Tucker Carlson Responds to Israel’s War on Iran (Transcript)

Just because the prime minister of Israel wanted a regime change war with Iran does not mean in any sense that it was a wise idea for Israel. It certainly wasn’t a good idea for the United States. That no one just really disputes. But was it a good idea for the country or for the prime minister who advocated for it? No. Probably not.

Actually, just because we want something doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Sometimes when we get what we want most, we’re destroyed by it. Hope that doesn’t happen to Israel, of course, or anybody, but it could. So when you get to the truth of things and you see who’s pushing for them, that doesn’t mean that person understands his own best interest or his country’s own best interest. Often, they don’t. Often, we don’t.

But it doesn’t change the fact that we got here because Israel lobbied for it. And virtually everyone in the US government, certainly in the Pentagon, understood the risks. The risks were obvious from day one. First, if you knock off a government, we have a long history of doing that. It’s not that hard. The individual bravery of the US military personnel, the soldiers who do it, is laudable, impressive, amazing sometimes, but that is, we have learned, the easy part.

Killing Saddam? Okay. Amazing. What comes next? Etcetera, etcetera.

The Risks of Toppling Iran’s Government

This is all very, very well known, and it was very well known forty-eight hours ago that there was no real plan to replace the government we were hoping to topple. At which point, what? Well, now you have a country, Iran, the size of Western Europe with ninety-two million people, a country that’s only a little over half Persian, that has its own internal divisions and dynamics and rivalries.

You have that country potentially breaking apart. And what does that mean? Well, hard to see that as a good thing for the rest of the world on so many levels, which we pray don’t become more obvious, but they’re even now becoming obvious. That could be a true, true disaster. So why would we want that?

Well, of course, we wouldn’t want that. The only country that seems to want that, or the only leader, to be fair, once again, not speaking for every Israeli, anymore than Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anybody else who runs this country speaks for every American, of course, but Benjamin Netanyahu wanted that. He thought that was his mission, but more than his mission, maybe his destiny. He suggested that in his remarks today. And that’s why.

America’s Strategic Interests

But nobody in the US government who I ever talked to or heard quoted on TV seemed to believe that this was primarily in America’s interest. There might be ancillary benefits. I mean, you hear these analyses of how the world is changing, and it went from being unipolar to multipolar. All true. And the United States ran the world uncontested from the summer of 1991 until, I don’t know, pick a date pretty recently, the rise of China.

And all of a sudden, you have multipoles. You have more than one great power vying for control of the world and its trade routes and its resources, etcetera, etcetera. And that somehow knocking off the government of Iran would be good for us in that complex game, and that’s a real argument, I guess. These things are kind of hard to understand.

And any wise person looks at the world and says, okay. There’s no stopping the rise of China. Their manufacturing capacity, their economic power, really the world’s largest real economy, is not going to end tomorrow, so there has to be a way to strike a kind of power-sharing agreement with China, with the east. The United States doesn’t rule the world uncontested, and for the foreseeable future is probably not going to. So how do we live in some semblance of peace and preserve our own interests?

And again, you enter into some informal power-sharing agreement with the other great power or powers. You probably can’t stop that process. It’s probably too late to stop China from controlling the east at this point. Killing the Ayatollah is probably not going to do it, so there’s probably a better way to do this.

But anyway, there are people who disagree. And if we do this, it’ll be better for us long term, and at least you have to give them credit for trying to think of a way in which this might benefit the United States. But most people who assess this knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with us. This is Israel’s war. That’s what it is.

How Did Israel Leverage the United States?

It’s not an attack on Israel, by the way. It’s hardly antisemitism or Jew hatred. It’s just a fact. A head of state came to our country. The head of state of nine million people came to a country of three hundred and fifty million people and demanded that we help them, or in effect do it ourselves, topple the regime in Tehran.

Now, how did they leverage to do this? That’s a complicated question, and it’s something really worth thinking about. But how did this tiny country with no resources and nine million people convince the world’s great superpower with the greatest military in history to do its bidding in a way that was going to hurt it?

Well, again, many layers to that question, but the most obvious and immediate answer is because Bibi told the president of the United States, “You can join me or not, but I’m going.” And the Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this in a call to congressional leaders yesterday. He said Israel said they were going.

And at that point, you really only have two choices. You can get on board and try and help or contain Israel’s war. That’s part of the calculation here. Israel’s going. Let’s try and keep this within bounds. Let’s try to be a moderating force on this adventure, whatever it turns out to be. Or you can tell Israel no, and they’ll just do it.

The Stakes: Oil, Energy, and American Lives

And if they did it, that would not protect us because there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Middle East, both in uniform and out, civilians and military personnel. And there’s also the world’s most important oil projects, oil, energy infrastructure, oil and gas, which more than any other factor has a determining effect on the global economy. So everybody needs their oil and gas, period. You can’t change that. Sorry.

And so if that infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, it affects all of us, all of us, everybody. So you can’t just let Israel go and do this.

The Option Never Considered

Now, of course, there’s a third potential theoretical option, which is you say to Israel, which is a client state, which we pay for, whose creation we made possible, “No. We’re not doing that. I get it. You don’t like the Ayatollah. You don’t like Iran, but this is bad for us, and we’re not going to let you do this. And if you do it, we’re going to, I don’t know what, cut off aid, something.” We can apply the pressure that is inherently ours to apply since we’re paying for all of this.

But that was not even on the table. That’s never been on the table. No one has ever in the last sixty-three years considered doing that.

The Last Time an American President Said No to Israel

Really, the last president to do that was John F. Kennedy in 1962, when he got into a, not as famous as it should be, dispute with the founding prime minister of Israel, then the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, over Israel’s nuclear program at Dimona. And then President Kennedy said, “No. I don’t believe in nuclear proliferation. This is one of the pillars of my administration, and you can’t keep testing, and I’m demanding inspections.”

And of course, he was not able to make good on those promises because he was killed in November of 1963, and the person who took his place as vice president, Lyndon Johnson, gave a green light to the Israeli nuclear program. So that was the last time an American president said no, a hard no, to Israel, tried to restrain its core ambitions, not like, you know, be nice to the Palestinians in the West Bank, but no. You can’t have nukes. Or no.

Israel’s Strategic Goals: Regional Hegemony

You can’t, I don’t know, bomb Lebanon or whatever. That was the last time. So that’s not, for some reason, even on the table. So the choice was, do you go along with what Israel’s doing, try to constrain it, or do you just sit back and then inevitably get drawn into it?

So the truth is, and this is hard to say, as a proud American and as someone who wants the United States to remain powerful in the world, a force for decency and order in the world, but above all wants America to remain prosperous and peaceful at home in the country that we actually live in.

It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did. And, again, it’s important to say that not to discourage anybody or make anybody feel despondent or hopeless. There’s no reason for hopelessness at this point. But in order that it doesn’t happen again, tell the truth so people can learn, hopefully improve and grow, but tell the truth no matter what.

Why Did Israel Want This War?

So then the question becomes, we know why it started — started because Israel wanted it and demanded the US military in order to do it. Why would Israel want this? We’ve already established that this may or may not be a good idea for Israel. Why would they want it? What was their thinking here?

If it was really about the threat of Iran building and deploying a nuclear weapon or a nuclear-tipped ICBM aimed at Miami and New York as Mark Levin told his poor listeners the other day — none of that’s true. But if it was really about that, how could this threat have lasted for forty years? How could, as Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday, how could Iran’s nuclear program been on the very verge, the cusp of building and deploying a nuclear weapon for forty years?

Well, of course, it wasn’t. What we can argue about Iran’s aims with nuclear weapons — they probably wanted one. Who wouldn’t want one? Look at what happens to countries that don’t have one. Everyone wants a nuclear weapon. But were they actually about to get one? No. So what was the point?

The Goal: Regional Hegemony

What is the point of this from Israel’s perspective? Well, the point is regional hegemony. Super simple. Israel has been around for almost eighty years. Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel’s got a pretty robust tech economy. But above all, Israel has big ambitions.

And by the way, it’s not an attack on Israel. Which growing country doesn’t have greater ambitions, and which megalomaniac leader of said country — and there are many of those around the world, by the way — wouldn’t want regional hegemony. Regional hegemony means you get to control your region, kind of a Middle Eastern Monroe doctrine.

Israel wants to be able to determine, roughly speaking, what happens in its region, and it doesn’t want constraints on its own behavior. In the same way, again, trying to be as generous and universally minded as possible here in this analysis because it’s true — who wouldn’t want that? Do we want that? Of course, we do.

We’re not — you know, we put up with a lot for Mexico and Canada, but if they all of a sudden started constraining our actual ambitions, we’d do something about it. I think, or the old America would have. A normal country would.

And Israel wants to control the Middle East, and they are the only announced nuclear power in the Middle East. Are they the only actual nuclear power in the Middle East? You could debate that. People can guess, but they’re the only country we know for certain has a big nuclear arsenal. So they want to be unrivaled in their power in their region.

