 Tucker Carlson? Why would the United States share any intelligence with Israel? Why would we be required to do that?
1:11:57 Speaker 02 I mean, there's always going to be sharing of intelligence, but it's going to be very careful, because we will get intelligence from them. I have no idea whether-
1:12:03 Tucker Carlson? The intelligence we get from them is fundamentally untrue.
1:12:07 Speaker 02 Well, that's for certain, particularly when it comes to some of the things that they try to sell us. I don't know if that relationship is sufficiently balanced, but we're making it increasingly unbalanced. And essentially saying that for something to be stopped, the president has to intervene. And this is also very problematic because it means that we would have to share intelligence about other partners that we have with the Israelis that actually could be betraying them in a way. So again, it's once again putting the relationship with Israel above all other relations that the United States-
1:12:37 Tucker Carlson? Above all other concerns, including like the most basic concern, which is how's America doing?
1:12:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:42 Tucker Carlson? That's subordinated to how do we support Israel?
1:12:45 Speaker 02 Absolutely. It's, it's, and you look, I think because they see that the writing is on the wall, that they're losing the American public, they're trying to do as much as they can now before they're going to be faced with an environment in which a lot of these things are going to be completely unthinkable. And pushing for this war, I think also Netanyahu saw, thought of it as probably his last chance.
1:13:06 Tucker Carlson? Of course. I just, I think that was clear in February. This was their last chance. I mean, they're not, they're certainly not stupid and they're laser focused on what they think their interests are. I think they are not good at assessing their own interests. I don't think they're long-term thinkers. I think they're nihilists. I think they're kind of crazy, actually, in their behavior, bombing Doha.
1:13:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:13:26 Tucker Carlson? On September 9th was one of them.
1:13:27 Speaker 02 But again, we have to also take some responsibility when we have put forward so few consequences.
1:13:34 Tucker Carlson? We've created this. There's no doubt.
1:13:36 Speaker 02 On them doing things like this, we shouldn't be surprised.
1:13:38 Tucker Carlson? When you see a child like this, you point to the parents and you say, you're a bad parent for creating a kid like this. Oh, I totally agree. It's our fault. I guess I just,
1:13:50 Tucker Carlson? I just don't see this getting resolved peacefully. And it feels like the United States is vulnerable to attacks from Israel.
1:14:00 Speaker 02 I can't, I can't even fathom what that would mean.
1:14:05 Tucker Carlson? I think there's precedent for it.
1:14:07 Speaker 02 Um, yeah, there is, there is. But, I mean, that would be such a suicidal turn of event. Turns of event for.
1:14:15 Tucker Carlson? Unless you lie about it and classify everything for decades.
1:14:19 Speaker 02 I think, I think there absolutely has to be ways to prevent that. And again, these are not technically difficult measures. It's just making sure you don't give any country, Israel, Saudi, if the US and Iran has a relationship in the future, I sure as hell hope that it doesn't get structured like this because it's ultimately bad for both sides. It's not good for Israel to have turned into
1:14:42 Tucker Carlson? I agree.
1:14:42 Speaker 02 This type of a, having this type of a security.
1:14:46 Tucker Carlson? Appraised welfare case. Yeah, no, I agree.
1:14:48 Speaker 02 So, you know, we just have to take away some of the. Those things, and I think Joe Kent has been right on the money of certain type of restrictions that need to be imposed, in my view, now, not after they've done something, not even as a threat if they do it. Take it away now, make it very clear, they're not going to be able to drag the US into another war. So creating false flags or creating these things is not going to lead to the US re-entering the war. Once that is entirely clear, the incentive to do so is, or at least incentive to use those methods to do so, is going to be significantly diminished.
