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In this episode of The Winston Marshall Show, I sit down with Israeli journalist and geopolitical analyst Haviv Rettig Gur to unpack the deeper forces behind the Iran war, the growing confrontation between the United States and China, and the shifting alliances across the Middle East.
We begin by addressing a claim circulating in American politics: that Israel “dragged” the United States into the conflict with Iran. Haviv explains why that narrative misunderstands the strategic reality, arguing that Iran had become a key component of China’s long-term geopolitical strategy against American power.
Our conversation explores how Iranian negotiations over its nuclear programme may have been used to buy time while missile capabilities and military infrastructure were expanded underground with Chinese assistance. We examine the intelligence operation that allegedly led to the attempted strike on Ali Khamenei, the strategic timing of American forces entering the region, and why the conflict escalated when it did.
From there, we widen the lens to the global chessboard: China’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz, and how Iran’s partnership with Beijing may have given China leverage over global energy routes in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan.
We also examine the unexpected alignment emerging across the Arab world, where several Gulf states increasingly view Iran as a destabilising revolutionary power rather than a partner against Israel. The discussion turns to what the Middle East might look like if the Iranian regime weakens or collapses, and whether regional power could shift toward countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia.
Finally, we discuss the role of international law, the limits of global institutions, and whether the world is entering a new era of great-power politics defined less by legal frameworks and more by raw strategic power.
A wide-ranging conversation about war, geopolitics, and the emerging global order.
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WATCH THE EXTENDED CONVERSATION HERE: https://open.substack.com/pub/winstonmarshall/p/the-secret-plan-behind-trumps-iran?r=18lfab&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:51 The “America First” Conservative Split on Israel
05:00 Why This War Is Bigger Than Israel
06:25 Iran as a Strategic Asset for China
07:32 How the War Actually Began
09:18 The Strike on Khamenei and the Start of the War
11:10 Why Iran Was Never Negotiating in Good Faith
13:09 Iran’s Nuclear Program: Weapons, Not Energy
15:00 How Obama’s Deal Changed Iran’s Calculus
18:16 The Lessons of the 12-Day War
20:08 Why This Is America’s War Too
23:18 The China–Iran Strategic Alliance
25:39 Oil, Sea Lanes and Global Power
27:30 Why Iran Became a Target in America’s China Strategy
34:15 China, Trade Routes and Global Hegemony
37:11 The Arab World’s Quiet Alignment Against Iran
43:09 Who Fills the Power Vacuum if Iran Falls?
48:57 The West, China and the Future Global Order
54:12 Is International Law a Mirage?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hello and welcome to the Winston Marshall show with me, Winston Marshall.
I sat down with Havive retic, again, we had spoken before during the 12th day war when
I was in Israel.
Now he still is in Israel and as we wrap this conversation up, the missile sirens went
off in the background and he had to go to his shelter.
So tensions are of course high, we are in a period of war.
In this conversation we address the real reasons for this war and if you follow a lot of
the media, well, if you follow a lot of the alternative media, you might believe that
Israel have yanked America into this war and if you follow a lot of the mainstream media,
you might only see it through the lens of a war between America and Iran or American
Israel and Iran.
But Havive zooms out a little bit further and sees the war in a global sense and that's
what we get into here is Iran, in fact, a proxy of China.
And is this a proxy war between America and China?
In this conversation, we look at whether this war was inevitable, what are the ideologies
behind the Aryatollars of Tehran.
We look at how this ties into Venezuela, Lebanon, Europe, in fact, the choke points and
trade points of the world.
This is absolutely a global war, even if the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer insists
that he is not getting involved.
Before you hear from Havive, I just wanted to say thank you.
Thank you for your continued support, without which we couldn't keep the show on the road
and if you head over to WinstonMarshall.co.uk, which is our sub-stack, not only will you
enjoy ad-free viewing and listening, but you'll hear Havive take some of your questions
and you'll have the opportunity to ask future guests your questions.
But without further ado, Havive retic gear.
There is a narrative that's spinning up, particularly in America, that Israel have dragged America
into this war.
And as far as I can tell, it's not just the usual anti-Israel types.
There's a bunch of America first types who see this, which has been particularly perpetuated
after Marcarubio's Secretary of State, was said in a press conference that America launched
preemptively when they learned that Israel was going to launch against Iran.
And they foresaw that the Iranians would retaliate so they wanted to get ahead of it.
And so that's, as far as I've understood it, has been used to make the argument that
Israel have dragged America into this war.
So I want to get into the specifics of exactly how this conflict started, because I think
that would answer that question.
There are two elements here.
One is this culture war within conservatives among the United States.
You have people like Tucker Carlson in the slightly more insane version, Candace Owens,
who just blamed Israel for 9-11.
But Tucker has also said things like that and not hinting either.
He is very much in a campaign to cleanse as he sees it American conservatism of its pro-Israel
slant and he's beatified the Qatari leadership.
They're apparently beautiful and wonderful people, social conservatives, whereas the Israelis
are the evil downfall of the West and of Christendom.
And they're trying to transform American conservatism into an anti-Israel movement.
And a lot of what you're seeing now, a lot of that America first people, then suddenly
deciding that President Trump must be in the Jews' pockets, they're just using that
opportunity.
These people have miscalculated, mispredicted, just simply been wrong on every substantive
testable statement they have made.
Member in June, the last year's June war between Israel and Iran, where America dropped
a few bombs at the end.
It was very much riding shotgun in an Israeli operation to try and make that operation
more effective in terms of slowing down, demolishing pieces of Iran's nuclear program, things
like that.
Tucker Carlson predicted a third world war and predicted vast fallout and predicted catastrophic
collapse.
And they're predicting that now.
And so it's not just the argument that Israel is the tail wagging the great dog of America.
The Trump is in the Israeli's pockets, then it's in Jerusalem manipulating Trump, which
is, you know, I don't know what to say about it.
I'm an Israeli Jew, okay?
I know Jews, Winston, you know Jews.
I'm not saying they're not good people.
I don't know that they have the organizational skills to be literally masterminding the world
conspiracy.
I don't know what, when you disrespect the entire defense echelon of the United States
so much that you genuinely believe that a war that Trump is conducting against Iran,
in which he's targeting Iranian assets that have nothing to do with Israel.
For example, the entirety of the Iranian Navy, for example, the ports in the Indian Ocean.
That's not about Israel.
That's about a much larger game that America is playing with China, where China is trying
to upgrade these assets.
So when you develop as a political movement that can no longer analyze what's actually
happening and can only talk about Jews, you are doing a terrible disservice to America.
These people aren't hurting Israel.
