Episode #158 - Joaquin Flores and Unraveling the Geopolitics of Israel and Gaza - podcast episode cover

Episode #158 - Joaquin Flores and Unraveling the Geopolitics of Israel and Gaza

Oct 24, 20231 hr 23 min
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Episode description

Geopolitical analyst and commentator Joaquin Flores joins me to try and unpack the multi-layered problems surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the wake of Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7th.

Show Notes:
Joaquin - New Resistance Telegram
Joaquin on Patreon

Gold Goats 'n Guns Patreon

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Gold Goats and Guns podcast for October 24th, 2023. My name is Tom Lillongo and we have a lot to talk about. It is episode 158 and with the world blowing up the way it is and me literally and well, I'm long gate teens, lead futures and rope makers at this point, right? And I'm like, okay, I'm in serious smoke and if you got a mode after everything has happened and has been happening in between Israel and Gaza.

I could think of no other person I wanted to talk to about this than walking forays over in New Resistance. Then walking has been on the show a couple of times before every and whenever I have confusion about a subject that I don't know I'm not an expert on. He's the guy that seems to fill in some gaps for me. So it's always great to have walking show up and fill in some fill in those gaps. So walking good day. How are you? How you been?

Mahalo, my friend. Hey Tom, I'm enjoying the apocalypse here. Stay in cozy as they say. I got my coffee here. I got some iodine ready to withstand and survive the fallout and hey, the day I learned to love the bomb was the day I learned to stop worrying and I think whatever happens, you know, carpe diem and all that I guess. Yeah. I mean, I hate to start with the apocalypse. But sometimes the only way you can look at the apocalypse is kind of laugh at it a little bit. It's the Kubrick.

You know, thank you for bringing Dr. Strangelo up because it really is one of those things where you're like, okay, well, if you guys really want to do this, there's nothing we can do about it.

So one of the angles on this, one of the things I've talked about, some of the things I think and I tried to keep things as strategic as possible because I'm not taking a side here me personally and I don't and it's up to everybody to decide where they think they're going to quote unquote, "royalties" or whatever lie.

I just know that no matter what you, what we may think we know about any of these conflicts around the world, there's always a deeper, greater strategic aim being played by somebody in order to advance what generally winds up being a particularly ugly political agenda. And there, I can think of no other conflict on the planet at this point, even Russia, Ukraine, that's more fraught with this level of, of, or pregnant with this level of, of import than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So my question to you, and I'm going to just keep this broad to start out with because you and I haven't spoke previous to this and the conflict breaking out again. What area of this conflict do you think is the most, kind of under reported, what angle

on this? Because everybody's done their thing from the Israeli and the Palestinian side and everybody's being forced to two sides and all the rest of it, but there's another angle, there are other angles to this that have not been explored and I think you might have, I hope you have a unique way of looking at it. Yeah, that's a great question.

I think there are two main things that have gotten kind of out of focus because there's a geopolitical angle and yet people keep bringing it back to the issues of, let's say, the Oslo one and two, a four camp David, they, they, you know, talking about the roadmap to peace and what used to be called the peace process.

And that all happened, and this was all happening during an age of, you know, large and powerful pan-Arab states, whether you had Iraq or Syria or Egypt as these, you know, pan-Arab nationalist states and the idea of making peace or having, you know, a solution to this resulted in the two-state solution roadmap.

You had, you know, Yitzhak Rabin, you had, yes, or arafat, you had these kind of big moments in history and time where kind of like the world or whatever you want to call it and the kind of Mickey Mouse, it's a small world after all kind of way, said, oh, yeah, we've made a solution. Let's clap. Now we just have to implement this roadmap and some people have followed the issue others have not, but as we kind of like flash forward, basically 30 years, 31 or 32 years.

And it's like, wow, there is still not a solution here. There's still people dying. You still have, you know, Israel with a kind of difficult to resolve or to manage, but legitimacy issue. But then you also have the legitimate rights of people, you know, to self-determined who are not Israelis who've been living there for a long time, Palestinians.

And it's very hard to people don't really want to just hear raw geopolitical analysis, even though that's the medicine to understand the conflict that people want to polarize it or moralize it. And of course, Tom, there are moral ethical things going on. But our job as geopolitical analysts is to kind of look at what's going on in terms of beyond beneath the surface, beyond those categories.

But it is important for people to know, however, like because human beings are capable of great self-deception. And if they're think they're being rational calculators, it's hard for people. I think I excel in this area by not falling in this trap, by not like prognasticating things that I would like to see happen. Like I prognosticate things that I see happening, not things I would like to see happening.

I hope actually that I'm wrong about a number of these things, especially as we, you know, like iodine drops and get ready to, you know, whatever stop drop in role or is that fires? Anyway, so the thing that's really under reported is how, while we focus on, you know, what do Israelis think or what do Palestinians think, this is something that's being driven by old Cold War geopolitics and the old Cold War geopolitics no longer exists. That's not my opinion only. That happens to be my opinion.

But remember that just in September, Anthony Blinken made a groundbreaking statement and he said, "Students of international relations, that's my field, will for generations be talking about this moment in time, basically the speech that Blinken himself gave." And he said, "The post-Cold War era has come to an end." And this was basically them saying, "We've given up on trying to flip China against Russia."

And then he acknowledges the ever-growing and ever-deepening in all fronts or all directions or all ways, whatever the expression is that Xi Jinping and Putin use to describe the Russia-China alliance for a relationship. And so that is the context to understand now where this conflict may go or how it may get resolved, but also kind of like what pushed it and what's happening.

So one of the things that's kind of also under-reported then is that like at the ground level, this is no longer like an issue of, you know, secular, Israeli nationalism against secular pan-Arab nationalism, right, or secular, Palestinian nationalism as a subset of secular pan-Arab nationalism. This is now within the rubric of the crisis of modernity where you have the rise of mystical movements, the rise of evangelical movements, the rise of religious movements, right?

As the gears of industry and supply line issues and poverty rises and all these things, like the Zionism and problems and corruption and science and the loss of faith in kind of these enlightenment things of the West like progress and science and rationalism and things like this, the enlightenment in short. And now this crisis of modernity and so at the ground level, you know, the people who are the most passionate about this are not secular nationalists.

You're talking about people that are devoutly religious Jews or devoutly religious Muslims, devoutly, devoutly so. And but they're not the ones that are driving the geopolitics, right? That's the other aspect of this. So it was one, so a funny outgrowth of this and I'll hand the mic back over to you that has been that I just saw recently is that they had the former director, Halavi of the Mossad, gave an interview on Al Jazeera and an English language Al Jazeera by itself.

Very interesting, by the way. That was yesterday or the day before. And what was said by the Al Jazeera host, you know, and what these two men agreed about, what was that Saudi Arabia had financed the Al News, Al Newsre front in the Syrian conflict. And I'm thinking, boy, that's a very strange thing that you can both agree on without commenting that Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, is also where Hania, the head of the Hamas is based, right?