1:15:23 Tucker Carlson? So I think there are a lot of means by which foreign countries exert influence in the United States, up to and including violence and blackmail, that's all real. But on the most basic and powerful level, it's campaign contributions. It's the donors pushing policies that the public doesn't want, that's not good for the United States. That's why Tom Cotton exists and Lindsey Graham and the rest. So for the Republican Party to be a party that serves the interests of its own country, an America First Party, it has to break with these donors. You can't have Miriam Adelson, who's not even an American, use her gambling fortune to hijack the political process.
1:16:05 Tucker Carlson? Like, do you think the Republican Party, Democratic Party is hopeless in my view, but the Republican Party, there was hope, and now it seems like until they break that addiction, there's no hope.
1:16:17 Speaker 02 I frankly don't have any hope with any of the parties right now unless they fundamentally change the leadership.
1:16:24 Speaker 02 I think we need to move towards a post-partisan situation.
1:16:27 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:16:29 Speaker 02 I have to say, you know, I'm very skeptical about the two-party system when you have a public in which the spectrum of views are as wide as they are right now.
1:16:39 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:16:39 Speaker 02 If this was a European parliamentary system, I'm not saying it's superior in all ways, in any way, shape or form, but these two parties would at least have been five or six parties. And many of them would actually have been able to work much better together because they were in different parties. But now you put so many different views in the same party and they're supposed to have one line. It just creates all of this internal infighting. And it also shoots out, pushes out a huge amount of the spectrum that the American public holds today. There's a reason why young people don't watch mainstream media any longer. They don't trust it. But it also is a very narrow set of views that are constantly being presented there. And those narrow views do not represent the majority of American.
1:17:19 Tucker Carlson? I don't know. I want to believe, I want to agree with you, but I don't see, I don't see any liberal democracy representing its population. It seems like no matter how many parties you have, your options are neoconservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy.
1:17:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:17:36 Tucker Carlson? Both of which are just totally wrong, don't serve the populations, destroy countries.
1:17:42 Speaker 02 And they're so intertwined, by the way.
1:17:44 Tucker Carlson? I know they are.
1:17:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:17:45 Tucker Carlson? And they're also just basically immoral and anti-Christian from my perspective. So, yeah, monopoly capitalism and more wars in the Middle East for Israel, like that's, but that's true. All European political parties support this. And the ones that don't are called Nazis and like prevented from even participating. So I think there are like no options under our current system in any Western country. But correct me if I'm wrong.
1:18:09 Speaker 02 You may be in a darker place than I am and it might be.
1:18:11 Tucker Carlson? Well, I'm just looking at the evidence.
1:18:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, it may be because I haven't spent enough time thinking about it. I might be as skeptical or cynical or just pessimistic about the situation. I do, I mean, I've said it before, in order to be able to make any change, you have to have a degree of irrational optimism. If you're entirely irrational about the processes, there's no way you're going to be able to succeed. You have to believe further. And again, this may be a case.
1:18:38 Tucker Carlson? No, that's really wise. No, that is wise, what you just said. You're absolutely right. But you also have to marry that irrational optimism.
1:18:47 Speaker 02 With some realism.
1:18:48 Tucker Carlson? Let's go to like a rational understanding of what the problems are and what the structural impediment is.
1:18:56 Speaker 02 Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. There should be absolutely no illusion of what the problem is. And the problem is, as you pointed out, the neoliberal economic system that is just destroying societies off the right, atomizing them.
1:19:12 Speaker 02 Combine, and again, there is a strong link between that and this essentially empire type of a foreign policy. You know, I helped co-found the Quincy Institute and we named it after John Quincy Adams. Because we wanted to remind Americans that there's a long tradition of American foreign policy that actually is nothing like what we're seeing right now. He gave that speech on July 4th, 1821, in which he said, "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." And later on in the passage, he points out, "If she does, she can become the dictresses of the world, but it will come at the expense of her own liberty and her own spirit."
1:19:50 Tucker Carlson? Boys, that-
1:19:50 Speaker 02 That's exactly what we've seen. The first thing that happened after 9/11 was the Patriot Act and the significant removal of Americans' civil liberties. And it's just been a trend that has continued ever since.
