transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] So it could be that we just can't stop certain missiles, like the hypersonic missiles, and even if we can stop maybe the less advanced missiles, the cost ratio is so unfavorable that we can't keep it up, and we literally don't have the stockpiles necessary to actually fight an extended war, an extended missile war. I like to refer to this as the first missile war, where Iran doesn't, in this case, Iran doesn't really have an air force. It's not relying on its Navy. It's not relying on its ground forces. What it's really relying on is missiles and drones, and you can think of drones as just cheaper, slower missiles to some extent. I was not surprised at what's happened. People who carefully study the military, the actual events even in the first week of the war, will note that very, very expensive, essentially irreplaceable billion-dollar long-range radar facilities that the US and Israel maintain were destroyed by Iran in the first days of the war. That is consistent with my thesis that Iran has some advanced missiles.

Speaker 2:
[01:27] Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of Seeking Truth From Facts. Today, I'm very pleased to be joined by Steve Hsu, a friend of the show and a regular on the show, to talk about the current year political developments. How's it going, Steve?

Speaker 1:
[01:41] I am great, Alf, it's great to be with you, and there's so much to talk about happening between the United States and Iraq.

Speaker 2:
[01:49] Indeed, of course, we've spoken before about the possibility of an American-Israeli regime change war against Iran and the difficulties that that would entail, and we're of course well and truly there now. How do you think this came to happen and which party do you think was in the driving seat in pushing the decision to go to war over the line?

Speaker 1:
[02:12] Yeah, I want to caution everybody epistemically that when things like this happen, whether it's the details of the actual military operations or the decision process, we have incomplete information, so I'm not necessarily expressing high conviction in any of these things, but I think that Trump was emboldened by the success in Venezuela. I think he was told by the Israelis that they had very strong intelligence in Iran and that this could be a short regime change operation. There's a joke in Israel about Mossad operations in Iran that there are so many Israeli spies in Iran that they bump into each other and they don't know when they're actually accidentally talking to another Mossad agent in Iran, so they could easily have tried to sell Trump that they had very good intelligence of what was going on in Iran and that they could easily affect regime change.

Speaker 2:
[03:13] I know there was a lot of discussion around Rubio's statement regarding why the US got involved and some were suggesting that it appeared that Israel was in the driving seat. What do you make of that?

Speaker 1:
[03:27] Yeah, I guess I take Rubio's statement at face value. Why would he say that? Well, anyway, it seems plausible to me what he said. I do want to note as someone who voted for Trump that one of the main reasons I voted for him was I thought he wouldn't get pulled into a war of choice against Iran, whereas maybe Kamala would. I may have judged it incorrectly and I may have underrated the strength of the Israeli influence on Trump perhaps through Epstein kind of compromise. I mean, of course, most people say that's conspiracy theory type stuff, but I think it's not completely implausible. In any case, they did somehow get him to go along with it, whereas they had been trying, BB has been trying for something like 40 years and through multiple presidencies, trying to get the US to attack Iran, and now they finally got us to do it.

Speaker 2:
[04:26] And it seems like there are other sources of Israeli influence on Trump as well as like Miriam Adelson or Jared Kushner, of course, who have quite longstanding ties with the Netanyahu family. And so the war lasted just over a month before the recent round of peace talks, which we'll get into later. So the expectations of Iranian performance going into the war, well, I think is fair to say quite low, especially given the strategic losses they've sustained in recent years. But I think it's also fair to say that Iran has outperformed most of these expectations, appearing to have rendered most US military bases in the region at least temporarily inoperable, whilst the damage that has been done to Israel remains somewhat unclear. Crucially, Iran now appears to have control over the strait before moves, which doesn't appear to be dissipating anytime soon, although that's still to be determined. What do you think led to Iran outperforming expectations in this way?

Speaker 1:
[05:24] Yeah, so this is probably the major focus of my interest in this conflict. This conflict does have major geopolitical implications and also implications for energy resources. But to me, the most important aspect of it is what it tells us about military technological capabilities of the US primarily, and what the implications are for a potential conflict in the Western Pacific between the US and China. So hopefully, we'll return to that in a moment. I was not surprised at how well Iran performed. So in my analysis of the 12-day conflict that happened earlier, I concluded that missile defense was not nearly as effective as establishment media in Israel and the United States leads the average person to believe. So this is a long-standing thing I've discussed on my podcast.

Speaker 2:
[06:18] I believe we discussed on a previous episode last year as well.

