Transcript: Tucker Carlson Debates Joe Kent on Trump Nuclear Risks and Impeachment Calls

Read the full transcript of Joe Kent’s interview on Risk of Nuclear War @Tucker Carlson Show, August 28, 2026.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent joins Tucker Carlson to examine leaked Pentagon nuclear plans and the rising risk of nuclear escalation. A 20-year Army veteran and Gold Star husband, Kent discusses U.S. involvement in the Iran and Ukraine conflicts, Israel’s actions in Lebanon, the influence of neocons, and whether impeachment now looms over President Trump.

Monologue: Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War

TUCKER CARLSON (00:00:04 – 00:23:40): There’s something about catastrophe that’s very difficult for the human brain to process. Something terrible happens, and most people refuse to acknowledge it as it begins.

Talk to anybody who’s seen a shooting, for example, and they’ll tell you — most of them will tell you if you interview them — “I thought it was fireworks or a car backfiring.” Most people perceive a house fire in the first moments as burning toast. Again, there’s something about people that pushes away evidence of disaster.

And so with that in mind, how would the average person assess the risk of nuclear war? Which, to state the obvious, or what used to be obvious, is the worst possible thing. A nuclear war ends inevitably in the destruction of all human life on the planet. So there’s nothing worse than nuclear war.

Ask your average American, are we close to nuclear war? And haven’t seen polling on it, but 9 out of 10 would almost certainly say, “Well, no, of course not,” because it’s just not imaginable. And let’s hope it remains unimaginable. But the evidence is mounting that some people are imagining it, and therefore we are moving much closer to it.

Russia’s Revised Nuclear Doctrine

What’s the evidence? Well, it’s all around us, and it’s only our unwillingness, our native hesitancy to add it all up that prevents us from seeing that. But here are a couple facts that might be worth considering if you’re trying to assess, are we actually close to a nuclear war?

Russia has revised its nuclear doctrine. Nuclear doctrine is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the rules that a country sets for itself about when and under what circumstances it will use nuclear weapons. Most countries that possess nuclear weapons, not all, but most, have what’s called a no-first-use policy. Meaning they pledge to the world, but also to themselves, “We will not be the first to press the button. We will use nuclear weapons in defense only.”

Notably, the United States and Israel do not have a no-first-use policy. They have reserved the right to use nuclear weapons offensively if they so desire. But until very recently, no one imagined that the United States or Israel or any country would ever launch nuclear weapons unless nuclear weapons had been launched against them.

And that’s why for over 80 years, nuclear weapons have basically preserved the peace, horrifying as they are, or perhaps because they are so horrifying. We haven’t had a global war since 1945 because the idea is nobody would win. Mutually assured destruction is the phrase that people often used for this.

And so it’s a big change when states start to think about using nuclear weapons in the same way that you would use, say, artillery. Or bombs or missiles? That has never been considered before. But now, clearly, it is under consideration by a couple or maybe several different countries. And those would include Russia, the United States, and Israel.

Again, how do we know that? Well, Russia has revised its nuclear doctrine. The United States is now in the process of revising its nuclear doctrine. As for Israel, well, the government of Israel and successive governments of Israel have over more than 50 years at various points threatened the use of offensive nuclear weapons. So we sort of know that Israel is capable of that, at least if you take them at their word.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons and the Pentagon

But the United States is a country most Americans never imagined would seriously consider lobbing nukes into another country unless it was attacked first. But it is a fact that that is now under consideration. And not just under consideration, it has been proposed in writing within the Pentagon.

Reports in the last 2 weeks indicate that during meetings within the Pentagon about how to respond to Iran in that current war, the possibility, the option has been floated of using what are called tactical nuclear weapons, which are just nuclear weapons detonated at a higher altitude or at a lower strength, but they’re still nuclear weapons, that discussions about their use have taken place in the Pentagon. And we’re here to confirm that that is absolutely true.

And not only have there been discussions about the use of nuclear weapons, tactical nukes against, say, Kharg Island or Pickaxe Mountain or various spots within Iran, those discussions have included slide decks, which is to say somebody wrote down on a computer screen, “Hey, maybe we should use nuclear weapons in this war, this war of choice, this war that we started for objectives that have nothing to do with America’s national security or national interest.”

Now, you would think at that point the meeting would stop and the person in charge of the meeting would say, “Who wrote that? Who’s suggesting that? Who actually put on a screen in letters in English the idea that we would use nuclear weapons in the Persian Gulf.” And the person running the meeting would find out, then he would call the president, and then legal proceedings, criminal proceedings, would begin against the person who wrote that down. Because anyone who suggests the use, the voluntary use, the offensive use of nuclear weapons is putting at risk the life of every person on the planet, and that would include your children and grandchildren and you, that person is by definition a lunatic, a dangerous lunatic who should not only be removed from any decision-making authority, but probably should go to jail, immediately, especially in a country that routinely puts people in jail for, I don’t know, tax evasion.

The guy who suggests ending life on this planet probably should face some kind of sanction. And the rest of us should join in in saying that’s not acceptable.

And again, anyone who suggests that is dangerous, is a crazy person, is in fact a criminal, because that’s true. People who suggest killing every human being are criminals. But nobody said that, in part because the president of the United States has repeatedly suggested using nuclear weapons in the war against Iran.

Now, if you were to pose this question to the White House press office, they would say the president has never suggested using nukes. But of course, that’s not true, because in statement after statement posted on the internet, on Truth Social, the president has threatened the total destruction of Iran, of the civilization itself. And of course, you can’t achieve that with any conventional weapon. There’s only one way to achieve that, the total destruction of a civilization, and that’s with nuclear weapons. And so openly, in public, for the world to see, the president has threatened — the US president has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in this war. And so we should consider that a real possibility. But of course we don’t because we can’t metabolize something that horrible.

Escalation in Russia

So in recent weeks, we’ve been hearing that the situation in Russia, not in Iran, but in the war ongoing against Russia, has deteriorated to the point that the Russians are considering using nuclear weapons. And so we’ve done everything we could by calling people to find out, is that true? And it’s hard to know exactly if that’s true, but here’s the way to think about it.

The war in Russia, despite getting almost no attention in American media, is not only ongoing, but it’s accelerating. That’s the first thing to know. And it’s accelerating because NATO, the United States, and the Western European powers are hitting targets, including civilian targets and energy targets deep within mainland Russia. And that would include a school, killing people on beaches with drones, hitting the Kremlin itself multiple times in drone attacks. So that’s becoming more intense.

