The Duran Podcast - America Aggressive Approach to Multipolar World - Max Blumenthal, Alexander Mercouris, Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

America Aggressive Approach to Multipolar World - Max Blumenthal, Alexander Mercouris, Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone and welcome. I am joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Max Blumenthal, the editor of Chief at the Grey Zone, which is an excellent publication that I possibly can't recommend more for our listeners. So for anyone who's not familiar with this, I would definitely go visit the Grey Zone right away. Max is great to see again, Alexander, likewise. It's an honor. So can I just also quickly say people should say, certainly read the gray zone. It's a place I go to every day. And I should also say you can also find Max on YouTube, Max Blumenthal on YouTube, and definitely go and watch and listen to the many,

many things he says there on his channel and elsewhere too. Yeah, thanks. Our YouTube channel is just simply the gray zone, gray with an A. And we learn a lot from the Duran. So it's a real honor to be here. Thank you. I thought perhaps it feels all the headlines these days are about Trump. I hate to also jump into this trap, but I guess this is also how he conducts his policies, make a big, if not a mess, make a big bluster in order to create some space for himself to reshape situation, get a new deal.

This can be destructive. but also at times he appears to get places with it. So it is interesting. And we're just speaking earlier on. And it's kind of interesting that in Europe, he seems to, that's where you see the real revolutionary changes, as he's now reaching out to what's in Europe, possibly the most hated country, which is Russia,

and is trying to come to a great power, understanding, and indeed ending the war in Ukraine, which the Europeans seem all too eager to continue. Meanwhile, we've seen the Americas, especially in Venezuela, he appears to be going much harder and tightening sanctions and being more hawkish than even Biden. And now in the Middle East, it's still unclear. He seems to be pursuing much of the same as Biden. Although it has to be said, this can be difficult to assess, to, again, distinguish between. the noise and the actions, but overall he seems to be taking very hawkish stance there as well.

So I was wondering, how do the two of you read Trump's policy? How would you explain, I guess, different approaches to the world? Well, should we start with Max? Because, of course, you are closer to the scene of things in the United States. And perhaps you could tell us what you think. Because, I mean, we've discussed all of these topics to some extent in our program. So perhaps if you could give us your thoughts, Max, we can work from that. Well, there are different regions that we have to separate out.

But in most of the world, what we are witnessing from Trump is continuity and escalation or intensification of the longstanding post-World War II policies of the U.S. government, which are imperial in nature. but with respect to Europe and especially Western Europe, we're witnessing something different where the Trump administration has, it has to be said, they've meddled in EU politics in support of a populist right-wing faction with which they have political affinity in Germany. J.D. Vance's speech was a signal moment at the Munich Security Conference. And they've decided to target the firewall in the politics of the most powerful, economically wealthy country in the heart of the EU, the firewall, which has kept out very popular parties like the IFDA.

J.D. Vance also made passing reference to left-wing populists, referring to Sarah Wagonacht, who is seen as Beyond the Pale by the Transatlanticist liberals. the, you know, the Munich Security Conference expected him to address Ukraine to present a path forward. And instead, he attacked them at the heart of their pseudo, their managed democracy. But there is a deeper meaning there, which is that there is an affinity culturally between many of the forces around Trump, J.D. Vance, for example, converted to, I think pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism just a few years ago and has gone through a kind of personal political transformation. There's a, there is a affinity there between that camp and the kind

of transformation that Russia has under, undergone since the 1990s where it's become more religious, more nationalistic. And they, they, culturally, the transatlanticists are out of the in the cold right now, and the hostility they displayed towards Trump in his first term is, you know, these are chickens coming home to roost. The hostility that the NGOs all across Eastern Europe, sponsored by USAID showed for Trump, the participation in Trump's impeachment saw that during the first term. There's a vengeful quality to Trump's policy, and he is now using Europe's weakened economic state post-2020 and the lack of credibility of its transatlanticist leadership to advance a new political project in Europe while leaning or while forging a new bond

with Russia. Now, this can, I see this as a move toward diplomacy, but also I've, I've, He is, in fact, meddling in European politics. The Europeans have nowhere else to go but the United States. They can threaten him all they want. Frederick Mertz can paint the U.S. almost as an enemy, and they will only suffer. There's nothing they can do. They are completely powerless at this point. And where the Trump administration will go with this in the longer term is if they can consolidate

some kind of peace and end the... Ukraine proxy war and force Europe to maintain the peacekeeping force and get them to pay more into NATO, they will pivot hard to Asia and escalate against China. There is a complete unity within the Trump foreign policy team on, of what we would call in Washington like panda punchers. They see China in hard ideological terms. as a Marxist-Leninist-communist rival, and they see it in Cold War terms. So that's where they would like to go long-term.

I think Glenn mentioned Venezuela. Marco Rubio is Secretary of State right now, and there was a real disturbing development in Trump's policy vis-à-vis Latin America that took place yesterday, where he gave in to the Rubio, Cuban-American South Florida faction within the Republican Party and opened up a giant contradiction in his own America First policy. Because as we all know, Trump won and by driving home

the rage that many Americans feel about illegal immigration. And this was driven by, it was fueled by the TPS temporary protective status policy of the Biden administration, which allowed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians into the country. The first two countries are places where the U.S. seeks regime change. It was the South Florida lobby, which Marco Rubio represents, had wanted those immigrants to be part of broadening, to broaden their power. They wanted to bring them into their lobby. And Rubio was at the forefront of ramming through the TPS policy with the Biden administration. Now he's Secretary of State. He's been forced to abandon TPS by Trump, but at the same time, he's obsessed with regime change

in Venezuela, Venezuela, which has been a lifeline for Cuba, the country that he would like to, where he would most like to topple the government. And so they have ended the waiver that the Biden administration gave for Chevron to operate inside Venezuela. This is bad for Americans. It will mean higher oil prices. It will also mean that as long as Venezuela's economy is strangled, there will be migration to the north. And obviously, it's bad for Venezuelans. But this is what Rubio has been kind of granted by the Trump administration to serve as Secretary of State and the Trump and Trump and the Trump and the Trump.