Speaker 1:
[06:21] Yeah. So I think missile defense is much harder than what people think. You can discuss this at two levels. One, can you actually intercept modern missiles, perhaps hypersonic missiles or ordinary ballistic missiles, but which have maneuvering capability on re-entry? I think that's actually quite hard. Even if you can intercept those missiles, the capabilities of the interceptors have to be very superior to the missiles that they're trying to hit. This is basic physics at play, and so the cost ratio has to be extremely unfavorable to the defender. So it could be that we just can't stop certain missiles like the hypersonic missiles, and even if we can stop maybe the less advanced missiles, the cost ratio is so unfavorable that we can't keep it up, and we literally don't have the stockpiles necessary to actually fight an extended war, an extended missile war. I like to refer to this as the first missile war, where Iran doesn't, in this case, Iran doesn't really have an air force. It's not relying on its Navy. It's not relying on its ground forces. What it's really relying on is missiles and drones, and you can think of drones as just like cheaper, slower missiles to some extent. I was not surprised at what's happened. People who carefully study the military, the actual events even in the first week of the war, will note that very, very expensive, essentially irreplaceable billion-dollar, long-range radar facilities that the US and Israel maintain were destroyed by Iran in the first days of the war. That is consistent with my thesis that Iran has some advanced missiles. Those missiles are very hard to stop, either because they're advanced hypersonic missiles, which can't be shot down at all, or they created some kind of combined attack involving both missiles and slow drones, but timing things to arrive at the same time, that overwhelmed the defensive systems. Now, if there's anything you want to protect, it's a $1 billion radar system, which once it's out of commission, can't be replaced for many years, and once it's out of commission, you cannot see the launches of missiles from very far off. One interesting aspect of this is that the warning sirens in Tel Aviv in the past have given people quite a long time, many minutes, to find their way to a bomb shelter. Reportedly, once this war got going, and once these radar systems were destroyed, the warnings were sort of as short as 30 seconds, or maybe there was no warning, and incoming Iranian missiles would hit targets. For listeners who find what I'm saying shocking because they read the establishment media and credulously believe what the establishment media tells you about what's happening there, I would just say you should be epistemically very cautious about claims from either side during a conflict. And if you're older and you've actually lived through a war, so if you remember what public briefings by General Westmoreland were like during Vietnam, or you remember public communications about what was happening in Iraq or Afghanistan, you realize there's no limit to how much these people will lie. I mean, once you have troops at risk, the moral calculus is such that a lie to a journalist is nothing compared to an advantage you would get in a war where your actual people are at risk. And so just remember that, like everything goes out the window once you're really fighting a war and everything is lies. And strategically, it's justified in the minds of the military and the politicians to lie once it's a war. So you just have to be very, very careful about the information that you're getting.

Speaker 2:
[10:05] I also wasn't particularly shocked by everyone's performance here, because of course, I think both you and I have been following the development of missile defense over the past years and going back, in my case at least, to the war in Yemen, where the kind of patriot systems that were given to Saudi Arabia proved to be pretty ineffective against the drones that the Houthis were sending towards the Aramco facilities and which ultimately led Saudi Arabia to make kind of peace in Yemen. Another example of what you described there, one involving Israel and one which we actually have some empirical evidence is, obviously in the 90s when Iraq, obviously then led by Saddam Hussein was sending Scud missiles into Israel, they claimed a very, very high rate of interception when later independent analyses found that those estimates were way off.