1:20:02 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, so we were told the war started, the attacks on New York and Washington were inspired by a hatred of our freedoms.
1:20:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:10 Tucker Carlson? By 19 Arabs with box cutters.
1:20:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then we took away those freedoms.
1:20:15 Tucker Carlson? First thing they do is eliminate our freedoms.
1:20:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:19 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, no, it was not lost on me.
1:20:21 Speaker 02 But it's important because so many people have been led to believe that the current foreign policy we have, this idea that we need to have liberal hegemony, we have to dominate every corner of the world.
1:20:31 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:20:32 Speaker 02 750 bases around the world, that that's what we always have been, that this is like written into the American DNA from the outset. And it's just not true. We have a very long-
1:20:42 Tucker Carlson? Well, we fought the American Revolution to get pride parades. And that's kind of why we did it.
1:20:46 Speaker 02 Oh.
1:20:47 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, well, the good news is it's so absurd that it's gonna come crashing down within my lifetime, without question. And, you know, the only question is like, what do we get in its place? And I just really want it to be a good thing.
1:21:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:04 Tucker Carlson? But you don't think there's any hope that the Republican Party-
1:21:09 Tucker Carlson? What changes just in this one specific way that it stops taking orders from people who don't put America first?
1:21:14 Speaker 02 Look, the money, bit outside of my expertise, but the money in politics, obviously, is, I mean, how could you not conclude that that's going to be corrupting, particularly mindful of the manner in which the amounts are just so astronomical as it is right now? And then there's also other areas that are not astronomical, but nevertheless are so opaque, non-transparent, that it's become a loophole. So, for instance, one of the things our team, Ben Freeman and Eli Clifton and Nick Cleveland at my shop really work on is the manner in which American think tanks are taking huge amounts of money from foreign governments.
1:21:53 Tucker Carlson? Unbelievable.
1:21:54 Speaker 02 And there's no transparency around it at all. If you give $250 to an American candidate, it will be in the public record and people can see that. But you can give 10 million plus to a think tank that pretends that it is completely neutral. And then they produce all of these different reports in support of the country that supported it, or these weapon companies that are giving that money, and there's no transparency at all. Most of the people that are testifying in Congress are coming from these think tanks. They never have to announce in any way, shape or form that I'm coming here to testify about this specific problem, but you should know I'm funded by this country that is very much part of this problem, or I'm very much funded by the weapons company that is producing the very system that you're having a hearing about.
1:22:38 Speaker 02 That transparency is completely non-existent. So, you know, there's going to take a lot to be able to change the system, given how much it's essentially been neoliberalized.
1:22:49 Tucker Carlson? Totally corrupt. I remember when I first heard that Heritage was taking money from foreign countries or foreign interests, I was like shocked by it. I couldn't believe, it was a long time ago, too. I couldn't believe it. AI and Hudson and Brookings and, you know, I think they're smart people. I know people at all of those places and they're smart and some of them are good people. But the system itself is just so rotten, it's beyond redemption. So that kind of
1:23:14 Speaker 02 But that is fixable. I mean, you could have a piece of legislation that essentially ensures, I mean, you have it in California, you cannot, I mean, there's limitations on how much you can give to nonprofit. You could just make sure that think tanks or a separate type of a category or research institutes that have to have transparency about who they are funded from. You can have a situation in which if someone is testifying in Congress, they have to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. There's ways to fix these things and they're very simple. We just don't do it.
1:23:46 Tucker Carlson? It's just, it's fascinating to me. You're born in Iran, you grew up in Sweden, you spent most of your life in the United States, which is why you don't have an accent, I think.