They're hurting America.
And America's ability to seriously engage in important issues and have real conversations
and be accountable and responsible.
What's happening, what happened in those negotiations that drove Trump to the decision that he really
can't just negotiate was that the Iranians were faking it as they've been faking it for
three decades, basically.
The Iranians were dragging out the negotiations, building out capabilities underground, trying
to move as much as they could of the, what remains, what is left of the missile programs
of the nuclear programs.
We know that China has been massively trying to restore, upgrade the missile program of
Iran, move it underground to places that even American bunker busters can't reach.
Last month it was reported by Reuters that Iran had signed a deal to buy supersonic missiles
that could actually sink in sufficient numbers, American strategic ships, the big ships,
the even aircraft carriers, potentially, in the Persian Gulf, in the Northern Indian
Ocean would develop these strategic capabilities, incidentally, the people from, from China,
from China, exactly.
And so Iran is part of a much larger international architecture, challenging America and was
moving its programs because of the lessons of the June War underground out of America's
reach and was joining in with strategic capabilities that could hamper America, this Chinese alliance
against American power in the world, that's not enough.
It has to be the Jews is basically where the, so let's focus it on what is happening.
And I definitely want to come back to China because I think you're onto something here.
But I just want to focus on the start of this war.
So just for clarity sake, why I think there might be a model.
The Geneva, Geneva negotiations started on February 17th and it was on the 19th the
President Trump said that they had a 10 to 15 days window to get the deal done at which
point there would be action.
And before the end of that window, Trump then on February 27th orders the start of operation
epic fury, which begins on February 28th.
And so that's why I think there's been some confusion.
But then the question is, why did it begin where it began?
And it's I believe because the Israelis had information that the Ayatollah was to be
part of a meeting information that they had because of a camera surveillance they'd hacked
into Iranian surveillance CCTV and had been monitoring within Iran for a long, long time,
many, many years and had found, oh, there he is.
And it was an opportune moment to strike.
And then they did indeed strike the Ayatollah in that first day.
So I just wanted to pursue that with you.
This operation, this CCTV, this surveillance operation that the Israelis were conducting.
What do you know about that?
What do we need to understand about that?
And am I correct in understanding it as I've understood it as how this Iran war started
exactly?
Yes, absolutely.
With one caveat that I don't know the answer to, the New York Times reported that in fact
that was the CIA that tracked Hamina E to this meeting and gave that information to
the Israelis and asked the Israelis to drop that bomb or those dozens of bombs that were
dropped on that compound at that moment, really launching the war on Saturday.
Now I can't tell you which report is correct.
These are different people leaking from different governments.
I don't know which journalists are more diligent on these questions and others.
I suspect that this was an American timing choice because the Gerald Ford was slowly, very
quickly, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's an aircraft carrier.
So slowly, puttering its way along in the Mediterranean until it reached range, ranges
roughly Israel's coastline where it actually gets to be behind the Israeli missile defense
shield and also be part of Israel's defense missile defense shield.
When the Gerald Ford reached Israel, the war began, I mean within hours.
And so the idea, the Gerald Ford, by the way, you think on the map that the Israeli port
city of Haifa is farther than the Persian Gulf where the Abraham Lincoln is stationed,
but just because of how geography works, it's in fact closer to Tehran than the Abraham
Lincoln.
And, and so the forces had arrived and they immediately launched.
I suggest that anybody trying to figure out Donald Trump doesn't look at what he says,
but looks at what he does.
This is a man who in June managed to convince the Iranians, even though the beettoos had
already taken off from Missouri, that he wasn't going to bomb them.
And then the bombing was a surprise.
Now they were tracking the beettoos, but they had sent other beettoos to other bases to
look like they were preparing to be maneuvered into the area.
And then the beettoos, nobody was watching because those beettoos that were the, he keeps,
and everybody should be expecting the bombing.
He keeps surprising people.
I, I, I, I, now, maybe that's the head of St.
Com.
Maybe it's not Donald Trump himself.
I don't know, but I'm amazed at the American ability to do that.
When you saw with the negotiations, I think, again, reporting by American press from American
officials, the timing absolutely was Haminei.
It was absolutely that moment where the decapitation was possible.
I'm astonished that Haminei is watching a third of the United States naval power on
Earth come within striking range of him, and he just has a regular meeting at his regular
office.
That to me is amazing.
And it looks like that was the timing that triggered it.
The last round of negotiations, though, was fake.
I mean, the Iranians treated it as fake, and I don't think the Americans treated it as
anything more than just cover for reaching, you know, D day, H hour.
And so I, I wouldn't, there'd been a lot of negotiations leading up to that.
At some point, Trump said they're just buying time and they're wasting my time, and we
can pull the trigger.
You say that it's, that it was fake from the point of view of the, the Iranians.
So why have you come to that conclusion?
They never, for a moment, agreed to give up any of the strategic things they needed
to give up.
They never for a moment, they publicly refused.
They never for a moment agreed to fundamentally change their anti-American posture,
regime ideology.
In Persian, Khamenei has been talking about the great Satan just in the last two weeks.
None of, nothing had changed, absolutely nothing had changed.
We know from Grocey, from the IAEA head that there wasn't anything moving there in
terms of inspectors.
And also, look, I don't know what to, how to put this, it's about trust.
It's only ever about trust.
Khamenei, buying time, in negotiations, telling you, yes, yes, let's have a conversation
three months from now about how we might let in IAEA inspectors eight months from now
and we'll figure out the mechanisms of that.
And oh, we haven't figured it out yet.
Let's talk a year from now.
That whole process, if you don't trust Khamenei not to build the bomb, doesn't matter
what, what agreement you reach, he'll just, he'll just violate it.
I mean, he's already violated it entirely.
The Iran has signed on the NPT.
Everything Iran has.
In terms of its nuclear program is a violation of the NPT, we know it's going for a weapons
program.
Again, for simple reasons, not sophisticated, complicated ones, a nuclear research program
is tiny.
It's a single little, you know, a reactor that produces some uranium, right?
A military nuclear program is medium sized and has to be able to produce a certain amount.
And then an energy nuclear program, those are the three kinds of nuclear programs that
exist are, is a whole network of nuclear energy sites, right, production sites.
This Iranian program is exactly in the middle.
It is the size of a weapons program.
It is way too big for a research program, way too small for an energy program.
You don't have to get complicated and when diplomats and pundits and journalists and analysts
and people who get, you know, basically just want to reign in Trump, which is totally
legitimate within American politics to have that position.
I'm just saying, when you then bring your domestic American politics to this question
of what is Iran's intentions, was it negotiating a good faith?