Republicans need that to continue to win Florida. But it's a contradiction. I had actually thought when Richard Grinnell, who maybe the next secretary of state, had gone to Caracas and negotiated for the release of several Americans who were accused of spying and other crimes, that there would be kind of an oil for migrants deal. And that Venezuela would be allowed to have an economy again. It would get, it would receive large numbers of migrants who have been languishing and pretty horrible conditions in the United States. And Americans would also get lower oil prices.

But that's not going to happen. And so Marco Rubio, when he mentions the multipolar world order and that we have to accept it, does not accept that within the Western Hemisphere. We're seeing what John Bolton called a Monroeist foreign policy come into view with the Trump administration in the Western Hemisphere. There's a long, term march towards conflict with China, but in order to get there, Ukraine is kind of the bridge. Now, this is all very interesting. Now, can I just say that at this point about the affinity between some of the people in the United States and the Russians, this idea that, you know, that the Russians are turning to Christianity, that they look like us, look like, you know,

they're European, white Europeans and that sort of thing. It's something that worries the Russians. And if you talk about, I know many people in China, they talk about it there all the time, that the Americans have this belief, at least the American right has this belief, that Russia is very like them. And that's one reason why the American right tends in these disputes with China and Russia to tilt more sympathetically towards Russia and is more hostile to China. And the Russians could see that as well, by the way, and they're very well aware of that. I'm going to say something straight away. Having been to Russia several times and having some acquaintance with the country, I think this is a mischaracterization of a much more complex reality, which I think some people on the American right, or a lot of people on the American right, do not understand. and I can see how, if that is the assumption behind a lot of the policy that we are seeing now,

it is going to end in very, very bad disappointment. Because one thing I do not see in Russia is any sense that, you know, we should embrace the Americans, even under this administration, as kindred spirits or as people like ourselves. I mean, that just isn't there. I mean, they are going to take a very hard. edged, very hard-nosed approach to this. They've had a difficult time with the United States in the last 30 years, putting it mildly. There's also many memories going back right through the Cold War as well. Glenn can tell you much more accurately and thoroughly than I can, all the various

stories of the agreements that were made by the Russians and the Americans together, which didn't quite come through. And that is a very, very live memory there. The Russian view, and I think this is a fair one, and in fact it was just expressed by Putin just a few days ago, is that it's all about power that the United States has come and collided in reality against the reality of Russian power in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine specifically. It now realizes that it cannot prevail. And, and And therefore, that is forcing the United States to come to terms. But it is all about that. The Russians don't really see any sort of basis for moving forward

as some kind of ideological affinity type policy at all. And the one thing they are very clear about is that the relationship with China is not up for negotiation. Because as far as they are concerned, not only is it the essential guarantee that they will not be pressured by the Americans again, but it gives them leverage of the United States, which they're not going to throw away.

And at the same time, it's a relationship with China, which they've come to value on its own terms. So there's a radical difference in perspective. and I wonder how that's going to play out over the discussions that are taking place over Ukraine, by the way, because there was a meeting yesterday between the Russians and the Americans in Istanbul. It didn't get very much attention. Both the Russians and the Americans said that this would be the test as to how well the process of rapprochement would go. The Americans are saying the meeting went quite well.

the Russians at the moment are saying nothing, which suggests that they aren't very happy by some of the things they said, they heard. So just your thoughts about this, because I think this point about ideological affinity is real. As I said, it's talked about in Russia, it's talked about all the time in China, and it does unsettled people there, because of course they have their own history of the press, pressure of the European powers and indeed of the United States on them in the past, and of Russia as well.

But as I said, I think that this isn't at all how things will play out in great power terms. No, and I mean, a more real material factor in why diplomacy is taking place could be the lack of a major industrial base in the U.S. to produce enough how it to deliver to the Ukrainian military, whereas Russia's industrial base has been stable and solid throughout the war. But for Trump, to be able to conduct diplomacy, there has to be a cultural base on which he can stand. And he has that not only because of the perception of Russia as more Christian, conservative country, however simplistic this might be, within the MAGA world and especially kind of in Trump Incorporated among those who are welcome into onto Mara Lago, onto the grounds of Mara Lago. Within the Trump is base, there's also a perception of

Ukraine as a country that is in the words of Ted Nugent, the rocker from the non-rock and roll Hall of Fame band Damn Yankees. Zelensky is a homosexual liberal. That's how they have viewed him. And these videos of Zelensky as a comedian wearing high heels and satirically dancing, playing his piano with his genitals,

have gone viral within conservative media. And on the opposite end, something I saw up close in Washington, Zelensky and Ukraine were perceived as a bastion of liberalism, of openness, of transatlanticism, and democracy, in complete contravention of the reality on the ground where there are thousands of dissidents in prison, disappearances, the hit list that were on, Murot Vorez. These are all signs of an authoritarian dictatorship, but liberals in Washington saw Ukraine as this great bastion and Ukrainian flags all around capital. Hill, just 10 minutes from where I'd been living, there was just a sea of yellow and blue. And this was also a simplification because Ukraine is also a deeply conservative religious country. The schism that was imposed on the church in Ukraine was seen by conservatives and supporters of Trump as an attack on Christianity.