Again, this is not a conspiracy theory or something weird to want. It’s what every country wants, and they want it. And Bibi wants it, and he sees himself as a figure out of history, not simply as a prime minister who’s fighting to keep his job, which he also is, but as a great man, who’s a modern Moses or whatever, as a figure.

And men like that, men of destiny, change the calculation for their nation forever. They don’t take small steps. They take big steps. They think big. He thinks big — to his credit or detriment, but it’s a fact.

And so this war is an effort — not simply in addition to everything else. No. No. It is exclusively an effort on the part of Israel to achieve regional hegemony, total control.

Sweeping Away Enemies: Iran’s Role

So what does that mean exactly? Well, it means you have to sweep away your enemies. And in the case of Iran, Iran was an enemy of Israel, by the way. And Iran was also funding insurgencies and militant groups in the region to kind of pick at Israel and hassle Israel, kill Israelis. That’s all true.

Hezbollah, Hamas — Iran funded, absolutely. Houthis — Iran funded, absolutely. Iran was doing that. That’s true. And Israel didn’t like it. Why would they?

But it’s also true that — and this doesn’t make excuses for anybody, but these are all dynamics. You know, one country does one thing, another country does another thing. Like a marriage — no party’s wholly responsible for what went wrong or what went well. This is a relationship, and people act against each other, with each other, but always on each other. Each action provokes a reaction.

And so this history goes back a long way, and historians can untangle it — the few honest ones left. But if you want to control the Middle East and you’re Israel, you have to decapitate Iran. You don’t have to rebuild it. Probably don’t even want to. It’s too big. It has too much mineral wealth, has too much energy. That huge gas field they share with Qatar, etcetera, etcetera.

You probably just want to decapitate it and make it helpless. You want to turn it into a hellscape because it’s better for you because you can dominate a hellscape. Now that may cause massive downstream problems for everybody else. You could have a refugee crisis in Europe. Well, that already happened when Israel destabilized Syria. You could have this open bleeding wound. That already happened when Israel destabilized Lebanon, when Israel pushed the United States to kill Gaddafi in Libya.

This is an ongoing thing. It runs — just the biggest and the final. So getting rid of the Iranian government had one purpose: to give Israel the ability to do exactly what it wants in the Middle East without getting hassled.

Israel as an Expansionist Power

And what it wants, among other things, is territorial expansion. Small country — they want parts of Syria, parts of Lebanon. They’re an expansionist power, like most powers, actually. Let’s demystify this. It’s not about the Jews. It’s about a nation state that is growing and trying to exert its power. It’s that simple.

You can take all the spooky stuff out and just see it in terms of conventional geopolitics, and it makes total sense. And part of the reason we can’t see this clearly is because we’ve been so propagandized in the United States to see every contest between nations as a moral contest in which we somehow have to pick a side — somebody’s Churchill and somebody’s Neville Chamberlain and somebody’s Hitler — and this is an absurd template which narrows our vision and prevents us from seeing that this is just what’s always happened, which is a contest between powers for primacy.

The Gulf States: The Other Speed Bump

But there are actually two other components, two other speed bumps on the way to regional dominance for Israel. The first is something called the GCC. The GCC is an informal alliance — maybe a little more formal as of today — but it’s the six Gulf monarchies. It’s the energy-producing Gulf states. And those would be Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

And these are some of the biggest, most important energy producers in the world. They’re all Sunni Arab states. They are all rich, and all of a sudden, they are all now internationally — or some of them are internationally — influential because they are the site of global diplomacy. They are filling the void left by Switzerland, which — not to get too boring about it — but basically took sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and is therefore kind of not really a place where people can negotiate in good faith.

They are, in fact, controlled by the EU and NATO. They would never admit that — the Swiss — but they are. They gave up their banking secrecy. They’re basically not aligned anymore. But some of these Gulf states are as close to not aligned as you can possibly get. Certainly, Qatar is.

And all of a sudden, every conflict around the world is being negotiated in Qatar, or most recently in Oman. And so they have a kind of moral authority on the global stage. They have very effective diplomacy. People like them. People also go there on vacation. They have the best airlines in the world. They are the obvious regional travel hub for the globe. They’re literally where east meets west.

So if you’re flying from New York to Delhi, you’re going to stop in Dubai. And they have government-subsidized airlines that are absolutely fantastic, so people have a familiarity, a firsthand familiarity with these countries, which were mysteries to most Westerners twenty-five years ago when 9/11 happened.

It was the first time I went to the Gulf. Most of America had never been there — unless you’re in the oil business or something. You’ve never been there, and you could imagine that it was all belly dancers and camels and slavery or whatever you thought. But all of a sudden, every other rich person in America has been to Dubai because they’re all traveling somewhere — going on safari in Africa.

So people — it’s been demystified to the West, and people like it. These are societies with problems, of course, but they’re also orderly and clean and elaborately polite and welcoming to outsiders and rich and kind of a little less gaudy than you would expect. Actually, some of the most functional societies in the world, and people like them despite a lot of propaganda.

And by the way, despite some complications — there are plenty of things about the Gulf states that Westerners won’t like, or some things anyway, and certainly parts of their foreign policy that make you wonder — but these are not North Korea. They’re the opposite. These are actually very civilized countries.

And they’re not all on board with Israel’s programs because they’ve got populations that disagree with how Israel has treated the Palestinians. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. Every Muslim is required to go to Saudi Arabia on the Hajj, to go visit Mecca. So these are countries with inherent power in the Islamic world, growing power globally, and resources. And so they can’t be ignored.

And if they were ever to get together, if these six countries were ever to form, say, a real military alliance, they would be a massive threat to Israel. So Israel has spent decades fomenting dissent between them, of course.

And that’s not necessarily just an attack on Israel. I mean, as anyone can tell you who spent time in the Middle East — the Arabs, many great qualities, but love to fight with each other. It’s like their favorite hobby, more than camel racing. It’s very easy to get Arab nations bickering and fighting, and the distrust goes back a long time, and it’s impenetrable to the outsider. But if you were trying to divide six countries from each other, it’s not that hard, and the Israelis have worked really, really hard to do that.

Israel’s Strategy to Destabilize the Gulf

But the truth is, if you really want control of the Middle East, you kind of have to degrade, if not destroy, the Gulf states. And so the Israelis knew — and the Americans knew as well, maybe not quite as realistic an assessment, but they had some sense — the Israelis definitely knew that if you start lobbing missiles into Iran, and if you start killing the leadership of Iran, and if you were to, say, kill the head of state slash religious leader of one branch of Islam, the Ayatollah — if you were to do that, it would provoke a military response that would hurt the Gulf badly.

And in some countries like Bahrain, site of the Fifth Fleet, you could potentially stoke a true revolution, because that country is almost, I think, half Shiite. So you could cause massive chaos in the Gulf if you were to do this.

Now that wasn’t a risk from the Israeli standpoint. That was the point. That was the point. They wanted to diminish the Gulf, and in two days, they have.

And I think anyone who likes decency and order and cleanliness is hoping that the Gulf will recover. The Gulf is not a threat to us. We have military bases in these countries. These are some of our closest allies. All of them are closer allies than Israel by far. They’re our friends, but they’ve been really hurt.

And in a place like Dubai — which is basically part of a country, it’s an emirate within the United Arab Emirates, but it’s also a luxury brand, basically. People go to Dubai because it’s beautiful and rich and clean and above all because it’s safe and orderly. It’s got the busiest airport in the world. You start seeing video on Instagram of smoke in the Dubai airport, and you’re like, “I think I’m going to Cabo this year.” Oh, sorry — drug cartels. Whatever. Maybe you go to Sedona this year.

It really, really hurts these countries, and Israel wanted to hurt these countries. That’s the point. Wanted to hurt these countries. Wanted to sow chaos and disorder because they are rivals of Israel.

Mossad Agents Arrested in Qatar and Saudi Arabia

So it’s probably not been reported, but it’s a fact that last night in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, authorities arrested Mossad agents planning on committing bombings in those countries. Now that’s weird. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in two Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran? Aren’t they on the same side? No. No.

The Strategic Goal: Removing the US from the Middle East

TUCKER CARLSON: Israel wants to hurt Iran and Qatar and UAE and Saudi and Bahrain and Oman and Kuwait. And they’ve succeeded. And the third thing you would have to do if you wanted true control over the region, which as we’ve established, Israel wants and shouldn’t be attacked for wanting. It’s a natural thing to want. But the final thing you’d have to do is get the US out of the Middle East.

Since 1948, the United States, from Harry Truman till present, US presidents, and as noted with diminishing success, have tried to constrain or shape Israel’s policies, its foreign policy. And we have a right to do that because we’re the most powerful country in the world and have been since 1945, and also because we pay for it. You know, Israel couldn’t exist without us right now, and we give them the defense umbrella. We defend them in their wars. And so why would you want the United States out?