Not liking Trump isn't an analysis.
What is this program?
It's a nuclear weapons program.
It's only ever been that.
It will only ever be that there is not a single Arab in the Middle East who thinks otherwise.
There's not a single Persian in this world who thinks otherwise and Trump didn't believe
them for a second.
They had never for one second negotiating good faith.
They were buying time to repair.
They were waiting for shipments of Chinese weapons that would upgrade everything that
they were doing.
That's all this was.
Trump pulled the trigger.
The Iranians, or certainly the Islamic regime, must have been lying to themselves that
they weren't on a suicide march.
How could they possibly have believed that they could win a war with America and particularly
given how degraded they were after the 12-day war in June?
How could they possibly have believed that they would have actually come out of that conflict
alive?
I think America did it to them.
For the last 20 years at least, America has taught every country in the world that it
doesn't have the political wear with all the capacity to go to war.
The Obama, when he signed the deal in 2014, said again and again and again, all options
are on the table.
If they just violate the deal, I've released vast amounts of money that was sanctioned.
I've given this over to the IRGC.
Obama said, we believe with our best assessment of our intelligence services, they're going
to use it for good things to build an economy, to build an infrastructure.
It's like the guys never met the IRGC.
This is an organization that's been gutting the Iranian economy for 47 years.
It's literally never going to invest in any of the Iranian people.
That's not what they are.
They're for 47 years calling themselves a revolution.
They will only ever invest this in the great revolution, which is destabilizing countries,
building proxies, engaging in terrorism.
Obama's kept saying, but look, if Hamine just doesn't play along, if Hamine violates
our great agreement, I will use force every option on the table.
Nobody on Earth believed him.
I don't mean some Israeli hawks didn't believe him.
I mean, not a single Iranian believed him, not a single American believed him, not
a single Democrat, not a single employee of the Obama administration itself.
Nobody on Earth believed that America was going to then go to some kind of kinetic war
because of a violation.
The Iranians would have sent diplomats out there to say, well, it wasn't such a vibe.
It was a little bit of a, and they would have hemmed and hod and hedged all the way to
a nuclear program.
And by the way, that's what they did.
So if for 20 years, your posture toward the Americans has been just fake it, they're
not going to do it.
They're all bluff.
Then you're going to assume this is that as well.
And this wasn't that.
And I want to say one reason why Trump himself came around.
Trump himself was not going to go to a war with Iran eight months ago, 10 months ago.
In June, the Israelis demonstrated that this is this entire regime is cobwebs.
There's one great strength to this regime, which is internal.
They are great oppressors of their own people.
They are great robbers of their own society.
The great leaders of this revolution for the oppress that Humeini founded in 1979 are
all billionaires.
They rob and oppress and beat and abuse their own people.
On the world stage, every success they've ever had, the capacity to build out his bala,
every possible strength they have been able to project is just because nobody will actually
challenge them.
As soon as you challenge them, they collapse.
And Trump saw that in June.
And by the way, he agreed to that B2 bombing at the end of the June war to help out the
Israelis to make that a more effective result to the war because he had seen the first
10 days of the war.
That agreement was at the end.
It wasn't something that Trump planned ahead of time.
And now the American planners, Israel did not get America to do this, except in one
sense, which was the proof of concept that the June war represents.
The American strategic planners, the China hawks and the administration, the Colby included,
the undersecretary of war for policy, I think, is his title in the administration.
All the people who planned this stuff, they saw the June war and they said, wait a second,
the Israelis did what they did in Iran.
The Iranian Air Force didn't even dare fly against them.
That's how badly the Iranians lost that.
They did all of that with American hardware.
And they did all of that with systems that America and Israel have already integrated
over the years.
So if we'd want to do this, we can, and not only that, the Israelis will fly with us,
absorb damage, take missiles, gladly they're willing to send their own soldiers on the ground.
I think we now have had some reports.
I can't confirm them.
I don't know any secrets, obviously, but that there are ground forces, massive intelligence
contribution by the Israelis.
And so we have a competent, willing, local ally, willing to not only do damage, but take
damage, making this a much more effective operation than just what America can do.
And of course, America can do vastly more than Israel.
All the conditions are in place in the Israelis have already proven it's possible.
Let's do it.
That's, I think, what happened here.
So without the 12-day war, you don't think this current Iran conflict would have been
inevitable.
I think the concept that you can't go at Iran, that Iran can set the Middle East on fire,
that, you know, Saudi Arabia's oil production will be destroyed for a generation, that the
world energy markets are going to, are going to blow up.
The concept that you can't go after Iran because the consequences are so dire, that it's
now, it's never going to be worth it, not even if they get a new, that basic concept,
which is, I think, still there in Europe, you still see it in Europe, but it's no longer
something the Americans believe.
I think that concept died when Israel demonstrated what could actually be done against the IRGC
in June.
Yes.
Okay.
So before we move on to the bigger geopolitical place, I still think we need to make the case
in clear terms why it was America's war to fight, because I don't think everyone totally
appreciates that.
There are some obvious things to me, like, for example, the Iranian regime made at least
two attempts to assassinate Trump, I think it was something in the region of 4050, American
nationals killed in October 7th.
American shipping has been commercial shipping has been affected in the Gulf ever since because
of Iran-backed Houthis.
But before we zoom out to the China thing, how else would you frame this?
I think Israel out for one moment that this was a war that was absolutely in America's
interests.
Iran as a regime is foundationally, fundamentally, definitionally anti-American.
What Khomeini thinks he is a revolution against in the name of all the weak in the oppressed
and the humble, and therefore the spiritually pure of this world, or as he called it the
Mustadafin, which is a word for humble from the Quran, the opposite of the Mustadafin,
the arrogant, the powerful, those destined to follow the Mustadafin are first and foremost
America.
America, the cultural hegemon, which he hated, there was a whole anti-Westernism in Iran
that he violently imposed on his society.
He hates America, and he can't not hate America, and this regime that he built and that his
descendants are running cannot not hate America.
But as long as Iran was a regional power, a regional problem, an Israeli problem, then
yeah, America will sell, you know, the Emirati's missile defense, and they'll sell the Israelis
F-35s, but they're not going to fight a war against an Iran that has no effect on the
grand strategic chessboard of America.
Over the last two, three years, Iran has become part of the grand strategic chessboard.
It did that because it wanted the patronage, the strategic depth of China.
So it began, for example, signing agreements to buy missiles that American missile defense
around its aircraft carrier groups can't stop.
That's the moment Iran became a Chinese weapon, and America actually had to take it off
the chessboard.
And that's basically I think the timeline and the story, and all of that is public information.