So it's like, like, that's a little bit strange to also not mention that Qatar was one of the main, just as Saudi Arabia was behind the Al Newsre front. Well, Qatar was behind any number of factions of the FSA and ISIS that were allies at the time, Al Newsre, in the Syrian civil war.

So it's a very strange thing because also the Mossad leadership and the IDF publicly have acknowledged that they provided logistical, military and medical support for these jihadi or Mujahideen fighters in the Syrian conflict against the Russian side, against the Iranian side, against the Syrian side.

In favor of the FSA, in favor of the Turkish, in favor of the Qataris and the other, and John McCain and Obama and all of their antics there, basically in short, on the side of the Syrian, the so-called Syrian revolution. So I thought it was very interesting that you had these two people that are, on the one hand, we just hear reports of, you know, IDF striking something and targeting Al Jazeera journalists or something like this is the apparent story.

But in reality, you have a recent history of these guys working quite closely together in the Syrian war. And virtually the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood, groups, militant groups were on the side of Qatar and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Israel and the United States in that war.

And of all of the chapters of Muslim Brotherhood internationally, Tom, interestingly only Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood of Gaza, which is very close to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, by the way, in terms of genealogy and the relationships and the people as well. But they're reliant upon Qatar into a much lesser extent, Iran. Sometimes that park gets inflated. It just depends on what you mean or what type of weapons you're talking about.

But the most consistent, ongoing, ideological intelligence, et cetera, support for Hamas is made possible through Qatar, like that much is very clear. And so it's very interesting that Al Jazeera is like the primary organization covering things and they're covering it from an angle that seems to almost be like a parallel inverted version of what you know from an Israeli intelligence perspective that they would want reported. So there's many things that are just not quite sitting right with me.

I'm not saying that any of the deaths are fake or that the passions are fake or that the conflict is fake. This is not what's being said. We're just talking about the intrigues at the level of geopolitics and intelligence, which suggests things that are strange, like why the IDF didn't apparently, according to numerous reports, not take action for the first five to seven hours that this stuff was happening.

I saw confirmed clip of a young woman at one of these Gaza raves or near Gaza, but in Israel, there's nightclub kind of things in the desert. And her mom is in Israeli parliamentarian and calls because she's doing a live TikTok stream or something or Instagram stream when her girlfriend calls on the phone, her phone rings, and it's like, "Mom, you can clearly hear mom saying and the girl saying, "Really, we should leave. There's going to be an attack."

And the mom is saying, "Yes, get out of there. And this was like the day before or whatever, right? This was like, because it was like a multiple day rave. It was called the nature party or the nature rave. You see, in Israel, it's not the peace rave. It's the nature rave."

So it was a very, very strange thing that there's just, you know, if all of these are confirmed, and I'm still smoothing it out, but if all of these are confirmed and they appear legit so far, it would suggest at the very least that there was, at the moment that they would have known, there was a decision to stand down. That doesn't mean that there was pre-planning involved per se.

It doesn't rule it out, but just in terms of minimally, minimally what this could mean with mean that at the moment that they knew something was happening, they decided not to take a decisive action or, you know, almost half a day or a quarter of a day. Right. That's real weird. So it is.

So what I heard from, just to thank you for all that, because it's really, really interesting, the whole, and a lot of what you just mapped out is the way I've known, I've understood the Syrian conflict that everybody, everybody was brought together in a quote, unquote, coalition of the willing to destroy Syria and everybody got their gips.

Turkey was going to become the gas hub of the pipelines coming out of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and they were going to get the 30 mile buffer zone in northern Syria along with the province, which would take them down towards the now Russian naval base of Tartus and the airport of Latakia, which were very important to controlling the Eastern Mediterranean. Yeah, there's all of these angles on this and we know that they were all in cahoots together to destroy Syria.

And that, however, that was, however, that was put together, whatever, put that deal together via John McCain or GCHQ or Victoria Nolander, whoever and Hillary Clinton, right? Because she was Secretary of State during all of this, right? What's interesting about what you just, you know, and you trace all of that, right?

And then you get up to the moment when the attack happens and you say, okay, I've heard from a number of different sources, I don't know how credible they are, but that there's that another way of looking at this is that this entire original, like quote unquote, stand down or lack of response was actually orchestrated from within Israeli intelligence because the goal was to get rid of Netanyahu because of the judicial reform issues that

were going through and a lot of people within Israeli intelligence and the Israeli politics wanted him gone over this issue. Now my understanding of this is rudimentary, okay?

So you might want to, like, I don't know if you buy into that angle on this or not and if you do, you know, add some little bit of color here because I think that will help to sharpen our focus about why, because I'm doing this on purpose because what I'm trying to get at is that my position on this has been from the beginning, everybody had a geopolitical angle that they thought would benefit them, okay, to allow this thing to happen, right?

That the cold warriors of the, of the Brits in the United States would be okay with this because it would give them the excuse to do what they wanted to do, but at the same time I can see the Russian Iranian desire to allow this attack to occur because if they can get Israel and the United States to over-correct and over-react, you get them into a kind of dosity strap if the thing escalates.

So the question now is, you know, it's not just, you know, like from that perspective, you can see everybody sitting back and going, yeah, let's have a war because we're going to win it. And then that's the scary part is that everybody wanted it. And so what I'm trying to do now is trying to figure out where some of those, you know, break points or some of those angles would have been played and how people could have been maneuvered into doing, allowing this thing to happen.

And then of course what happened was, I think, well beyond what, what, either side was hoping, was expecting, they were expecting something, I'd probably smaller. And then they got something that they can't now walk back from. So I don't know, these are been my observations and, you know, you're, you know, give me a, give me some color on that or what you think is, you know, where I'm right, where I'm wrong, got it, got it.

Well, you had a very interesting thing happen when Biden, whatever that means, was speaking and said, oh, that we have, that they made a strange announcement at some point, okay, that we are selecting 2,000 Americans, like the right ones that can be, that can go there now instantly if we decide that what we're selecting them now.

And at first I thought, this is by and time, or this is making it sound like you're doing action because you're not, you're not saying you're sending 2,000, you're saying you're selecting 2,000, right? And, but you're using the word boots and you're going to send them. And so it's like created that image. But then actually, then later he says, and you know, what's amazing is that sometimes he just talks gibberish and says something that he shouldn't say, but is gibberish.

Other times he's being very lucid and he just says the quiet part out loud and you just don't know with him because it's so strange. He's such an interesting character. But he definitely said, he definitely thanked, he, there was a group of soldiers there and he's thanking him, thanking them as first responders. And he said, you guys were there as first responders when this was happening and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like, well, this is very strange, you know, I mean, we're there Americans, you know, embedded with some of these hand gliding Hamas guys where there are Americans involved in invading Israel from the Gaza side. I mean, these are all just things that crossed my mind. I don't have sauce on that. But these are things that crossed my mind when he said those things because it was so fricking strange to say quite frankly. And but yet exactly the kind of thing that they would do.

I mean, this is exactly the kind of stuff that they would do.