Well, because the United States, while not doing a very good job of constraining Israel, has been issuing requests in any case to Israel for a long time, and that’s very annoying. Imagine if we are getting the same kind of communication from, I don’t know, Ottawa, and they were like, “You can’t do this. You can’t do that.” We’d say “buzz off” at a certain point. “Back off, Canada. We’re doing what we want. We’re a great power.”

So you have to get the United States out. And this war is designed to do it because the Israelis, who are very well aware of domestic American politics, know that there is no appetite whatsoever for casualties among the American public, that this war did not have anything approaching majority support. In fact, it had small minority support, and that’s shrunk even in thirty-six hours, and that this would cause a political crisis in the United States, and that it would most critically convince our Arab allies in the region, meaning, really, the Gulf states and Jordan.

Poor Jordan. Wonderful country. It would convince them that the United States is a bad ally. Why? Because the second you hit Iran, and the Persians are not stupid at all, you know that they’re going to hit American bases in those countries, which they have, except Oman. But in the other six, they have.

Gulf States Left Vulnerable and Undefended

TUCKER CARLSON: And those countries are not going to be defended by the United States, and they haven’t been very well. Some of these countries are on fire right now, and they feel completely vulnerable. And they are — and not letting loose with any operational secret that you can’t find on the Internet — they’re running low on missile defense.

And so a country like Saudi or UAE or Qatar, Bahrain or Kuwait, I mean, they’re all right on the gulf directly across from Iran. They live on their energy production, and that’s being damaged, and no one’s protecting them. A Saudi Aramco facility went up last night. Saudi Aramco being the longtime joint US-Saudi energy production company, biggest oil company in the world, and part of it’s on fire today. The Iranians said they didn’t do it.

Why would they say they didn’t do it? What possible — Israel did it? Why wouldn’t they? Because if you think about it, scaring our other allies in the region, letting them know that they can get attacked and the US will not defend you. You put up with all this crap for decades because you got American troops on your soil and your population doesn’t like it, but you do it anyway because you’ve been told if there was ever a problem, the US will come rescue you.

Well, guess what we just learned? The US is not coming to rescue you. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans, civilians, caught in the Middle East. They can’t get out. And the governments of those countries are panicked and they’re enraged, and the message to them is the US is not a reliable partner. What’s the point of this partnership?

What’s the point of allowing you to have an airbase in my country if, when missiles come raining down or drones attack our airport or international airport, you’re not going to do anything about it? That’s how they feel, and you can understand why they do.

The Economic and Investment Fallout

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s the message to them? There’s no upside in dealing with the United States. There’s no upside in foreign investment in the United States.

You go to any of these countries. You just go to the airport. Go to a restaurant. Who do you run into? American businessmen. And some of them have good ideas. Some of them have ideas that are so stupid that they couldn’t sell them in Silicon Valley. They couldn’t go to VCs in the United States and raise the money. They go to the gulf. And it’s not that the gulf Arabs are dumb.

In some sense, they’re doing this because they see the United States as their only real ally. And so they’re investing in American business ventures a lot. Hundreds of billions of dollars. And part of that is economic calculation. They think these companies are going to grow, and they’re going to make money. Part of it is friendship. “You’re an ally and have been all these years since the British left.”

What do they think now? They don’t feel that way quite as much. Because for them, this is very serious. I mean, these countries don’t grow their own food. So if you close the airport and the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea are closed in effect, where do you get your food? That’s a real issue. These are countries that are supplied by, in some cases, desalination plants, pulling seawater through a membrane and then piping it to the urban centers. What happens if those pipes get blown up? You have no water. There are millions and millions of people.

So you can see, without getting too into it, just how vulnerable these countries, our strongest allies in the region, now feel and how their calculation about the United States and the region has changed dramatically.

The End of American Influence: A Suez Moment

TUCKER CARLSON: The British lost their influence in the Middle East in 1956 in what is known as the Suez Crisis. It was a crisis that was so complex, it’s hard even to understand it now seventy years later. But the net effect was the UK was not able to restore order in the region. They had less power than people thought they did, and that was it. That was the true end of Britain’s empire and certainly the end of its control over the Middle East.

That’s what this is, and it’s on purpose. They did this. The Israelis want us out, and they did this on purpose.

Europe: The Other Big Loser

TUCKER CARLSON: And then as a last sort of footnote, there’s another big loser in this war, in Israel’s war. And this was obvious years ago, and that’s Europe. Europe.

Who cares about Europe? Well, the neocons care about Europe for reasons that are not entirely clear. But you often hear the neocons, the war hawks, shills for Israel, whatever you call them — but people who supported what we’re seeing now. And they’re mad at the Shiites and the Ayatollah and the Arabs and, of course, got it. But if you listen carefully, there is a deep hostility and hatred, in fact, toward Western Europe.

Now where does that come from? Someone should think deeply about this because it’s had a big effect over the past eighty years. Doesn’t even matter where it comes from. They hate Western Europe. And maybe the biggest loser of all right now is Western Europe.

So last night, Qatar shut down its LNG exports. LNG is liquefied natural gas. Without getting boring about it, LNG is essential to the global economy. It’s essential to Asia. South Korea subsists on Qatari LNG exports. China is a huge consumer of them, and Western Europe. Britain — forty percent of homes in Britain are powered by Qatari LNG. Lots of reasons for this. Blew up the downstream pipeline is one of them, but it doesn’t matter. That’s the truth.

So when you shut off natural gas from Qatar, and it’s now shut down — it’s twenty percent of the world’s total supply that is shut down — well, you get all kinds of effects from that. It crushes markets. It hikes inflation. It can wreak havoc on the global economy. Say a prayer that it doesn’t, but it could. But the first thing that it does is totally shafts Europe.

The Refugee Crisis and the Destabilization of Iran

TUCKER CARLSON: And then here’s the second order effect: refugee crises. Let’s say that this operation achieves its only real stated aim, which is to decapitate the government of Iran. Doesn’t seem to have happened yet. I mean, who knows what’s actually going on? But the Ayatollah was killed. Government’s still sending missiles, so someone’s making decisions.

But let’s say over the course of however long this takes, chaos becomes the state of play in Iran. The thing just falls apart. It’s chaos. It’s a huge chaotic country with no one in charge and lots of different ethnic groups and religious splinter groups fighting with each other, heavily armed. And the normal things start to break down, like food distribution and water, schools. What do you have?

Well, you have what we’ve had in Lebanon and Syria. Really, every country that Israel has destabilized on purpose. You have a refugee crisis. And where do they go? Well, of course, a lot will come here, but a lot will go to Europe, just as Syrians flooded into Europe ten or twelve years ago in the aftermath of that conflict, which was, underneath it all, fomented by Israel in order to destabilize its neighbor in order to increase its own authority in the region. That’s a fact.

So if you think Europe’s in bad shape now, oh, boy. Give it a year.

The Real Losers: US, Europe, and the Gulf States

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s Europe, the United States, and the Gulf states. Those are the losers. And if you’re trying to ascertain motive, which is hard and you probably should pull back from that most of the time, but if you’re trying to understand, like, why this is happening, why would you want that? Look at the effects. Don’t look at the ideology they’re telling you about or whatever motive they’re claiming they have or that you have.

Shut up. Look at the effects. The point of the system is what it does. And what does this system, what does this war do? Hurts the Gulf states, crushes the Western Europeans, and it hurts the United States. That’s the point.

Naftali Bennett on Turkey: Israel’s Next Target

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you doubt that, if you doubt that that’s actually what’s going on, this is a longtime Israeli politician and leader, Naftali Bennett, explaining Israel’s next step. Here’s where they’re going next. Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

NAFTALI BENNETT: A new Turkish threat is emerging. I want to be very clear. Turkey and Qatar have gained influence in Syria, are seeking influence elsewhere and everywhere throughout the region. And from here, I warn: Turkey is the new Iran. Erdogan is sophisticated, dangerous, and he seeks to encircle Israel. We can’t close our eyes again.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: “He’s sophisticated and dangerous.” It’s hardly an endorsement of Erdogan, the Turkish leader, to say — when Bennett says “he’s dangerous,” what he really means is “he’s sovereign.” We can’t tell him what to do. We don’t fully control him. We can influence him, and it’s clear that Israel and Turkey did have some kind of relationship in the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria last year, just a guess.

But the real problem with Turkey is that it can’t be controlled, so it is therefore a threat to Israel. And, again, not attacking Israel. That’s true. That is true. In the same sense that when we have hostile leaders in big countries in our hemisphere, it really bothers us. And sometimes we kill them, regime change them, and we make up this whole — “No, it’s really important. The people of country X need to be free.” But really, we need to be unconstrained because we’re a great power. That’s what it is.

Propaganda and the Suppression of Truth

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s important to say this, not to allege some sort of dark conspiracy by the Israelis, but to explain that it’s not unusual at all. It’s the most usual thing in the world. What’s unusual is to live in a country that is so controlled, whose media environment is so precisely constructed to keep you from knowing anything that matters, from seeing the most obvious things, and that it has been constructed — not a conspiracy theory — over the course of many, many years to keep you from knowing.