Public opinion in Russia clearly is moving in a more bellicose direction. There are elections underway in Russia right now, which end September 20th, the Duma elections, the lawmakers’ elections. And it’s very clear that more and more Russians — and it’s hard to quantify this precisely — are surprised and dismayed that their government is allowing attacks not by Ukraine, but by Ukraine’s sponsors, NATO and the United States, against Russia. And it’s not destroying the Russian economy. We haven’t been able to do that, but it is hurting the Russian economy. And of course, it is a threat to ordinary Russians. People are getting killed on beaches by drone attacks paid for by the United States or NATO.

And if those attacks are being targeted with coordinates given to the Ukrainians by the CIA, and that’s exactly what’s happening, then your average Russian is beginning to wonder, why aren’t we doing anything about this? And so there is mounting pressure on the leadership of that country, Vladimir Putin, who despite American and Western propaganda is not an absolute totalitarian dictator, which is to say he can’t make any decision he wants. He is subject to the opinions, influenced by the opinions of all kinds of different power centers within that country, including public opinion. So the point is pressure is mounting on Putin to do something to stop these attacks on Russia.

And of course, the people mounting the attacks, paying for them, it’s not the Ukrainians. By the way, there is no real Ukraine anymore. Its population has been decimated in this war. The big decisions are made by outside powers. Ukraine has no sovereignty, unfortunately for Ukraine. But the people who are making the decisions — and that would include the CIA in the United States, the NSA in the United States, the heads of state of Great Britain and France and Germany and basically the rest of the West — those people clearly understand that we’re moving toward some sort of more open conflict with Russia.

And that’s kind of the point. Push Russia to do something radical against the West, blow up Kyiv, for example, the Ukrainian capital, hit Poland, maybe even lob some kind of weapon into Western Europe. And at that point, you get what they’ve wanted since day one, which is an open war with Russia that they expect that they’ll win somehow. Which of course they won’t.

The Historical Precedent: Napoleon and Hitler

But the delusion that Western powers can control Russia by force is long-standing. Many leaders have fallen to that delusion. Napoleon himself in 1812 famously invaded Russia, got all the way to Moscow, occupied Moscow for a month in 1812, and then retreated and destroyed the entire French army. Hundreds of thousands of French soldiers died on the march back to Paris. But totally undeterred, crazed with hubris, Napoleon continued to pick other wars. And in less than 3 years, he was defeated finally, famously, in a fight with the Brits at Waterloo and died at 51 in exile. And France was never again, to this day, a global power. So he destroyed France and the French Empire because he thought that he could control Russia through force.

And 130 years later, almost within living memory, the German government under Adolf Hitler did exactly the same thing in Operation Barbarossa and marched all the way to Moscow once again and was once again totally destroyed.

So there’s something about Russia and the idea that outside powers can conquer it, take its resources or something, prevent it from becoming a global power, that is very alluring to Western leaders, but there is zero track record of success. Now, once again, within living memory of the last attempt, which was the German attempt in 1941 to do the same thing, European and American leaders have decided that, no, this time it will be different and we will control Russia through force. But of course, that’s not going to happen. It will not work, and it could lead to nuclear war.

Interview Clip: Leonid Slutsky

So in any case, we have been talking to as many people as we can about this, and one of them we interviewed yesterday from Moscow, Leonid Slutsky, who is the leader of a political party in Russia, a sophisticated, very knowledgeable person, very well connected within Russia. And to ask him how — how close are we to some kind of conflict? Most Americans are not paying attention. The American administration is totally distracted by the war with Iran. “Do you think that we are moving toward some kind of nuclear conflict?”

Now, unfortunately, that interview — it’s not possible to air most of it because it got screwed up by a translator. But we’re going to show you one clip. So in this, Slutsky says, look, “We don’t plan to use nuclear weapons unless and until some other power, some Western power, sends nuclear weapons to Ukraine.” Here he is.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

LEONID SLUTSKY: “If tactical nuclear weapons supplied by Zelensky’s patrons are used against us, perhaps we will ultimately have to consider the possibility of taking asymmetric steps. But so far this has not happened, and I very much hope — I repeat, I very much hope it will not happen.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

NATO sending nukes to Ukraine. Is there a crazier idea? Well, no, because of course this war began in the first place because Russia didn’t want other people’s nuclear weapons on its western border, its border with Ukraine. And it was the threat of that, the threat of Ukraine joining NATO, provoked by the Biden administration and administrations before Biden, including the Bush administration. It was that threat that pushed the Russians into invading eastern Ukraine. And the war, now more than 4 years old, is the result. And the deaths of hundreds of thousands, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, total unknown, but clearly the depopulation of Ukraine was the result. The total destruction of the nation of Ukraine was the result. And that was predictable, it was knowable. But less than 5 years later, we can say that if you push Russia hard enough and if you threaten to put nuclear weapons on its border, you will get a maximalist response. Of course, as you would from any power you tried to do that to.

Who Is Actually Running the War Against Russia

So the question is: are the European powers, is the United States crazy enough to do something like that? Well, of course. So the 2 things to know, and we’re going to speak to Joe Kent about this in just a minute, but the 2 things to know as you try to assess where is this all going is one, the United States, despite claims to the contrary, is in charge of the war against Russia.

It’s not a war to liberate Ukraine. No one in the West wants to liberate Ukraine. Of course, the United States sponsored a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to make certain that we could control its governance. So there’s no interest at the policymaking level in any Western country in allowing an autonomous, sovereign Ukraine. We don’t want that. We’ve never allowed it. So ignore those claims. This is not about liberating Ukraine. This is a war against Russia. And its purpose is to separate Russia from Ukraine because, as Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, if you combine Russia and Ukraine, you have a superpower.

The resources of Ukraine, the manufacturing capacity of Russia, the size of Russia, you have by definition a superpower. So if you want to prevent Russia from becoming a superpower, you have to divide Russia from Ukraine. Of course, it’s not as simple as saying so, but that has always been the object. And there are probably other motives here, complicated historic motives for what we’re doing, ugly motives, motives that have to do very much with the reimposition of Christianity on Russia by Vladimir Putin over the last 26 years.

But whatever the motive, you should know that the United States is now waging a war against Russia. That’s just a fact. And there’s a lot of pretending that, “Oh no, we’re not, we can’t control the Europeans,” but that’s a lie. And we know it’s a lie because a couple of days ago, John Ratcliffe, who’s the Director of Central Intelligence, who runs the CIA, flew into Moscow on an American military plane. And we don’t know exactly what the conversation was between Ratcliffe and his counterparts in Russia, but we do know, because the CIA has told us out loud, that before he left, before the plane took off from, I think, Latvia, John Ratcliffe called the Ukrainians and told them to stop any offensive action against Russia for the time that he was there. He halted the Ukrainian offensive while he was in Moscow.