And again, this helped stabilize the cultural base for Trump's diplomacy there. It's a fascinating dynamic to witness, even though it's completely simplistic, and I highly doubt the Russians see it in such a simplistic way, especially when they're fighting an existential war. Well, I think it's often said that in the United States, they tend to care more about domestic policy than foreign, and often you see the foreign policy seen through this prism. So everyone see what they want to see, I guess, in this conflict. So again, on the, well, the Democrats, I guess, they would see this as the world redivided between liberals and authoritarians. And then, of course, Ukraine is this shiny beacon of democracy. At least it became overnight in 2022 versus this authoritarian reincarnation of Hitler, which would be put in. But it is interesting that this shift you have now in the United States, this new political polarization on the right now to see it very different.

the world being divided, not between liberalism and authoritarianism, but more liberalism and conservatism. So when they look at Ukraine, now they see what is in their own country, which is this idea of the liberals taking it to the excess, that is this new liberal authoritarianism, moral decadence, and on the contrast, you have then the traditional conservative Christian values. And then suddenly, yeah, Zelensky is the bad guy. All the Russians can play the role of the good guy. But I think you're correct. It's an oversimplification and it's trying to pack international affairs into a very comfortable domestic setting. But also had a follow-up question on this multipolar issue because it does it, it appears that they can go both ways with this

when Rubio says we're now in a multipolar world. On one hand, if you are in a multipolar world, then you need some kind of a great power agreement, some that we don't threaten each other. And on one hand, Trump's been suggesting, we should reduce nuclear weapons, we should slash our military budgets, he suggests US, China and Russia should come to this great power deal.

On the other hand, it also appears that multipolarities still viewed in this prism that you still have to knock out your rival so you can reclaim the throne. As you also pointed out for the past few years, the main idea has been, let's knock out the Russians from the ranks of great powers and we'll focus on China thereafter. I mean, countless American leaders have been making this point,

and even in his first administration, Trump took great pride in supplying these javelins. And now that we lost the war, we seem to be shifted. saying, hey, let's embrace the Russians. We'll pull them away from the Chinese, and then we'll go for the Chinese. But again, I think that Russians are very worried about this, because they saw over the past three years that the West tried to reach out to China, trying to help them put pressure and sanctions on the Russians. And now they're switching around telling the Russians, hey, let us come over to our side,

we'll help us remove a week in China. I just can't imagine anyone in Moscow would fall for this. But which of those multipolarity do you think America would be leaning towards? The one of great power cooperation, or let's reach out to the weaker one to knock out a stronger one? Well, the questions to me, obviously the latter. And multipolarity is a term that's subjective, I think, the way Marco Rubio interprets it, since he's the first leader of any stature in the U.S. or figure of any stature in U.S. politics to actually use it positively, is that powerful countries are granted a sphere of influence within which they can do whatever they want. And in that sphere of influence for the United States is Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, a NATO member, which is now being threatened. Canada, which has been jokingly fantasized about by Trump as a, 51st American state, prompting a sudden surge of Canadian nationalism outside the realm of

angry truckers, something you don't see very often from figures like Christia Freeland. Panama is within the U.S. fear of influence. And Panama has been threatened. And it's a country that has been abused and attacked by the U.S. before. this is, I think, their interpretation of multipolarity. And Ukraine being in Russia's fear of influence, we'll have to seed some territory there. How that relates to breaking Russia apart from China is a separate issue.

I don't think the Russian leadership is foolish enough to make the mistake that Zelensky made, where he leaned completely on one. power mafia in Washington and the transatlanticist faction in Europe at the expense of relations with another and even may have meddled, at least figures within the kind of post-Maidon leadership in Ukraine, meddled in U.S. politics in support of Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump and antagonized the other faction that was clearly incipient, it was going to come back into power.

It was a huge mistake. U.S. leadership and any treaty with the United States, look at the Iran nuclear deal, JCPOA, are unreliable, whereas the Chinese leadership is far more stable, far more reliable and centralized. So why would Russia discard its relationship with China for the constantly fluid rotating cast of figureheads in Washington? I don't think they're going to make that mistake. indeed can i just a few a few quick points here firstly about this this issue of spheres of influence because it's one we talked about a bit on that you ran um falling on from trump species and indeed if you look at rubio's comments rubio's comments were quite interesting because he interpreted

multi-polarity as essentially being about great powers. If you look at his interview with Megan Kelly, he only talks about great powers. He talks about China pursuing its interests, Russia pursuing its interests. We should do the same when great powers have common interests. They should work together and pursue those interests. When they collide with each other, the role of diplomacy is to find a way to manage those conflicts, but it's exclusively about great powers. He's not looking at a wider community of nations of states. It's again entirely about a select group of powers that are militarily and economically strong and which between them can make the kind of decisions that, you know, the United States take seriously.

