Latest / Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News / Iran, China, and the weaponization of energy is the root cause

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Iran, China, and the weaponization of energy is the root cause · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

0:16
Hello, I am Todd Roy, and what an episode we have today.
0:20
I'm the host of Geopower, Energy, and Real Politics.
0:24
And I hear there's a few things going on in the world.
0:26
And so we're going to focus on that today.
0:28
And what we're really going to focus on is Iran.
0:31
The reason this show is called geopower, energy, and real politics.
0:35
And the reason energy is in the middle of that is that energy affects everything.
0:39
And then when you then go into the geopower, which is geopolitics, which goes back to the term of self-interest, rightly understood by Alexis Tocqueville's democracy in America, you then can understand what is this Iran war really about.
0:55
That gets us to real politics or real politics, the politics of reality.
1:00
You put all that together and you go, why is the United States Israel?
1:05
Now Qatar has joined.
1:07
Why are they doing what they are doing?
1:10
Interesting.
1:12
Because I will tell you that what this is all about is hydrocarbons.
1:17
That's what this whole thing is about.
1:20
You can say, oh, this is about their nuclear weapon program.
1:26
Sure, that's you don't want a fanatical regime to have a nuclear weapon.
1:32
What you can also really say this is about is the energy that China needs.
1:41
Uh document that was recently released in the national military document as well.
1:48
We lay out the the Trump administration lays out the framework that we are trying to turn China into a consumer nation.
1:56
Right now, when you think of China, you have to realize this is a country that is advanced, that has over a billion people, that can also be fanatical, that you could really say is the largest um crime syndicate in the world.
2:14
We know they're they're putting fentanyl in America that's killing 100,000 people, utilizing the Mexican cartels, they've utilize uh Venezuela to do this.
2:24
We know they've militarized the South China Sea.
2:28
We know they really don't like India.
2:31
We know they still hold uh historic um grievances against Japan.
2:37
It's the reason why the new uh prime minister Japan said we will defend Taiwan.
2:42
And you go, well, why would that bother China?
2:44
Well, because they still hold rightly so historical grievances for tens of millions of people being killed by the Japanese Imperial Army.
2:55
But yet what we're looking at is a nation that has sunk its teeth into Iran and into the Middle East.
3:05
They receive upwards of three million barrels of oil a day from Iran.
3:09
Uh, they have called for the Strait of Hormuz to be opened up, they've called for restraint on all sides.
3:15
Isn't it interesting how they've not condemned the United States?
3:19
Think about that.
3:20
Uh, they also didn't condemn uh the United States with Venezuela.
3:25
Because they knew they had their cheap Russian oil and they've also got their cheap Iranian oil.
3:32
Uh, when countries are heavily sanctioned the way they are, that's been their lifeline.
3:37
They've done hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments and buying of um oil, crude oil from Iran.
3:46
We know that um Chinese technology is in current uh bombs, radar technology.
3:53
But isn't it interesting how you could really say this entire war could be summed up in one and in absolutely uh one sentence?
4:04
This is about stopping the Chinese.
4:07
That's what this whole thing is about.
4:10
Um you can say, oh, we want to you know get rid of the the craziness and and all of that.
4:17
Um there was actually a really interesting interview by Robert Popp, uh political science of the University of Chicago, who talked about how air power can never uh do regime change.
4:29
Um he also said that uh President Trump is now caught in an escalation trap.
4:33
The war is already in the process of widening, the trap has not been shut fully, but it is tightening its grip.
4:40
And he said, for over a century, states, including the United States, European states, Russia and Israel, have tried to topple regimes with air power alone.
4:48
It has never, and he goes, I'm choosing my words carefully, it has never worked.
4:53
The key reason for the consistent failure is that when you have foreign air power trying to topple regimes, you inject nationalism into the politics of the target, which makes positive regime change in the direction of the attackers' wishes almost impossible.
5:07
All that is true.
5:09
Uh very good political scientists at the University of Chicago.
5:13
Do I think this war is, do we see is it going to turn out like Venezuela?
5:16
You go in, uh, the kidnapping of somebody, you you you now basically have a regime that's compliant.
5:24
You have an oil industry that's getting back on its feet.
