The Duran Podcast - Trump Gaza ceasefire. Biden takes credit

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Trump Gaza ceasefire. Biden takes credit

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the Gaza ceasefire and the announcement yesterday that there is a ceasefire in place, though we do have Netanyahu starting to say that Hamas is starting to back out of the ceasefire or something like that. I don't know exactly what Netanyahu is trying to get to get to, but let's just assume that the ceasefire has been wrapped up. all the world leaders, most of the leaders involved in the ceasefire have announced that it's a done deal, Qatar. Biden, if you want to say that Biden was involved in this ceasefire, Trump. A lot of people say that Trump was the actually driving force in getting this ceasefire done. What are your thoughts on the ceasefire? Trump. Trump was behind it. I think that's pretty obvious now, even though Biden is taking credit or trying to take credit for it. Actually, it looks like from various articles from Israeli media that Blinken was trying to sabotage many ceasefire attempts in the past.

At least that's what the Times of Israel is reporting and other Israeli media citing sources, negotiators, telling them that whenever they were close to a deal in the past. It was Blinken, along with Netanyahu, who would sabotage the deal? I don't know. That's what they're saying. Anyway, what are your thoughts on everything? Well, they're absolutely right about that, and we'll come to that in a moment. And can I also quickly, quickly say that there is absolutely no doubt at all in my mind that what has made a deal, what has made us get a deal now is Donald Trump and his intervention.

and the way that he and his representative, Stephen Whitegolf, gate crashed the negotiations in Doha and basically banged people's heads together and forced a deal to come out of it. But before I just deal with that, I do want to say something about the fact that there is this delay in Israel at the moment. And the reason there is this delay, I think, is not because Netanyahu really believes that Hamas is trying to renege on a deal, because from Hamas's point of view, this is as good a deal as they're likely to get, and I think they know that. And I think they also know perfectly well that it would be very dangerous for them to backtrack on a deal. Now, when all of their big backers,

the Arab states and the Russians and the Chinese and all those people, but also, of course, Donald Trump, who's basically created it and who has warned them that they'll have a hell of a price to pay if they don't honor this deal. I think it's most unlikely that Hamas is the other people who are creating problems. The reason I think this has happened, and I think it's not difficult to understand, is that there are people within Netanyahu's coalition, people like Smatrich and Ben Gvier and people like that, who are very, very unhappy with this deal indeed. And I think that for that reason Netanyahu is reluctant for the moment to put it to the Israeli cabinet, because he's afraid that though the cabinet probably will

endorse it, that there's a majority of ministers who will back it, Smotrich and Ben Gvier, might walk out and that could bring about the fall of his government. So I think this has to be understood within Israeli politics. Now, this is a big topic. We can come back to it later, probably not in this program, but let's focus instead on what happened. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Trump secured this deal. We've had negotiations, which have been going on in some form or other, for about a year. here now. We've had an agreement that was basically sorted out in draft back in May. Biden is pretending that it was he who basically got all the various parts of the agreement

sorted out in May. But the reality is, as anybody who's followed these negotiations closely, which we have done, that the people who basically ironed out all the details got Hamas to agree put a proposal to the Israelis and the Americans, which the Americans said they would agree to, and which the Israelis at one point said that they would agree to. The people who hammered out the details were the Arab states, Egypt and the UAE, first and foremost. The reason we have not had a deal is that the Biden administration has been conducting, and completely ineffective, in fact, misguided foreign policy in the Middle East. On the one hand, we had Joe Biden himself going to Israel in October 23,

shortly after the Hamas attack, and as we reported at the time, handing out blank checks, which is an absolute disaster, it induced the Israelis to start this huge, military operation in Gaza without any clear idea of how it should be called off. And we've had hardliners both in Israel and within the administration itself, who wanted to press on with this war, even though they've never really explained how they expected to win it in Gaza, press on with this war because obviously they saw it as a pathway, ultimately, to their strike against Iran, which is what they were also working towards. We've had people like Blinken, who was clearly a hardliner, who went repeatedly to the Middle