you know, in terms of power dynamics. And again, it's a situation. It's a conception of international relations which presupposes rivalry and conflict because you're going to inevitably, if you think exclusively in terms of great powers, drift into theories of spheres of influence, create your own sphere of influence,

influence in Greenland and Panama, and in, by the way, the whole of Latin America. And I've been reading some very disturbing things about, you know, going into Mexico and attacking the cartels there and declaring the entire Mexican government, a terrorist government, and that kind of thing. So really, very, very disturbing things, especially if you know the history of Mexico and its relations with the United States. But, you know, all of that, that's all coming back. And the assumption is, that the other great powers in the system are going to be happy with that and might be happy to divide the world into spheres of influence

in the same kind of way as the United States is. And one which treats smaller powers as, you know, pawns in a game that the great powers are going to play with each other. Now, that I think is a very potential, unstable system if it is approached in that fashion, whereas other concepts of multipolarity, such as you get in places like China and India, and to some extent now, increasingly so in Russia, say a completely different system, one based on the United Nations Charter, equality between states, respect for sovereignty,

focus on trade, material development of people. In other words, let's try and move away in our own self-interest from great power rivalries and those sort of things, towards a more stable and more harmonious. world. And of course, the point is that if there are great powers rivalous towards each other, then, as I said, that creates an unstable system. And what the United States appears to be talking about is a unipolar system for itself, for one restricted to one specific part of the

world, which it can more easily dominate, than the entire world, which it no longer realizes it can. And that is, in some ways, even more unstable than the previous system. I hope I've explained myself clearly. But anyway, I mean, that's a few thoughts about what Marker Rubio was saying. And they don't seem to be that different from what the United States is up to now, or at least the Trump people are up to now. absolutely i i mean the the the way that i look at multipolarity is that countries have will gain the

increased ability to not align themselves with a great power and to develop economically and maintain a system with the consent of their population that benefits them um you look at a country like nicaragua where i've spent a lot of time i was just there um it's under sanctions by the U.S. The United States is determined to topple its government. USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy spent millions of dollars cultivating rent-a-riot mobs and color revolution leadership, which erupted in 2018 into violence across the country, nearly destroyed the country's economy, over 300 people were killed, scores of police officers were killed. I was there in the immediate aftermath. It was absolutely horrible. And since then, Nicaragua has been punished for defeating

these mobs, which included cartels that they had never seen before in their country. Nicaragua had been a country that was at peace and had one of the lowest levels of homicide and gun violence in the Western Hemisphere, not just in Latin America, completely at odds with what you see in the Northern Triangle, with El Salvador and Honduras. And it had an important. embrace the kind of hard-hand policy of those countries towards its poor. It's been turned upside down. Congress unanimously, without exception, every member of Congress voted for the Nika Act, which has cut off Nicaragua from international loans as well as trade opportunities with the U.S. And what you see now is China is moving in because Nicaragua wants to survive. And the government

is completely misunderstood there. It is not a hardline Marxist-Leninist government. It's a nationalist government. It's socialist-oriented, but it has a very mixed economy in which a billionaire, Carlos Pellas, is able to operate his industries openly. It's basically a country that wants to survive and continue to provide some benefits for largely poor Campesino population. And China is moving in with plans to build a new airport, to possibly build a canal, which the U.S. would respond to extremely violently. And in the course of sanctioning Nicaragua, the Biden administration provided what Nicaraguan's called parole or temporary protective status. And they created a gap in the U.S. Mexico border, which not many people are

aware of, but I would see at the airport in Nicaragua, if you connected through San Salvador, the San Salvador airport would fill up with people from Kenya all throughout Africa as well as Egypt, and they would fly into El Salvador, and then they'd fly to Managua, and Managua would let them out of the airport, which no other country would do under pressure from the U.S. Because the relations were ruptured, they would get out, and then they would take taxis north and go to Mexico, and then they would stride across the U.S.-Mexico board, border, and this is part of what fueled the crisis as well as the hysteria about immigration that fueled Donald Trump's return to the presidency, the TPS that Nicaragans were given.

Like, people I knew down there who would be the town drunk or a local drug dealer were coming in. This is not good for Nicaragua. It's not good for our country. And now Trump is president. And is he going to deal with this rationally? the multipolar world, in a multipolar world, Nicaragua would prosper.

U.S. sanctions would be offset by benefits from China or the U.S. would just stop sanctioning Nicaragua because of the power of, or the specter of bricks. You know, the U.S. dollar no longer has, as the global currency in the SWIFT system no longer matters, but they're not seeing that. And therefore, there's this consistent crisis of illegal immigration, which is increasingly destabilizing U.S. politics and pushing us to the extreme. So I actually think a multipolar world would be a more stable world in the Western Hemisphere and countries like Nicaragua, which are so

poor, as well as Haiti or Venezuela, would be able to prosper and keep their population. That's how multilarity would ideally function, that is, by having any centers of power, you would create a cost upon the belligerent state that it would isolate itself with such aggressive policy. Now, but of course, if this isn't, if we add a sphere of influence assumption into this great power or multipolar system, then that could explain why United States will not permit the Western Hemisphere to actually diversify, as we saw with Panama, and trying to make sure that there is only one central power so the U.S. can, I guess, course them in the direction they want.

It's a very crude turn-of-the-century mentality, the kind of mentality that fueled the banana wars across Latin America that saw figure. like Smedley Butler march in and topple governments. And this is what informs the Trump administration right now. They don't see the complexity of countries like Nicaragua or even Cuba, which is begging to do trade with the U.S. and would benefit the U.S. agricultural industry. But this is why I think if you look around the world from Middle East, Asia,

most countries are pursuing this polarity because they can diversify. so they won't become hostage or excessively dependent on one great power. But again, Europe is an interesting case because I think on this continent, we voluntarily didn't diversify as opposed to the rest of the world. I think simply Europe became under the unipolar order, the assumption that we would be America's junior partner. It led to complete dependence and subservient. So now that we're shifting into multipolarity,

this has been no diversification. and we've kind of been trapped, but for the Latin Americans, I think they're increasingly will be forced into, yeah, only looked into one center of power. But you also, besides Nicaragua, looked a lot on Venezuela. Do you have any overview of the deaths and, I guess, the consequence of sanctions? And also what this means, are they leaning? Are they trying to reach out to China, for example,

and find other partners to overcome this? I guess very strong hegemonic impulse in America's backyard. Yeah, absolutely. And I couldn't recommend more highly the fairly new book by my wife and close collaborator, Anya Parampil, corporate coup. I think she'd make a great guest to talk Venezuela. She documented the coup attempt during the first Trump term in detail. There's a lot of inside the room reporting there.