It's not complicated to find out, and people should find it out.
I'm not saying America isn't fighting this war with Israel.
I'm not saying that to some degree, the Indian administration, there's a lot of pro-Israel
people, and where Israel is one of the top four reasons to go to this war.
This isn't a single reason war.
As you say, they tried to assassinate Donald Trump.
That might have slightly angered Donald Trump, but you can't pretend like what America
is doing now.
The resources it's devoted to it, the domestic political blowback it's willing to suffer
for it is literally about Nitenyao.
That was the thing that just, it just doesn't make any sense.
My eyes were actually open to this by Melissa, who came on the program on my podcast.
We talked about this Chinese connection.
This is my fiance, Melissa, Chinese talking about this.
Yeah.
Who just, I had known a great, she also taught me new actual facts, but I had known a
great many of the facts that she presented, but I had never seen them strung together
in the way that she put them together for me.
And the facts are every little agreement that Iran has signed with China, every little
economic connection to China.
Once you put them together, you begin to understand that there has been a kind of Chinese takeover
of Iran.
A willing, very much willing.
What Iran got out of it was it's only real way to sell oil and get that injection of
cash in yuan's, the, you know, the Iranian currency, the real is worthless right now in
the world stage.
And this huge injection of cash that they were using to spend double digit percentages
of on, on military spending and keeping Iran's military stable and, and well funded, despite
the fact that the economy itself is in ruins.
And you begin to see how much Iran was working hard to make itself useful to China in the
much larger Chinese American confrontation.
So for example, Iran sells 80 to 90% of its oil to China.
China is basically its one customer has a little bit around the margins.
It's basically to China.
And China has used that very cheap oil when you're the only customer in practice.
You can set your own price.
China buys it for very cheap and China has used it to create a 1.1, 1.2 billion barrel strategic
reserve.
Why does China need a billion barrel strategic oil reserve that could keep China running
for a hundred days because more than half of China's energy input, energy imports goes
through the Malacca straits.
The Malacca straits is a tiny little strength between Malaysia and Indonesia that has a huge
percentage of global trade literally sailing this two mile wide straight.
And China's utterly dependent on that tiny spot to be able to keep its economy going.
And the United States Navy patrols that spot and can basically shut it off, shut it, shut
that spigot off at will.
So Iran has been building out capabilities in the ports in a new missiles that China was
selling them.
These supersonic missiles keep up the capability of reciprocally if America, because there's
now a kinetic war over Taiwan, shuts down the Malacca straits to try and bring China's
war effort against Taiwan to an end.
China would now have through Iran, the reciprocal ability to shut down the strait of hormones
and cause a similar damage to the West and to the United States.
Iran was receiving missiles.
China was being handed the port of Jask on the northern Indian ocean outside of the straits
of hormones.
All these things that Iran was doing for China, huge amounts of cyber that Iran was becoming
a Chinese testing ground for all these technologies of oppression.
You know, AI connected to facial recognition software.
Iran a couple years ago switched from the GPS system that America can easily disrupt
to the Baidu system, the Chinese GPS system.
All of these ways where each single agreement, each single news report from Reuters doesn't
mean anything until you line them all up together and you discover that Iran had made itself
a Chinese power projection capacity to shut off a quarter of the world's oil supply if
it was ever threatened with its own oil supply being shut off.
In other words, Israel before it went to the war with a great enemy on the regional
scale, because Israel doesn't operate on the global scale, it operates on the regional
scale.
It's great enemy on the regional scale is Iran.
And before it went to Iran, it had to take out Hezbollah's ability to open a second front
in the north.
So the war was Hezbollah first, that's neutralized, then you can face Iran with vastly lower damage
and much more ability to focus.
Iran is America's Hezbollah.
You want to not have the sea lanes of the Indian ocean shut down on you.
You want to not have the entirety of the global oil markets overturned when you have to
then crack down on China because it's just invaded Taiwan in 2028.
You want that ability to focus on the main foe without a second front.
You have to take Iran out of the running now just like Israel had to take Hezbollah
to the running then.
So you begin to line up all of these issues.
By the way, China has not come to Iran's defense and everyone sees it.
Everyone in the world understands that you go on the Chinese side of this great international
divide between these two superpowers vying to be the world order in 30 years.
The Chinese side is not going to help you, no matter how much you give them, no matter
how much of your economy is in their control, Cuba is a very similar story of the being part
of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative deploying Chinese cyber in Cuba.
China uses Cuba to spy on American military movements.
For example, in the big headquarters base in Tampa, I expect the Trump administration
to turn on Cuba next.
There are three sanctioned oil providers to China that China takes in, allows them to
sidestep American sanctions and uses that as part of its diversification of its oil imports
and it's a strategic, it's a quarter of all China's oil imports together and that
is Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Two of those are down.
Trump decapitated Venezuela and I expect you should be looking for a Trump administration
pressure on Russia through various means to no longer be a major supplier of oil to
China.
Now, I don't know how you would do that.
I don't know what it is they're planning, but when you see Iran in the context of the
American grand strategy, by the way, nothing I'm saying here is mysterious.
Nothing I'm saying here is secret information given to me by some secret official.
Half of this stuff is in the literally public national security strategy.
The administration published a few months ago.
The connection to China, Iran being, well, if I may.
If you read it, they are not explicit that China is the enemy.
It's very much implicit and if you follow the work of Elbridge, as you've named and various
other people's in the State Department, it's hard to interpret it in the other way as
China are the threat, but it's not explicit.
There's a lot of talk of Taiwan in that document and I bring this up because, look, for me
in you, we are probably in a chord that China is the problem.
And if you leave aside the fact that China have been an ally and funding Iran who are
explicitly and, you know, say deaf to America, explicitly enemy of America, comicals it
might seem to try and leave that fact aside.
We actually have to get to the first principles because in your country, in Israel and across
Europe, it is not at all taken for granted that China are the enemy of the West.
In fact, I think America might be in a slightly different place for various reasons, not
least Trump has been saying China, China, China, as long as he's been in politics.
But it's not clear to people.
In fact, China remains a bit of a black hole.
People don't really understand what they're about and what they want.
So to understand them and understand even why the Belt Road, Belt Road Initiative is
a problem.
You have to get back to the first principles of it.
All attempt to do now and you can chisel at this and if you think I'm right or wrong.
So the Belt Road Initiative was Xi Jinping's signature policy.
He comes to parent 2012.
He announces it in 2013.
What is it?
It is a land trade policy.
It is globalization with Chinese characteristics.
Now, if you're not anti-China, you might think, so what?
Of course, China needs to trade.