Speaker 1:
[11:02] Yeah, that's a good example of reporting during wartime being 100 percent wrong. It could be wrong because one side is deliberately trying to hide some embarrassing facts about how things are going, or it could just be during the heat of battle, there's a lot of misanalysis, it's hard to know what's really going on. You mentioned what back in those days was called the Great Scud Hunt. So Scuds were a very primitive Soviet era missile that the Iraqis had, and the Iranians have improved missiles, generally Scud level or better. One of the big questions about this conflict is, to what extent can Israeli and US forces find launchers of Iranian missiles and take them out? And those could be mobile launchers that are sort of hiding and then launching a missile and then moving. They could also be very complicated underground complexes, which are built into mountains and which have many, many exit tunnels. And from those tunnels, they can launch, either launch missiles or send out mobile launchers. And the US can generally find the entrances to these tunnels and maybe drop some bombs or actually, we haven't actually dropped that many bombs. Mostly we've been using standoff weapons, which is a whole other topic if we get into the military details we should talk about. But we can attack those entrances and exits to the tunnel systems, but then they can clear them out again. So it's very unclear how successful the United States has been and Israel have been in reducing the launch capability and the missile stockpiles of Iran. I'm not convinced at all that we've done a great job. You can see intelligence estimates, official intelligence estimates all over the map, saying, oh, we got rid of two-thirds of them, or we got rid of half of them, but it just shows you they don't really know. And so I would not be surprised if Iran has had a significant reduction, like half their stuff is gone, but the other half still remains. But I also would not be surprised if most of it's still there. And so that's one very important aspect of the conflict. Something else I'll point out for the listener who's like, just doesn't believe this picture of how things work, that missiles are actually, in a way, a kind of dominant kind of weapons platform, even over like our advanced air force. Our aircraft carriers operate one to 2,000 miles away from Iran, okay? And that makes life extremely difficult for the aviators because they have to do refueling in order to be able to fly close enough to launch their missiles and then come back. So if we are operating that far away from Iran, there is a good reason for it because there's a very negative consequence of operating that far away, but we are. And the good reason is that we actually are worried that Iranian missiles and drones can cause significant damage to our aircraft carriers and other ships. And so that's another piece of information that says that, if we ever go up against the Chinese or even the Russians, our Navy would be hiding the whole time. Our Navy would be literally hiding from the other side because of the effectiveness of missiles and drones.

Speaker 2:
[14:25] Now, over the past few days, we saw a temporary ceasefire emerge at the last minute on the back of Trump, threatening civilizational annihilation. Who do you think has the leverage in these peace talks? And how likely do you think they are to result in anything meaningful in the long term?

Speaker 1:
[14:44] So we're recording on Sunday, April 12th, and probably some events will have evolved before this episode is actually released. What I just read in the Financial Times and New York Times right before we got on to record, is that Trump is now threatening to block the flow through the Straits. So the Iranians are blocking, are still blocking the Straits because the negotiations have collapsed. And now Trump is saying, if any country that pays Iran to allow its ships to pass through the Straits, the US. Navy will block. So that could be the next thing is that some Chinese ships that are going through or even ships going to bound for the UK or something, the US is saying that it will actually stop and board those ships. Now, that could easily lead to World War III, so who knows if Trump or the US. Navy would dare to actually pursue this strategy. It's something that Trump literally just announced, I think, in the last couple hours. So I think when the negotiation started, I thought there was very little chance the two sides would converge because the 10 key points that Iran insisted on as quote the basis for the talks, very few of those points, perhaps none of them are things that would be politically palatable for Trump to agree to from the US perspective. So it does seem that two sides are at loggerheads and I just don't, it doesn't seem like it's going to be easy for there to be a compromise.

Speaker 2:
[16:18] You mentioned not long ago that this war is, of course, occurring in the wider context of the US-China competition and we can discuss various aspects of that. Of course, China, the kind of normally talking point on this is that China gets much of its oil from the region, affected whilst Trump claims the US doesn't need Middle Eastern oil. Obviously, he seems to be forgetting the other oils are global commodity, prices which is affected by global shocks. But nevertheless, what do you think the effects of this war will be of China competition?

Speaker 1:
[16:53] Yeah, so I would say coming back to the first question you asked me, that most of the cause of this war really is the Israelis BB wanting it. And so I believe it was a war of choice. It was not an existential situation for the United States. We can talk about the Iranian nuclear program in a minute. But I do not think this was an existential question for the United States. I think we were basically, for some reason or another, compelled to do this for Israeli interests. But some Trump supporters, some MAGA type people, immediately jumped in and said, the subset of MAGA people who don't want to blame this on BB or Israel, jumped in and said, no, no, the reason we're doing this is because if we can seize control of Iran and the straits of Hormuz, this would give us a big geopolitical negotiating advantage over China, because China does get a very large portion of its fossil fuels, oil and gas, from the Middle East. So that was another justification for this. So in that scenario, had we won a quick victory, as with Maduro, and caused regime change in Iran, and then suddenly a friendly regime was in power in Iran, kind of coming back to, for example, the Shah, that would be a big problem for China, because in order to get its oil from the Gulf, the oil has to pass through the Straits of Hormuz, and then that would be under the control of a US puppet regime, right? So that would have been the best outcome for the US., a short war that caused regime change, and then installing a friendly regime, which then controls the Straits of Hormuz. So I think that's the best thing you can say for this, is it was a gamble to try to do that. I don't think the assumption that regime change was going to be easy or was very realistic. I think that's sort of typical old school neocon talk about the people being ready to overthrow a bad regime and they all want to be Americans or something, which is just, I think, profoundly unrealistic. I'm not an Iran expert, but my understanding of the situation in Iran is that the regime is not as fragile as those people might have thought. So now the question is of the China. My understanding is that they have a very large stockpile, which they've been building of petrofossil fuels. I think it's something like 1.4 billion barrels of oil that they've stockpiled, so it's almost a year's worth of resources. They also can get oil from the Russians. I think they've also increased their buying from Mexico during this period. I don't think it's that easy to corner them over fossil fuels, but it is a definite concern of China's. I think they would prefer to be able to buy oil from Iran, and buy oil from Saudi Arabia, etc.