Bari Weiss may run CNN. Whoever thought that would happen? Okay. But the point of these moves in the media is to control the way things are described so you can’t see things clearly, and to muddy the conversation with “antisemitism,” “the Nazis.” No. No. This is classic great power competition, and we just can’t see it because we have been so thoroughly propagandized. We think that this is some sort of effort to liberate somebody. It’s not.

But then the question becomes, like, what is our role in this? So now that we know — and by the way, it’s perilous that we know. And one of the reasons I almost didn’t do this, not that I’m saying anything that isn’t obvious, and it’s all very obvious, but to say it out loud does not make things more stable. In other words, once you have a war going on and everybody knows that it’s not being waged on behalf of the people who are dying in it or the families they leave behind, then things don’t get more stable.

And no one wants to add to the present instability, but I just think it’s important to know the truth and to know what our leaders have planned. Because as you already know, they lie, and they have no scruples at all.

Senator Tom Cotton and Where They Want to Take Us Next

TUCKER CARLSON: And there are very few people in Washington who have fewer scruples than Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. I hate to say that. Know him well. But this clip from the Sunday show, which apparently still exists, yesterday, really tells you a lot about how they’re thinking and about where they’d like to take us next. So this is Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas yesterday.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

TOM COTTON: Good morning.

MARGARET BRENNAN: The president of the United States warned the American public that there could be casualties, American casualties. Does that mean the US is putting boots on the ground?

TOM COTTON: No, Margaret.

The Risk of Ground Troops and Regime Change

The president has been clear that what we should expect to see is an extended air and naval campaign that’s designed not only to continue to set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but most importantly to destroy its vast missile arsenal. Many more missiles in the United States and Israel have air defenses combined as well as the missile launchers and its missile manufacturing capability.

Now obviously one risk of that kind of campaign is that an aircraft could be shot down and the president would never leave a pilot behind. So no doubt we have combat search and rescue assets in the region that are prepared to go in and extract any downed pilot. But barring that kind of unusual circumstance, Margaret, the president has no plan for any kind of large scale ground force inside of Iran.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: The president has no plan for any sort of large scale ground force in Iran. Oh, really? So a small scale ground force. Is that what you’re saying? Well, that is what he’s saying.

And the secretary of war was just interviewed moments ago, and pressed on this a little bit, and he said it’s possible because, of course, it’s possible. By the way, you shouldn’t even attack people for telling the truth ever. You should attack people who try to prevent you from telling the truth, and what secretary of war Pete Hegseth just said is, of course, obviously true and was always true.

There’s not one person who understands a situation like this, kinetic war, who thinks you can affect regime change from the air. No one’s ever thought that. No one thinks that now.

If you’re sincere about changing the leadership of a country, it by definition, requires you to get in there. Not well, of course, not you, but some young guy, some younger man, who’s fighting for freedom to get in there and risk his life to do it. You need troops, ground troops, boots on the ground, or whatever dumb euphemism they’re using for putting young Americans in the path of potential death.

And so, of course, that’s always been the plan, and shame on the rest of us for not just saying that out loud. Shame on the rest of us for being so cowed by their relentless incantations, whatever they are. “No ground troops. This is not the point is not regime change. It’s to stop their nuclear program.” Some of us understood.

The Lie About Iran’s Nuclear Program

Charlie Kirk understood back in June. That was a lie. The point wasn’t “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Why does Israel have a nuclear weapon? Why does France have a nuclear weapon? Nobody wants nuclear weapons. Nobody thinks that Iran should have a nuclear weapon outside of Iran.

But no honest person believed in June. Those people have been vindicated that this was about stopping a nuclear program. It was regime change, and regime change requires ground troops. And, therefore, if you’re serious about it, you’re going to get ground troops.

The only group left out of this calculation was the American public who probably had no idea and probably still don’t have any idea that that would even be a remote consideration, given everything that’s going on in this country right now and given the tiny percentage, relatively speaking, of Americans who wanted this, who voted for it, who support it.

Both Parties United Behind the War

The leaders of both parties support it. Chuck Schumer supports it more fervently than Trump. MSNBC just did a long segment on this, which I’ve watched, about this war, and it’s the fault of the Gulf states. It’s the Gulf states. Yeah. It’s Qatar again. Barely even mentioned Israel. They’re all on the same page. They’re all neocons.

When it comes right down to it, they’ll support this. But the public doesn’t support it, and it’s terrible for the United States.

And by the way, if you think it’s a good idea for the US to get out of the Middle East, which it might be, by the way, that’s not a crazy desire. This is not the way to do it. Humiliated with American dead. That’s not the way to get out of the Middle East, but that’s how Israel wants us out of the Middle East.

You won’t come back. They can pivot to their new partner, China, and Israel can provide the tech that will even up the match against the Chinese tech that Pakistan used in their last confrontation, which scared China. They realized, “We need better tech.” China’s like, “Oh, yeah. We’ve got the better tech.” So it’s a natural alliance, and there are other reasons it’s a natural alliance.

But Israel’s moving on to India, and the United States is, if Israel gets its way, going to be humiliated and weaker, mourning its dead, and very resistant to getting involved in Middle East politics ever again. “You want to annihilate every last child in Gaza? Go ahead. You want to kick the Palestinians, the Christians out of the West Bank and fill it full of people from Brooklyn? Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it.” That’s the goal right there.

American Deaths and the Cost of War

So along the way to that happening, Americans are going to die. The Department of War has confirmed that there are four Americans who’ve died. That’s what they’ve said. They have not done their normal briefings. They haven’t told us any information as of Monday afternoon, which is what it is right now. They have not told us more, but it’s pretty clear that tragically more have died.

And I think that’s upsetting to people in the administration. I don’t think that they make these decisions lightly, and I think a lot of the commanders who sent those young men into this war had ambivalent feelings about it. I mean, they did for sure. So it’s not attacking anyone who gave the order because, again, they’re employees giving orders.

But the people who advocated for this, their attitudes about the death of young Americans, really the best Americans that we have, on behalf of a foreign power that really has contempt for us. Is there any other world leader who has more contempt for the United States than Benjamin Netanyahu? No. There just isn’t. It’s pure contempt for the United States. And these people died for him?

If you’re commenting on this, if you’re trying to understand it from afar, you’ve got to grieve over that. It’s so unfair. It’s so wrong. And yet the people who’ve advocated for this don’t seem to care at all.

Frank Gaffney and the “Cost Free” War

Here is someone who’s been advocating for a war against Iran. I’m not going to go to motive and accuse him of being paid to advocate for it. Be interesting to know. But Frank Gaffney, who’s been around Washington forever and nonprofits and think tanks — there’s no place on the planet where less thinking takes place than in a think tank. But they’re basically lobbying organizations with tax exempt status. And he has been lobbying for a war with Iran, well, I don’t know, since I started shaving probably. But here he is yesterday on the possibility of Americans dying.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

FRANK GAFFNEY: This isn’t going to be over tomorrow. I pray it will be, but I don’t think we should expect that. Will we take more casualties? I mourn the loss of three American servicemen as much as anybody. But this is essentially cost free to us at this point. Will there be more losses? You saw Rabbi Walecki talking about them in Israel. Of course, there will. Should we be operating on any basis other than this is likely to be a slog, a hard slog. But the fight is incalculably important because if we do, in fact, render a decisive defeat of Sharia supremacism in Iran, it will help us with all of the other places.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

So I want to put that up there not because Frank Gaffney is the worst person in Washington or because that’s the most insane thing anyone said in the last twenty-four hours, but because it’s so perfectly representative.

The Refusal to Be Reverent Before Death

First, there’s the sort of pro forma nod to, “We really were mourning, we’re praying, I mourn for the deaths.” When in fact, what you’re seeing in America right now from people like Frank Gaffney is a total disrespect for death, a refusal to be reverent in the face of death, which is always and everywhere a sign of a refusal to be reverent in the face of life.

If you can’t appreciate death, if you don’t bow before it in silence knowing that you don’t fully understand what it is, but that it’s bigger than you. If you refuse to do that and instead, “I worry. I’m so glad he’s dead.” No matter who it is. If another human being has died and you don’t pause and acknowledge that you didn’t create that life because you can’t because you’re not God, and that there is something mysterious about death, something bigger than you, if you don’t, you are dangerous.

Even animals do that. You bring your dog to the vet and the dog doesn’t want to go in. Why? Because the dog can smell death. And the dog is afraid of death. The dog is in awe of death as we should all be.

But almost no one in Washington feels that way about death. Just cremate them and throw them away like he never existed. Functional countries mourn their dead. They bury them and they visit them. Why? Because functional countries understand that they’re not in charge of life because they don’t have that power. And people who forget that are seized by something called hubris, which is always the beginning of the end for people and civilizations.

And so the, “Oh, yeah. So three died. We mourn their deal. We’re saying prayers.” Really? What kind of prayers? Have you said a prayer? Do you know their names? Oh, their names aren’t public. That might get us thinking about it too much.