1:23:56 Tucker Carlson? But you have the most, but you're foreigner. I didn't even know you weren't a citizen. I just found out and I want to ask you about this. But you have by far the most pro-America kind of take on all this of almost anyone in Washington, which is kind of weird since you're not an American. But I think objectively, you have a pro-America position on these questions. Because you have a pro-America position, there was this story that emerged last week, which is why I called you initially, that there was a move to get you deported? Can you explain what happened?
1:24:32 Speaker 02 So there was this hit piece in Bari Weiss's Free Press, very ironic name for that outlet, that just listed, I mean, it was 10 pages long, just listed this long list of lies against me that has been repeated by the neo-cons in Washington for the last 20-plus years.
1:24:52 Tucker Carlson? What and low?
1:24:53 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm an agent of the Islamic Republic, all of these different things in order to kind of cancel me, shut me down.
1:24:59 Tucker Carlson? You're an Iranian agent.
1:25:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. I'm an Iranian agent, essentially. And all of that, but the only thing that was new is that they claimed that the State Department was now investigating me in order to have me deported.
1:25:15 Speaker 02 And it took only a couple of hours, but the State Department itself came out and denied this and made clear that they have no plans of doing so, at least not for now, they said.
1:25:24 Tucker Carlson? So this ran in Barry Weiss's Free Press, which exists to promote the interests of a foreign country, Israel. I mean, that's, that's, that's the reason there is a free press is to promote the Israeli government.
1:25:36 Speaker 02 At a minimum, the elements that have been constantly trying to silence me have come from that direction. And it's a lot because of, you know, I, I wrote my dissertation, which ended up becoming my first book, Treacherous Alliance, on Israel and Iran. And no one had written a book on it for about 20 years prior to me writing that book. But everyone was constantly talking about it. I mean, it was on the news all the time. Should we bomb Iran? And all of Iran is an existential threat. And I tried to get to the bottom of the story, and I did so by actually really spending time in Israel to try to understand their perspective, understand the perspective of the Iranians, and then do it as a dissertation. But it revealed a very different picture of what they were saying. And I got a lot
1:26:19 Speaker 02 of play in media, and that really threatened them. And they started to do everything they could to silence me. Later on, when we started Quincy, that became an even greater threat because we were trying to build bridges between the anti-war left and the anti-war right. For such a long-
1:26:34 Tucker Carlson? Andy Basovich was one of the people-
1:26:36 Speaker 02 Andy, Andrew Basovich, the absolute legend, was our first chairman and then one of the co-founders.
1:26:41 Tucker Carlson? Who had been, I mean, I first dealt with him when he, I worked at the Weekly Standard run by Bill Kristol, and he was writing for us-
1:26:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:26:49 Tucker Carlson? -at the time. I thought of him as a neocon. And then his son was killed-
1:26:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:26:54 Tucker Carlson? -in Iraq. And a war that was waged on behalf of Israeli interest, not American interest. And he changed, this is my read as someone who doesn't know him well-
1:27:04 Speaker 02 He changed before that.
1:27:05 Tucker Carlson? He did, okay.
1:27:05 Speaker 02 He was against the war from the outset. Towards the end of the 1990s, he, actually, after he left the military, he started to, I mean, I think he's one of the absolute sharpest and deepest American intellectual critics of American foreign policy.
1:27:20 Tucker Carlson? There's no question about that. I agree with you.
1:27:21 Speaker 02 And so, the tragic loss of his son happened already after he had completely turned against that foreign policy. He was against the Iraq war from the outset. His son still deployed, went there, and sadly got killed.
1:27:37 Speaker 02 But we were trying to build bridges between the anti-war left and the anti-war right. There had been collaboration between the two sides. Rokana was working with Mike Lee in the Senate, for instance, to prevent, stop the support for the war in Yemen. But it was episodic. It was never something structural. And we thought that if we can establish this institute that tried to marry the two, it would be a real strong counter to the uni-party war machine. And that became an even greater threat to the...
1:28:03 Tucker Carlson? But it remained this kind of tiny island in a sea of people who disagreed with you in Washington.