Speaker 2:
[19:52] You mentioned the other justification on the US side for this war, which was Iran's nuclear program. My thinking on that, the 12-day war and the strikes on Fordow were supposed to have neutralized Iran's nuclear program. It can't really be true at the same time that those strikes were successful, and feel we need to go in, the American needs to go in and annihilate their nuclear program. I don't know what's going on now. I don't know what you make of that.

Speaker 1:
[20:23] Well, that's another example of, again, I say this to younger people who haven't been through this, but someone who reads the news carefully and thinks for themselves, after living through a couple of wars, just realizes that everything is lies during wartime. During the 12-day conflict, as you said, at the end, we said, Trump came on and said, we dropped these MOABs and we really set back their nuclear program, so now we can call it quits. I think the background for that is they were realizing that there was no way they could continue to defend Israel against the missile launches from Iran, and that really drove them to want to just call it quits.

Speaker 2:
[21:01] I mean, I've also heard rumors that Israel were taking quite big hits and were asking for a kind of ceasefire by that point.

Speaker 1:
[21:09] Exactly. I think that's probably true, but in any case, either they were lying then or they're lying now. Right? So either they actually destroy the Iranian nuclear program or they're lying now about that program being an existential threat that's worth going to war over. Someone in the Trump administration is lying about this. Either they were lying then or they're lying now. Now regarding the nuclear program of Iran, the previous leader whom we killed during, while we were negotiating, supposedly negotiating, we killed the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, and he had issued a fatwa which said, because nuclear weapons tend to kill more civilians than military people, this is not a moral kind of weapon that Muslims can use. And I find it convincing that that fatwa was part of what held back the Iranian nuclear program. I think the Iranians, actually, given that they have, you know, 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, could, if they want, sprint to what is called a gun-style fission bomb. So that was the, I believe, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which was never tested. That design was never tested because it's so simple. It's basically just a block of uranium that you fire another, which has a sort of region in the middle that's empty, and then you fire a shape of a uranium that fits into that empty volume, and when the two are together, then it goes to criticality, and you get a 15 kiloton explosion, like the Hiroshima bomb. And everything I understand says that they have enough centrifuges, they could sprint toward 92% or whatever it is, enrichment in a few weeks, and then they could build a gun type bomb. But they were restraining themselves from doing it because, number one, their previous supreme leader said it wasn't a moral thing to do, to have that kind of weapon. Number two, there are many cosmopolitans, people tend to regard all of our quote enemy regimes as being monolithic, and they don't realize every society has multiple competing interests. Factions, there are plenty of cosmopolitans who just wanted to like, they would say, we don't need nuclear weapons, let's not build this and then hopefully we can normalize trade with Europe and other places.

Speaker 2:
[23:36] There are even moderates in the current regime right now. Of course, the president, Pazeshkian is believed to be of that faction. There have been of the past as well, people like Zarif and Rouhani, believed to be of the moderate wing, who whilst they've seemed to have become less powerful in recent years, still they still have a voice at the higher level of Iranian leadership.