But despite, or maybe because of, and you just heard Gaffney say this, not being mean, not being unfair. He said, “This is essentially cost free for us.” Really? Three Americans just died for BB in a war that nobody wants, in a war designed to hurt the United States, and that’s cost free? And it’s a lot more than three. And I say that with real sadness. It’s that attitude that got us here, but it won’t stay that way. It’s already changing.

How War Accelerates Change

The thing that people need to remember is that war accelerates trends and progress. Nothing accelerates change like violence. And that’s true for big broad social changes. Women in the workforce — that happened after World War II. Integration after World War II. I mean, good and bad. But things change fast once people start dying.

Not just because of demographic changes because a lot of people die and you need others to move into their jobs. It’s more than that. A different spirit descends on a society in war, and lots of things happen. People become way less free.

That’s the greatest lie of all embedded in neocon theology. “We’re killing these people so we can be free.” Find a war in which people in the homeland became more free. It’s always the opposite. The second Britain went to war, what did the British government do? It turned their opposition, their domestic opposition, with their families, with their wives, for the duration of the war, for years. That was in Britain, which was, at least we thought, a pretty free country. They gave us the Magna Carta.

So, no, countries don’t become more free. They become much less free during war. A spirit of violence descends, and people change fast and calculations change. Political calculations change really fast. Social trends change really fast, and people’s attitudes change. And part of it is not political or temporal. It’s spiritual.

The Bloodlust of the Neocons

You can feel on people the bloodlust, the hate, and it accelerates. And that explains what you’re watching right now, which is the rage of the neocons, which doesn’t make sense. They’ve been advocating for years that the US government, on behalf of Israel, kill the Ayatollah Khomeini. They’ve been saying that for years. I’ve been in this thirty-five years, and I’ve heard that every single year.

They got it yesterday. Khomeini got killed. Okay. You got what you wanted. It’s Christmas morning. You just opened the present. Why are you mad? They’re angrier than ever.

This is the key to their psychology, and it’s a spiritual principle. Bloodlust is never sated, just like any other kind of lust. It’s never sated. Nothing is ever enough. You taste it on your tongue and you want more. It’s like eating candy. It doesn’t satisfy you. You’re always hungrier for more, and killing is the same. Always.

But there’s a specific psychology at work here, and it’s a graceless, antihuman psychology that has no room for forgiveness or good sportsmanship or decency. The second people like this win, they want to kill the people they vanquished.

So imagine this were, I don’t know, a tennis match, and you win. If you’re a sort of normal western person, you walk up to the net, you say, “Good game.” Trying to display what your father beat into your head as a child, which is good sportsmanship, which is grace in victory. Don’t lord it over them. Don’t hurt them. You already won. Be graceful.

What you see in the advocates of this war, in the neocons, is the opposite. You beat someone in a tennis match, you leap across the net and beat them to death with your racket. That’s what you’re seeing now.

Purging Dissent Within the Conservative Movement

And so you’re seeing this crazed, hysterical effort to purge anyone in the conservative movement or MAGA, whatever those are, to purge anyone who had any doubt about the wisdom of this war. And not just to purge them, but to discredit them. “You’re an Islamist.” A lot of these people are, like, sincere Christians, who opposed on religious grounds. “You’re an Islamist. You’re taking money.” And, of course, it’s all projection. You accuse people of what you’re actually doing yourself, of course.

But it’s more than that. It’s bloodlust. They shouldn’t just be silenced and deplatformed and prevented from speaking at this or that conference or from having a podcast, but they should be interned. They should be arrested.

The Risks of Escalation

How long before it’s “they should be killed?” Not long. That’s how quickly these things are moving. Because a spirit has been unleashed, and violence does this every time. A spirit of violence and hate has been unleashed.

My personal advice, having thought a lot about this, is don’t feed it.

This is demonic influence clearly. This is not rational. Of course. Why would you be angrier when you win? Why would you be madder when you got what you wanted?

That tells you this is not in the realm of normal human desire. You wouldn’t be. And these people feed evil — evil itself feeds on hate. They project hate, but they also intend, consciously or not, to inspire hate because hate makes them stronger. And this happens not just in this country, not just in 2026.

It happens every single time. War brings people like that to the fore, and it makes them more powerful. And that’s why you’re seeing, as you have for the last several years, an increase in true radicalism in this country. And by radicalism, I mean, “we hate these people because of how they were born, and we want to hurt them or kill them.” That’s, I think, all would agree, actual radicalism.

That’s not, “hey, what happened to USS Liberty?” That’s not radicalism. That’s like an honest question. And the answer, of course, is Israel targeted on purpose because we’re in their way, just like they’re doing now.

That’s not radicalism. Radicalism is, “hey, let’s kill people who we don’t like.” And you’re seeing a massive increase in that in this country, in Israel. Would Ben Gvir or Smotrich, would they even have been conceivable twenty years ago?

Of course not. No one like that had power in Israel twenty years ago. I was there. It was nothing like that. Well, it’s nothing like it was because war has unleashed this, and it’s empowered people.

We have figures like that in this country, several of them who have actual power. Not in government yet — thank heaven. But certainly on its periphery and certainly influencing government. Yes, they do. More power than ever.

And it’s also true, by the way, in Iran. And one of the reasons this can be difficult to get out of is because this war has already, a day and a half in, radicalized the leadership, to the extent it still exists in Iran.

“Oh, but weren’t they so radical already?” Yes. Some were. Some weren’t. A huge country. Lots of divisions and differences within it. Very complicated country. Anyone who tries to learn anything about Iran or deals with Iranians will tell you, if he’s being honest, “oh, complicated, hard to understand.”

So, yeah, there are radical factions, and there were less radical factions. And now, of course, maybe you could have predicted this if you’re planning to kill the pope of Shia Islam. The radical elements are more powerful than they were because the gates of hell have been opened. That’s the truth. And the people who did this knew they would be.

And so in a moment like this, chaos and violence being its hallmarks, only the worst people benefit. And that’s true of every conflict like this, every single time.

If chaos breaks out any place, what’s the first effect? The police, the military, they’ll melt away. There’s no civil authority. There’s no legitimate authority. Who’s in charge? Drunk fifteen year olds with automatic weapons. They’re in charge. They make all the life or death decisions. That happens in governments as well as intersections. That’s just a constant fact.

That’s why you build civilization — to protect the weak and to make sure that drunk fifteen year olds with automatic weapons don’t have all the power. That’s the whole point of it. But now they do once again.

Getting Out: The Case for Withdrawal

So how do we respond to this? This is only thirty-six hours in, and because you don’t want to make things sound worse than they really are, we could go through all the many, many risks, some of which are becoming even clearer than they were. But clearly, the United States is not going to benefit from staying longer in Iran.

And sorry, Tom Cotton — putting troops on the ground, boots on the ground, whatever you call it, committing young American men to go die in Iran is not in our interest at all. It would cause not simply heartbreak in the families of those killed, but it would cause potentially real turmoil here domestically and render an already fragile social fabric even more fragile.

So where do you go from here? Well, get out right away. It’s just that simple. Of course, it’s also incredibly complicated, but the first step is deciding that we’re leaving.

It’s only been less than two days, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to gain anything more. And how do we know that? Because no one has explained what we’re there to gain. No one has described the mission. Ask anybody — what’s the point? How do we know when we’ve won?

And some of us spent twenty years asking, “what are we doing in Afghanistan?” “Shut up. Are you pro-Taliban?” No. But I would like to know when we’ve won. “Sorry, you can’t know that. It’s classified.”

Okay. But now is the time to be totally honest. We’re not going to get anything more than we’ve already gotten — assuming we’ve gotten anything — by staying. And the longer we stay, the greater the risk.

Two Critical Risks

What are the risks? Here are just two that you should be paying attention to.

One is that Israel gets really hurt. And in case you think this is a long video attacking Israel for Nazi reasons or anti-Semitic reasons, it’s not. It’s merely an effort to try and think through what’s good for the United States. But also, as someone who wishes Israel no harm, to think through clearly what’s going to be terrible for Israel.

And one thing that’d be terrible for Israel is getting hit with a hypersonic missile, which as of right now, Iran has not yet fired. And they may never. But let’s say they did. What would Israel — which is a country the size of Maryland — how would it respond? How could it respond?

Well, it might respond with nuclear weapons, which it has, and which it has threatened to use before, and which it has implied it might use many times. One of the reasons you can’t let Israel go alone is they imply, “hey, don’t make us go crazy and do something wild,” and that would include the use of nuclear weapons. Not saying it’s going to happen, God forbid, but it could.

And if Israel was legitimately threatened — not performatively threatened, but actually threatened, like with a hypersonic missile into downtown Jerusalem — then, yeah, it might. And in that case, who knows? Because nuclear weapons have not been used since August 1945, but a number of countries have them, including Pakistan and possibly others. And so it could get there.

And you’d hate to be in a spot where you were relying once again, as we did in June, on Iranian restraint — relying on the Iranians to call your airbase in Qatar before hitting it and giving you a warning. I hate to say that, but if you find yourself in a place where you’re relying on the restraint of a country you have described as morally diseased, a terrorist nation, a Nazi country as they’re telling you on Fox — if you’re relying on their reasonable behavior, you may have exposed yourself a little bit.