This Tom, this requires people to exercise tremendous willpower and stepping outside of their own BS and just understand these historical figures as people that are in it to win it, their Machiavellian or whatever they're doing and to have a view of Netanyahu, which is not like worried about things he said when in the 1980s as a firebrand politician or things that he, you know, but just look at Israel through a geopolitical lens and where they are, how is the, how does the Kineset work?

How does the Supreme Court work? What is going on with judicial reform? What is going on with cyber war and the battle between cyber, cyber security firms in Israel? And what does that mean and why is there a fight, right? Well, you can look from many different analysts from the West Brookings Institute, what is the Neocon will think tank project for New American Century. This mere stuff that, you know, the old Russian nationalist firebrand Jirenosky has been saying.

So all around 2030 years ago, they were saying, you know, there's going to be a geopolitical problem with Israel. It's going to be hard to maintain it. They're going to have a population issue. The Palestinian population is growing. The Arab populations are exploding. Israel, because they have done these kind of Western neoliberal type of austerity type reforms that have to be a Western country. They've discouraged large families.

Apartments are small professionals are having the, you know, Israeli professionals are very much like people in New York or LA who, you know, or Chicago, the cost of living is high. People finish their, you know, second masters degree. They get married when they're 37. Then they start thinking about having kids when they're 40, you know, I mean, it is what's happened in Israel as well among, among professional class people. And many of them are just normal people. They're not racist.

They're not anti-Palestinian. They take a practical view to life. It's like living next to Native American Indian reservation, if you're an American, I mean, you know the history. You have sympathy for them. You hope it works out. You live your life. And so, net and y'all right now is only polling like 20% support according to some media outlets, which is very strange because he seems to also pull a lot of support.

I mean, he just played the game to get back into power after you had a couple of, right? So this judicial reform thing seems to be something where clearly it's not the issue so much of how long he's in power. He's able to see it is, but he's certainly able to, he's able to remain in power.

But what about these bigger things that deal with the security apparatus or the doctrines of the state or the positions that you pick for the, for the Mossad or the IDF or things that basically changes in society that so far, the kineset seems that it seems that net and y'all whose gambit is that he will continue to have strong influence over being himself, being king maker of the kineset effectively. And so then that means that the only body that can stop him is a supreme court.

So he's basically trying to introduce a legislation so that it would a super majority in the kineset. Like let's say you pass legislation with 50% plus one in a kineset, then Supreme Court can say that's unconstitutional, right? And they have a kind of an English kind of living constitution type of concept, you know, it's not so much, right? It's a statute, but it's like all there in decisions by the court has basically created the body of constitution of court rulings.

So in so doing, he says they're, they're argument and there's a reasonableness to this argument that net and y'all who is making, you see, which is that effectively, the judiciary is having the power of the, of the, of the congressional body of the kineset because they can basically say this law can't go because it's unconstitutional. So you know, in the US, there's a different mechanism to solve that problem.

So we encounter it, but you can see that in the US, you can definitely get around the Supreme Court, right? And by making it a law and we're amending the, amending the constitution, right? You can amend the constitution, you can, you can amend the constitution. We haven't had to do that in a long time, but it does happen. I mean, it has happened a few times.

So Israel to have a similar thing, they would just basically need to have a kineset that can overrule the Supreme Court with a supermajority. I don't know if that's like 70% or 67, 2/3. I don't know what the exact formula would be, but that's what Netanyahu has been fighting for. So the opposition to him politically, personally, or their concern for the constitutional processes in the country have been kind of behind some of this opposition, but it's also been other things.

There was the COVID lockdowns, the mandatory vaccinations, the infringement on, I guess in the US, you would call it habeas corpus.

Just think about Israel outside of the conflict with Palestine and just think about it in terms of being like a parliamentary republic that has all the kind of same things that have been going on in France or the US with these kind of issues, austerity, the cost of living, then the inflation lockdown COVID, like all these things have been, are part of this narrative, actually internal inside of Israel right now.

So, that's driving that kind of politics on that level, but broadly geopolitically it's like, so the US has, I guess, the sixth fleet, offside the coast of Gaza, and I guess that's led by the USS Mount Whitney, which is scheduled to be retired this year for funding and scheduled to be decommissioned in 2026, so I hope not Whitney doesn't somehow sink. And if you feel me, I mean, it's the defunding for that boat, which is the flagship is like ending this year, this 23. Right.

So, again, another kind of, I'll think of it this way, in the way my partner Dexter White put it to me, talking about Hamas, in the immediate aftermath of the attack we were having a conversation, he said, I can see this as a, you know, if you, if you map Hamas to Iran is like, well, Iran's in a use that are lose at the moment with Hamas, because Hamas is losing, it's a, there's a certain amount of, you know, asset depreciation here with Hamas, right?

Because at certain point everyone hates Hamas on all sides. And so you can almost argue make the, you're almost saying to me as well, well, this, this, this carrier group is also a kind of user or lose a kind of asset. If you think about it from the neoconservative perspective, because they're going to lose it anyway in mind, we'll do something with it.

You know, and knowing that it's, you know, how the USD commission ships, sometimes they use them as, as target practice, that's the known fact that sometimes they sink them, that's a known fact. So, you know, it would be a shame if they decided to decommission it this year off the coast of Israel, if you feel me.

And, and, and then blame somebody for it, you know, also very interesting is that right now, and this is a confirmed fact is that the USS Mount Whitney has a largely civilian crew, and it is the, yes, it is, yeah, I'm giving, this is an audio podcast. I'm giving Joaquin the, the, oh, that's interesting look. Sorry. Yes, yes, I know it's because, you know, big claims need big receipts.

So, we're on the same page with this, but I was, when I was, I was researching this because I was concerned about the things that might happen. And so, I thought that was interesting. Also, they have the capacity for one of the purposes of the, of the USS Mount Whitney is also it has capacity specifically named in its, in its like charge of whatever that it can transport and care for civilians that if you're going to remove civilians, I think they can hold two or three thousand civilians.

And they already have a partly civilian crew, which is highly unusual for any, you know, U.S. naval, U.S. naval asset, right? So, geopolitically, and in terms of supply line security and stuff like that, like you saw not long ago that Netanyahu got before somebody and said, I don't know if it was a Kinesit or the UN, I believe it was the UN because he was speaking English. Yes, I see now the green marble background in my mind.

Yes. And he's basically showing like, look, like we have good relations with Jordan, we have good relations with Sudan, we have good relations with Egypt, we have good relations with Saudi Arabia. These are these green countries and we're going to build a pipeline from India, you know, through Qatar, Saudi Arabia and into Israel. And then that's going to go on to, you know, maybe to Cyprus and in Degrees, etc. Right.

And India to Europe basically pipeline and broadly, this is multi polarity and this is like a different type of brick and road or belt and road initiative that's not China driven, but India driven, right? And that's very interesting to me. Those all seem like very good projects in essence, you see. And he was touting this also. I mean, he had to include his lines about how Iran is a terrorist state and we must stop Iran and stuff.