Speaker 1:
[24:01] Well, I believe my two leading hypotheses for what's happening right now is either the IRGC and hardliners have gained enough control over the system now because we assassinated the previous supreme leader, his son is taken over, his son is someone who is much more aggressive and has argued in the past against that thought, as far as I understand. So he doesn't believe it's immoral, especially when Iran is facing an existential war against nuclear armed countries, i.e. Israel and the United States. I think he would say it's okay for them to race for a bomb. And so my two hypotheses are one, they have decided to race for a bomb and they're just quietly doing it. Or the other one is, oh, there's still disagreement in the leadership and they're not sure whether they're going to race for the bomb. And so they're maybe they're not doing it yet, but I think they're capable of doing it faster than most people think. And they do have advanced missile systems so they can deliver the bomb once it's made. They could build some number of, you know, maybe half a dozen or a dozen of these bombs relatively quickly if we keep pushing them to. And what we're doing is, you know, guaranteed to like strengthen the case of the people who want to build that bomb. Because once they have that bomb, we're going to leave them alone. I mean, you know, Look at North Korea. Yeah, exactly like North Korea. Barring some tail risk thing where Bibi just goes nuts and says, oh, they've got the bomb, launch immediately.

Speaker 2:
[25:28] Bounce an option, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:30] Yeah, barring that tail risk, I think generally we're going to leave them alone. If they suddenly declare, we have 10, 15 kiloton bombs.

Speaker 2:
[25:39] I mean, think if they do a test and it becomes observable, but they have one.

Speaker 1:
[25:43] Yeah, I don't even think they have to have a test. They could just say, look, we built this conservative shitty kind of bomb, but it was good enough to destroy a Roshan, okay? We now have 10 of them and just leave us alone. What are you going to do? I think the US planners are going to have to take that pretty seriously.

Speaker 2:
[26:01] I don't know to what degree you think, because of course for about at least 30 years, there's been this, do they, don't they? You have a bomb and it seems they have had the capacity to build one at some speed for quite a while. To what degree do you think that represents them hedging?

Speaker 1:
[26:19] I think they've had the capability. The enrichment is the hard step and building the gun type bomb is pretty easy for them. They have pretty advanced missiles. They're not as advanced as the Russian or Chinese missiles, but you can see they're pretty good. So I think they've had the capacity to do this. They haven't pushed super hard on the enrichment. I think they were happy with the JCPOA. And so what happened is when Trump, Trump one pulled out of the JCPOA and that's when they enriched to 60%. Now it's much harder to go from zero to 60% than it is to go from 60 to 90 plus percent, which is what you need to actually have a functional bomb. So the last step that they have remaining is pretty small, but they made the big step because the stupid Americans reneged on the JCPOA. So then they said, okay, fine, we're going to do this, right? So the whole thing is a, it's just a comedy of errors really.

Speaker 2:
[27:18] And then moving back to what we were talking about a bit earlier about how this relates to the US-China competition. What do you think the dynamics particularly that makes to missile defense and Iran's use of missile technology, what do you think that says about how a hypothetical US-China war could unfold?

Speaker 1:
[27:38] Let's break this up into two pieces. One is the military technology, what we learn about missile war and military technology from this conflict. And the second thing is the geopolitical reverberations of what just happened. On the first topic, I think, again, it's just crazy, you can't find very much good analysis on this. But for people who understand the physics of missile defense, understand remote sensing. So for example, probably the Iranian, some of the improvements in their performance, both of drones and of missiles came from access to the Chinese Beidou system, which is better than GPS and harder to jam, so that they could improve their accuracy by, the Chinese could easily send a plain load of chips that allow the Russian missiles to use the Beidou system for targeting and geolocation. Those could be installed on drones as well. So there are all kinds of reasons to think that the US failed to defeat the Houthis when they tried to block the Red Sea. They couldn't shoot down missiles that very easily, missiles that the Houthis were launching. They can't shoot down the more advanced Iranian missiles. Maybe they can shoot down the less advanced Iranian missiles, but the cost factor, the cost ratio is so high that they're kind of out of interceptors. They're actually taking interceptors from South Korea and other places, which looks really bad to our allies in Asia. So I think now if we transpose this to the Western Pacific, the distances are much vaster. I think drones are a little bit less important in that theater. It's really missiles. But I think, and I've maintained this for the last 10 years, US carrier operations and US bases would be subject to attack from missiles launched from the mainland or from ships or from submarines, whatever you want, that are highly accurate in which we can't shoot down. And so our carrier groups would, just as they do in the actual war games, retreat to the edge of the map in order to survive. The bases can't move. So the radar systems, the power systems, all kinds of important things at the bases would get knocked down very quickly. And the whole thing would be, not saying somehow the US couldn't eventually prevail, but certainly would be extremely bloody and costly. And there would be a huge shock to US ordinary people in the US from such a violent conflict in its early days. So I think that's, I think anybody who disputes that is just not, not paying attention to what's happening. Now, in terms of geopolitical reverberations, every ally of the US is watching, is observing some things like when a country like Iran, which is really a poor backward country, it's been subject to sanctions for a long time. However, they have a core of technically able people who have built up their missile and drone programs. When a country like that really stands up to the US and is willing to take damage, they're willing to take bombing, they're willing to suffer casualties, but they have effective weapon systems that can threaten US bases and the US Navy. The US can't beat them. And so all of these other countries are realizing this. So this illusion of US military supremacy is being eroded fast. So that's one huge consequence. Allies in Asia that have to choose between being a little bit friendlier to China and a little bit less subservient to the US or vice versa, they're looking at this and saying, well, when push came to shove, the US pulled all kinds of defensive systems from our inventories and sent them to protect Israel. So they're not gonna forget that calculus that basically the US didn't, for all this talk about pivoting to Asia and et cetera, when push came to shove, the US really cares more about Israel for some reason, somehow our system has to prioritize the interests of Israel and not so much the interests of South Korea, for example. I think the South Koreans are hopping mad over installing these THAAD systems many years ago, that kind of poisoned for some period of time their relationship with Beijing. But now when push comes to shove, we like pack up the THAAD system and send it to the Middle East to protect Israel. So this kind of thing is not lost on people in that region. And so it just makes the US seem like a less powerful and also less reliable ally.