Well, the person who can stop the fighting is in charge, of course, by definition. And so in doing that, John Ratcliffe showed the rest of us who’s actually running the war against Russia. And it’s him. It’s the Central Intelligence Agency and the Trump administration. The Trump administration is waging a war against Russia. And it’s important to say that out loud in the United States because most people don’t know it here. But in the rest of the world, and certainly within Russia, everybody knows it.

So once you start waging a war against the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, there are risks involved, of course. And the main risk to you, if you’re an American, is you don’t even know what’s happening. And so it’s impossible to protest against it. To protest against the risk that is being imposed on you, the risk of the total destruction of your country and the world, the death of your children. That’s exactly what they’re risking. So that’s the first thing to know.

Weakness Breeds Danger

The second thing to know is that powers, nations, like people, become much more dangerous when they become weaker. The world has very little to fear from a legitimately strong country. A strong country simply wants to preserve the status quo, its own interests, its trade routes. It doesn’t want to be threatened by other countries, but it doesn’t seek, say, territorial expansion. Because why would you take the risk when you’re strong, when things are going well? Why would you want to change them?

The risk always comes from the weaker party, the party that is cornered like an animal or a short man in a bar fight. That’s the dangerous opponent, is the opponent who feels that his options are running out, that he has no choice.

And that is exactly why there are conversations now in the Pentagon about using offensive nuclear weapons against Iran, a non-nuclear armed power. A strong country would never have that discussion because a strong country would, for example, use its navy, its trillion-dollar navy to, I don’t know, open the Strait of Hormuz and restore balance to global energy markets. That’s the point of having a navy. But we have demonstrated over the last 6 months that we can’t do that. Our Navy is not, for a bunch of reasons, capable of opening the Strait of Hormuz.

And so the United States is facing a very tough decision. And you do have, as reckless and crazy as this is, you do have some sympathy for it. If the US leaves the Persian Gulf with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, there’s no lying about what just happened. We lost the war. The US is much weaker than it was at the outset, and we’re going to have to live with the consequences of that up to and including a monetary reset globally, which is to say the loss of global reserve status for the US dollar. And that has huge implications for this country domestically. The end of empire is always ugly and it can be extremely ugly for the nation that administers the empire.

And so the US has an awful lot to lose. It’s hard to walk back from what we’ve done in a graceful way that preserves our power and our prosperity at home. So the Trump administration is in a really, really tough position. The question is, will it make it much worse? Will it get everyone on Earth killed rather than accepting the inevitable loss. And at this point, that loss is inevitable, unfortunately, tragically.

So in this case, and it pains me as an American to say that, the dangerous party here is not Iran and not Russia. And it hurts even to use those words because it was unimaginable even 10 years ago that the United States would be the threat to world peace. But in this specific instance, yes. Because the United States doesn’t actually have many options left. There is no conventional way to beat Iran in this war. There is no conventional way to beat Russia in this war. And so at this point, the option is pull back or accelerate into nuclear holocaust.

And it’s important to say this out loud, not to scare people, but so that people know where we are right now at the end of August 2026. And perhaps a public outcry can get the lunatics who are marching toward annihilation to pull back.

And with that, we’re grateful to have one of the wisest and best-informed people we know assess where exactly we are. That’s Joe Kent, most recently the head of the Counterterrorism Center in Washington, and our friend Joe Kent.

Interview: Joe Kent on Iran, Russia, and the Path to Nuclear Escalation

TUCKER CARLSON (00:22:22 – 00:23:40): Joe, thanks for doing this. Don’t want to be alarmist. Don’t want to scare people. Don’t want to be scared. But the evidence suggests that the US is running out of options and the logic of this escalation gets us to a first-use nuclear strike. That’s my interpretation of where we are. Do you think that’s right?

The Path to Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran

JOE KENT (00:23:42 – 00:26:50): I think if you zoom out and you get beyond the day-to-day kind of back and forth — are we sanctioning them, are we going back to some kind of a conflict — and you play out the scenario based on the parameters that our leaders, especially the president, have outlined.

The president has said a bunch of different things throughout this entire conflict, but he started out with, “Hey, we need a total surrender.” And we were using the rhetoric of regime change. And at times we walked that back. But every time that we appear to get a deal, the MOU is a great example, we’re in another period right now where we’re trying to get a deal, but we’re still implying that the Iranian regime as we know it must collapse, that there has to be some kind of a total victory.

And that sounds like, “Okay, maybe we could do that.” Maybe people thought that in the February, March timeframe, but now here we are at the end of August and that still hasn’t happened with the military tools that we have at our disposal. And so if our goal is to completely and totally collapse the regime, have the regime crumble or surrender in some way, shape, or form, we’ve kind of got 2 options, because it’s not going to happen through sanctions. It’s not going to happen through the limited air campaign that we’ve done up to this point, because if that was going to work, it would’ve worked by now, or we’d be doing more of a limited air campaign.

So we’ve got 2 options, and that’s to escalate by putting boots on the ground. And if you just take a look at how big Iran is, how the terrain actually is — even if we had the full scope of our military called up like we did for the 2003 invasion, and even if we had a coalition like we had in 2003, a ground invasion inside Iran just is not feasible whatsoever. Even if we had the national will to do it, the country is simply too big, the terrain is too much. And then even if we could come in and topple the regime like we got rid of Saddam, well then, as we know, we have this thing called the insurgency.

And so the ground option really quickly, that’s just not a serious thing. And then also we don’t have the political will for it. So then you go back to square one. Our goal is for the regime to be totally collapsed. And so quickly you arrive at, well, we kind of have to use a weapon of mass destruction or a nuclear weapon of some sort. And so really, if you just play out the scenario for long enough, you arrive at weapons of mass destruction fairly quickly.

And then even if we set the bar at just — we want Iran to not have the capability to develop a nuclear weapon — and now we’ve set our sights on Pickaxe Mountain, we’ve gone back and forth between saying the 3 nuclear sites were completely obliterated to they may still have some nuclear dust in them. And that’s where I think we’re tempted to use a limited tactical nuke on a specific target as opposed to a population center.

But I just think the longer that you play out the math, you kind of come back to the Japan scenario, which is where we were the last time, the only time thankfully that we’ve used nuclear weapons. We didn’t want to commit the ground forces necessary to take Japan because we had already expended so much. The Pacific campaign had already cost us so much. And so he said, actually, the best thing that we can do is drop a nuclear weapon. And so I think we would be fools to think that this couldn’t happen here in this current scenario, especially as the administration scrambles for a way out.