But besides all those kind of obligatory shibbolus that he had to utter, the main thing that he was saying was like, look at how for the first time that Israel is economically integrating into the region, right? That's the one thing that the British and in other Western powers do not want. They like this strange relationship of caring forward these Cold War politics and imposing them not just on the Palestinians, but on the Israelis. Absolutely. So you're sort of, you see what I'm saying?

So it's a very interesting dynamic that has emerged and what is the picture that is becoming clear to me is that Israel is trying to make itself as flexible as possible, which means that it needs to have a stable of a leadership as possible, which means they need to be basically election proof if you feel me and they need to be able to have a power over the judiciary, right?

The judiciary can't put breaks on new legislations, bad, of course, you know, the Supreme Court justices are, you know, very long time or their life appointments or whatever the case may be. And their institutionalized, you know, from a past time when there was a different schema.

And so, and of course, you know, that opens up like these questions that so brilliantly you introduced at the top of the show with, you know, you know, what are these different machinations and what's going on with, you know, is this a move against Netanyahu, right? And very well possibly, you know, is really my conclusion. So yes.

Well, what's interesting when you bring up the, I didn't realize, again, it's like, I've been so focused on the machinations and at the central bank level for the last few months of that, you know, taking my eye off of some of the geopolitical stuff, right?

So you tell me that Netanyahu is at the UN touting a pipeline to bring, you know, gas in to, you know, bring it in, I look at it and through Israel and potentially into, into Europe and I go, okay, well, that's a dividing line between what I would call the Davos crowd and the Europeans and the American or Anglo interests because look, the US slash, you've got a UK doesn't want Europe to have access to anything, any oil or gas that comes from Russia or comes from Iran.

This is why the JCP, in my mind, this is why the JCP, POA was signed. It's why everybody was so angry about it, right? Because the goal was, and it's why, like, Neo conservatives, every Neo conservative I've ever talked to and some of them used to be my friends. Not because I, and they're not past friends because I don't like them as past friends because I haven't talked to them or they're no longer alive. Would counted as the worst piece of legislation ever passed.

Well, this far as I'm concerned, the JCPOA was a mechanism by which to open up European investment into Iranian oil and gas in order to supply, supply Europe and that the Khabash was put on that by people like Trump who are who's at the end of the day. Trump is for lack of a better term of oil. And it's easily swayed by effectively British geopolitical incentives. And so I look at that and I say, of course, there's going to be now a fight internally in Israeli politics.

Now that the JCPOA is dead, they've got to figure out another way to get energy collusion collateral into Europe because Europe doesn't have any. Okay, from a big perspective, from the big thousand foot, 40,000 foot perspective, the thing that I've been discussing with people like Alex Kranor and others with for months now has been this idea that Europe doesn't have any collateral. They don't to undergird their debt markets, undergird their economy, right?

And they willingly thanks to, I would argue like German Greens who are as far as I'm concerned with British assets and American assets, cutting them off the relationship with Russia in every way and making sure that it's dead so that to isolate Europe and then force them to buy American oil against it. Right. We know that your power tends to be in movement. Right, and all of that stuff. And so this is just to get another one of those things.

And the internal Israeli politics are just another manifestation of this, right? Is to keep Israel and Europe starved of energy. Now, like again, I'm the fan of the European Union, I call it the EU SSR. So part of me is like, this is like mixed emotions, right? It's like the old joke about what's the definition of mixed emotions. You're your mother in law driving over the cliff and your brand new Mercedes.

Well, I don't want to see Europeans get access to energy because I don't want the EU to survive, but I have no problem with them getting energy once they get rid of the EU. You know what I mean? I get so I don't, it's like, get rid of the EU and then, and then, and then, you know, let the, let the, let the, and let's, and let's stitch the world together with pipeline so that we don't go to war.

Maybe getting the energy in there is part of what undoes this Brussels relationship, relationship with Washington, et cetera. So it's well, there's the other, the other angle on this is that's why the Italians are so important because it's the internally within the EU, the EU is and Davos are desperately trying to starve the Italians out of major economic status and they've absolutely starved Italy of gas from the Mediterranean.

There are gas deposits that they can't develop that have been capped that they, we've blown up most of North Africa for these, these reasons and, you know, so there's all the stuff to have. We've been streamed, stream is supposed to go through connect with the Azure. Yeah, they were supposed to be the, all the energy from the Shah Dennis to consort him in the Caspian Sea is actually supposed to wind up through the trans-Ajratic pipeline. Yeah, absolutely.

And you're supposed to have a lot more energy independence for Italy and stuff. So you have a lot of these, the thing is that the Swiss approved that as well and the big consortium is behind that are like Swiss and Italian dominated. And yet, yeah, I mean, most of these politics in the EU ever since the third energy package are like totally aimed at weaponizing EU policy against EU countries. So it's absolutely. Absolutely. And if you remember, do you brought up, you brought up Turkstream.

Turkstream was originally supposed to be four trains, right? One going in the hungry, one going through Serbia and into Austria and then two of them were supposed to go into Italy and they did handle to bring gas into Western Europe. Of course, it's since the Russian gas. That's now verboten. So of course, that pricks up the ears of the blinkens and the new ones and the, you know, the GCHQ set, yada, yada, yada.

And then how long have they been trying to get this, Israel been trying to get the East Med pipeline off the ground, right? Which is a boondoggle from a, from an economic perspective. It's an incredibly expensive pipeline to lay. But again, it's another one of these moments where you keep looking at the drastic level of geopolitical maneuvering done to starve certain players in southern Europe. Right. You don't want Greece being getting transit fees.

You don't want Italy getting the gas they need because then that would empower them to say no to the European project. So Russia is able to pull the leash on Iran and Russia is able to balance Israel and Iran's both mutually existed legitimate security concerns. And Russia is in the position to guarantee the stability and lifehood of an India to Israel, to Greece pipeline. And in addition to that, how much of that Indian gas is actually Russian gas going this way or whatever?

You know, because you have this whole, they're saying that these sanctions, and this is so strange to me, because you always look at bribes and stuff like this, you know, and people who are bought in, they're hedging against their own government, they're hedging against their own policies and they're actually investing in these Indian or Russian or Israeli energy projects because they're saying things like, oh, doesn't matter.

Even if the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow, we're going to keep sanctions on Russia for the next 10 years. And that sounds to me like saying, your investments into energy consortiums with India are solid for the next 10 years. That seems like that's all what they're saying. They're advertising, please invest in Russia, India, pipeline, politics and right, and investment.

So I'm trying to like wrap my head around what that means when the euro crafts are hedging against their own future, you know, so it's a very funny thing, right? Right. Right. Against their own policies, but actually that would help Europe. It wouldn't help the EU as this Atlantisist thing, but it would actually help the countries of Europe if they could get this gas from India, whatever that means. You know, so this was like a project and then.

And then you got to ask, oh, here's another side of this. Why are we trying to build a pipeline from India, a net energy importer that needs its own gas in the first place, to send it all the way back to Europe? Like, how was that make any sense? Like if the Indians own this gas, why are they sending it to Europe and not using it for themselves?