So if this continues, you could see potentially things going really crazy. And of course, the craziest of all would be a nuclear exchange, and that could happen. That’s not off the table. Ask anybody who’s dealing with this or thinking about it. Doesn’t mean it’s going to — again, God forbid — but it could. And the possibility that it could is terrifying.

The Threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque

Number two is Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which was apparently built on the site of the second temple. If you’ve been to Jerusalem — big gold dome, a whole complex — that is one of the holiest sites in Islam. Not an expert in Islam despite many accusations, but it is.

It appears to be coequal in Islam, from what I can tell, with Mecca and Medina. It’s a huge deal. And since 1967, it’s been under the military control of Israel. It’s actually controlled legally by Jordan, but it’s a holy place for every Muslim — about two billion of them.

And there are people — Orthodox Jews in Israel, not all, some — and some evangelical Christians in Texas, not all, but some — who would like to see it blown up and replaced by a third temple. I’m not going to get into the theology of it, which is deranged and demonic, actually. But it’s a fact that people want this, and that is the beginning of, really, the end for the world as we know it. Because that would set off a religious conflict unlike anything we’ve seen.

Killing the Ayatollah didn’t get you there? Okay. Blow up the mosque, and then you will be there. And that’s not good for anyone. It’s certainly not good for the United States.

And if this continues, there are already people in Israel — at least one well-known rabbi is calling for a false flag against that mosque. Just blow it up and blame the Iranians. And the truth is, whether the Iranians blow it up intentionally — unlikely, but let’s just say — or by mistake, or there’s a false flag by Israel that blames Iran, it doesn’t matter. If it blows up, that’s not a solvable problem. That’s the end of everything that we know.

That’s an enduring, generational, thousand-year — as long as the world lasts — religious conflict that no one wants to be a part of. Only the craziest, darkest people want any part of that at all. That’s the opposite of what we want, and that could happen.

What Needs to Happen Now

So the point is, once things start getting crazy, they can potentially — indeed, they tend to — get really crazy. So stop the craziness. How would we affect that, to the extent that we can at this point?

Declare victory and go home, or pull back. It’s hard to negotiate with the Iranians. They’ve turned down our offer three times. Yeah, true. Iran has decided — to the extent they decide anything, who knows who’s actually making the decisions — clearly, they’re being made by compartments, or it seems that way.

But to the extent that the Iranian government can respond as a cohesive whole, they have responded: no. “We’re not negotiating with you.” Okay. We can’t negotiate with them. So we’re stopping. Defensive measures only. We don’t want this.

The global economy is at stake. The global order is at stake. American lives are at stake. American prestige is certainly on the line. Our ability to control anything beyond our borders — or maybe even within them. We’re out. We killed the Ayatollah. We came. We did it. We’re going home.

At this point, that would be a wise decision. And it was very clear from the outset — whatever revisionism people want to add to the story — it was very clear that Donald Trump did not want an extended war in Iran. He certainly didn’t want a protracted boots-on-the-ground war. He certainly doesn’t want the kind of war that Tom Cotton wants, obviously. And we are on the way to getting that really quickly, into a lot of suffering.

So declare victory, get out. That would be move one.

Second, at some point, the United States has to get Bibi under control. Sorry. It’s not antisemitism. This is the head of state whose decisions are getting Americans killed and affecting the history of the world and the fortunes — literally the fortunes, but also the future — of the United States.

At some point, very soon, the United States has to say to the government of Israel, “you are not in charge.” And no president since John F. Kennedy has been willing to say that. But no administration has paid a higher cost for going along than the current administration, and it’s tragic when you think about it.

And of course, it’s not simply the administration, the president, and everyone who works for him. It’s the country and the people who voted for this president in the hope that he would improve their lives. None of that will be possible if this continues.

And the fault, of course, is with anyone who went along with Bibi’s demands or threats or whatever. But it’s their fault for going along with this. The root cause is Bibi and his ambitions, and so somebody immediately needs to say no.

Protecting Americans Abroad

Third, we need to protect Americans abroad. Hundreds of thousands of Americans live in the Middle East. A lot of them are stuck in the Gulf right now. Americans who live or work there, Americans in uniform at our military bases — which are getting hammered, not just in the Gulf, but in Iraq and Jordan and other places, getting hammered, dying. But also Americans who work in the embassies, who are there on vacation, kids on spring break, are stuck in the Abu Dhabi or Dubai airports. There are a lot of those right now, and they can’t get out.

And to its great shame, the State Department did not order an evacuation of even embassy employees before these strikes, because they didn’t want to give away when the strikes were. Maybe they didn’t know. But all of us who were watching carefully knew something was likely to happen, and the State Department did not encourage these people to leave, and they didn’t help them leave.

And as noted, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still stuck there, and in some places, they can’t get out. Without making it sound more dire than it really is, just point out that it actually could be dire. These are countries that are highly dependent on imports for food and water. And if you close the sea routes out and close the airports, they’re pretty stuck.

So right now, you’re seeing Americans try to get into Oman — the one Gulf country not under attack from Iran — and fly out.

The Obligation of Government to Serve Its Citizens

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re seeing people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out. What you’re not seeing as of right now anyway is the US State Department make an effort to prioritize Americans. So it’s possible in Doha, for example, that Poles, Polish citizens will be assisted by their government in getting out of the gulf before Americans are assisted by their government. There’s no excuse for that at all. The point of the US government is to serve Americans.

The point of US diplomats is to serve the country they represent and to serve Americans in need abroad. And this has been degrading for a long time, a long time. If you’ve ever gone to an embassy in Mexico because you got arrested for something, you know what I’m talking about. But the point is when a war breaks out started by your country, you have an expectation of help from that government when it breaks out, and they haven’t received it. And it’s outrageous.

And the fact that the US government moved apparently a THAAD battery or some kind of anti-missile defense from Saudi where it would protect critical infrastructure and Americans, or a lot of Americans in Saudi, to Israel — not only shafts Saudi, a critical partner in the world, a much more important partner than Israel has ever been or ever will be. It shafts Saudi, but it shafts Americans. How many American energy employees live in Saudi? There’s a direct flight to Houston from Riyadh. Like, what is this?

Underneath it all, at its core, is the obligation of the US government to serve the people it represents, who pay for it, in whose name all these things happen. And they’ve completely lost sight of that.

Divided Loyalties in the US Government

And that gets to a deeper and more taboo problem, which is a real problem and whose fruits we’re seeing now, which is there are a bunch of people in the US government who do not put the United States before the interest of Israel, period. And you saw that very clearly with Mike Huckabee. We interviewed him last week in Tel Aviv, and there was no sense at all that he represents the United States or has any interest in what happens to the United States at all.

His party is in defending Israel. Now Huckabee, thank heaven, is not Jewish. He’s like some kind of — who knows what his religion is? But he’s not Jewish, so you can’t — it’s not antisemitic to say that. It’s just a fact.

Mike Huckabee’s loyalty is to Israel over the United States, but he’s hardly alone in that. How could there possibly be in 2026 a dual citizen sharing citizenship with any other country, including Israel, but not limited to Israel, any country? How could there be any dual citizen at a high level of government? You can’t serve two masters. You can’t be loyal to two countries simultaneously.

This is why we’re against polygamy in the west. Right? But we allow it. Why? Because no one wants to be called names if they oppose it.

And it’s not just dual citizenship. It’s a confusion about on whose behalf we’re working. And in some cases, it’s unintentional. No one has spelled out the rules. It’s not malign. It’s just dumb.

No one has had the brass to say, “Hey, you work for the US government? Every decision you make has to put at the top of the queue American citizens. Is this good for my nation or not?” No one ever gets that lecture. There’s no culture of that, and it’s not under this administration. It’s every administration of my lifetime. Certainly since 9/11.

We need to have a government that has as its stated goal the protection of American citizens, period. And if other nations benefit from that, great. We’re not against anybody, but the point has to be America and serving America’s interests. And if an idea sounds good but it’s going to hurt the United States, we’re against it. That’s our official position as a country.

And if you work for the government and you don’t share that view, you can’t work for the government. And you certainly can’t serve in a foreign military. What are we even doing?

Service in Foreign Militaries and Questions of Loyalty

That’s so real. All these people in public life have served in the Israeli military, but not the US military. That’s fine. But you can’t have influence over my country at that point. You served in a foreign military and not in ours.

And no one just wants to talk about this, but it’s been going on a long time. Bill Clinton famously said when he got out of office during a speech, “I wish I’d served in the IDF.” Really? He dodged the draft. It’s not a defense of the Vietnam War, which was idiotic. It’s a clear statement of priorities. “I would serve in a foreign country’s military before my own.”

Well, you can’t be in my leadership then. Sorry. You’re not a loyal American. How are we defining loyal? Putting on a uniform of a foreign military and showing up in the US Congress, waving a foreign flag in the US Congress? Those are totally disqualifying acts. And the fact that we’ve lost the capacity to see that says that we’re all but under some kind of spell.