The Problem of Unconditional Surrender

TUCKER CARLSON (00:26:50 – 00:27:31): So now and then, both of those calculations began with the same demand, which was total submission. Before, really before the modern era, defeat didn’t necessarily mean unconditional surrender, right? You just want to resolve whatever the conflict is, but that doesn’t necessarily require you to enslave your opponent at the end. And so maybe the problem is our original demand, or the president’s original demand for unconditional surrender. You can imagine a world in which you just said, “Look, it’s enough that you don’t have an active nuclear program, and we can back off and let you run your world or your region.”

JOE KENT (00:27:33 – 00:30:19): And this is a fundamental problem we’ve had with this last iteration of this conflict. We have really failed to set the parameters. We failed to say what our strategic goal is before we got into the war. We got into the war and then we fished around and we’ve moved the goalposts several different times.

And that’s had many ripple-down effects. I’d say mostly with the Pentagon, with the Department of Defense, who’s trying to come up with viable solutions for the president using the tools they have at their disposal, which is, you know, military tools. They really haven’t known exactly what the president’s wanted because he came out and he said, “Okay, total surrender, the regime is going to fall,” etc. But then we backed off from that. And now it seems like we’re just trying to get basically the Straits of Hormuz opened up once again. But then we kind of fall back on “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

And so there’s a lot of different angles there that you and I have discussed before on why we’re fixated on the nuclear dust. I think the vast majority of it is due to the pressure from the Israelis, and the Israelis want regime decapitation. They’re completely comfortable with a scenario where we’re constantly mowing the grass. They’re comfortable with the chaos, but they know Americans aren’t. And so they’ve had to sell us some kind of an objective. But the president has failed to define that.

So if our goal was just to come up with a solution to the Iranian nuclear option — number one, the negotiations were working. That’s why the Israelis had to shotgun through this war so quickly in the lead-up to the 12-Day War. Midnight Hammer, I believe, took that off the table. And I think that was the president’s intent. He was done talking about levels of enrichment. He was sick and tired of the Israelis pressuring him. And so he just took it off the table.

I think the Iranians actually went along with that because they went right back to the negotiating table. But now we’re back stuck in this space where we’re demanding some kind of a total capitulation from the Iranians when really that’s just not feasible at all. And we seem to have recognized that at varying points. Again, the MOU, I think, is a great example. The president even said we have to do the MOU because we’re facing an economic disaster in this country. So for a brief moment there, he realized he needed to be pragmatic and say, “Okay, good enough. Our main goal has to be the Straits of Hormuz being opened up again, some kind of a status quo or working relationship we could have with the Iranians, and then we’ll discuss their nuclear file later on.”

But he couldn’t even tolerate the pressure internally from the pro-Israel lobby, because immediately we dispatched Marco Rubio over to Lebanon where he cut basically a side deal that negated the MOU. And then we also started pressuring or allowing ships to come through in violation of the MOU through the Straits of Hormuz. So we seem to not know exactly what we want. And this is why I think we should be very, very concerned about something that most people will think isn’t feasible, like a nuclear weapon being deployed, because there is so much confusion and friction and chaos in this entire process.

The Case for Removal from Office

TUCKER CARLSON (00:30:19 – 00:31:10): I was opposed to impeachment, the 2 impeachment attempts against Trump, strongly opposed. I think the whole thing was absurd. I believe in stability. I think elected leaders should serve out their terms. I don’t hate Trump personally. So with all of that said, the second any president actively considers first use of nuclear weapons, that person should be removed from office immediately. Immediately. Because that’s got to be the red line. Destroying all of humanity with a nuclear strike? So why isn’t there an attempt to remove him from office, immediately? Anyone who would even tolerate that kind of talk from any of his subordinates or employees is by definition unfit. That’s the total destruction of the world.

JOE KENT (00:31:11 – 00:32:30): The contrast is pretty wild. I mean, they wanted to impeach President Trump before because he had the audacity to question if mail-in ballots were legitimate or not. And he said, “Go, go march peacefully and patriotically onto the Capitol to protest this election.” However, he has threatened to annihilate an entire civilization, and the so-called opposition party — they seem to be completely okay with that.

Every now and again, in a hearing, they’ll throw out some barbs and jabs about, “Oh, didn’t you know that your interceptors were being depleted?” But there doesn’t seem to be any actual pushback from the Democrats. And I think this really points to the true bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C., which is they always want more war, especially this war with Iran. And I think that really speaks to the amount of influence the Israeli lobby has over our elected officials.

But even with the Ukraine war — now because the president has said different things, Republicans I think are a bit more torn than they were before when Republicans weren’t in power. But even with the Ukraine war, there was a lot of pushback, there was a lot of back and forth. But with this war, there has been no real pushback from the Democrats. And then by and large, the most resistance I think you’ve seen has been from Republicans or former Republicans that are saying, “Hey, this isn’t what we actually ran on.” So I think this has been a great unmasking that just shows there’s only one party in Washington, D.C.

Pentagon Slide Decks and the Threshold No One Enforced

TUCKER CARLSON (00:32:30 – 00:34:34): I agree with that completely. And I think there’s going to be a huge political shift after November, I would think. But I just can’t get past the fact, and it is a fact, it’s not a guess, it’s a fact, that the first use of nuclear weapons, offensive use of nuclear weapons, has been discussed in Pentagon meetings and put in slide decks. And Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that a couple of weeks ago and was dismissed. “That’s not true.” Well, it is. It’s factually true. And now everyone in the administration knows that it’s true.

I don’t understand how that can be tolerated. Again, it’s not a partisan question. It’s not about Trump’s personality, or it’s not about anything. It’s not about any of the debates that we normally have. That has to be the end. You cannot allow that. But no one seems to think that. Everyone’s fine with that.

JOE KENT (00:34:37 – 00:35:58): I left the Trump administration, and I think that there’s a very odd — I guess is the best way I could put it, probably the most polite way I could put it — culture throughout the entire administration that you just need to go along with whatever the boss says, which is the job that we all signed up for. And if you can’t do that, you should leave, which is what I did.

However, there does seem to be an erosion of — I would say, you know, “norms” is cliché, but I would just say an erosion of any kind of moral compass where people should stand up and say, “We shouldn’t be doing this,” or, “Why are we letting a foreign government put us in this position?” I’m not sure why it’s not reaching the president that the best thing that we should do right now is just pick up and leave before things get far worse. I, for the life of me, don’t understand that.