Because Nord Stream got blown up, and I mean, it's like, and it's going to keep, and it balances, it's Russia balancing against China and it's Russia playing some favorite footsie with India to help improve India's overall profile, their overall footing. And it helps, and all of that is going to balance, I mean, India is very pro-Israel. So it's going to balance the Iran-Israel situation in the Middle East, and Russia is going to be kind of like the global police force in the, so to speak.

They're going to be like the bouncer of these, you know, the, the guarantor of the security, you know, supply line stuff and the relationships. And, I mean, look at, you know, look, you've got Russian S-400s at Latakia, you have Russian S-400s at the, you know, Hemi-Mine Air Base at Tartus, etc. It's right there in Syria. Well, the IDF for the past seven years has been bombing different places in Syria through a defliction line.

They notified the Russians that we're going to hit a Hezbollah target, which is an Iranian proxy, which is also Russia's friend in a way, but they're like, okay, hit those go for it. There's not been a single S-400 missile launch that any IDF, or sorry, IAF IDF jet, you see? So they're not there defending Syrian airspace, right? You know, so there's just so many layers to this.

It's super interesting, but, you know, through this all, the part that we were getting into about cybersecurity fight within Israel and, you know, what that means, because there's, not just an inter-eleete conflict about the direction of Israel and their ability to pivot towards India or to pivot towards Russia or to balance with you to have Russia be the guarantor that balances against Iran or whatever the iteration of that looks like for you.

The one thing that people agree is that the United States does not have the force projection potential to be the sole guarantor of Israel's security, and yet Israel's legal structure, the political system, a lot of their existing economic deals are all based in that rubric. So it's kind of like, how do you get out of that?

And then what you're seeing now, you're going to have protests in the street, you're going to have a Supreme Court fight, you're going to have maybe false flags, you're going to have delayed reactions, you're going to have many things that look strange, you know? And of course the people who want to reduce it to matters of the heart or have every right to do so, but that's just outside of the domain of this level of analysis. Yeah, absolutely.

And then it becomes even weirder when you start to really parse, seriously, I've been saying I think for a long time now, watching Putin work Syria going back to 2015, it was very clear to me then that ultimately if you want peace in the Middle East, it's going to be Russia, that's the guarantor because of their real, their ability to actually engage in diplomacy by making deals and then sticking to them, whereas we in the, in the US, UK orbit, and I

would, I'm going to separate out Europe from this for right now, that the, that the neo-conservatives within the US, UK, the old Cold War mentality, which is every ceasefire or every agreement is just a tactic in order to try and stabilize a particular situation, then, then change the facts on the ground in order to break that agreement to then move forward.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about Syria, Ukraine, Israel, all of these things have been done this way, which is why when, like, I think it's funny, I think, it's, I think for me over the last 10 years as I've gotten better at this, and it's been a process for me.

One of the moments where I, I, I, so like one of the seminal moments for me was when Putin gave a speech, I can't remember if it was that speech for Valdeye or wherever, and he said that the Americans are not agreement capable and, and Andre, the Saker, when he went over that speech, being a Russian, explained that the particular Russian construction Putin used was this is a, the implication is these people are refused to be to honor their agreements,

as opposed to not being in a position to honor their agreements.

Like, they, there's a difference between wanting to honor your agreement and be agreement capable and not being able to, because you don't have the power or the resources or whatever, the assets, but then there's the willful, not agreement capable, which is the construction Putin used, and that was, that was a moment that changed the way I see the world, because it then gave you a, a specific insight to Vladimir Putin's headspace and how he treats everyone

and how he treats every, so that when we turn around and go, hey, we're losing in Aleppo, let's have a ceasefire. And Putin says, no, let's not have a ceasefire or Ukraine. Hey, let's have a ceasefire. No, we're not going to have a ceasefire because we know what you're going to do with this. And it turns out the Minsk agreements in Ukraine are a perfect example of this.

And when, when she's finally out of power, Angela Merkel explained it all to everyone, and when she said the Minsk agreements were nothing more than a time buying exercise for us to build the Ukrainian army with which to eventually attack Russia with. That's right. And so we have the evidence. We have the past behavior, and in this respect past is prologue as to where we, and that's why we are in some of the situations that we're in today.

And we can also understand why the Russians refused to negotiate, and all they're doing now is putting terms on the table. And then at the same time, you can see where they would act in a particular way ruthlessly, because they are, believe they're in an existential fight for their own existence against powers that have been hostile to them for 300 years, that a tragedy happens in Israel, and they're like, well, we're going to use it to our advantage. I can seek Putin making that calculus.

And I have, I'm not making, passing a moral judgment here. I'm saying, but that's the reality of the situation. And because that's the level that he's been pushed to, or however you want to put it, you know, make those, make that calculus and make that decision. And again, look the other way. So absolutely.

I think that that, you know, when I think about the layout and who are the different, we talk about like if the CIDIDIs trapped multiple sides believing that they have an angle to win it, is makes it a very interesting question, because normally when you look at like, well, who was behind making this happen? You just, you asked the question, you know, Kuibono, right? The problem is that, you know, Iran has an angle that this works for them. Russia has an angle that this works for them.

United States even also has an angle that this works for them. There are, you know, there are many different countries that have an angle, not many, many, but those and maybe a few others have an angle with which this works for them conceivably as a strategy. So at the very least, as I think you intimated, then you're going to have a lot of reasons that at least people didn't stop it earlier on when they might have, might have been able to.

Everyone thinking they have an angle or maybe they're playing an ongoing game of chicken or bringsmanship and, you know, who's going to blink first as we drive off this cliff in Israel, Palestine. You know, meanwhile, it's just going to be Israeli and Palestinian civilians that suffer or live in fear or the paranoia or the loss of children and innocent people. Just as a level of a human being, I have to get that out there for ever going to talk about this question.

I have to say my heart is with innocent people who are caught between the great power geopolitics. And I just hope to the stars to the universe that there's a solution that it happens fast and that we end the violence, you know? From the perspective of great power geopolitics, you know, this looks, unfortunately, increasingly unlikely because the, because the buy-in to stop the violence is much less profitable and much less attractive.

I mean, chaos is much more profitable than, you know, it's some very predictable, you know, rate of return on a very, you know, long game investment.

You know, if you're, if you have hedges against and you know that there's going to be some plot twist, which is the definition of chaos, you see, that's far more profitable to get behind, you know, to vote, to be, to be investing against what the, you know, the regular normal people are investing one way and you've got some other knowledge or whatever that there's going to be a plot twist or a, or a kink or a, you know, chaos really, then it's, it's, there, the stakes are too high.

There's, there's too much energy behind chaos, you see, from that angle and whether you're talking about the military industrial firms, whether you're talking about the energy consortium, the futures, the investment, keeping those together, like they, they don't have a lot of interest in stopping the bloodshed. So, you know, from a very raw Machiavellian calculus, I mean, so their sentiments not was standing.

So, you know, the, the, this is in many ways, you know, from the different angles and you could like work through like Kui Bono or what's, you know, probable one interesting thing is, of course, you had, you've basically had this ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive that has failed.