The problem, though, becomes when you see how they're operating.
First and foremost, it seems like a bit of a soft colonialization.
So they coax in second and third world nations into debt traps and those countries become
vassal states of China.
So it's colonialization in the Chinese manner.
But there's another step which is that China are actually trying to become the global
Hegemon, a head of America.
But not everyone accepts that because, well, I guess not everyone's read Xi Jinping.
But even I, having read a decent amount of his work, he's careful in how he phrases
this stuff.
Americans are careful in the NSS document and how they phrase it because no one's explicitly
saying each other's their enemies.
It's commentators like in our world who are saying, yes, China are the enemy.
But the governments themselves are a bit more careful.
Do you think I've got that right or wrong?
This is how I understand what's happening.
It's not, I'm no expert whatsoever of any kind on China itself.
This is how I understand the Trump administration's vision of the world.
And it's, you're right that it's not explicit that China is the enemy.
It is explicit.
The China is the great, one of the three or four big pillars, the great challenge, the
thing that America has to be dealing with, the great pivot to the Pacific, which was
something that Obama talked about already.
You know, I think at a certain point of America is spending trillions of dollars over
20 years to completely recalibrate its military posture to the Pacific and telling the Japanese
to build an army again that we can start to take a guess at what it is that concerns
them.
And I think that you're absolutely right.
That is, that is Xi Jinping has this vision of China.
Now he's constrained.
He's constrained by certain real hard limitations, which people can just plug into their favorite
AI to fact-check.
I mean, these are not complicated points.
This China is, I think, the world's fourth largest oil producer, but it's a billion
and a third people, something like that, and it's this vast economy.
And even though it produces more oil than Iraq, it can't actually produce a third or
a quarter of the oil it needs.
And so it's a massive net importer.
And the choke points are controlled by America.
And that's an enormous challenge for China.
China's military is now undergoing basically a massive purge.
Most of the generals have been fired just in the last year.
And that's because the military isn't seen by Xi Jinping as being up to scratch where
it needs to have become by now to challenge America specifically and especially and immediately
on Taiwan.
So China is building the ability to control its near abroad, to retake Taiwan or to take
Taiwan rather.
It's building fake islands to continue to push back its economic waters.
Well, the waters under its control.
It's constantly harassing South Korean, Japanese, Filipino, you know, Taiwanese shipping.
Obviously, it's the great challenge.
Yeah, there's another key point, I think, about the Silk Road initiative and the choke
points is that America are increasingly getting control of the various significant choke
points around the world when it comes to shipping lanes and the oceans.
Iran is absolutely crucial for the land Silk Road initiative.
So this is the connecting point between China and the Western world and Africa.
So if they lose their ocean choke points and America can take Iran, or rather block
somehow, cut across that land road, that land Silk Road, America have even more power
in China and even more of a backward position as I've understood it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Iran provides a disruptor of the sea lanes.
Look, nobody can challenge the American Navy.
No six navies combined on this earth can challenge the American Navy.
And so China, as you say, has tried to find land-based alternatives to the American Navy.
It has laid pipelines with Russia.
It has built roads.
It has built new trade routes with Iran.
Iran is absolutely central.
It is China's Middle Eastern anchor and it is absolutely part of that.
There's a corridor in northern Iran along the Caspian Sea, which is not part of the great
plateau, not difficult to traverse.
It's this low lens in this country that's actually very hard to traverse because it's so
mountainous that China wants accessible to it because the Iranian regime is a puppet
of it.
All of these reasons are all operational.
All at once, China needs to diversify its energy input, not just imports, not just in
terms of the countries that it sources it from, but also in terms of the physical routes
that it gets it from.
Not everything could be by sea because America is literally capable of besieging China
by sea.
So absolutely.
It's, you know, it joined that global chessboard.
China wanted it.
Iran wanted it.
It was a fatal mistake for Iran.
I want to understand the Arab world now and what we're seeing quite unprecedented is Arab
Muslim majority countries finding themselves on the same side as Israel in a war against
Iran.
I'm not sure what the president is actually for that.
Now there's also what's going on in Lebanon.
It seems that rockets are not just going from Lebanon via, hezbollah aren't just shooting
rockets from Lebanon to Israel, but also to British territory in Cyprus.
That's unconfirmed, but it seems to be the case, British sovereign territory, which to
our great shame as a country our Prime Minister is doing very little about.
But I want to understand how the Arab world is seeing this conflict, how they were affected
by the Saudi territory being bombed.
I mean, for Muslims, Saudi Arabia is the holy land.
So that must have had an impact.
And how you think that this will reshape the Arab world and the Middle East.
We've seen, we've seen an amazing thing.
First of all, now that Iran is lashing out at most, almost everybody, the gap between
the competent and the incompetent has become very, very clear.
Iran has fired far more missiles and rockets at the Emirates than it has at the Israelis.
And what's been amazing to watch is how the Emirates have handily with this six-layer
missile defense system that they've been putting into place over many years, while
everyone else kind of slept, have been shooting it all down.
It's a country that has proven to be competent.
That's, I mean, that sounds like a very ordinary, banal sort of word, but it's actually not
so easy for a country to be competent, especially an extraction economy, right?
This is a country whose economy was built on oil and gas, and yet it has invested massive,
massive amounts of its GDP at this point, in tech, in finance, in AI.
It's become an AI superpower.
And it has these missile defense systems that it learned from Israel, and that are performing
as well as Israel's over the last five days.
So that's an extraordinary thing to see.
We've also seen the confusion of countries who thought they were not on Iran's side,
but neutral, certainly anti-Israel, like Qatar, like Oman.
There's so many flippant kinds of propagandistic things that people say about the Middle East,
in the Middle East, that as soon as the rubber hits the road, the fact that they were just
convenient lies becomes very, very obvious.
There's an American base in Qatar defending Qatar.
American bases in Oman and Bahrain and all these places defending all those countries.
You know where there isn't an American base?
Israel.
American troops stand in the breach to defend Arab countries, not actually to defend Israel,
but it's still very convenient for the Israeli troops are on the front lines of every war
Israel fights, not American troops.
So it's very convenient to throw out this, oh, Israel only survives because of America.
It's kind of a cope of large parts of the Arab world, the less competent parts.
You never hear this from Emirates, for example.
It's a cope to say, why is Israel so powerful?
Why does it show out class so many Arab countries?
Well, it's obviously just a colony of America.
Then you say to them, okay, but Israel didn't have that American support in the 60s when
it clobbered the Arab world even better, even more, right?
And they don't answer because by now you've already reached the third sentence in the conversation
and it's no longer interesting.