I do think there’s a major cultural issue right now within the administration. We should be seeing a lot more people from the administration stand up and leave. They don’t have to do it the way that I did. There’s a lot of criticisms you can make of how I left, that’s fine. However, the fact that we haven’t seen more people leave the administration and say, “I’m not going to go along with this, this is taking our country in a disastrous direction,” I think just speaks volumes to the incentive system that is created inside Washington, D.C. And unfortunately, the people who end up in these positions — that’s something that we have to fix if our country is actually going to be saved, or the world.

Israel, Lebanon, and the Likud Election

TUCKER CARLSON (00:35:59 – 00:36:53): Any leader of any country who suggests first use of nuclear weapons has forfeited his right to lead. He has to be removed immediately. I think that’s just a fair standard. Any normal person, I think, if we were to kind of cool the temperature a little bit and just ask objectively, is that fair? Yeah, of course that’s fair. You can’t risk the destruction of the world. You’re not allowed. You didn’t build the world. You’re not allowed to do that.

So back to the internal incentives here that are driving us toward destruction, and it is destruction. I have just heard that Israel, that the Netanyahu government, which is facing an election in October, is considering an acceleration in Lebanon, like more killing in Lebanon. Do you think that’s true? And if Israel does that, what will the US response be, do you think?

JOE KENT (00:36:55 – 00:39:57): Well, the easy answer to the latter part of your question, what will the US response be to anything that Israel does? At best, we’ll allow some US official to say, “We really don’t like it that Israel did that.” And then a couple days later, they’ll walk it back and say, “Yes, but Israel has the right to defend itself,” or some other boilerplate line.

Unfortunately, regardless of sometimes using more strongly worded tweets or public statements against the Israelis, we have yet to change the relationship with the Israelis whatsoever. Regardless of how many times the Israelis have publicly violated what the president has told them to do or not to do in this conflict in particular, we continue to provide the Israelis basically with whatever they want. We’re merging — and people don’t like it when I say “merging” — but we’re giving the Israelis access to some of the most sensitive capabilities within the Department of War, within our intelligence community, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. We’re still giving the Israelis nearly $4 billion in assistance. We launched this war at their behest, which has cost us, I think, somewhere to the tune of $300 billion and 18 fallen Americans, tragically. So we have yet to really change the nature of our relationship with the Israelis. So we should not expect the Israelis to change how they behave.

Now, the Lebanon piece I think is very, very interesting because the Israelis are very smart. They understand American politics very well. I think they know that they ran up to the limit where they can publicly humiliate the president by going and taking offensive actions inside of Iran, because that’s just a blatant smack in the face of the president. They got away with it on multiple occasions and they got us into this war. They know that they don’t need to put the president or Republicans in the hot seat any more than they already have going into the midterms.

But that’s where Lebanon is much easier. Lebanon is right on their borders. They don’t need any assistance from America to reach inside of Lebanon in the way they do with Iran. However, because this war has gone so poorly for us, the Iranians have moved their support from Lebanese Hezbollah. They’ve moved it away from being clandestine and covert, and they’ve said, “Okay, now we are actually going to act as a true regional power and we’re going to hold the Israeli government accountable whenever they do something inside Lebanon that we don’t like.” And in the past, this would just be covert support to Hezbollah, but we’ve seen them actually launch ballistic missiles now against Israel.

So Israel knows they can restart the war. The Iranians, I think, in a way to attempt to rein in Israel, they put Lebanon as part of the MOU. And that’s one of the first violations that we made. And it’s one of the first failures that we had with enforcing the MOU — we cut that side deal that allowed the Israelis to maintain their presence and to continue to go on the offensive inside Lebanon. So Lebanon is going to be essentially the easy button for the Israelis to kind of poke at the Iranians to flare back up this conflict. And right now, I think the Likud government, they’re in a very dangerous position because they’re facing reelection. So they want there to be a hot war. They want to show their people that they’re going on the offense against Hezbollah. So again, for us to put ourselves in this position, I just think is incredibly reckless.

TUCKER CARLSON (00:39:58 – 00:40:14): So the future of the United States hangs on the fortunes of the Likud Party in a country of 9 million people and their elections in October, which most Americans know nothing about, don’t even know they’re happening. But our children’s future depends on that, like Bibi’s desire not to lose.

The Israeli Lobby and the War’s Origins

JOE KENT (00:40:15 – 00:42:21): When you say it out loud, it’s absurd. And most people, if they just heard that statement, they would be like, “Well, Tucker and Joe were being hyperbolic and that’s just ridiculous.” However, if you just look at the last, I mean, 6 months — obviously there’s a longer history prior to that — but if you look at the history since basically we got into this war in February, that is essentially the scenario.

We got into this war — don’t take my word for it, listen to Secretary of State slash National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. We got into this war because the Israelis were about ready to launch an attack in Iran. And we knew that this time, this iteration of the conflict, the Iranians wouldn’t take it on the chin. They would actually hit us back because they had already been through one iteration of conflict before. And so we got into this war because of the Israelis, and we’re staying in this war.

The Israelis have killed several of the moderates, the so-called Iranian moderates that we were negotiating with, are actually at the negotiating table with us. The Israelis got us on board with killing the Iranian Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which has led to a more hardline leadership class coming into power inside of Iran. So we can’t get ourselves out of this war because the Israelis got us into it. Every time we think we’re trying to get out of it, the Israelis take some action, primarily at this point in this juncture inside Lebanon, that keeps us in this war. We refuse to change our relationship with the Israelis, so the Israelis have no incentive to change their behavior whatsoever. We’ve never held them accountable.

So when you look at it through that lens, the fact that the internal politics of Israel and the Likud Party, and the Likud Party facing reelection, and the Israelis knowing in the back of their head — they know that Donald Trump is probably the last pro-Israel president that they’re going to have. So essentially, they’re going for broke. They’re trying to get as much as they can right now out of the United States of America, out of the US taxpayer, out of the blood of American soldiers before the ride comes crashing to a halt sometime in January of 2029.

So when you look at it through that lens, everything that you just said about this tiny country, because of the influence it has over our politicians driving basically the fates of the world, the world economy, the potential use of nuclear weapons — it’s 100% true, and it should scare. And it’s not just Iran.

The Same Donors, the Same War Machine

TUCKER CARLSON (00:42:22 – 00:43:03): The same donors who pushed Trump to follow Israel into this war, who have a hammerlock over this administration, are exactly the same people who pushed us to war with Russia. So they’re not different people. It’s the same group. And so I don’t understand why Trump is still their slave. He’s very frustrated. This is destroying his legacy. It’ll hurt his family. It’s hurting the country. It’s wrecking the Republican Party. It’s all downside for Trump. So I don’t — and he’s mad about it. Obviously, he said so in public. Why is he still under the control of neocons right now?