But when you remember things like the things that were discussed in Ukrainian media, from Ukrainian intelligence, Baudenauv, others in, you know, Shmigol and others in Ukrainian power structures, SBU, minister of defense, minister of foreign affairs, when they talk about the Ukrainian counteroffensive, universally they spoke about it being global in nature.

They since, they talked about working directly with the CIA to do things that were kinetic and nature that would be aimed at like, you know, at least, you know, in over and getting Russia to over commit like in any number of directions, the Rhineland, etc. Then you had Azerbaijan Armenia, which seemed to fit perfectly into this kind of mentality or thinking about what the Ukrainian counteroffensive was really all about, you know, it's not just,

oh, we got seven kilometers in Rabotino, woo-hoo, right? We've got 700 more to go, not gonna happen. It's also these other things, you know, happening in Azerbaijan, you know, then you had the Iranians mobilized to the Azeri border, mind you, and they're backing the Armenians, but the Armenians are not backing themselves. That goes all the way back to the day that Pasinian took power in Armenia. I'm like, that guy was backed by the West and saw us like that.

He's played this game, you know, and he, you know, he was supposed to be thrown out of power and he refused to leave. Like, you know, three or four years ago, the last time this flared up, he was supposed to be thrown out of power with the amount of a, of a, of a program that was, you know, being thrown at him by the people.

He was supposed to use, you know, any, any man with any sense of shame would have walked away from the scene and of course, you know, locked himself in his tower and said, no, I'm not leaving. I'm like, well, that's, he's clearly in the borders. And like, the military hates him. Because the, the first president of free modern Iran, 1992 or 91 post-communist Iran, the first president was the leader of the Artsakh movement, right?

He was the leader of the Armenian movement to liberate or to rejoin Nagar al-Qaeda with Armenia proper, you know? Right. This is basically like the, the, the Armenian anti-Soviet sentiment, right, through the fucking Cold War, right, is driven by this, Azari, which was also a Soviet republic, but is driven by this Azari Armenia attention. Like, we don't like that the Soviet authorities in Moscow, of which were part of the Soviet Union, right?

Azar by John, that they consider historical Armenia as Azar by John and somehow we have a, you know, an autonomous, you know, county, right, with a protected minority inside of Azar by John.

So yes, of course, Peshiniin is a color revolutionaries, you know, sorrows, the State Department, USAID, etc., radio free liberty, radio, Europe, national and dominant for democracy, but in addition, that doesn't mean that the bordering countries, Iran and Russia are going to allow Armenia to sabotage itself because that can create the very type of spiraling black hole that creates those Arab spring type, you know, I call the Arab spring the destabilization phase of

a color revolution, like a color revolution might just be to overthrow the government because you want to change a policy or split them from one camp to the other, but there's also color revolutions that are meant to create permanent areas of destabilization so that no one can invest so that no one can stabilize so that no one can normalize so that it just becomes maybe even a cancer that grows slowly than quickly. You're not going to let that happen to Armenia.

So then you have the Iranian forces deploy north to the Azari border, that's where I understand that they had deployed the most and the most recently and then you have this stuff flaring up where now they have to think about reinforcing their Hezbollah assets and Lebanon. So is this something that Iran is leading? Are they responding? I don't know, but you can see how all these pieces move.

I keep looking at the silent hand of the triangulation of various, I'm sorry, but they're really good at it. They've been doing it for 300 years.

We know that so much of this is being driven by the British who left all of these places, open wounds and these open wounds are never allowed to close because there are always opportunities to flare these things up, turn them into open, turn them from open wounds into festering wounds and then start to take center stage and they do this over and over and over again.

So when I'm looking at what was happening in the Gernogarabak, I see the quote unquote failed Ukrainian offensive, I'm not surprised then that come October, well that's not working. So now what do we do and so do we activate Israel Gaza again? This is the way this stuff works and then how do you get the Turks involved and especially with Erdogan being extremely, what's the word only?

He's really picked the side here and then you note also that the Syrians have been attacking American assets, East of the Euphrates River and yet then the Israelis go in a bomb, the Al-Bukhamae border crossing between the Syrian and Iraq and all of these things are happening, try to contemporaneously or as move from one week period, all these things are happening. Yeah, all like a three week period, all the stuff has happened and you're like, yeah, okay.

So you can see how everybody, but here's the thing, one of the things that I brought up, I'm going to run this by, you know, let you, let you, let you, you, you, you, you, you, in my, you know, when I was talking about this in the last month's issue with the news leader and I laid out, you know, basically why the, the Israelis, well, the, the, the Atlantisists in the Israelis would want to falsify, I get in order to justify escalating

this thing and on the other side, you have the quote unquote, use it or lose it scenario with Iran, Russia and Hamas and how both of them see this opportunity. This is all downstream of, it's a, it's a, these are, again, we're going to start a new war of attrition. We're going to open up a new style, new, attritional war moment. The Russians have been fighting a, an attritional war and a multi theater attritional war against

the West, right? It's not just the reason that there's many reasons why the Russians are prosecuting the war in Ukraine, the way they are. Some of it is just the way their military is organized. They don't have many other options. They're, you know, they don't have, okay, if you argue that, and I'm, yeah, they're not that argument. The nails a certain way. I mean, right? I mean, they, you know, they, they only have, they only have so many tanks. They only have, they,

they, they move their logistics on rail lines, bobble, all this stuff, right? Fine. But you fight a ground world war one artillery war to waste assets of the West and keep forcing and keep pouring the pouring assets in there. Meanwhile, the attrition is being taken on the world stage, financially, politically and everything else. So now you have that attritional war is really having

worked out to the Russians favor. It makes perfect sense for me. If Biden is trying to get, and the Atlantisists are trying to get, we're at this moment when there's no speaker of the house, we got a mushroom for president. Do we have, the American Congress has basically said no to more funding for Ukraine? So here's the perfect opportunity time wise to move your night in such a way that you force the, I'm going to take either your work or your, or your, or your bishop, you choose,

Israel or Ukraine. And that's the fork. And I, for the first time in an awfully long time, somebody finally put the West into the position of having to lose one major asset. And that's the way I see this strategically, which is why I can make the argument that, you know, what happened in Israel was tragic and probably well beyond. Again, like I said, what anybody would have thought this

thing was going to turn into the kind of humanitarian massacre crisis that it was. But, you know, when you've got homophilters who are as radicalized as they are after, you know, I'm not trying to make an excuse here. I'm trying to understand the people and you get, you know, I watch dogs fight enough to know that what starts as a small fight over a bone turn into a bloody conflict depending on,

you know, the dogs. Yeah. What happens when they, you know, when, when dominance is challenged. So like, right, things just happen when you want you to get into conflict, you know, we're not rational people at that point. And we, and we, as observers can't take our rationality and push and, and imprint, we have to now start thinking about what would you do if you were in that situation? What would

you, how would you react if you had to get all of this out? A newer homos fighter who lost his entire family and or a couple of children and, and, and, and, and then you have this opportunity to get it all out of your system in this orgy of violence. It's very obvious that it's possible that it could have occurred that way, even though all the geopolitical strategists were just hoping for, you know, 100 guys go across the border, you know, do some stuff and then, you know,

flare the thing up and it turns into something much, much bigger than that. And then all of a sudden everybody is turning around and going, Oh, fuck me. Now what? And you either, you make one of two choices. You either try him back down and try and de-ask the entire situation or you go, never

got a crisis. Go to waste and go, ho, hock. And it's like, it's like that moment in Dr. Strangelov, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you brought it up earlier when after we, after everybody finds out what General Ripper did and there's George C. Scott saying, well, look, we have a real good opportunity to catch up with their pants down and making the argument for going, we're here, we're in it,