1:28:08 Speaker 02 Well, at least there's an island. There wasn't an island at all before we founded Quincy.
1:28:13 Tucker Carlson? I guess what I'm saying is, even though you represent 1/10th of 1% of, you know, opinion among powerful people in DC, but probably 80% of public opinion nationally.
1:28:26 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:28:27 Tucker Carlson? But within Washington, like, it's you and not many other people, they couldn't tolerate that.
1:28:33 Speaker 02 No, no, absolutely not. They don't tolerate anything. They don't tolerate the slightest question marks, because at the end of the day, if people start to question the very foundational premises of this foreign policy in a structured and then rational way, it's going to collapse. You can't defend this. You can only silence the voices that are trying to question it.
1:28:52 Tucker Carlson? That is the truest thing, right there. And the more reasonable you are, the bigger the threat you are.
1:28:59 Speaker 02 Absolutely, yeah. And I laid this out, tried, you know, on my Substack, trying to explain exactly what happened here. And I think the most critical thing that has caused this significant spike against these attacks, because, you know, look, they tried to silence me for a long time. They never elevated it to try to actually deport me. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, despite the fact, you're absolutely right, we're a small island in Washington, but nevertheless, there is an island now, and we are making inroads, and we certainly have the support of the American public. That is a massive threat.
1:29:32 Tucker Carlson? That's for sure. So this piece in Barry Weiss, who now, I guess, runs CNN and CBS...
1:29:39 Speaker 02 CNN, CBS.
1:29:40 Tucker Carlson? I gotta give her credit. I mean, she is just... You know, mid-level IQ, zero talent, very charming, relentless.
1:29:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:29:53 Tucker Carlson? Great with people. She's great with people. And on the right side of the donors and she has done, she has outperformed her ability like I've never seen it. Like, America still is a land of opportunity for certain kinds of people. Amazing. So she commissions this or runs this piece that claims something factually untrue, that the State Department is planning to deport you. Who wrote the piece?
1:30:18 Speaker 02 Uh, the guy's name is Jay Solomon, who is a former, um, he was fired from Wall Street Journal for ethical violations. He was apparently involved in an arms deal.
1:30:29 Tucker Carlson? What?
1:30:29 Speaker 02 With one of his sources in the region.
1:30:31 Tucker Carlson? As a reporter?
1:30:32 Speaker 02 As a reporter, yes. So they fired him in 2017, I believe.
1:30:37 Tucker Carlson? He was involved in an arms deal?
1:30:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this is all public. If I remember the details correctly, he was involved in a lot of different business deals with this source that he was relying on a lot for his reporting. And at least some of those, uh, uh, business deals were actually arms deals in the region. And he was covering the region.
1:30:57 Tucker Carlson? I've never heard of anything like that before. Wow.
1:30:59 Speaker 02 But it's, it's funny again, you know, you can be on, you can commit something as egregious as that. And still have a successful journalistic, uh, career afterwards, as long as you're on that side of the aisle. Cause that's where the money is.
1:31:13 Tucker Carlson? Barry Weiss can run CNN.
1:31:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:31:16 Tucker Carlson? Zero experience running any news organization, I mean, the whole thing. Yeah.
1:31:20 Speaker 02 And she made a name herself countering cancel culture and most of what she's doing right now is exactly that.
1:31:25 Tucker Carlson? Actually, she initially made a name for herself as a proponent of cancel culture, canceling people critical of Israel.
1:31:32 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:31:33 Tucker Carlson? At Columbia. So that, that's when I first read about her. I don't know. Next thing I know, she's like a conservative hero, someone who shares not a single, one of my beliefs or values at all. They're all repugnant to me, socially liberal, economically neoliberal. That, that's not the program that I thought I was defending. It's the opposite. Pride parades, monopoly capitalism, and bombing Iran. Okay, now, um, sorry. So I'm the third worlder. Yeah, okay. I'm the American, actually. Anyway, so she gets that guy to write a piece falsely claiming that the State Department is planning to deport you because you're not enthusiastic enough.