JOE KENT (00:43:04 – 00:46:15): That’s the question of our era. And I hope we get answers to it at some point. But I feel like this question will be studied for quite some time.

President Trump came to power on, I’d say, 3 major principles. And number one was foreign policy. He called out on the debate stage how foolish the Iraq War was. He has said over and over again on the campaign trail how foolish the Ukraine war is and how he would solve it. And this was the key premise, I think, of his 2016 campaign, most certainly his 2024 campaign. There was also immigration, of course, and there was secure border, there was a lot of labor and trade issues there. But the foreign policy and the ramifications of American foreign policy is something that President Trump just — he understood at a gut level. This is why I supported President Trump from the time that he attacked Jeb Bush on the debate stage in South Carolina, nearly a decade ago. That’s why I supported him, because I was like, “Hey, the guy from The Apprentice actually understands foreign policy better than all the so-called experts.” And me and most of my friends had spent the last decade and a half in these foolish wars.

And so what I still, for the life of me, being on the inside, I don’t understand how someone who understood that at a gut level — and he actually understood too, more importantly, how the American people felt. He really knew that this was a sensitive issue with the American people. And so to see him get walked into a scenario that he knew was going to be a disaster for our country, but then also for him politically — I mean, President Trump has great political instincts. And so to watch him just walk into this glaring bear trap, off a cliff, whatever analogy you want to use, it’s something that shocked me, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

And people will say the Israeli lobby, the neocons, they played to President Trump’s ego. They got him at the right time. They said, “Hey, the protesters are on the street.” Venezuela, most certainly, I was concerned when the Venezuela operation happened, as were many of my peers and colleagues and even guys in the military. They were concerned that this was going to give President Trump the false sense that any country that we had a problem with, we could just swoop in, grab the leader, and it’d kind of be endgame. That concerned me a lot too.

And so, did they give President Trump the pitch at the right time and tell him, “Hey, this is going to be super easy?” Of course, I think all that happened. However, for President Trump to even begin going down this road before the 12-day war is something that it still baffles me. At the beginning of the administration, early 2025, he was utterly just not interested and kind of disgusted with people even entertaining the idea of military operations in Iran. He put all of his chips in with Steve Witkoff and his negotiations. And why he flipped on a dime, I don’t know.

And this is why I say that we should look at every single factor that could influence his decision-making, everything from Butler to the breaches of his security, to having one of his closest political advocates who was against the war in Iran, who was against the 12-Day War, who was actively petitioning the president not to get back into the war when he, Charlie Kirk, was publicly assassinated. I think we should factor all that in too. And again, I can’t individually connect all these and say that they are all intertwined and it’s the same group or some vast conspiracy. However, I do think all of these things can, should be included when we’re trying to assess why President Trump made the decisions that he made.

The Venezuela Precedent and Mossad’s Pitch

TUCKER CARLSON (00:46:16 – 00:48:32): If you talk to people around Trump, which I still do, they will say he just got convinced, he just got over his skis, and Venezuela played a huge — the January 4th kidnapping of Maduro played a huge role in this. It was easy, minimal loss of life, minimal expense, huge upside glory, and he was told by — not by US intelligence agencies, but as you know since you were there — by Mossad that this would be similar in Iran. “Just kill the Ayatollah and it’ll work.” That’s their view. Or they say that’s what they think. Who knows what they really think?

But anyway, it’s impossible to believe that after the Israelis sabotaged Trump’s effort to get a negotiated settlement to this — we don’t have a negotiated settlement because of the Israelis. And Trump hated that and sent his vice president out to criticize them. And there was this moment, if you — I know you remember the summer, where it was like, “Oh gosh, Trump finally gets it.” But now we’re back to where we were in the opening days of the war. So you can’t argue that he’s been fooled at this point. He knows perfectly well, but he’s still doing their bidding despite the fact it’s destroying him. So what?

JOE KENT (00:48:35 – 00:51:02): This is what I can’t wrap my head around either. I would think from his business perspective, and then just him probably being mad at everyone who gave him this advice, if it were up to him, he would pick up and leave. And look, President Trump is very politically savvy. I know that all his critics then would come after him and they’d be like, “Oh, you’re retreating,” all this narrative, that narrative. Nobody can drive a domestic political narrative like Donald Trump. And so Trump knows that. So there’s no reason why he wouldn’t just pick up everything and say, “Hey, we’re going to deal with this later,” and then come back and say, “Hey, I won the war, don’t listen to the fake news that says I lost.” And then he would just simply switch the topic. We’d still have to deal with all the ramifications from the war, but I think we could do that quietly.

Why he’s not doing that, I have no idea. But that points back to why I think we do need to assess all of the potential external factors, and even the factors that are much darker and some would even say are kind of conspiratorial. Because at the end of the day, nothing that we’re doing right now is logical whatsoever. Our relationship with Israel, the way that we’re letting them continue to sabotage these deals, the fact that we’re just staying locked in this mess. President Trump has been cutting business deals his entire life. For him not to be able to assess that right now the Iranians, they’re not primed for a deal — the Iranians are not going to give us a deal on a piece of paper that he wants. That doesn’t mean that we can’t work out some arrangement where the Straits of Hormuz are open back up again. I would think President Trump would understand that, and I think he does understand that. So why is he not just simply walking away before this escalates and gets even worse? I truly don’t know.

I don’t think it’s the most obvious answer. People are saying, “No, Trump is just a captive of his own ego.” And I’m sure some of that is true to a certain extent. However, he wants to be politically successful. He doesn’t want to get blown out in the midterms. He’s saying right now like, “Oh yeah, the midterms, I don’t really care, that’s Republicans’ fault.” He’s saying all that, but I don’t think that that’s actually his heart. I think he wants to be successful. So for him not to pick up and walk away, there’s a much deeper and darker answer there, I fear, that I think we should continue to probe and ask about. Because anytime we ask about these questions and we say, “Hey, there’s something influencing President Trump that’s not just his ego, it’s not just bad information,” we are attacked to a certain extent because people don’t want to look into those dark places. But I think the more that we look into those, hopefully we can put some light and try to hopefully figure out who actually runs our government.

Keith Kellogg and Ukraine’s “Meat Grinder”

TUCKER CARLSON (00:51:03 – 00:52:10): I talked to Trump as much as anybody in the weeks before this war began, and my strong view then and now was he didn’t want to do it. So that’s my opinion based on a lot of conversations with Trump about this. So maybe I’m wrong, maybe he was lying, maybe he secretly really wanted to do it, but I feel like I knew him well and I didn’t see any enthusiasm at all, only kind of resignation and dread.