Mr. President, you know, here's your opportunity. And that's what he represents. And that's, that's the kind of calculus. Somebody is playing the role could be playing the role of, you know, George C. Scott and Dr. Strangelov, and if you haven't watched it recently, go watch it again, because, you know, this is what happens. And I, you know, again, not, again, I'm with you, walking absolutely. I'm on the side of, I'm on the side of humanity here. I'm on the side of the

end of it, the, the, the, the innocent people who are, who are being placed in this situation. And it's horrible and so horrific. And now we are all in a certain level, endangered by all of this. And everybody is playing a very dangerous game. And it's the kind of game that, you know, could wind up in a bad place. I had, I got, I got some text last night from a friend of mine, a patron of mine, and asked me about what was going on. And I said, you know, he's like, and I said,

you know, like, we got 12 carrier groups and all of this other stuff. And I'm like, yeah, and 12 Kinjals, if you put them in theater, take them out because we can't defend against them at all. This isn't your father's war where they, where it's an aircraft carrier based war. You and I, I remember you saying this when talking about Syria, I've, you know, it's like, they're, they're, it's not the same conflict anymore. As military assets, aircraft carriers are not the same thing

that they were in times past. They are for protection platforms for asymmetric warfare. Were you radically outpower the person you're, the, the, your target militarily? This is, so, ask myself, I asked the question. I'm like, huh, well, you know, where are the carrier groups actually at this point?

Are they outside of, you know, Iran's ballistic missile range out of Russia's missile range, which is why the basic TARDIS is so important, which is why the Russians, the presence of Yemen in, in Syria is so important because it gives them the ability to start there and then, you know, push out the carrier groups. And it's very clear to me, because like, if the truth of the matter is, if we weren't scared of those weapons, there would be a carrier group in the Black Sea.

Where, where, where seconds matter, Russia has minutes head start, where seconds matter, Russia has minutes head start by having its assets right there. When I think about this kind of long game and inside baseball, I can see that, and I, we may have talked about this before, is that Europe is the low-hanging fruit, they're the odd, continental Europe is the odd man out. When you look at, for example, India and Russia, right, well, also, we talk about India, but among the families of the

English or British ruling class, like how many of those companies were really nationalized? How many of those assets or how many of those companies have 40% or 30% British co-ownership or individuals that are British that own in there? Or what about South Africa? Why is Musk so interested in Russia? Well, think about bricks and think about how the English and the Americans have multiple ways to

back-loop into bricks through South Africa, through India, the Americans through Brazil, right? And so it's Europe that's kind of being forced out of the world through these sanctions, you know, the British and the Americans have back doors back into, you know, there might be a world where you have kind of a bricks-based denomination, you have the the Western Atlantis denomination, the dollar, whatever, you have, you know, the basket of currencies, but it's like Europe is the

odd man out, militarily, geopolitically, like because they don't have sovereign control of their own political processes. So they're being at, they're like, you know, here go, go, go, you know, sit on this sword, go take a jump on the sword here, it's very, very strange. And then then there's Victor Orban goes to Beijing to meet with Putin and G, right? Yeah, and and Vuchich was there too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Why? Because, you know, it, it, it almost is a big signal to

me that Ukraine is a thing is almost over, right? Because now they're, you know, look, don't, you know that there are back channels, you know, there's de-confliction lines, you know, also that the State Department is effectively run by, you know, uh, uh, British Alain Eoconservatives.

So having someone like Victor Orban be the messenger of what's coming next makes sense. And like, you know, it's funny, I just, I look at all the stuff and I say to myself, the, I don't see the American Department of Defense wanting to fight this war that the politicians are trying to get us into. I don't see that. If I saw that, we would have, we would not have

back down at the NATO summit in Vilnius. We would have pushed for, you know, Ben Wallace to become General Secretary of NATO, the UK, the, the A time, the UK Defense Minister, there would have been upgraded path for Ukraine to join NATO and then we would have had World War Three. There's no congressional method right now to fund this stuff. I know.

And that's no accident. No? Yes, exactly. There's no, I know it's no accident. I've been saying that there's a counter-revolution happening in the United States politically behind the scenes for two years now. That's right. There's no, there's no, there, the issue is not the money. They, they can, they can, they can make the money available to Ukraine. The problem is that there's nothing to fucking buy

with that money. All of the weapons have been spoken for and now that people see that there can be other conflicts popping up, do you think that Israel is going to allow any more of its weapons to be given to Ukraine? No, they're saying we need these things. That's actually blowing up in Biden's face that they had Israel hand over. There are 155 howitzers and other shells to Ukraine that they would love to have those right about now ain't going to happen. So you, this is the very, and then

Zalensky requested to come with, with Biden to, to Israel and Israel said no. And, and why? Right? Well, very obviously like dude, like no one loves you anymore. You're out of it. Like this is, you, we're not going to allow you to get FaceTime in here, act like you're the helper or you're on our side or whatever, like your, your reliability, bro. Well, it's even worse than that, right? Matt Gates goes after Kevin McCarthy and on the Sunday talk show circuit before the speaker vote,

he goes and he lets the, and he tells everybody the story. He's like, I don't expect to win this. And of course the standard media reply is, well, then why are you doing it? Well, I'm doing it to let everybody know that I want to force the Democrats to back McCarthy to prove to everybody that there's a uniparty for war in, in, in DC so that I can primary out all these sons of bitches in the spring and get rid of them all from both sides. And so the, the, the, the, the, and see, can see who,

who's, you know, who's on the, this is the gig. And he's like, I don't expect to win. I expect Kevin McCarthy to be speaker of the house on Friday, backed by Democrats. And then the Democrats left McCarthy out to hang because they had to prove they had to, they had to, they chose, they had to choose.