Hopefully it breaks now, because you can’t continue with the system that we have. It’s not an attack on anybody. It’s the standard that Israel would apply to itself, or any sovereign country would apply to itself. You have to be for us or you can’t work here. And we very much don’t have that.

The Danger of Domestic Division and Religious Conflict

Most upsettingly, really, is the possibility of what might happen here, and that’s the next thing we need to do — is brace for a lot of domestic change. As I said, the spirit of violence, of hate, of killing has been unleashed, and you see it in people. If you read online commentary, you certainly see it in evidence there. People are angry. They taste blood on the tongue, and they want to kill. You don’t want that here. You don’t want that in your country.

That defeats the whole point. The only reason we have a military is to ensure peace and prosperity in the United States. That’s it. And if military action increases poverty and violence in your country, which it always does, it’s bad.

So you are seeing now a concerted effort by people acting on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu — some technically American citizens — to foment religious conflict here. “Hate the Muslims. I’m not sure what I think about Israel, but we have the same enemies.” No. The only enemies we have are enemies of the United States, and we know who our enemies are by what they do to us, how they treat us, what they demand of us. And by that measure, Israel’s not an ally.

And I don’t know who these Muslims you’re talking about are. If you’re against mass immigration, of course. How do we get mass immigration? Does anyone know? We got mass Muslim immigration after 9/11, and the people who pushed it — because I was here, and I remembered very well — are the very same people, in some cases literally the same people, who are now screaming about how Islam is our enemy.

It’s not an endorsement of Islam at all. As a Christian, I don’t endorse Islam, but I hate lying because it’s never accidental. It’s always in the service of some darker end. And in this case, it’s in the service of the darkest of all ends, which is to divide this country against itself along religious lines.

And yet people are standing up and saying something they never would have said twenty years ago: “Hate all Muslims.” How is that better than “hate all Jews?” I’ll pause while you explain. And of course they can’t explain, because it is in no sense better than “I hate all Jews.” It’s the same thing. And “I hate all Christians” for that matter.

But you are seeing a concerted effort to do that. And you will almost certainly see, as we have seen before, acts of violence that may or may not be organic, designed to move public opinion strongly in one direction to benefit people outside our country. It’s just a fact.

Declassification and the Demand for Truth

And if you think that’s not a fact, if that’s a conspiracy theory, if that’s an antisemitic conspiracy theory — “Oh, you alleging a false flag?” Oh, yeah. They’ve been documented at length, but there is a way to end this argument. We don’t need to debate this. We can declassify it. We can know the truth. We can let, as Justice Brandeis said, sunlight in, which will disinfect. Why don’t we do that?

And we’ll start with the Kennedy assassination, sixty-three years ago. Those documents have not been declassified. Why is that? Why are thousands of Kennedy assassination-related documents still not declassified? That’s a fact. Despite an executive order last January, acts of Congress over sixty-three years — I don’t know. We’re just speculating now. Let’s find out.

Why are there millions of 9/11 documents still classified? And the same people who call you a nut for speculating as to why they might be classified demand they remain classified. There’s no justification for it. Secrecy abets evil. That’s the point of it. There’s no national security consideration at play in the Kennedy documents, the 9/11 documents. I call BS on that. You’re lying. So let’s end it.

And by the way, if you wanted hate and ethnic strife and conspiracy theories, if you wanted to make Americans distrust and dislike each other, if you wanted to eliminate all confidence in government, if you wanted no authority to have legitimacy in a country, you would make everything secret so everyone had to speculate as to what was actually going on. You would create a nation of conspiracy mongers.

That’s the effect of classifying over a billion federal documents. You end democracy. Of course, you can’t really meaningfully participate in a government if you don’t know what it’s doing. A democracy with a billion classified documents — it’s gone. It’s an oligarchy. And you would make the population suspicious. You would make them distrust each other. You would sow division, which is what you always do when you want to dominate and control anybody. You divide them from each other. And of course, you would hide your own crimes.

The Intelligence Behind the Iran Assassination Claims

So Kennedy assassination, 9/11. But let’s start with the purported assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Now why are those significant? Because yesterday, the president of the United States said — did this. And by this, I mean killed the head of state of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini. “He tried to kill me twice, but I got him first.” It’s almost a verbatim quote from the president, who thinks that he’s been told that. Get it.

What do we know about that? Where did that intelligence come from that proved that the government of Iran, run by the Ayatollah, this religious leader, tried to assassinate the president of the United States twice? Do we know where that came from? Oh, it came from Israel. That’s where that intel came from. Well, let’s see it. Why not? At this point, he’s dead. Why can’t we see that? “Oh, sources and methods.” Tough. We went to war over this. Americans are dead because of this. You can’t hide behind that anymore. Show us.

And maybe we’ll find that there’s really good intel, and it just absolutely shows that the government of Iran, run by the Ayatollah, tried to assassinate the president of the United States. That might have been a good reason for war right there. But maybe it doesn’t show that, because this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence and other foreign countries’ intelligence, but certainly by Israeli intelligence.

That’s why we thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel, which is bad — not endorsing that. Israel wanted them out. Get it. Why did we do that? Because Israeli intelligence told us that he was working on chem-bio weapons and a nuke. Totally false. We got that from Israeli intelligence.

So at that point, the track record suggests — and no offense to Ted Cruz or all the other dumbos always saying, “No, we get all this actionable intelligence. It’s so important. We need them so desperately.” Really? Let’s evaluate the quality of that intelligence. What percentage is true? What percentage is sincerely mistaken? And what percentage is designed to manipulate us into military action on their behalf? It’d be interesting to know.

And until we do know, the rest of us are going to just speculate. And some of us will put brakes on our own imaginations to try not to be too dark about it, try not to imagine evil where there’s no evidence for it, but others will let their imaginations go, and you can see why. Does that bring the country closer together? No. It makes people hate each other.

Antisemitism, Classified Files, and the Call for Transparency

So the next person who talks about antisemitism, the rising tide of antisemitism — fair. It’s real. It’s bad. Totally bad. How do we fix it? Declassify the 9/11 files. And then all those people on the internet were like, “Oh, the dancing Israelis, they did it. Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11. There were text messages sent to Israel warning of 9/11.” All true, by the way. What does that add up to? Maybe nothing. I don’t know. They won’t declassify the files. They lie about it. Why? Just tell the truth.

And by the way, if there are ugly truths involved in the dump of documents, people can generally handle it. What they can’t handle is being lied to generationally and then attacked for trying to figure out what the omissions amount to, which is exactly where we are now.

The Threat of Iranian Sleeper Cells on US Soil

And so they’re telling us today that there are going to be attacks in the United States by Iranian sleeper cells. Maybe. Sounds plausible. They blew up our base in Bahrain. They hit the air base outside Doha. Okay. I mean, I believe it. But if those things actually do happen in the United States, we’re going to need to believe it. If there is any real doubt, if there’s a sense that actually maybe the FBI manufactured this, they’re not telling us everything.

Foreign Lobbies and the Threat to National Unity

If we have the same feeling about whatever those attacks — pray they don’t happen — but about whatever those attacks turn out to be, as we had about, say, January 6th or Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Can you imagine a more divisive thing to happen to this country? If you really wanted to bring America low, that’s what you would do. So it’s actually essential that the government has the trust of the governed. Absolutely essential.

Not just morally, but operationally, it won’t work without it. And the only way to do that is to tell the truth and to call out people who lie, scream at you, call you names. “We’re going to intern you, throw you in jail.” Alright. But first, declassify the 9/11 files, and then we can all calm down.

How’s that? That’s not just provocation. That’s sincere. The next thing we need to do is get foreign lobbies under control, and it’s not just AIPAC. It’s not just Israel.

It’s a lot of them. It’s a lot of them. And the downside to mass immigration, of course, is that you can import other people’s conflicts and ancient ethnic rivalries into your own country and then be destroyed by them. And this was well known at the turn of the century when the United States had its last biggest, second biggest wave of mass immigration — people fleeing Eastern Europe mostly.

And the sense strongly was this can work. We can use them for their labor. Actually, the population hated it, to be totally honest. It’s always hated it, but no one cares what they think. But a more evolved and selfless and wiser class of leaders at the time thought to themselves, this can work. We’re feeding our factories with the labor we need, but we could also get a lot of trouble.

So let’s invent this concept called the melting pot where everyone is welcome. We’ll put a little plaque on the Statue of Liberty kind of explaining this idea, but everyone has to kind of share in a common culture and common values. You leave your ancient grudges behind, and it doesn’t matter — kind of like if your ancestors killed my ancestors, we’re not going to kill each other. And that’s the only way it’s going to work, and they were absolutely right.

And we’ve abandoned that, of course, and it was intentional. It was an effort to divide the country against itself in order to dominate it, and lead to events like today. But it’s accelerating to a point where the country won’t hang together unless we get this under control, and people don’t seem aware of this — or maybe they are, but are pretending it’s not happening.