And that was a time when Venezuela had been under sanctions, actually, since 2015. You saw just a complete reversal of the prosperity, the national boom that Venezuela enjoyed under Hugo Chavez. When Chavez died, the Obama administration issued its first set of sanctions. And by 2015, the economy started to decline. The migrant outflow began. and as the Venezuelan economist who was an advisor to Henry Falcone, an opposition figure who actually campaigned against Nicholas Maduro, Francisco Rodriguez documented that there is a direct, like you can draw a direct line between U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and the migration crisis

from Venezuela to the U.S.-Mexico border. He has a new book called The Collapse of Venezuela. which I recommend. What Venezuela is trying to do to offset sanctions is diversify its economy because the sanctions primarily apply to the oil sector. And Venezuela is rich in minerals, gold. It actually sits on one of the world's largest gold reserves. And Chinese business interests have been moving in and collaborating closely with the Venezuelan

government to exploit those, that that mineral, wealth, mineral wealth, which U.S. business interests could have also enjoyed. And obviously Chevron wants to tap into Venezuela's oil wealth, but isn't going to be allowed to by the Trump administration. Unless there is a change in the regime, the leader of the opposition, Maria Karina Machado is arguably more fanatical than Juan Guaido. Juan Guido is sort of guided by this figure Leopoldo Lopez who led a kind of liberal party which had been created and propped up by USAID, the NED, and behind that the CIA. He's also very close to the Spanish government. His father has been a legislator in the Spanish parliament from a conservative party. Maria Kriena Machado's

been this arsonist who's been inside Venezuela for a long time, starting with a party called Sumate, which was completely created by the National Endowment for Democracy, seeking a recall of Hugo Chavez. And now she's been vaulted to the forefront because she has been there. Guaido has been put out to pasture in Florida. And she speaks a kind of a language of purging Chavismo from Venezuela, toppling the statues of Chavez, mass purge of his support. And she speaks a kind of a language of purging Chavismo, very violent language, and she's portrayed in U.S. media as a hero, like a Margaret Thatcher of Latin America. They call her the Iron Lady. And I started to notice, as many people did, when Maria Carina Machado emerged, that her campaign was first of all being managed from the outside by advisors who came from Spain.

It had a lot of money. You could see the placards that were being printed were very professional, that there were. outreach resembled kind of like it just struck me that she had professional U.S. and European consultants who were managing the whole thing. And Elon Musk suddenly developed an interest in Venezuela. This is the Twitter ex owner, Tesla owner, whose entire empire, business empire depends on electric batteries, who vowed that we will coup whoever we want, referring to Bolivia, which has one of the world's largest stores of lithium. Venezuela has an enormous amount. of lithium as well. Why would he be so interested in Venezuela? Was he and a consortium of

Trumpist businessmen and consultants? Were they financing Maria Carina Machado's campaign in exchange for access to Venezuela's wealth? Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, he was threatening Nicholas Maduro with an invasion. Why was this suddenly happening? To me, it seems like there's some kind of interest in regime change in Venezuela so that the Trump administration's Trump world can basically pillage the country's mineral wealth. And until they can get rid of Maduro, that's off the table. And China is very, very active in Venezuela, for obvious reasons. It's a matter of national survival. Very interesting. Can I just make a point which is about diversification of economies and trades and those things.

Because one of the other themes that you're getting from the Trump administration at the moment is about the importance of defending the dollar and threatening anybody who dares to move away from the dollar. I think this is again very misunderstood because if you're looking at the BRICS countries, I think there's a widespread perception, especially in Europe, that the people who are driving the movement away from the dollar are the Russians. It is not actually true, not within bricks. Russia is a very big country, as we all know, it's the biggest country in the world. It's self-sufficient in food and energy. It can always make and has made bilateral deals with countries that it

needs to trade with, like Turkey, India, China, those sort of things. The real, the people who who speak about this most within the bricks are to some extent the Chinese, because they are the great traders of the world. They're the people who send goods all over the world. So maintaining a trading system for them is very important. But also the Brazilians, Lula in particular. He's just made another speech about this. Because of course, Brazil, which is a big country, obviously, are very rich in resources, probably ambitious in the medium to long term. It is not going to be happy if we go back to the 1960s and there's an expectation that it's going to be part of an American sphere of influence all over again.

And they therefore clearly will resist this and they will obviously push for diversification of currencies, new currencies. Lula is the only Brick's leader that I'm aware of who's actually spoken of alternative currencies to the dollar. So the major rebellion, if you like, against the dollar is coming from precisely those people who the United States is trying to herd into its sphere of influence again.

I wanted to ask another question, though, and that's, you could comment on this if you like. But where does this leave the Middle East? I mean, does the United States think of the Middle East as its sphere of influence do? I mean, is this why we are seeing so much violence there? I mean, why the United States won't break the link with Israel or change policies with Israel? Because here on Israel, the continuity between administrations is greatest. Now, you have covered the situation in the Middle East, brilliantly, if I may say. You've talked about the whole Gaza crisis in the most, if I can say, humane way that I know.