Again, another one of these Bishop of Rookforks, you can choose to keep the illusion of the, of the not uniparty of the fight, the fight between the Democrats and the Republicans alive by saying, oh, no, we, we voted as a block against you or we're, or we're going to rip the bandaid off and we're going to, you know, and if you do that, then we're going to lose the, we're going to lose the,

the, the, that illusion. And we're going to eventually lose all the power within Congress because, you know, but in the 20 or 24 election, you're not going to be able to cheat that much to stop the revolution against, you know, that's going to come at the congressional during the congressional primaries. And you're going to wind up with, you're not going to have to rabbit, you're not going to have to rabbit Neocons running as a Democrat or Republican in the fall. Right. You're going to

have, you know, a clear choice in 60, 70, 80 house seats. It's all OK. Again. And so, you know, mirroring the kind of thing that you just described with the Israeli Kineset, that's what was on the table. And so, of course, in that timing, in that moment, would you not believe that that wasn't an existential threat to the quote unquote, powers that be that have fermented these conflicts and wanted to try and keep their colonial assets in place for as long as possible. If you do not see them,

you know, say, yeah, turn a blind eye and let Hamas go on. Oops. If you had two, two choices narrative, right? So you're the director of the narrative angle here in reality, you know, simulation reality. You've got two narrative choices in winding up the war in Ukraine. Is it that the West has no more weapons to spare or is it that, oh, we're having a political fight so we can't approve the money? Like which, from the point of view of prestige and foreign policy angle and

power projection is the right approach. It's better to say that we're having a political fight that's tying up the money for some time at right as you need it, rather than saying, oh, here's, you know, $100 billion or here's $60 billion have fun buying what I don't know because we don't have anything to sell you. That's going to be the headline is we're out of

weapon. So it's better to have the headlines, you know, Republicans are fucking up the thing with the speaker and now we don't have money, you know, that's a much better narrative for preservation of the whole brand, America brand. And then we try to silently re-purchase whatever refill backup or stockpiles, you know, quietly for some months in the background of many, many months about two or three years. The other angle on this is that you preserve that illusion and then

you gin up a wider conflict on a humanitarian crisis. Again, sure, geostrategic calculus, because the goal is, I'm talking about the British at this point. I'll be honest with you.

Okay, but that, you know, that Hamas doing what they did, right? Yeah, yeah, and then you, you try to inflame everybody's passions in the United States because now you've got more outrage and because you need to turn Joe Biden into a war president because you can't win the election any other way because and that's their goal because they don't have because look, when you look at the order of events that come up to this, they were positioning Gavin Newsom or Gavin

Grewsom to be his replacement. And guess what? He started to back out. Why? Kamala Harris made her move.

By and finestein dies. Harris Newsom immediately appoints one of Harris's allies. So now the whole Clinton wing of the Atlantisist Neocons, Obama wing of the Davos of the of the continental Europe wing and then you have a third faction within the Democratic Party emerging, which is someone put a deal on the table to Kamala Harris because if you get rid of Biden, she's president and they were absolutely trying to figure out a way to spear or agnog her out for God knows how long and they weren't

able to do it and she just holds herself up in the naval observatory and starts taking offers because I don't think she is on anybody's team except team Harris. I've never thought that about. I've never thought that she maps to any to either the Clintonistas or the Obonis. I've never

thought that. Okay. So when you when you start delving into it internal American politics and you realize that there are that every one of these old, you know, factions that we've mapped out previously geopolitically, they've all split right because they're all losing and they're all and now the real chaos is at the top and it's nine of the long knives for everybody. Right. That's about right. I have it. That's how I

have it in my head also actually. So I'm glad you laid it out so succinctly. All together then with this crisis in Palestine, Israel, there are off-ramps and there are ways that this could end tomorrow and that gives me some reason to think that at least there's a game to be played otherwise there's

just no game. It's just war. As long as these off-ramps are viable enough, I think that it's a good hypothesis that this was angled also against Netanyahu and that this is something going on in the military intelligence service on the side of the British to destabilize or to create this problem and that Netanyahu is likely trying to have the power to be able to accomplish some type of landing, reorient, re-alignments, these development deals integrating into the Middle East for the

first time. Independent of this, it's very obvious that just think about businesses, the people, the tremendous human technical capital in Israel and its development. The idea, it's all the Mediterranean is small. It's a lake. It's a big lake and the idea that it's that far from Europe is not that far from Europe. It's just a lot closer to the countries that it borders and in the and with the issues happening in Europe. It's not that attractive to have European partners

right now. They can even be a liability. A lot of their wares are fraudulent or what are they called reproductions? What you want to do is invest in physical economies that are growth-oriented in the region. I know this is strange for people, but just imagine what Israel could accomplish if they make peace and just imagine the tone and the change at the religious level. Imagine if settlers could get along with the type of people that voted for Hamas. You see what I'm saying?

This is what's possible when people integrate and build business together. When they actually think beyond these religious and national or block thinking and really look at this is a land. Here are the roads. Here are the pipelines. Look, we're all right here. We have an integrated grid, this power grid system, West Bank, Gaza and Israel, right? This is like a no-brainer. These are just ideas in our mind that are getting in the way of building power together and getting past this

Israel-Palestine conflict in a way that works for everybody. I agree. I see there are potential off-ramps here and then the question is, it's being clearly pushed to ensure that that does not happen. I think what we've been trying to do this morning, lucky enough, is to illuminate for people the fact that those that are pushing that scenario, forcing that onto everyone, and then the imperatives of everyone, again, trying to... It's not just maximized their position

on the game board. It's about the potential for people to feel that they're under existential threat. And when they feel that way, they act rationally, but they don't act in any way that we would consider moral, because they can't. They have lost that luxury in many ways. And I just want everyone to

understand it like that. And again, not taking sides here, it would be... But again, when you think about when you look back on the last five or six years, this blanket bringing up the idea of not agreement capable, it's very clear that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the civilizational powers of Asia have all tried to negotiate a settlement. They have offered settlements over and over and over again. And since the Biden administration has taken power, we have engaged in non-diplomacy,

anti-diplomacy. And there's nobody home. Right. And there's no one to make a deal with, which Putin says all the time. So there's no partner. Clearly no one wants to make a deal. And so that means that we have to continue to fight this out until the rabbit dog finally submits. That's about the long and short of it. All right. I'm glad we had a chance to have this talk, man. I really do. It was a lot of fun

and sobering, but at the same time, I think also really illuminating. I really appreciate you putting in the color on some of the angles that I hadn't considered, especially the guitar angle and other stuff. It was really, really valuable. I hope that people take this seriously, as to what we were trying to accomplish this morning. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We'll do it again soon. Great. Thanks. Well, that'll wrap it up for episode 158 of the Gold

Coats and Guns podcast. I really want to thank Joaquin for his unique insights into the world of Geopolitics. It's always such a pleasure to sit down and banity around ideas with him. I've learned a lot from Joaquin over the years. And I consider him not only a friend, but a tremendous asset in this fight for the future of humanity, to be honest with you. So with that said, we're about done.

So as always, you can follow my work over at my blog at tomluongo.me or goldgoatsandguns.com. You can follow me on Twitter @TFL1728 and you can support the work over at Patreon, at Patreon/GoldgoatsandGuns, where you can sign up for either the twice-weekly market reports and private blogs, or you can add to that the monthly Gold Goats and Guns investment newsletter, which is all original material with

a portfolio designed to help you make some sense in this crazy world. As well as you can also follow Joaquin over on his telegram channel at New Resistance, as well as you can support him on Patreon as well. The links will be in the show notes to this episode. So with that said, I'm out folks. You guys be well, you take care, we'll talk soon. Keep your set on your list.

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