It's just a cope.
And what we've seen now is that all these countries, the Qataris, the Omanis, the Saudis,
Iran is no longer tolerable.
The thing about the Israelis, even though a lot of propagandists are saying, are out there
on Twitter saying things like Israel's blown up eight countries around it, it's bombed,
it's just, it's on a warpath, it's insane.
Actually, it's not, actually, it's not, actually, it's very careful.
And if you don't want its destruction or don't give Iran a foothold from which to launch
rockets at it from your country, it will definitely not
bomb you.
Don't host the Hamas leadership, there won't be a missile in Doha.
And everybody really understands that everybody knows that nobody wanted to develop a nuclear
weapons program because Israel allegedly had nuclear weapons.
I say allegedly, I suspect they do, I just, they don't tell me so I have to say allegedly.
Everybody, when Iran started trying to break out to a nuke, everybody started talking
about having a nuclear program from the Turks to the Saudis.
The Arab world is looking at what's happening right now and it's saying, wait a second,
we can live peacefully, happily doing good trade with the Israelis forever, they're stable.
You know what the Israeli government mainly wants to do?
When elections increase the Israeli GDP, that's their main job.
It's an ordinary country.
You know what's not an ordinary country?
A revolution that lets its people starve and go without water and go without electricity
for 47 years because it has to export the great revolution in the name of the coming of
the Messianic age.
That's the weird, crazy country that on its way down a fall that it itself engineered
for itself will bomb even its friends in the region.
That's explicit talk now in the Arab world and not just in Abraham Accords countries.
Saudi Arabia over the last couple of years turned kind of against Israel, kind toward the
Muslim brothers, kind of toward in 2023, China, brokered a datant between Saudi Arabia and
Iran.
Well, where's that datant now?
The Saudis, the Emirates, even the other GCC countries that you wouldn't expect, including
Oman and Qatar, are having a conversation.
I don't think it'll go anywhere, but no one has ever imagined they would have this conversation
that they will join the war effort in Iran.
That's new.
Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and talking about Jordanian sovereignty and knowing
that it is under the Israeli defense umbrella because Israel will do anything to secure
its longest border, which is the border which Jordan.
So it wants that stability of Jordan.
Everybody's now embedded in an American Israeli security architecture.
And Iran is the insane psychopathic revolutionary, disruptor, and destroyer of things.
And it's basically a unanimous view among Arabs and Jews today.
They don't have to like Israel.
They will still tell you that this is the truth about Iran.
Yeah, it might be unanimous now, and I remember being in the Middle East during the 12
day war and spent a bit of time in Jordan.
I wouldn't say the Jordanian people that I was speaking with were pro-Israel, but they
were pretty happy that Iran was being or their nuclear capabilities were being taken
down and degraded.
But this alliance during the war, it's hard to imagine it lasting long after the conflict
is over.
And so I'm curious, difficult as it is to speculate about the future, how the vacuum of Iran
or the Islamic regime of Iran might be filled.
And of course, we don't know what will happen within Iran, but the great game, whether it's
Turkey, whether it's the Saudis, might change their posture.
And I've seen some evidence that the Saudis, particularly amongst the Moms in Saudi Arabia,
becoming a bit more anti-Israel than they had been before when they had previously been
talk of the Saudis drawn in the Abraham Accords.
With Iran and the old ancient Shia Sunni rivalry in a very different position as it might
be after the war, what happens to the power balance between Arab states and Muslim states
in the Middle East?
A lot depends on what Iran is after the war.
If the regime remains intact, and not just literally the people remain intact, but the
policy remains intact, Maduro was taken out of Venezuela.
Venezuela is fundamentally shifted to a stance that is not pro-American in any sense, but
working closely with America, doing America's bidding.
One of the regime has changed, except the guy at the top, and that's enough for Venezuela
to have understood that America is the head of the man in the region and to be working
for American interests, or at least not disrupting American interests, not serving China for
our purposes.
Iran, if Iran was smart, if the regime was smart, it would jettison the one thing that
has caused it all this trouble, which is this revolutionary idea that it has to topple
the West and the democracies and be the great revolution that destroys everything it touches.
And just stay in power, right?
If the IRGC remained a kind of military regime in Iran, but it was not anti-American anymore,
if it was not pro-Chinese anti-Western disrupting building proxies, but investing Iran's vast,
vast oil and gas wealth in the Iranian economy, everybody would be fine with it.
And all of this would be over.
So is it possible that what falls in Iran isn't the regime itself, the structure of power,
because nobody quite knows who has the capacity to even replace them with in Iran, but just
the pieces of the ideological elites that prevent Iran from being a normal, stable country
with a rational policy, then you'll actually have an Iran that will probably pretty quickly
be stronger than what it was before.
We have after this a deeply weak Iran, you know, sunk into chaos, possibly with a little
bit of an ethnic civil war underway, there are many different ethnicities in Iran.
It's a diverse country.
It's a very large country.
If that is what happens, and Iran really becomes a power vacuum, then the Sunnis will
step in to that power vacuum.
The single most powerful competent state in the region in the Sunni world is Turkey.
And Turkey is very much eager to step in as a regional hegemon in the place of Iran,
and is a member of NATO, and does everything he can to be close to Trump.
The Americans would not mind, I think, this development, because again, it's just about
being an American-led world order, serving America's interests.
None of this has anything.
They don't care if Erdogan is also a little bit Islamist, like that's not relevant in
their calculations.
And so then we could see a region that really is kind of divided between Israel and Turkey.
Turkey has begun to build out a serious proxy system in the region.
It's heavily involved in the Libyan civil war.
Why would it have massive forces in Libya to disrupt the Israeli-Greek, Cypriot, Eastern
Mediterranean energy-related alliance against Turkey, which Egypt also is considering joining?
It's an infinitely complex chessboard, but we see that in Turkey.
Turkey has been investing in the Muslim brothers in Jordan.
I should tell you, the Muslim brotherhood in Jordan was made illegal in the past year
in Jordan for the first time.
Iran tried to invest in it to destabilize the Jordanian regime as a way of hitting Israel,
and Turkey has begun to invest in it as a way of closing in on Israel.
And in fact, Jordan, I believe two months ago, I have to check exactly when it was, but
sometimes the very recent months, for the first time in 30 years, reinstated military draft.
Jordan is preparing to have a real military that he can field in the field.
So a lot of things are changing, a lot of this question of who's the hegemon on the Muslim
side after Iran is already underway.
The Saudis would love for it to be them.
The Saudis haven't really built the capabilities, the military capabilities to single-handedly
project power in the region.
They're basically just a financial empire, and there are limits to how much financial
empire can do.