But in the last two conflicts — today being one, Venezuela on January 3rd being the other — but you could pick a bunch more. You had really active lobbies of exiles from those countries lobbying the US government and its military to overthrow the dictatorship they left because they’re mad. And that’s not a good reason for the US government to act. People who’ve been here for a while or born here, whose ancestors fought in the Civil War or founded the country, they have a say too, and they don’t want anything to do with that.

They built this country actually, and they have a right to say no. If you’re mad, go back and fight for that country’s freedom, but now you’re an American.

The Iranian Community and the Wag the Dog Problem

But we’ve gotten to a point where — well, here’s CNN from yesterday. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The largest Iranian populations outside of the Middle East. You see the gathering there behind her. Julia, how is the Iranian community responding?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, this gathering has only grown, Jessica, over the past few hours — excuse me, since we’ve gotten here. It has amassed a large number of people, and the celebration is striking.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

So the Persians in LA are really psyched. And by the way, if you ever run into Persians in LA, great people. Muslims, Jews, probably a few Christians, but great people. Hilarious, interesting, super successful, fun to be with — really one of the most entertaining, enriching immigrant groups, just to be honest, having dealt with them a lot. They’re great. Handsome people too. Smart.

However, their anger at the Ayatollah should play precisely no role in what our military does. It’s just not relevant at all. Making this specific group of voters happy because they were thrown out of a country or their parents were thrown out of a country — I mean, that is talk about wag the dog. And that’s not Israel. In this case, it’s the Persians of LA on the west side of LA.

Or it could be the Cubans of South Florida — another awesome group, great people. Lindsey Graham said yesterday, next stop — deranged by hubris — Iran is going so well, we’re going to overthrow the Cuban government next. Cuba Libre. Okay, now. After sixty-five years.

But the point is, Lindsey Graham was worked into a frenzy by the very awesome, super nice, productive, smart, attractive — everything great about them — Cuban lobby in South Florida, very conservative, Christian. They’re great. Love them. They can’t have control of America’s foreign policy. No ethnic group can have control of American foreign policy, whether it’s the Venezuelans.

Importing Ancient Conflicts

How many South Asian immigrants are in this country now? No one even knows. A ton. Talk about a region riven by ethnic strife. Ever been there? I mean, there’s obviously Pakistan and Bangladesh and India, but then even within India — libraries of books have been written about this. If you were to import those conflicts into your country, you’d be Canada, where there’s a Bengali killing a Punjabi and a high-profile assassination. No one who was actually born in Canada understands. It’s a nightmare.

It’s not an attack on the Bengalis, Punjabis, or anyone else. It’s just a very obvious point that these are functional countries, the Anglosphere. They were created by Anglo-Saxon immigrants with a certain system, and they work. And everyone wants to move here because they work. And the fastest way to keep them from working is to import the bad habits or centuries-old grudges of the homeland.

So come here, bring your ambition, your kindness, your decency, your commitment to the American project, but don’t bring your lobbying efforts to get us to go to war with anyone — not Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, anybody. Because if we allow this to continue, in ten years we will be fighting a war in Somalia on behalf of the Somali state of Minnesota or Portland, Maine or whatever. If you import this stuff here, this country will fall apart.

A Spiritual War

And here’s the last point, which I think needs to be made, is that this is a spiritual war. And you hear that thrown around. It’s been thrown around for the last, I don’t know, five or six years, as people who are paying attention have begun to realize there’s no rational explanation for a lot of things that we’re seeing — transgenderism, or that just love of abortion for its own sake. Like, what’s that?

Well, it’s obviously human sacrifice. Like the Mayans and the Incas and the Canaanites and every other civilization — it’s human sacrifice. You kill a human being to appease the gods and to get power for yourself. It’s the oldest religious ritual there is, and we’re just seeing its modern manifestation. So people are more familiar with this term “spiritual war,” but its manifestations are not always so obvious.

But if you look back at various points in history, two things become really clear. One, underneath it all, it’s aimed at Christians. It’s aimed at sincere Christians. They are always the main victims. Everyone lies about it.

“The Bolshevik revolution really wasn’t about Christianity.” Really? “The French revolution really wasn’t about Christianity.” Why were they beheading nuns? Spanish Civil War, same thing. The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 lasted four and a half months. What’s the first thing they did? Execute all the Christians, the clergy, of course.

So the spiritual war can have a little finer point on it. It’s Jesus who’s the center of this, actually. Prove me wrong. Ask an Armenian.

Corrupted Spiritual Leadership

So okay. What do you do with that information? Well, first, just know it. If we go to war in Iraq on false pretenses and the group that suffers more than any other group — disproportionately more than any group by far — turns out to be the Christians, who weren’t really raising arms against anybody, that kind of proves the point. If Syria goes upside down and the first people to get genocided are the Christians. If Christians in Bethlehem can’t actually drive the twelve miles or whatever it is to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — because who knows why — they’re the target. Of course.

Why is Western Europe being destroyed? Why do you think? Because that’s where Rome moved, obviously. Because it’s the seat of Christian civilization. Of course.

So that’s what’s actually happening. And one of the things that you need in order to understand that and to fight against it is strong, consistent spiritual leadership. Not military leadership — you need that in another realm — but in the spiritual, you need strong spiritual leadership.

And you’ll notice when that leadership becomes completely corrupted — truly corrupted — when the leaders of Christianity or parts of Christianity in the United States are not simply wrong or flawed or off base — that’s all of us — but are actively trying to lead people in the wrong direction. When Paula White, who is like some crazed, totally discredited televangelist who commands her followers in church to give her money or they’re not going to be saved or something — it’s like a female Jimmy Swaggart — when she’s the head of the White House faith office, literally, then you know there has been a concerted attempt to corrupt your spiritual leaders so that you won’t know what’s going on.

You see that with Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist preacher. And one of the ways this happens is subtle and not obvious to a lot of American Christians, but that’s the endorsement of violence.

Franklin Graham, who’s the son of a great man — Billy Graham was his dad, adviser to many presidents, great evangelist, probably the greatest evangelist this country’s ever produced. Franklin Graham is his son, a kind of evangelist and sort of an aid worker of sorts who flies around the world giving food to people, but considered a Christian leader in the United States. He gave a sermon — if you could call it that — at the Pentagon, I think, over Christmas, in which he described the Christian God, and I’m quoting now, as “a god of war.”

“We follow a god of war.” And we don’t, actually. Not a god of physical war, not a god of dropping bombs on kids. That’s not the Christian God. That’s not Jesus, and there is no place in the Gospels that suggests that. In fact, there’s a lot that suggests just the opposite.

And so if you find yourself in a position where, as a Christian trying to figure out the right position to take or the right spirit to have — the right approach, what do I do? — and you find yourself listening to a Christian leader who is endorsing violence against innocents, you know, without attacking the guy personally, you’re not hearing the Christian message. That’s not the Gospel. That’s the opposite of the Gospel, and yet it’s everywhere.

The acceptance in the United States by Christian leaders of violence against innocents should be shocking to our ears, but we have spent so many decades listening to it that it seems normal, and it’s not normal. It’s a deception, and it will lead to people’s destruction — not just the people being bombed, but the people calling for the bombings.

John Hagee and Christian Zionism

And then, of course, there are examples like John Hagee, one of the most prominent evangelical pastors in the United States, head of Christians United for Israel, sort of the face of Christian Zionism, politically active, a huge proponent of the war we’re currently in, and he is even now considered a Christian leader. Here’s John Hagee, in case you’re not familiar with him.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JOHN HAGEE: What you do to Israel, America, God will do to us. The day we stop blessing Israel will be the day God stops blessing the United States of America. The US Congress must quit arguing every year over whether or not we should send military assistance to Israel. We must continue to provide Israel with the specific capabilities and intelligence support they need to target and destroy these savages once and for all. We should sink any Iranian naval boats that threaten international shipping. If you don’t really fully understand what I’ve just said, let me say it to you in plain Texas speech. America should roll up its sleeve and knock the living daylights out of Tehran for what they have done to Israel.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

That’s not Frank Gaffney. That’s a Christian preacher. That’s a man who tells you he is proclaiming the Gospel, demanding that the US government sink Iranian boats and kill “these savages.” That is not Christianity, and it is a deception. It’s a heresy, and it is the path to total destruction — not simply of our bodies, but of our souls.

A Closing Prayer

We had a reading in church yesterday, which I’m going to try to get through without getting emotional, that provides, I think, a different path — the right path. This was written in the nineteenth century by John Henry Newman. This was the peace collect. It was the collect for the day in our church yesterday. My wife wrote it out for me, and I just want to read this on the way out because I think this is the truth.

“Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love. So mightily spread abroad your spirit that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father, to whom be dominion and glory now and forever. Amen.”

John Henry Newman, who was both a Protestant and a Catholic priest — that is the truth right there. “No sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness.”

God bless this country. Pray for it every day, and we’ll be back. Thank you.

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