And you watched and tracked everything that people have said. You took on Mr. Blinken as everybody who watches the same. program undoubtedly will know. But the Trump people don't seem to be that difference. They're still stuck on these issues. In fact, they're going even further rhetorically than the Biden blinked people ever went. So, you know, do they think of it as the sphere of influence as well? Is this what their plan is? If so, I mean, we're not going to get peace in the Middle East. We're going to get an eruption of violence, the like of which we have never seen. Well, so it seems to Well, Trump antagonized the more, maybe the more principled members of the America First base when he mentioned his interest in owning Gaza and possibly even sending U.S. troops there to conduct some kind of final solution of Palestinians.

This is, you know, those within the fray of America First have more proper. isolationist perspective, a Buchananite perspective, and shuddered at the idea of sending American troops, I mean, they may not have even been interested in the human rights dimension of ethnically cleansing 2.2 million people, but sending American troops to do it when there's no U.S. interest at stake there and when it actually would contravene U.S. interests, horrified them. And yet Trump has persisted promoting this perverse, almost satanic AI video showing him as a golden idol at the heart of a ethnically cleansed Gaza with trans belly dancers dancing on the rubble converted into a gold coast of casinos. He's persisted in entertaining

this fantasy of the U.S. taking over Gaza and somehow profiting from it when it would be seen as not even peripheral to American interests. But then you have the conflict. the looming conflict, hard war, or hot war with Iran, which Israel is clearly pushing for. Israel believes the Israeli military intelligence establishment believes that it has a short window of time before Iran can enrich its uranium to a point where it can produce enough nuclear weapons to establish a protective umbrella and consolidate the survival of the so-called resistance axis. Israel believes that after it's the war that erupted on October 7th, it's done so much damage to the resistance axis that it needs to capitalize on these gains,

and it needs U.S. support to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Can't do it without U.S. in-air refueling support or, I don't know, guidance systems for U.S. G.B.U. Bunker Busters. And so Trump has to authorize this. J.D. Vance is on the record opposing it. Tucker Carlson is dead set against it, is on the record against an attack with Iran. Doesn't seem to a deal with Iran over its nuclear capacity would seem to be more in the interest of American geostrategie. But then, I mean, you have the iron triangle which sets U.S. policy of Congress, the national security bureaucracy and interest groups. And here on the issue of Israel, the interest groups are at the top of the triangle, the interest groups being APEC and the Zionist movement more generally. And they have more control over Donald Trump than any presidency. And it appeared that they had total control over the Biden administration.

I mean, just witnessed Tony Blinken himself identifying as a member of the Zionist movement on his first trip to Israel on October 10, 2023, when he said, I'm not here as a diplomat. I'm here as a Jew. But what you have with Trump is open, unsheathed influence from one of the most extreme factions within the Israeli or Zionist political spectrum in the figure of Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late Zionist warlord and casino Baron Sheldon Adelson, who enjoyed a better seat at Trump's inauguration than every member of Congress and most of Trump's incoming cabinet secretaries. Miriam Adelson donated, argue probably more than Elon Musk did to Donald Trump. But look at what Elon Musk, look at the kind of transformation Elon Musk underwent in just the past few years, where Elon Musk, after buying Twitter X, came under attack from the Anti-Defamation League,

one of the most powerful Zionist lobbying organizations in the U.S., which accused him of hosting many anti-Semitic accounts, Elon Musk joined forces with a not very pro-Jewish, small but rising faction within America First called the Groyper's to popularize a hashtag ban the ADL. And then suddenly, Elon Musk completely changed course and announced that he was going to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro, the top Zionist or pro-Israel podcaster in the U.S., where he then declared that he was aspirational Jewish. Musk then proceeded to go to a kibbutz that had been attacked by Hamas on October 7th, standing in front of a crib with Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the fact that no babies or children had been killed in that kibbutz, a crib filled with NATO bullets, which Hamas didn't possess, a completely

staged hoax in order to proclaim his loyalty to Israel. So you have, and I don't know what happened in between there, but clearly Elon Musk was turned. Clearly, the world's richest man has a more powerful force above him or behind him. And so you have the two most powerful billionaires in Trump world who are absolutely dedicated to Netanyahu's agenda. And Netanyahu's agenda is contingent on pulling the U.S. into a direct war with Iran at this point. It will really take personal resistance on the part of Trump. And more immediately, Gaza is still technically at war. And the Israelis, Netanyahu, are doing everything they can to prevent phase two of the negotiations

towards a long-term ceasefire from taking place, and Hamas is not going to budge on its determination to enact phase two. And if Gaza returns to war, this will destabilize the entire region and make war with Iran more likely. So I think we're in a very dangerous period of time right now, and it won't be clear for the next three to six months how it will shake out. Do get a bit of a feeling, though. quite before the storm because

well as to speak I think Israel and Hamas are in Egypt to discuss the ceasefire and there's been a good chance this could as you said fall apart indeed appears that Israel is quite interested to see it fall apart there's also concern now with

Syria being down that this could be used to go after Lebanon to go after Hezbollah and of course the biggest concern, of course, is if Israel is able to get the United States on its team to go after Iran. But maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I got the impression that Trump was very much against this, that he might plan for an ideal with the Iranians. Again, I have

like everyone else a bit hard time reading Trump. But what do you see being the likely possible pathways to, again, unraveling or the region or major war. Well, within Iran, Trump has a small window of time, I think, to make a deal because of the instability or unpopularity of the Iranian elected leadership of Mahmoud Pasechian and Javad Zarif behind him. They've been coming in for some harsh attacks from the principalist camp, which believes that Iran is being, has been taken.

they had been duped and weakened themselves by making the first deal with the United States. And they might actually have a pretty strong case there, given how they've been treated over the past year, where the United States has not done anything to hold Israel back from attacking not just Iran's consular facilities in Damascus, but carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil and initiating new sanctions on Iran's institutions. So the window for a deal is closing. The axis of resistance has suffered some harsh blows. They acknowledge it.