So you asked exactly the right question.
All I can do is make it a complicated question.
I can't give you answers.
So then for the world that has not taken the same viewers, UNI, on China.
And I'm thinking, of course, not just of my country, Britain, but France, Canada, other
nations who have been leaning towards China through 2026.
They see America as volatile, and they don't understand the logic of Trump's foreign policy.
And they're turning towards China with various deals.
France just did it themselves.
And this begs the question, I think, is all of this going to exacerbate the very thing
that the Americans didn't want to have in the first place, which is PACCINICA, which
is that because people don't understand what he's doing, let's say after Greenland or
Venezuela, they push countries like France and Britain into the arms of China.
Do you think there's a danger with that?
I think we've seen it.
The Canadian Prime Minister, Karney, said, America is unstable, America is predatory against
us.
The Trump administration talked explicitly during an election about Canada becoming the
51st U.S. state, that desperately hurt the conservative candidate in that Canadian
election.
That was very much an American shot in America's own foot, and that sense that America
has become that kind of chaotic predatory destabilizing factor drove Karney to go to
Beijing and to have this meet and greet with Xi Jinping.
I think that, you know, Karney is a clever guy, pretty profound and serious and well-known
economist.
I think he's a little new to the geopolitics.
America at its craziest, silliest worst, and it's a lot less silly and crazy than it
looks.
Greenland makes sense.
It might be wrong, you might oppose it, but it really is about making better conditions
to access to have to have a soul or mostly soul access to those rare earth metals.
And you know, Trump was obsessing about Panama at one point.
That really is about a choke point.
So it really is about building out an architecture for facing out China going forward.
And if you see it, you don't suddenly unsee it.
Like it all clicks into place and you know to expect things in Cuba, et cetera.
But if you're new to this game, if you're new to thinking in these terms, which a great
power has to think in, then you'll be surprised.
So yes, we saw Canada try and cozy up to the Chinese, you know, best of luck to them.
That's not going to go well for them.
China buys you.
It does not, it doesn't, you know, trade with you.
It doesn't, you know, like you, it doesn't ally with you.
It certainly won't come to your defense in any cost.
Look at what's happening to Iran.
So I would say that that's a cautionary tale, in fact.
And if you want to find those cautionary tales, as you said, go to all the belt and road
countries that have just taken China in as a great investor, as a great, you know, boon
to their economies.
I mean, everywhere, Laos, Pakistan, it doesn't matter where you go.
If China is there, the countries are sinking into debt to China.
China is taking control of their infrastructures and ports.
And they become part of a Chinese orbit in ways that they don't want to be.
When you become an ally and trade partner of America, you tend to then flourish.
You tend to then prosper.
You tend to become more democratic.
South Korea is a great example, but there are others.
When you are a Chinese ally, a Chinese trading partner, you tend to sink into debt and become
dependent on China.
I don't think that's something any Western country wants.
One interesting point is we've seen that with Germany now.
Germany merits went to Beijing, met with Xi Jinping.
I mean, there was just a couple of speeches I haven't followed this closely.
He seems to have decided that is exactly the opposite of where Germany needs to go and
really be doubling down on the West and on a world that at least its biggest power.
I don't know if it's an alliance, exact is America.
And so I think that a Western response to the Trump administration, to the chaos potentially
of the Trump administration, should be a doubling down on the West.
If Europe is scared of where America is going, Europe is 20% of the world's GDP.
And Germany and Britain's armies put together right now are smaller than Poland's.
Europe is rich enough to become as powerful as it chooses to be.
It's choosing not to.
And you know what, if you can't depend on America, don't get in China's pocket, become
the power you think the world needs.
I know that's easy for an Israeli to say, but you know what, it's not easy for an
Israeli to say.
We spend four or five right now, I think seven percent of our GDP each year on defense.
And we also are the biggest per capita spenders on R&D on earth.
The second biggest by the way is South Korea.
That's if you take all private and all public together, but that's the spending on R&D in
Israel.
Now, these are replicable, Israel isn't magic.
It's all replicable.
And then you become an incredibly reliable, incredibly loyal, incredibly capable American
ally.
And then you no longer have to play these games of running scared every time America
maybe it looks in a different direction.
So my recommendation to European powers is become a serious, properly armed, properly
navigating the world stage kind of country.
So I'm going to ask a question, which is about international law.
And I'd love to take your impression on this.
I'll start by saying mine is international law is a mirage in my opinion.
And it's only ever been might that keeps people acting moderately well behaved.
It's only been American hegemony that has kept the peace.
And I don't quite see the point in international law, anything international law seems to
be an excuse for people like my prime minister, Kirstama to do nothing and to be a coward
as he keeps learning on international law.
What do you think about international law?
I share your skepticism and I share it deeply and viscerally.
I remember as a young man in the army, I was a soldier in the northern border for a short
time and standing on that Israeli border, looking into Lebanon and seeing villages of South
Lebanon, she of villages, ordinary places, you know, populated by wonderful, decent, ordinary
people and knowing that 100,000 missiles and rockets are buried under those villages and
knowing that Iran put them there and knowing that Chisbala man them and knowing that the
purpose was to make sure that any Israeli attempt to clean out those missile arsenals meant
to set our cities on fire would have to result either in many civilians fleeing or many
civilians dying and standing there and then seeing alongside places that we knew were
Chisbala outposts or maybe even we knew were Chisbala tunnels, we're built alongside
UNIFIL bases, alongside UN forces that were meant to challenge Chisbala, prevent Chisbala,
disarm Chisbala after 2006, but in fact, just served as themselves human shields who refused
ever challenge Chisbala and allowed the arming of this militia buried under this massive
civilian population. Everything that we've seen in Gaza, Chisbala planned in Lebanon and asking
myself, what the hell is the UN? What is it? UN forces in the Israeli experience, they
divided us from the Egyptians and in the run up to 73 and in the run up to 67, the Egyptians
just said leave and the UN forces all left and then they proceeded to have a war with us.