1:32:14 Speaker 02 I don't know if it was falsely in the sense that, again, I don't have full insight, but we had a lot of conversations, as well as folk inside the administration, that had made it clear this is not actually happening. And it may have been that there was a rogue element inside the administration who was wanted to push this. You know, Laura Loomer had been tweeting about this for weeks, trying to get me deported.
1:32:38 Tucker Carlson? Really?
1:32:38 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Laura Loomer had like 7,000 retweets on all of her tweets trying to get me deported. This has been going on for several weeks.
1:32:46 Tucker Carlson? Deported? How long have you been here?
1:32:48 Speaker 02 I've been here since 2001. I have three American kids. I love this country. I'm in the process of getting a citizenship, but...
1:32:56 Tucker Carlson? You've got three kids born here?
1:32:59 Speaker 02 Born here, absolutely, yeah. Born and bred here.
1:33:01 Tucker Carlson? Do you ever, um, are you on the SNAP program? Are you taking welfare?
1:33:04 Speaker 02 No.
1:33:07 Speaker 02 What?
1:33:08 Tucker Carlson? Are you an MS-13?
1:33:09 Speaker 02 I don't think I am. Last time I checked.
1:33:11 Tucker Carlson? Have you ever sold fentanyl?
1:33:12 Speaker 02 Never even seen it.
1:33:15 Tucker Carlson? So, but you're the priority?
1:33:17 Speaker 02 I'm the priority. Exactly, exactly.
1:33:19 Tucker Carlson? Interesting.
1:33:20 Speaker 02 So it seems like, again, a theory, I can't claim that I have full evidence for it, that there were some people inside that wanted to get this done, who thought that this hit piece would further push, um, the State Department internal process to move it forward. They even produced an AI video of me getting arrested by ICE. It's actually, I mean, it scared a lot of my family members because it's so realistic. They even got my ball spot right in the AI video. And at the end of that video, there's a smiling Marco Rubio. And it really made it clear, he is the audience for this video because the statue that they're using, he is the ultimate decision maker on this.
1:34:04 Tucker Carlson? And what's the statute? Are you in violation of immigration law?
1:34:07 Speaker 02 I don't know the full details of it, but essentially that the State Department determines that someone who is on a green card is acting against the US's interest. And the case they would use for that in me is that I've opposed this war. I opposed it for 25 years. I've argued so strongly against what we have now seen. There's no longer a theoretical argument. It's practical. We've seen what a disaster this is. I've argued in favor of diplomacy, argued in favor of a different approach to the region, a different relationship, not a hostile relationship to Israel, but nevertheless, a different, much more healthy relationship. And that they are trying to say is a threat to US national interests and the basis for getting me deported.
1:34:46 Tucker Carlson? Well, this is what happens when you, this is the logical outcome of conflating Israeli interests and American interests. Or whatever Netanyahu says Israeli interests are.
1:34:55 Speaker 02 And remember, I mean, that very premise is something they would even disagree with because there's no such thing as a difference between them. They're one and the same. So you're not conflating two different things. Israel and America's interests from their perspective is the same.
1:35:12 Tucker Carlson? So you're not getting deported that you know of?
1:35:14 Speaker 02 Not that I know of, but I don't think this episode is entirely over. I think this first attempt by them probably backfired. There was also a lot of public support that came out that was completely organic. We had nothing to do with that, that I think was potentially a factor in all of this. I suspect that it was, but I don't, again, as we talked about.
1:35:35 Tucker Carlson? I want to add to that organic public support.
1:35:37 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:35:38 Tucker Carlson? Because I think you're one of the most reasonable pro-American voices on this question.