East. We pointed out in program after program that whenever Blinkin went to the Middle East, no progress was ever made on anything. In fact, things always went backwards. And I think what the Israeli media are telling us about Blinkin being a spoiler rather than a move forward in the negotiations almost certainly is true. And what then happened was that in November, Trump won the election, completely changed the whole political geometry. We now know that he rejected in November proposals from the Israelis and the neocons in Washington for a strike against Iran in the early

part of this year. We have had a whole article about this in Axios. And he sent his envoy, Stephen White Goff, to the Middle East. White Goff with Trump's backing, gate crashed the negotiations in Doha, the negotiations with the ceasefire in Doha. He then apparently, and this is all in the Israeli media, telephone Netanyahu's office and said that the deal was ready. And, and, he wanted to discuss it with Netanyahu. Netanyahu came back and said that he wasn't prepared to discuss it on that particular day because it was the Shabbat and Netanyahu doesn't work on the Shabbat. White Gauph apparently exploded over the phone according to the Israeli media. We're taking all of this from the Israeli media. What they refer to as salty language was used.

in other words, oaths and coarse language and shouting and whatever. And he said that he was coming to Israel, to Jerusalem, and he expected Netanyahu to meet him. And he came to Jerusalem and told Netanyahu that you must sign up to this deal and do so now. And that has put Netanyahu between a rock and a hard place. He's either got to sign up to the deal, which basically he has, because Trump is insisting on it and he doesn't want to quarrel with Trump, but he's now got the problem that he's made all sorts of promises to his hardliners

to Smotheridge and Ben Gbeer about Gaza and about other things, that it's now looking as if he can't honor. But to be clear again, it was Trump who ended this disastrous policy of drift that the Biden administration has followed for over a year and who achieved the breakthrough in the negotiations in Doha and who pushed the Israelis into finally signing off on a deal, which was certainly agreed in May and which with minimal diplomatic action could have been agreed in February, in other words a year ago. Yeah, that's the main takeaway is that they could have gotten this deal six months ago a year ago,

Blinken and Biden. They could have put pressure on Netanyahu in Israel to come to an agreement. What was the pressure that Trump placed on Netanyahu? Well, again, we don't fully know. But I'm going to say something that there is a difference already in the feel in the sense that we got with Biden throughout the last three years, four years of his presidency, The impression of a president who basically was a neocon, who wrote blank checks to American allies, de Zelensky, to Netanyahu, who always sought confrontation with people that he saw as American enemies.

And now we have a very different type of personality in the White House, one who is intent on asserting the authority of the United States, does so in extremely blunt and straightforward terms, and who's basically brought a stop to all the drift. Now, the United States has huge influence over Israel if it wants to use it. Netanyahu's domestic political position is precarious. I think that Netanyahu has probably made Calgary. that given how weak his own position in Israel is, given how Israel's geopolitical problems have been growing over the course of this year, he simply cannot afford to antagonize Donald Trump. So I think that's what the Israelis have caved, Netanyahu has caved.

He's now dealing with a much stronger and more forcible personality. personality in the White House, and we see the difference. Yeah, with a weak executive, with an incompetent and weak executive, Israel has leverage, but a strong executive, the United States can exert leverage. Yeah, that's what this shows us. Exactly. Biden, White House, blink in incompetence, evil, because it seems like every time they were telling us they are trying to prevent a wider war, what they were actually doing. At least this is how it appears if you go off of the reports from the Israeli media,

which claim that Blinken was sabotaging any progress towards a ceasefire all along the way over the past year. It seems like every time they were telling us that they're trying to avoid a wider war, what they were actually working towards was widening the war with the end goal of going after Iran. Exactly. And I wonder if they thought, if they calculated some of the neocons that even with a Trump victory, Trump would stay on the course to go after Iran. I wonder if they thought that that would be a trajectory that would not be changed,

even with a Trump victory. I'm talking before the November elections, before the results. Absolutely. You know, even if Trump wins, he'll still stay on this trajectory towards widening the war out and going after Iran. Absolutely. Now, we did a program about a week ago or 10 days ago about an Axios article, about a meeting between Jake Sullivan and Biden in the Oval Office. And I'm sure Blinken was there, in which despite claims to the contrary, it's obvious that Sullivan was trying to persuade Biden to authorize missile strikes on Iran. Now, we were told that this meeting to place a month before the article was written.

which would place it somewhere at the end of November, beginning of December. So after the election, and we discussed in that program that clearly what had happened, and we can now see it, and we can join the dots even more clearly. We're getting all this information from the Israeli media now about what Lincoln was really up to, the fact that he was sabotaging peace agreements and working to expand the war, not to limit it. What was clearly happening was that we'd had a steady buildup throughout 2024 towards a big attack on Iran.