The UN forces on the Golan Heights separating the Israelis and the Syrians, well, in the Syrian
Civil War, I think around 2013, roughly or 14, when Jabalta Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate
was coming down the Golan Plateau, all those UN forces fled behind the Israeli military
line and there's a set of separating Israel and Syria, they ended up being people that
the Israeli army now has the headache of having to protect. There is no such thing as
international community and international law when the rubber hits the road. International
law did not stop the massacres in Bosnia. International law did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. International
law never stops anything when Bill Clinton makes the decision, personally, literally, to
bomb Belgrade, the Bosnia war ends within two weeks. After four years of nobody doing anything
because international law. International law is not a thing. It won't protect you if you're a
small people in this world and if you rely on it to protect you, it will fail you guarantee. There's
zero chance it will actually save you, protect you or do anything useful for you. So what actually
is it? Why do people constantly talk about it? Well, then you go and look at who's constantly
talking about it. The progressives teach us a very important lesson. The purpose of a system is
what it does, not what it claims it is, not what it pretends to be, but what it actually does in
the world. International law does one actual thing in the world. It allows very safe, very powerful
people to feel very morally righteous about their safety and power. That's it. It doesn't actually do
anything more than that. Europe constantly talks about international law because it has zero
challenges. If it actually had a security challenge, if Putin invaded Poland, defeated the
polls, which is I think unlikely because Poland has quite a significant military, but if it did
that, and now Germany had to face directly the Russian army, you know what the Germans wouldn't
care about? They wouldn't care about having a lawyer's committee figure out every airstrike before
they drop the bombs because they would be desperate and they would actually have to survive this
thing and win this thing. And so international law only survives because Germany doesn't think
that's ever going to happen. And so he can just talk about the great and enormous and self-congratulatory
morality. I want international law. I wish we had international law. I desperately wish we had
international law. You know what international law would mean? It would mean that Iran was constrained
by the world from being able to ever try to exterminate might people, from putting 200,000
rockets under the villages of South Lebanon. That would have terrible costs for Iran.
Cost Iran cannot afford because that's what law is. Law is enforceable. If you can't enforce it,
it's not law. It's a conversation. It's a suggestion. It's a best practice at best.
You know what law is? Law is flows from the population that it imposes itself on.
Right? I have a social contract with law, community, law enforcement, infrastructure. Protects me.
Every day they go out there and they catch the bank robbers and they catch the people
speeding who threaten my teenage son so that he can drive on a safer road.
And therefore because they protect me, they can also demand of me things. Well international law
can't protect me. So what right doesn't have to demand of me? What right doesn't have to
tie my hands behind my back and I'll fight with Chisbalah? If it can't do a damn thing to protect
me from Chisbalah. And I happen to be powerful, self-made, powerful. So, you know, I'm relatively safe
from an international law that can't protect me. But you know what? You want to take this case to
the other side of the aisle and not have an Israeli declare he doesn't care about international law?
Palestinians. What the hell is international law ever done for them? Has it protected them against
Israel? Has it protected them from Lebanon, which for decades had laws on the books that were
basically the Zaurist oppression laws against the Jews in Eastern Europe for a century under the
Russian Empire. They couldn't own land. They couldn't work in professions. Lebanon treated
the Palestinian refugees for four generations in Lebanon the way the Zaurist regime treated the Jews
that sent millions of Jews fleeing. Where was international law to protect Palestinians,
either from us or from anybody? Where was that? What happened to that? You come to the Arab world
and you ask about international law. Do people scream and shout and yell about international law
more than in the Arab world and in Iran? The Iranian Foreign Minister talked about international law
this very week. Well, that's an interesting point. The Israel has been taken to the International
Criminal Court to face charges of genocide and various other charges. And then you actually look
around the Middle East and you notice, you know, there are no Arab countries that are even members
of the ICC that signed the Rome statute, except I think Tunisia. The Arab world demands that the
Europe take in millions of refugees from Syria. The Arab world took in almost no refugees from Syria
with a couple exceptions of Jordan and Lebanon. I think that's it. Well, why didn't the Arab world
take in any refugees from Syria? Why does Germany and Britain and France have to take in more than
all the Arab world combined, each one of them on any given month, more than the Arab world ever has?
And then you realize that all these Western countries in the name of morality and international law
are all signatory to the refugee convention, you know, who's not signatory to the refugee convention,
just about every Arab country. International law is the law in which the people who would
behave that way anyway, the good, the decent, the democratic, constrain their ability to face down
those who just don't care and don't plan to ever follow these laws. It's a bad idea if only the
good people can't defend themselves. And that's what international law has become. It's not even
built. It inherently can't be enforced and actually be the one thing that I need a law to be.
The one thing that gives it the right to make demands on me, which is that it protects me.
It doesn't protect me. What rate does it have to make any demands?
Wow, I couldn't have put it better myself. Thank you for exploring this with me. I'm going to invite
you over to our sub-stack, but I want to ask you some questions from our sub-stackers. But before we do
that, is there anything important that you think I might have missed and is there anything you'd
like to bring attention to in your own work? How can people find your podcast? We're going to be
connected. So this is joint released so people can click on to find your YouTube channel
below the video here. But is there anything else you'd like to bring attention to?
The reason Iran is so weak is that it has engaged, it has been consumed by a politics of blame,
a politics of conspiracy. The Iranian regime has argued for 47 years that every problem Iran
faces, somebody else did to Iran. Not that Iran has anything it needs to fix,
not that Iran has to build, not that Iran has to, you know, when you talk to Iranians about what
happens to this, the unbelievable talent pool of the Iranian population, some of the great geniuses
in this world, especially in tech and math specifically are Persians. And what the Iranians tell you
is that Iran, the country, the government, the regime has taken Iran's most talented people
and turned them either into martyrs, killing them. These are a lot of the protesters, a lot of
them are university people, university students, or refugees. They all fled to the west, a politics
that finds other people, other forces, Western imperialism, the Jews, and explains every problem
in society that way, ends up looking like Iran, ends up an incompetent, self-destroyed, internally
incoherent country. Iran is the warning. Iran is the warning, the cautionary tale, don't engage in
this politics, that is where countries end up when they engage in those politics. Look at the
difference between the Emirates that don't engage in those politics and the Iranians that do just
in terms of competence, happiness, prosperity, that's the difference. Where you can find
my podcast is called Ask Havi of Anything, which I thought was a great brand. It was my wife's
suggestion. It's actually a terrible brand because now I get hundreds of questions that I either
don't know the answer to or don't have time to respond to. But nevertheless, we try to respond
and try and get a lot of answers and try and tell the story. These complicated stories. None of this
is simple. Havi, thank you, especially as you are literally in a conflict zone and it must be
been a very trying and testing week to say the least. So thank you so much. I'm going to invite you
to the sub-stagnar. Thanks for listening to The Winston Marshall Show with Havi v. Retic Geur,
head over to WinstonMarshall.co.uk right now for an extended conversation between
me and Havi where he takes some of our sub-stackers brilliant questions and you can enjoy
at free viewing and listening. That's all at WinstonMarshall.co.uk. But until next time, be safe and be

The Winston Marshall Show

The Winston Marshall Show

The Winston Marshall Show