1:35:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, but as you said before, they're relentless. And I am, and the work of Quincy is not designed to be against them. It's designed to be in favor of a much better American foreign policy that actually serves US interests and serves the American people. It doesn't serve the American people to be in these endless wars. It doesn't serve the American people that so much of our involvement in the world is not even structured to be based on our interests, but is based on the interests of our allies. I mean, if you take a look at it, any average think tank report in Washington DC. On the Middle East, if they even would bother to define what the US interests in
1:36:25 Speaker 02 the region is, and oftentimes they don't even do that. But if they do, it would be a long list of things. And at the end, it would be stand with our allies, as if that is a core vital interest. What does that mean? That's a catch-all variable that means whatever interest they have is now suddenly our interest, because we have to stand by them. This is part of the reason why we're at war all the time, because the bar for us to use military force, the bar for what is a vital interest, has just essentially been pushed down to the very ground.
1:36:54 Tucker Carlson? Whatever some foreign politician wants.
1:36:56 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:36:57 Tucker Carlson? I do think Gaza changes everything. You can't do something like that and get away with it. They will not get away with it. In the end, they will be punished for what they've done. Everyone knows what they've done. And anyone who defends it will be diminished at best, punished at worst, as anyone who defended the Nazis was in the end. And their memory is soiled for all time, because whatever else you did, you defended the Nazis. And no normal person thinks that's good. It's awful.
1:37:29 Speaker 02 It's absolutely terrible.
1:37:30 Tucker Carlson? And defending the genocide in Gaza is not different from that, no matter what they say.
1:37:36 Speaker 02 And we're also going to have to reckon with our role in this.
1:37:41 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, we made it possible.
1:37:44 Speaker 02 And it started under Biden, of course, and you know, Biden explicitly, well, I don't know if he used the term, but they said that the strategy they had was to bear hug Israel, give it everything it wants, and as a result of that, have leverage to be able to constrain the Israelis. It's a completely nonsensical and idiotic approach. First of all, it presumes that the US doesn't have leverage with Israel unless it first gives Israel everything it wants. The United States has tremendous amount of leverage with Israel. It's just that we don't have politicians with a backbone to use that leverage.
1:38:20 Speaker 02 But the idea that once you've given them everything, suddenly they would not go and act as recklessly as they did, is of course also nonsensical. It was obvious that if we never imposed any cost, in which the Biden administration even lied to Congress, Tony Blinken lied to Congress, about the fact that the State Department itself had concluded in their reports that the Israelis were violating international law in a manner that would, according to US law, not make them eligible for military support any longer. But lied to Congress and said that that was not the case, that they have not come to any such finding, whereas in reality they had. But they suppressed those reports and you had several people resigning, of course, from the administration. Not as many as I wish of seeing.
1:39:03 Speaker 02 In fact, I think it was a big point of shame for the Democratic Party that there were so few of them.
1:39:09 Tucker Carlson? Samantha Power, who wrote a book scolding the world for tolerating genocide in Rwanda in 1994, aided and abetted genocide, she did, sorry. And then it's very defensive and you can ask her about it in Gaza. But it almost doesn't matter. Like, everyone's internalized this upside-down moral structure where criticizing the killing of innocents is the crime. No, killing innocents is the crime. We're supposed to object to that. And we're just in upside-down world, but everything returns to true north in the end, because it's nature.
1:39:48 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:39:49 Tucker Carlson? And anyone who has defended this or participated in it, knowingly sent money to it, made excuses for it, attacked its critics, all of those people are going to, at some point, be treated as abettors of Nazism, have been treated for the last 80 years, which has, you know, accomplices to a crime.
1:40:07 Speaker 02 And we're going to see the reckoning of that in the Democratic Party, I hope, because whatever yet happens, whether they win in 2028 or not, there's going to have to be a reckoning. There's going to be... People rising up in that party and their challenge to the existing leadership is very much going to center on Gaza. And the fact that the DNC report-
1:40:28 Tucker Carlson? Because it's a conversation under.