So I think anyone who dismisses questions about how that happened as conspiracy theories is a liar. That’s what I think. So one of the darkest things I’ve ever seen — shouldn’t have surprised me, but it still did. This week, Keith Kellogg, former general, Fox News contributor, former negotiator for Trump in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is in Ukraine and starts telling the Ukrainians that they need to start drafting women and feed their women into the meat grinder of this war and exterminate all their women because that’s honorable or something. Did you see this, and what do you make of it?

JOE KENT (00:52:13 – 00:53:54): Yeah, I saw it, and it’s disturbing. I think it’s disturbing anytime American officials go over to Kyiv and basically are allowed to continue to pressure our government to support this war. That to me is a decision that the president should be making. We can’t stop individual civilians from traveling and speaking their mind, etc., but I think for us to try and pressure this war to continue, and we know it’s going to result in some kind of an escalation — I’m sure we’ll get to this, but we just had the CIA director in Russia yesterday — there is some form of escalation that’s brewing. You can see that in the way that the 2 conflicts are becoming blended.

But also, this has been a stalemate. Russia is kind of grinding it out and winning. The only reason Ukraine is remaining afloat — number one, I respect the Ukrainian people for fighting for their territory, can’t underplay that whatsoever, and they have every right to do so. However, the only reason Ukraine is still afloat is because of the support that the United States government has given them, and then also the UK and NATO, etc. But we are essentially using them as a proxy because we still have this obsession with trying to hurt and bleed Russia. And so we’re using these young men and now these young women basically as our proxies. And you get people like Kellogg, the former Vice President Pence over there, saying, “Oh yeah, we need more young Ukrainians, we need young Ukrainian women to go out there and fight and die and basically be cannon fodder,” because the West has some kind of obsession with Russia or really wants to accelerate us more closer towards the Third World War. It’s just sick and it’s insane. And then again, this is another one where you wonder, what is the actual point? Why are we telling more Ukrainians to go into the meat grinder?

“The Extermination of a Population”

TUCKER CARLSON (00:53:54 – 00:54:31): Why are we inspiring genocide in Ukraine, which is what we’re doing, like just exterminate the entire Ukrainian population? And then the president, the sort of non-Ukrainian president of Ukraine who’s not elected, by the way, won’t have elections, has created a police state, banned the biggest Christian denomination, this Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine — that guy’s like, “Oh, we’ll just import Indians into Ukraine.” It’s like to replace the Ukrainians killed in this totally pointless war that he could have gotten out of but didn’t. It does raise questions like, what is this? And it seems to me like the extermination of a population. That’s what it looks like to me, on purpose.

JOE KENT (00:54:33 – 00:56:14): Yeah, there’s no other way to read it. It’s weird. It’s definitely on purpose because we have been encouraging them, we’ve been funding it. It’s definitely the extermination of a population because Russia is massive. They can pour more bodies into this conflict than the Ukrainians can. So the Ukrainians have just run out of bodies and Zelensky’s saying, “Yeah, we’ll import more.” I guess he’s taking a playbook out of the West — we’ll import more foreigners to replace all of our native-born people and then let BlackRock do the reconstruction.

The whole thing is absolutely sick. And again too, just the stakes — the fact that we are pushing a nuclear power, one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers, they have the most nuclear weapons, they’re the world’s biggest natural resources producer, massive landmass. We are pushing them to a point where they feel that they need to use nuclear weapons. And that’s not a justification for anything Putin’s done, etc. But why are we pushing them? What gain do we get from this?

As a matter of fact, I would say that the war in Ukraine — who controls the Donbas doesn’t matter to anybody in America. It’s debatable if it matters to really anybody in Europe that’s not even close to their borders. It definitely doesn’t matter to us, but we’re paying for this. But if this goes sideways, if our calculation is completely wrong, if Putin isn’t restrained, or if for whatever reason some of the hardliners inside Russia take over or gain more influence with Putin and he uses a nuclear weapon or a limited nuclear weapon — where are we? Or what if in the scenario we just discussed, us or the Israelis use a limited nuclear weapon inside Iran? What message does that send to Putin? Putin’s going to say, “Oh, okay, well, America, if you guys set the new norms, I got you loud and clear. Those are the new norms. I’m going to use one now on Kyiv.” And then where are we? And at the end of the day, for what? What gain? What are we getting out of this? It’s absolute insanity, right?

The CIA Director’s Visit to Moscow

TUCKER CARLSON (00:56:14 – 00:56:22): We’re upon, as the Ukrainians are, a larger plan, obviously. What was the CIA director doing in Moscow this week?

JOE KENT (00:56:24 – 00:58:24): Well, one would hope that he was there trying to cool tensions and saying that, “Hey, we’re going to tell the Ukrainians to back off on all the targeting of infrastructure and targeting civilians that they’re doing, and we would hope that you would do the same. And hey, maybe because of the energy crisis in the Straits of Hormuz, let’s stop targeting energy for the sake of the world economy.” If we’re going to put a favorable lens on it, hopefully that was the message.

However, considering the fact that we may be at least wanting to keep escalation in Iran on the table, I do think that he’s saying to the Russians, “Now is not the time. You better back off. You better not escalate. You better just take all the hits that you’ve been getting. You better just keep taking those on the chin,” because the Ukrainians have been targeting a lot of energy infrastructure inside Russia. They’ve targeted Russian civilians. They’ve done targeted assassinations of political officials. So the Russians at some point are going to have to respond. So I would imagine we are asking the Russians, if not demanding that the Russians don’t respond outside of the battlefield inside Ukraine.

Now, why the Russians would feel any obligation whatsoever to listen to us at this point, I don’t know. This is a big problem with the sanctions package the Biden administration threw at the Russians, kicking them off SWIFT. The thought process there was we were going to really hurt Russia, but in really hurting them, we kind of took away a lot of the leverage that we had. If we were still doing a lot of trade with Russia, we’d have different levers that we could pull. But right now, since we’ve taken away a lot of those different options, we’re basically at this almost kinetic phase, this pre-kinetic phase, where we just say, “If you do this, then we’re going to do some other kind of kinetic action.” So again, it’s very dangerous. And again, I don’t know why the Russians would really take us very seriously at this point, because President Trump said he was going to get a peace agreement. We never stopped funding the Ukrainians. We never stopped sharing intelligence with them. The Russians know what we’re up to inside of Ukraine. So I just don’t know why the Russians would really listen to any American official right now at this point based on our behaviors.