Speaker 2:
[32:33] Moving back to the ways in which this is related to the US-China competition, one thing that's emerged recently is that Iran is now charging Yuan, the Chinese Yuan, to the ships, passing through the strait. So what impact do you think the world will have on dollar hegemony?

Speaker 1:
[32:51] I think it's quite bad for dollar hegemony. I mean, all these Gulf countries, let's look at the logic. So they were forced to price their oil in dollars, and that was part of the security arrangement. United States provided security for them. They then had to comply by selling the oil in dollars and then recycling the dollars through US treasuries and things like this, investments in the United States, et cetera. Now that security arrangement is very much in jeopardy, right? Because they saw the US both couldn't protect them from Iran very well, and also didn't really expend as many resources to protect them as it would expend to protect Israel. So I think all of these GCC countries are recalibrating their relationship with the United States. I think it could be a disaster for us.

Speaker 2:
[33:44] Moving to the American home front, this war is unprecedented in recorded American history in terms of its unpopularity at the outset. The situation is made particularly acute by the fact that, as you mentioned, President Trump heard run on an America Firth Peace Ticket, and a promise of not getting involved in foreign wars, and especially not for the sake of foreign countries. What do you think the long-term effects of this war on American politics could be?

Speaker 1:
[34:13] Yes, this is a great question because if you look at polling, the Dems are already pretty anti-Israel, and now you have this big fracture within the right, within the MAGA movement, with people like Tucker Carlson coming out explicitly saying, hey, this war in Iran should have never happened. It only happened because of disproportionate influence of pro-Israeli political forces or possibly compromise, getting Trump to do this. And so US politics is going to be, I think, heavily fractured. And I think it's going to be very hard for politicians that are very, very pro-Israel to survive because if they're on the right, their base is kind of fractured. If on their left, the very strong majority disfavors that position. And I think BB understood this. I mean, I think you can find actual sort of not even hot mic, but just recorded conversations between BB and others where they sort of see this sort of political movement or change happening in the United States. And that probably also led to his urgency to carry this out now because, you know, another term from now, I don't think he'll be able to get this kind of war going.

Speaker 2:
[35:33] One figure on the American right who's been consistently against this war and those like it, as you mentioned, is Tucker Carlson. So, I mean, looking specifically, looking forward to the 2020 election, and on particularly the Republican primary. So it seems that Vance and Rubio will really struggle to distance themselves from this war. This is assuming it continues. And yeah, the most consistent voice against it has been Tucker. So what potential do you see for a Tucker 2028 presidential bid?

Speaker 1:
[36:10] I personally would like to see Tucker run for president because I think a lot of the, you know, I don't follow him that carefully. So maybe there's some crazy alien stuff or, you know, other conspiracy theory type stuff that he advocates that I find crazy. But on this particular issue, I think it would be good for real American populace to raise these issues. I mean, Trump raised all these issues himself. It's saying that, you know, these wars are all losers for the average American. They don't help the average American, their mistakes. And then he went ahead and did it. So there has to be some campaign where people who, you know, I don't want to say true MAGA people, but people who have the interests of the average American in mind and want to advocate for those interests and are willing to call out what Trump did, which is promise X and then do not X. So stay out of a war with Iran, but oh, well, no, we're going to launch a war against Iran. I mean, I think someone like Tucker needs to run, just to point this out to the American electorate.