1:40:30 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:40:31 Tucker Carlson? It's like, "You're lecturing me? Oh, I'm sorry, you support the genocide in Gaza? I don't have to listen to you. What are you even talking about? Adults are talking, right?
1:40:40 Speaker 02 And you saw the DNC report that was going to be an autopsy of why they lost, and they didn't even mention the word Gaza in it. So they're still afraid of touching this subject. And that's going to be, again, part of the reason why I'm skeptical about their ability to be able to make the type of changes that are necessary, unless they have a complete overhaul of that leadership of that party.
1:40:57 Tucker Carlson? It's just crazy. I'm sorry, I will stop after this, but it's like, I don't like moral lectures. I regret when I give them. I really don't like receiving them. The self-righteousness is disgusting. It's prohibited in Christianity, by the way. But I just noticed a connection between the people committing or making excuses for the worst crimes of my life are also the most self-righteous. And the most to call themselves victims and like attack you? It's like, what? Have you noticed this?
1:41:27 Speaker 02 Oh, absolutely. I know it's, you know, it's a self-protection mechanism.
1:41:32 Tucker Carlson? Of course it is. And I guess we all do it.
1:41:35 Speaker 02 Not to have to deal with the reality that they supported a genocide.
1:41:40 Tucker Carlson? You're right. And it's not just supporters of Israel. It's like, it's all of us. We're all that way. People are that way. I'm sure I've been that way. And I don't want to be self-righteous in my attack on self-righteousness. Because I do think people have that capacity, but it's so ugly.
1:41:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then when you make it into a foreign policy doctrine, in which we're going to run around and just lecture every other country-
1:42:08 Tucker Carlson? You're right.
1:42:09 Speaker 02 And think that all they're yearning for in those countries is for us to come and save them and recreate them in our image. I mean, this is highly, highly problematic. And again, something I think the younger American demographic is not in line with at all. Recognizing that we have plenty of learn from everyone else, and they have plenty to learn from us. But you only learn it if it's a two-way street and if it's voluntarily. No one is running around really thinking that their 5,000-year culture needs and some sort of Americanization and neoliberalism and McDonald's on every street corner. You know, we have to be humble about these things.
1:42:43 Tucker Carlson? We have to be humble about everything.
1:42:46 Tucker Carlson? So for people who've made it through these two hours and want to know more about your views and what you think the right path forward is, where do they go?
1:42:56 Speaker 02 They should go to the Quincy Institute's website, which is QuincyINST.org. We have also a foreign policy magazine online, ResponsibleStateCraft.com, or .org, sorry, that has really become one of the biggest.
1:43:10 Tucker Carlson? It sure has.
1:43:11 Speaker 02 And it's frequently cited even by mainstream media now. And it's really a home for this alternative restraint and realism line of thinking, which is getting so much support.
1:43:22 Tucker Carlson? You've been proven right, so that helps.
1:43:23 Speaker 02 Yeah. And they can go to my Substack, which is TreatUpHarvey.substack.com or to Twitter. But we're out there. We're going to continue to fight and get our views out there. And, you know, you mentioned that we're an island, but that was the entire point. You have to take the fight to Washington at the end of the day.
1:43:39 Tucker Carlson? Well, it actually worked, and I do think you have a reality on your side.
1:43:44 Speaker 02 It's a good thing to have on your side.
1:43:45 Tucker Carlson? I know. Treat Up Harvey, thank you very much for doing this.
1:43:48 Speaker 02 Thank you so much for having me.
1:43:49 Tucker Carlson? I appreciate it.
1:43:49 Speaker 02 Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Previous MAJOR SHIFT: Will Trump Split From Israel? Israeli Journalist on the Critical Situation in Iran. Next Trump Puts Bibi in His Place & Neocon Heads Implode Over Peace in Iran. Tucker & Piers Morgan React. Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