Trump’s Sincerity and Losing Control of the CIA

TUCKER CARLSON (00:58:24 – 01:00:17): Why do you think — my read from talking to him a lot about it was that Trump was sincere in his desire to get this conflict over. He blamed Biden correctly for this conflict, the Russia-Ukraine war. He didn’t think it was good for the United States. He said in public repeatedly, “It just drives Russia to China. That’s a threat to us. This is terrible. We should be friends with Russia, or at least not at war with them. And I can fix this in a day.” He said that many times — of course, that was silly, of course — but he did want to fix it. But he never really tried very hard. And now he’s prosecuting a war against Russia. How did that happen? Do you have any idea?

JOE KENT (01:00:17 – 01:02:30): I would say he never got full control of the CIA and our intelligence apparatus and the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex, in terms of the weaponry that we were sending over to Ukraine, that’s come back to bite us now that we’ve gotten into basically a conventional fight against Iran. But at the time, that was a cash cow for the military-industrial complex.

But also post-War on Terror, post-Afghanistan withdrawal, the CIA was looking for a new mission. The whole intelligence community was looking for a new mission. They found one. Biden gave them one with this proxy war inside Ukraine. And so because the president didn’t go in and, I would say, micromanage that all being shut down in order to get the Ukrainians to the negotiating table, all of that just kept churning in the background.

And that’s a big thing that I learned inside government, and especially in the first Trump administration when Trump tried to get us out of Syria — that cost my late wife her life. And then also in Afghanistan, the same thing happened. The president said, “I want out of these conflicts, go make it happen.” At one point in time, he’s having to pass handwritten notes to his aides because he doesn’t trust the system. He should have learned that you have to micromanage these things almost like a psycho. You have to go in and say, “I want these done. Here’s steps 1 through 10, and I’m going to be supervising every single step,” if you’re going to be serious about actually making the intelligence community and the Department of Defense do what you say.

So this is a big problem in Ukraine. He came in and he said he wanted negotiations, but he didn’t aggressively go and shut off all the offensive capabilities that we are giving the Ukrainians. And the Russians saw that. And that’s where you have Putin saying, “Okay, well, the president may have changed out, but the men” — whatever phrase Putin uses — “the men in the dark suits are still in charge.” Because he sees that even though Trump came in and uses much different rhetoric than Biden and may have the best of intentions, at the end of the day, the battlefield realities didn’t change in Ukraine. So Putin just said, “I don’t really care. Might be a new guy, he might say he wants some talks, but we’re not changing what we’re doing. This is existential for his country, so he’s going to continue on.” And I think President Trump got really frustrated that Putin didn’t automatically change his behavior. But the reason why Putin didn’t change his behavior is because we didn’t change the intelligence apparatus that was propping up Ukraine and going against Russia.

“That’s Not Democracy”

TUCKER CARLSON (01:02:30 – 01:02:50): I don’t think 1 in 1,000 Americans understands that we’re at war with Russia, that we’re running that war with Russia, and that we’re doing it in a way that’s totally outside of civilian control. No elected leader has control over our government and, oh, over this war. That’s not democracy.

JOE KENT (01:02:52 – 01:04:24): It’s not. And this is a huge problem. We need people who understand how the intelligence community works and functions. A lot of times, even guys like Ratcliffe, even though he was the DNI before, he doesn’t have a background in the intelligence community. So when he comes in, the intelligence community is great at receiving him and making him feel like he’s the number one, you know, spymaster, he runs the CIA, etc. But he doesn’t understand the nuts and bolts of how it actually runs. And so the apparatus keeps on churning and doing whatever it is that it wants to do. And it’s already set on an azimuth and run by people who have viewed Russia as an existential threat to America for a wide variety of reasons, but for decades. And they got the mission of a lifetime when Biden allowed them to go over and support the Ukrainians.

And even if we look at it charitably and say that Ratcliffe came in there and attempted to do everything he could, he’s one of 2 political appointees at the CIA. And so without those 2 having intimate knowledge of how the CIA runs, in particular a lot of the pointy-edge programs of the CIA, they didn’t really have the ability to go in there and start changing things. And then the president immediately got frustrated and thought that Putin was just trying to rub it in his face. And so then we’re at this point where the president says, “Okay, well maybe I will go with what the Europeans are saying.” And then you get the military-industrial complex that comes in and shows him all the incentives for continuing the war. And then next thing you know, we’re now here in almost the second year of the Trump administration, and the war is becoming more and more dangerous, potentially going nuclear and potentially expanding past the borders of Ukraine.

Is Either Conflict Fixable?

TUCKER CARLSON (01:04:25 – 01:04:30): Do you think either one of these conflicts, Russia or Iran, is fixable in the short term?

JOE KENT (01:04:33 – 01:06:28): In the short term, with the right leadership, I think they are. I still remain optimistic even though President Trump might not like me or you very much. I still think he’s very capable. If he decided to reclaim his agency and he took some drastic measures, I think he could turn them around.

I think if he pulled our troops and our blockade out of the Middle East, if he withheld the Israelis, like seriously started pulling away a lot of aid from the Israelis, and went to the Iranians and said, “Hey, if you guys want sanctions relief, if you want your assets unfrozen, let’s talk shop about how we open up the Straits of Hormuz and we’ll work out everything else there” — and I think that would take down the tensions. There’d still be a lot of diplomatic work we’d have to do, but that would take down the tensions, that would take down any potential of the war expanding. It would get the Straits of Hormuz opened back up again. It would be clunky, it wouldn’t be pretty, but I think it would work. And I think President Trump could do that. He would just have to, again, micromanage it almost like a psychopath.

And then I think Ukraine is going to be a little bit tougher of a lift, but I still think that he could do it. I think he could take down the tensions in Ukraine. Could he completely end the war? That I don’t know. I’m a little bit more skeptical on it because I think the Russians, again, they view this as being existential to them. But I think if we made it very clear that we don’t think who controls the Donbas is existential to us, because it’s not — there’s no world that exists where who controls the Donbas or Crimea is existential to America. If we made that very, very clear and we stopped all the support that we were giving to the Ukrainian government and we exerted the control that we should have over our NATO partners to stop that and simply said, “Hey, we’re walking away from this, we’re happy to help broker a ceasefire,” I think that would take down the potential of this thing becoming a nuclear event or expanding into a wider war.

So again, I really think that President Trump, if he decided to put his full political powers against both these problems, I think he could do it. And why he’s not doing it, especially in the latter part of his presidency, I simply just don’t understand.

Closing

TUCKER CARLSON (01:06:29 – 01:06:43): Well, as you said, that’s the question of our era. You were the first person to raise it in public, and I hope that we get to an answer just for future generations. Joe Kent, thank you very much for that. It’s great to see you.

JOE KENT (01:06:43 – 01:06:45): Absolutely. Thanks, Tucker.