And the idea was that they would have launched that attack after they won the U.S. election. Now, they didn't win the U.S. election. Instead, Trump won the election. And what we have now learned from another article in Axios is that there was another set of meetings, presumably in Washington, involving an Israeli official, someone sent by Netanyahu, in which it seems that Trump also was lobbied to authorize the strike on Iran. And Trump wasn't keen. In fact, he made it absolutely clear that he did not agree. And then it seems it was only after this meeting, when it became clear that Trump was not going to agree to the strike on Iran,

that Blinken and Sullivan cobbled together this further meeting with Biden, in which they tried to persuade the old man to agree to the strike on Iran in the last weeks of his presidency. And fortunately, perhaps because the Pentagon objected, or who knows for what reason, the authorization was not given. So we can see that there was a distinct pattern to work towards a war with Iran. And what stopped it in its tracks was the November election, Trump's victory, and Trump's determination that there should be no more wars in the Middle East involving the United States and that the existing war, the one in Gaza, should be brought to an end.

Right. So the pushback that you're going to get, Alexander, that we're going to get is that absolutely Trump wants a war with Iran. He wants war in the Middle East. He's very anti-Iran, pro-Israel. True. He doesn't like Iran. He despises Iran.

Trump, as most of the U.S. political class, would absolutely welcome a regime change in Iran. I'm not saying a war, but they would absolutely 100% welcome. a regime change in Iran. Trump is not a fan of Iran. He's not a fan of Hezbollah, not a fan of Hamas. He despises all of these organizations. But he doesn't, at least in this term, let's call it Trump's second term, where he has a lot of issues that he needs to deal with in the U.S. it seems that he doesn't want a war, a military war. An economic pressure, I forgot, what was the term that he's calling it against Iran? Maximum pressure.

Maximum pressure. Maximum economic pressure. Okay. But I'm talking about a military conflict. It's clear that he doesn't want that in this upcoming term. He wants to focus on the U.S. This is my perception. of it. He wants to focus on the US. There's a lot of work that he needs to do. It's a lot of

work. This is a huge undertaking what he's planning to do in the United States. And the last thing that he needs is instability in the Middle East, a hot war in the Middle East. It doesn't mean that he's not going to go after Iran. His administration is not going to pressure Iran in other ways. What are your thoughts on that? Well, you are absolutely right. In fact, you've put your finger on it, the thing people need to understand is that you can be strongly anti-Iran. Trump loathe the regime in Iran. He absolutely detests it. He's made that absolutely clear. You can be strongly hostile to Iran. You can be strongly hostile to Hamas, which Trump absolutely is. You can loathe Hezbollah as well and still be opposed to wars in the Middle East. The one does not exclude the other.

And I don't think actually it's different from his first term, because that was exactly the same policy that he had during his first term. He avoided wars in the Middle East at that time. In fact, he was constantly trying and was being prevented from closing them down. He wanted to pull US troops out of Syria. He was war intending to come to some kind of arrangement over Afghanistan, whereby the United States would extricate it from Afghanistan. He wasn't too keen on the Iraq mess, and it made it absolutely clear that he thought that George W. Bush's war against Iraq was a huge mistake.

He wanted to end wars in the Middle East. He did not seek war with Iran during the time when he was president previously. What he wanted and what he still wants is regime change in Iran. But he wants regime change, not achieved through a direct war with Iran. He wants to do it through massive economic pressure, maximum pressure, relentless sanctions. Probably he also wants to let loose all of the usual agencies that, you know, organized regime change operations in various countries. and I'm sure he wants, he's going to try and do that in Iran again. And I think that's his policy, that the point is he does not want war in the Middle East.

And the reason he doesn't want war in the Middle East is, I think, two reasons. First, I think Trump has a fundamental aversion to wars. Now, again, this is not because he's weak or soft or because he's a peacemic or something of that kind. It's because he sees wars as a losing proposition for the United States, one which involve incredibly reckless gambols, which in the Middle East consistently fail to pay off. And that's one reason. So he's got an aversion to war as a solution to America's problems. That is one. And secondly, I think he perfectly well understands. that if there is a war in the Middle East, it will absorb all of his energies and all of his administration's energies and divert him from the course that he really wants to take, which is about building up American power and American wealth back home. That's his priority. So he does not want wars in the Middle East. He wants regime change in Iran. He would like to see Hamas.

extinguished, if possible, but he doesn't think that war is the right way to do it. And by the way, he is absolutely right. I mean, I don't want to discuss the ceasefire now. I don't want to talk about the details of this. But remember, the original objective of this offensive, this military offensive in Gaza was to destroy Hamas. A year has passed, more than a year has passed, and Hamas is still there. and according to reports in the Israeli media and the Wall Street Journal over the last couple of weeks,

it's grown stronger. Now, Trump is not going to fall for the sunk costs fallacy. He's not going to double down on failure in the way that the Biden administration, Blinking and all of those people, did. He says, look, you've not achieved all the things that you said you wanted to achieve. I'm not going to waste time, resources, political energy, my own political credibility, drifting into a major crisis in the Middle East, when I calculate that that is not in America's interests, or by the way, Israel's interests also. And I get to say something, there's going to be critics of all of this in the United States.