For Hezbollah, for example, they were supplied from Iran through the main Syrian population centers, which are now under the control of their harshest, most sectarian rival. in the form of Ahmed al-Shara, aka Muhammad al-Jolani, his people were celebrating the death of Hassan Nasrallah on the day of Nasrallah's funeral. So this is ominous for Hezbollah, but at the same time, they have, there is no possible force in Lebanon

that can get them to give up their weapons. And Israel has demonstrated its failure to demolish or eradicate Hamas, which is a much weaker faction in a besieged area where it has no direct supply lines except through kind of, you know, through tunnels. So Israel's weaknesses on display as well and Israel's Air Force is all it can depend on.

It is desperate to end the threat before it even begins from an Iranian nuclear weapon. But you also hear Netanyahu. I mean, I see this as an expression of weakness. He's trying to kill the ceasefire deal with Gaza because of his fear of Hamas re-arming. So Israel is really just set the stage

for just a kind of permanent, protracted war. And there are no assassinations that can weaken the threat that it faces. it has no way out. It has no way of planning for the next five to ten years. I think the only way out for Israel would have been to develop as a kind of mid-level power like Turkey, but it doesn't have the population, it doesn't have the stability, and it doesn't have the alliances regionally to do so. So it's just stuck.

We have as a regular guest, Alistair Crook, who speaks of who talks to us often about the situation inside Israel. And I'd be curious to know what you think about this. He talks about the fact that there is this very radical element that is coming to, you know, rising inside Israeli society that people like Ben-Gvier and Smartruch are far from isolated figures, that they do represent a powerful current within Israeli society. and a growing one.

And he is very, very skeptical about Israel making any kind of peace or seeking any sort of peace or seeking any kind of diplomatic resolution to its mounting problems. And I think I'm not misrepresenting him when he says he thinks that whatever tactical gains Israel has made over the last year, they don't offset

the larger strategic failure the inability to break Hamas the inability to defeat the forces the resistance forces in Gaza the fact that Hezbollah is still there

it's still standing so he fears that left to itself this situation will continue to escalate, and that we are in what he calls a long wall, and one which is going to be very, very difficult for Israel itself, the one which, given these trends within Israeli society, has every possibility of escalating. I'm just curious to know what your thoughts about all of that out, because I get that from Alistair Crook. He's discussed a lot, the eschatology, which,

if it's true, I find extremely disturbing of some of these people. But, I mean, have you any opinions yourself about this? And do you think that the Trump people in Washington have any understanding of any of this? Because I certainly don't. Well, it first needs to be said that Israel was founded on a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the socialist-oriented labor faction within the Zionist movement, not the Jabotinskyites who are represented by Netanyahu. The 67 war is and the 73 war were, and all of the calamities that Palestinians experienced in between were carried out by the labor faction all the way up until 2008, 2009, including the first

war in which Israel used large numbers of attack jets on Gaza, Operation Cass led. that featured as defense minister Ehud Barak from the Labor Party. The settlement project was ideologically a project of the messianic religious nationalist right in Israel, but it was authorized by the labor movement. And so we can't let them off the hook. And it completely exceptionalize the settler, the fanatical zealots and religious nationalists of the settlement movement that are now taking the reins after a long march through the institutions of Israeli society. They always saw the secular state as they would actually, Rabbi Abraham Cook, who's their guiding light, who helped inspire the rise of the settlement movement, referred to the

secular state as an ass or a donkey that they would ride to glory. And they've almost arrived at their destination. Netanyahu also comes from a very secular background. He's, no more religious than I am. And he is in a relationship of mutual exploitation with figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Ben-Govir has left Netanyahu's coalition. Netanyahu has stabilized his coalition, but Bezal Smotric is still a part of it, and he's arguably stronger because he is the only figure representing an incipient rising force within his Jewish-Israeli society. And what do they want? What is their ultimate goal? It is Apocalypse. They have an eschatology that is based on the third temple ideology in which the Alaksa Mosque, the Alaksa compound will be

destroyed and will be replaced with a third temple and traditional Jewish ritual will be practiced. They believe that the prayer that's conducted at the Western Wall below the Alaksa compound is almost blasphemous that Jews didn't traditionally pray there. What they did is they stood at the top of that compound and sacrificed continuously sacrificed sheep and other animals in order to glorify their God. And in order to do that, they need World War III. I mean, what would it actually do? What would it, what kind of force would it unleash if a bombing of the Alaksa mosque and compound took place and it was all destroyed? It would involve the entire Muslim world. all the way to Indonesia and Malaysia in a kind of conflict, an insult like that, an attack like that.

And that's what they're pushing for. They also, in a material sense, sacrificed heavily in the war in Gaza. The religious nationalists lost many men, suffered many injuries, and also carried out enormous atrocities as we saw through their TikTok accounts. and they use the Gaza War as a staging ground or a theater for inciting religious warfare in the region by carrying Torah scrolls and setting up giant Hanukkah menorahs in destroyed neighborhoods and inside destroyed homes in order to inflame Muslim anger. That's their objective.