Speaker 2:
[37:17] I think last night, actually, I saw some very interesting polling on Tucker. And what it showed is that, I think, among independents, views amongst independents are roughly evenly split between those who have a negative opinion, who have no opinion, who have a positive opinion. And something like even 20% of Democrats, it showed, have a report having a somewhat positive opinion of Tucker Carlson. And I think it was something like 25% of or a third of independents. So I don't know what's going on there. It seems he does have, despite being decidedly on the right, it seems he does have a kind of cross-ideological appeal.

Speaker 1:
[38:02] Well, I think a lot of just average people, if you listen to Tucker in short chunks, you kind of get the feeling he's a likable guy, he's not an idiot, and he cares about the average person. And his basic principles are pretty populist, so they could appeal across both parties to some extent. So yeah, I don't see why. I mean, I think he, obviously, there's lots of, there's a big long path between here and there, but I think he could be a viable candidate.

Speaker 2:
[38:34] I asked Ryan Otham, we did touch on this a bit already. We've discussed before on the show as well how support for Israel amongst Americans is declining quite significantly. This is occurring, and it has occurred on the left and is occurring on the right. And it's particularly concentrated, I think the particular importance is that it's concentrated amongst young people, both young ordinary voters as well as a lot of reports suggesting young party staffers. And this may well present a serious challenge for Israel going forward. So, I mean, how do you think this war, do you think this war will have accelerated this loss of support?

Speaker 1:
[39:13] Yes, I think absolutely. And again, like, you know, we don't really know the full story about this war. For example, did we actually deliberately hit twice, double tap, a school full of young girls? I mean, did we actually do that? Like, of course, the establishment media doesn't want to talk about this, but, you know, I think it actually happened. And I think we knew what that school was, and those were all daughters of people who are in the Iranian military. So I think this was a very cold blood, if it turns out that, you know, we did this intentionally, it really was a war crime. And so I just, I think this whole thing, the whole Iran, this war, voluntary war was just a loser for us. I believe it's accelerated the chances that they'll go for a bomb, for a nuclear bomb. I think it's degraded our reputation around the world. I think it's also exposed the weakness of our military. You know, we have the most powerful 20th century style military ever, okay? But it's a 20th century style military. It missed all of the stuff with drones and advanced missile systems, partially because we were so involved with wars against insurgencies and other non-peer militaries for 20 plus years. So we focused on that and we didn't try to build the systems that would be necessary to actually defeat, for example, China or Russia in a real peer conflict. Every time we go into action against somebody that has at least some level of capability, it just exposes the situation.

Speaker 2:
[40:48] We alluded this to our, this earlier and ran off this theme. What role do you think the Israel lobby has played in this whole conflict? And what do you think its prospects for survival in terms of not only loss of support but competing lobbies on behalf of, for example, Gulf countries, which now have more money than ever. What do you think its long-term prospects are?

Speaker 1:
[41:16] Well, it's interesting, you know, so there was this famous book written by Mearsheimer and Wald called The Israel Lobby. And it was very, very nuanced. They, you know, they took great pains to never bring up concepts like dual loyalty or ethnic affinity. They just said, this is an interest group funded from abroad and also funded domestically by wealthy, you know, pro-Israel donors. But the way it's organized, it has very, very strong influence on our politics, right? If you're a congressperson and you don't toe the line, I mean, this is a kind of one issue thing, right? It's like the level of your support for Israel. Go visit Israel as soon as you're elected. You know, if you deviate from that, they're going to run candidates against you and they're going to lavishly fund those candidates, right? And this goes all the way up to the presidential level. Mearsheimer and Walt pointed this out. They were basically excommunicated from elite discussion, elite discourse for I think about a decade. I actually discussed this with Mearsheimer when I taped my podcast with him. You know, it was very painful. So he went from someone who could not, who would regularly easily be able to publish an editorial in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, to someone who literally could not appear in elite media for really a long time. And he only kind of got rehabilitated recently because of the rise of things like YouTube and podcasts. And in fact, it was because he more or less predicted what was going to happen in Ukraine that NATO expansion was going to lead to a nonlinear back reaction from the Russian side, and this would be a bloody war. You know, he sort of came back into the public eye because of that. But still, when, you know, that there was a speech he gave that has something like 30 million views on YouTube, that talk sort of brought him back into the public eye. But even then, I don't think he could get an editorial in the Wall Street Journal with the New York Times. Maybe now he's more fully rehabilitated, but it just goes to show the power of this lobby slash interest group in America. And I think Americans are not allowed to talk about this. Even the comments I just made could get me into trouble. However, if you go to other countries, like if you ask the top Chinese strategists or political analysts, they just openly acknowledge this point. Now, of course, you could say, oh, they're living in China. How could they possibly know what the main forces are acting in the US political system? But I don't think they're that dumb. I think they actually have a decent understanding of, at least moderately good understanding of how our system works. And they talk openly about this kind of thing. So, but I think we might have reached peak pro-Israel influence in the US political system. I mean, only time will tell.