I believe, however, that the vast majority of the American people, the people who voted for Trump, even many people who didn't vote for Trump, will prefer a president who makes decisions and who's able to act on behalf of the United States and assert its authority and move things forward further in a potentially constructive way to a president who spends all his time writing out blank checks. Does this hold, this ceasefire hold? Well, as to that, we will see. I mean, a lot now depends on what happens in Israel. I mean, I think it will. I think Trump wants it. I think Trump will get it. I think people in Israel understand that that is what is going to happen. I think that the question in Israel is whether it will be Netanyahu who delivers it for Trump

or someone else, because I think the pressure on Netanyahu from Trump is enormous and probably irresistible. But Netanyahu has the major problem of having to deal with his own supporters, or not his supporters, but his coalition partners who are very unhappy. Yeah. I was just thinking about the videos that we've done covering this, talking about how none of this had to happen, the conflict, the war, the death, the destruction in Gaza. If you really wanted to go after Hamas, there was a diplomatic way. We don't need to get it to it again. You've explained it multiple times in great detail via the UN, via diplomacy. There was a way to choke off Hamas is financing without all the destruction. It's now very clear that that the Biden White House wanted none of that.

And as far as Trump goes, I was thinking about the many programs that we did during his first term when the tension rose with Iran with Soleimani and how there still is a bit of a misconception as to what happened there, where you had the likes of, I believe it was Pompeo and Bolton, who it looks like they're the ones that tried to get something going with Iran and, and, and, there was an off ramp provided by Swiss mediators to prevent a conflict between Iran and the U.S. I mean, I kind of remember everything that happened there with Soleimani. I remember it very well. Trump would go out and give speeches and say, I took out Soleimani because it's Trump, so he

understood what he had to say, but he almost got baited into a conflict with Iran by by the hawks. Exactly. And it was with mediation that we avoided that in his first term. These are warnings for what could come, though. I mean, why I'm saying this, why I'm bringing this up is that, you know, the hawks are not just going to leave this alone. No, they're not going to agree with it.

I mean, Trump is the same man as he wasn't his first term. I think that's the important thing to understand about the Middle East. The line he's taking now is exactly consistent with the line he took then. He didn't want a war with Iran. When the assassination of Soleimani took place, it looked briefly as if there might be a war with Iran. He's hard, the hardliners, the hawks, neocons, Trump, oh, sorry, they're not Trump, Pompeo and Bolton were trying to engineer a war with Iran. Trump stepped in. He pushed Pompeo and Bolton aside.

He took personal charge of the diplomacy. He worked through the Swiss and he was able to arrange an off-ramp with the Iranians. He did not want a war then. He does not want a war now. That doesn't mean he likes the Iranians, doesn't mean he likes Hamas, it doesn't mean that he's selling out Israel or any of these things, which is what his critics, some of his hardline critics and the Nicon critics in the United States are going to say, it's just that he doesn't like wars.

He doesn't like wars altogether because he thinks that nearly always they are a losing proposition for the United States. And he specifically doesn't want wars in the Middle East, which he sees as a huge distraction from all the many things he wants to do. All right. Anything else to add on this agreement before we wrap things up? Well, as I said, we'll see what happens in Israel. I mean, what happens in Israel now is obviously going to be critically important. But I'm going to simply say this to those anybody that. who's listening in Israel, it is very, very much in Israel's interest to get this agreement done. They did not achieve the maximalist objectives that Netanyahu and the Biden administration,

by the way, Blinken all promised back in October 2023. But they should never have started this military conflict in Gaza in the first place. All the military people, all the really, military people who were really familiar with Gaza, warned against it. All that's happened since then has not worked for Israel. Going back to a process, a diplomatic process, works fully in Israel's interests and getting as see as far as the first step. Yeah. All right. We will end the video there. Duran.locos.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, bitch you telegram, Rockfin, and X, and go to the Duran Shop, pick up some merch like what we are wearing in this video update. The link to the Duran Shop is in the description box down below. Take care.