Netanyahu cannot rule without them. That's how far they've come in Israeli society. And they will continue to gain power over the military. and or the Supreme Court, they will eventually weaken the Supreme Court. That was what the judicial reform Netanyahu was authorizing was partially about, and they were Netanyahu's support base. My book, Goliath, which I published in 2013, tells this story, the story of the transition in Israeli society that took place in 2009 with Netanyahu

taking charge. And, you know, I predicted in that book that he would become the longest ruling Israeli prime minister that has proven correct. And he rules by sheer cynicism because he is willing to join forces with this faction. I should also mention another one of their heroes or father figures of this movement is Meyer Kahana, the late rabbi who was, you know, cut his teeth. in New York City, was an FBI asset, founded the Jewish Defense League, a kind of terrorist organization, then moved to Israel, founded Kach in the occupied West Bank, which was the JDL, like kind of a terror militia in the West Bank, which has been armed with U.S. supplied rifles

after October 7th and granted Israeli Army uniforms basically deputized. Kahana's terror militia was basically deputized by the Israeli military after October 7th. And Kahana's objective was spelled out in his book, They Must Go. I mean, the title speaks for itself. Total ethnic cleansing. First of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, his belief is that you, and there's some truth to it, depending on how you look at it. You cannot have a Jewish and democratic state as Israel presents itself. It will either be Jewish and be the Jewish state or it will be democratic and it will be

swamped by Palestinians and continually in conflict. And more and more of the Israeli population, when I say more and more, I mean a vast majority of the population of Israel agrees with Kahana now, that it must be Jewish and not democratic. And they support ethnic cleansing. They support Trump's plan for Gaza. They believed only 3% of the Israeli public told pollsters in 2024 that Israel was using too much firepower in Gaza. So that should tell you a lot about the future of Israeli politics. And of the Middle East. Gosh, just one quick question on this.

I mean, is it true that 40% of Israeli army officers now hold to these beliefs, that the army has been very heavily penetrated by these people as well? Yeah, absolutely. I did a report while I was working on my book, Goliath, about a book that was circulating through the officer corps of the Israeli military and among religious nationalist troops who had joined for ideological reasons. They weren't just being conscripted. It was called Torat Ha Melech, or the King's Torah.

Now, first, before I explain the contents of the book, you have to understand there's always the Israeli military would hire these ethicists, bring in these ethicists to determine what the laws of war were. and after the siege of Gaza, the ethicists who were secular figures from academia, one of them was named Asa Khashir from Tel Aviv University, would bend the laws of war to contravene the Geneva Conventions to authorize disproportionate force and the killing of civilians because they thought it was necessary in Gaza.

They were authorizing state terror from a secular standpoint. Torat Hamelah, or the King's Torah, was authored by one or two of the most extreme rabbis from the most extreme yeshiva or seminary in the Northern West Bank called Yitzar, one of them, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg. And they had put this book forward as a kind of replacement of the secular ethics being put forward for the Israeli, military. This book instructed soldiers that they had an obligation to kill children, Palestinian, not or just Gentile, because they will grow up to harm the Jewish people. The book openly called for genocide from a religious standpoint. And its authors were actually called in for interrogation by the Shabakh, the General Security Service of Israel, Shibat, for interrogations. And

refused and they were not arrested because they enjoyed so much popularity. And I attended a conference at a hotel in Jerusalem of some of the most senior, popular, state-funded rabbis in the Israeli rabbis to defend that book. And they defended it on the basis of, for example, the Passover tale in which God slaughters the firstborn of the Egyptians as punishment for their treatment of the Hebrews. It was shocking. I mean, it was sort of like an anti-Semitic fantasy come to life. And that book was just being distributed at big gatherings of religious nationalists in the army. So that, what I'm telling you is there's been a project or a campaign within the army to instill these beliefs.

And we saw it play out in the Gaza Strip for the first time in almost a live streamed fashion with the deliberate killings of children. You know, over 65 doctors who were in Gaza testified that children were being deliberately sniped in the head by Israeli soldiers. Like, where is this coming from? It's coming from this project by the religious nationalist right to take over the Israeli military, the most revered institution in Israel, and they are succeeding. So that 40% number will only increase over time as long as US aid and diplomatic support for Israel continues.

And Israel enjoys total impunity. Well, I'm hoping Trump will reflect a bit on what is getting into before he doubles down on this bit strange fantasy. which he tweeted out this AI video. I think this is, I think if he thinks he can control what is unleashing, I think it's making a mistake, though. I would think so,

but the other question is, what would happen if he did wake up one day and realize that he was unleashing something horrible and went in the other direction? What would happen to a US president? Great question. Good question, absolutely, very good question. But I think,

Are we out of time? Yeah, we're out of time. So definitely a question we must look into in our next program, if I may say, Max. Because I don't think he has any idea of the forces that are playing out here. I who consider myself a well-informed person hadn't realized that we had these forces gaining strength in Israel to the extent that we did until about a year ago, just so, maybe a bit more than a year. ago. So I'm sure Trump doesn't know anything about them.

And they're never discussed here in Britain. Our media never touches on them. Even that part of the media that is critical of what has been happening in Gaza. They are very careful to avoid talking about these things.

So I'm absolutely sure that it isn't talked about much in the United States either. At some point it's going to force itself on people in the West, and at that point they're probably not going to be prepared for it. But I'm talking away, and as I said,

I think we've held you for a very long time. Can I just say from my point of view, I'm sure Glenn is going to say more, but thank you very, very much for coming. It's been very, very interesting altogether, and very informative too. Yeah, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. And, yeah, we hope to be able to speak to you again

there's a lot more to discuss. So thanks again, Max. Yeah, I would love that. And again, the Duran is one of my favorite shows. I learn so much every week from you all. So keep up the great work. Thank you.