Speaker 2:
[44:07] I think this, the kind of outrage that stems from these kinds of discussions, it really has its origin and an inability to distinguish between the normative and the descriptive, right? Like, whether it's our discussion or Meir Scheimer and Walt's book, what we're engaging in is descriptive discussion of, here's an interest group that has a substantial amount of influence. It's not saying it's like good or bad or whatever, it's just saying this is what's going on, right?

Speaker 1:
[44:37] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[44:37] I mean, there are moral issues that come with it, but there are separate layers here.

Speaker 1:
[44:45] Yeah. I mean, I think what happened is, so there's a descriptive question of, is there a very powerful, wealthy group of people who are one issue, people and really just lobby in favor of pro-Israel policies, foreign aid, military aid, actual military intervention on our part for Israel? Does that force exist in US politics? Who's involved in this? I think that's 100 percent descriptive question. If you were a KGB analyst or a Chinese think tank analyst, or you would just look into this because you need to understand the political system of your competitor. Now, the problem is in the US, if you're like Mearsheimer and Walt, I'll just remind you Mearsheimer is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, and Walt is a distinguished professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. If you touch on this topic, then one of the main moves that the people who don't like you looking into this will make, one of the main moves they'll make is they'll just say, you are anti-Semitic, right? Mearsheimer and Walt were pretty careful. They would write in their book, I think things like, look, we're not accusing people of dual loyalties. This is totally normal for an interest group to arise that has these particular goals. It's just that in this case, this interest group is exceptionally powerful, and it influences US foreign policy in the following way. So they were very careful the way they wrote, I don't believe either of them is anti-Semitic, etc. But it's so easy to level that charge against them, and then actually just strip them of their reputations in polite society. That's an unhealthy situation where you can't discuss a perfectly natural descriptive aspect of the political system in the United States. That's the situation that we have been in.

Speaker 2:
[46:46] I think that's a great way to round off what has been an amazing podcast, very in-depth. There's been so much to talk about and so many developments. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on to discuss them. I doubt it'll be too long before we do something similar like this in the future.

Speaker 1:
[47:04] Yeah, we'll come back again. I actually will be surprised if the situation in the Middle East is resolved anytime soon because the US and Iran really are pretty far apart in the negotiation. I think there's a very good chance it could spiral out of control. If what Trump just announced a few hours ago takes place and they start trying to stop, say the Chinese pay the Iranians to have their ships be able to pass through this straight forward move, and the US boards forcibly interdicts those ships, that could lead to World War III. I don't think we're out of this problem at all at the moment. We didn't mention what's happening in Lebanon, so now they're mixing it up. The Israelis are mixing it up with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The thing that's happened now, I think if you follow closely, is that someone has managed to get these Hezbollah forces, some pretty powerful FPV drones of the type that are being used in Ukraine. So I think even some of the ones that have these trailing optical fiber cables that the Russians use have been seen in Lebanon, and they've been very effective in knocking out tanks. So the whole nature of ground warfare, as people who follow Ukraine realize, has been transformed by these drones, because you can have operators far away who were able to knock out tanks, kill individual soldiers, knock out artillery, et cetera. That had not been seen very much in the Middle East until now. Now it seems like Hezbollah has these kinds of, I mean, these are very inexpensive technologies. So it does seem like the Israelis are having real problems in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. And so I just don't see things cooling off anytime soon.

Speaker 2:
[48:58] Absolutely. And yeah, I think that that would be much too much to discuss going forward. And I look forward to discussing it with you on the show. And thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 1:
[49:07] Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks a lot, Alf.