Haviv Rettig Gur - The Secret Plan Behind Trump’s Iran War

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