5:28
Tens of billions of dollars of investments will begin to flow in, and you're seeing stability.
5:34
No, it won't happen.
5:37
Um what's interesting, Iran International reported the story this way when China called on all sides to protect ships, transitioning hormoons.
5:50
Strait of Hormuz, there's a approximately 20 to 25% of all the world's hydrocarbons.
5:56
Essentially, oil and natural gas flow through there.
6:00
Qatar, which is across from um Iran within the Strait of Hormuz, the rest uh Amon Terminal, which has been hit and shut down, essentially supplies about one-fifth of the world's natural gas that is shipped around the world or liquid LNG.
6:17
Strait of Hormuz, we could make an argument, is the greatest area of economic activity in the entire world.
6:25
I could I could map out for you whether it's scope one, two, three emissions, uh, do value chain studies on the Strait of Hormuz, look at the economic multiplier effects, and you can make the argument that nothing is more important than the Strait of Hormuz.
6:41
But again, why would China say we call on all sides to protect ships?
6:49
Uh transiting Hormuz.
6:51
Wouldn't they say they wanted to protect their investments in Iran?
6:56
Hundreds of billions of dollars at minimal 100 billion dollars.
7:00
Um why would a regime that uh is very protective of their people in some ways, but certainly protective of the Chinese Communist Party.
7:12
The investments that are made, the Chinese Communist Party has now called on investments to no longer just be put out into the world, but frankly, to use an investment framework to look at the homeland first, to make sure that if what they are doing things with their belt and road initiative, which is in many ways been a failure, it's going, it's not just putting money out there to gain geopolitical influence, but is it a safe and smart investment?
7:40
So again, why would China call on all sides to protect ships transiting Hormuz?
7:49
Here's why.
7:52
According to senior executive, this is in uh Iran International.
7:57
According to senior executives at Chinese state-owned gas firms, briefed by government officials, Beijing had urged Iranian counterparts not to target oil and liquefied natural gas tank tankers transiting the narrow waterway and to refrain from striking key export hubs such as Qatar.
8:18
Why?
8:19
China buys the vast majority of Iran's oil, providing Tehran with a crucial economic lifeline, but the world's largest energy importer depends more broadly on Persian Gulf supplies with bro with both crude and LNG cargoes passing through Hermoose.
8:35
One thing I would call on whether the Trump administration or Congress or anyone dealing with China is look at the soft power of energy.
8:54
Why not sign a hundred-year contract with China to supply them everything that they import at a targeted price?
9:04
Let's put that targeted price at 75 a barrel oil.
9:09
Let's put it at LNG at 5 million uh $5 per million uh BCU.
9:16
If you why not?
9:19
Why not just I'm I'm throwing numbers out there, but it's obvious.
9:23
So if they're importing about 3 million barrels of oil a day, here's what you have to know about oil markets.
9:29
Even a one million barrel, either addition or deletion severely affects oil markets.
9:36
What it also shows is that China, for all of its technological prowess, what you're really seeing, and and I disagree with people who say the country's not doing well, is what you're really seeing is the growth of their middle class.
9:53
Because there's a contradictory nature to what I'm about to say.
9:57
We know based on their one child politics.
10:00
Policy that they killed via uh forced abortions and sterilization, about 300 million uh children.
10:07
Um yet their economy is still growing.
10:11
Now they do have a high debt to GDP ratio, same as the United States.
10:16
We certainly know they have these phantom or shadow cities, or they're just building things that is not really needed.
10:23
Yet we also know their middle class is growing.
10:27
Anytime you see that a middle class is growing, same thing with India.
10:31
You're going to look at the need for energy, which I would say is very hard to model out.
10:37
Um what they're telling you is is very telling within this war.
10:44
I do not think this war is at all is about, oh, Iran was about to attack Israel or they were about to attack us.
10:52
Big deal.
10:54
They've been doing it for 40 over 45 years, they've been killing Americans.
10:58
They've been, I think, I think they should have been avenged uh over the the uh the marine barracks from Beirut.
11:05
We should have carpet bombed Tehran at that point.
11:08
Uh certainly the Americans that were being killed in Iraq, you know, the Iraq, uh, the Iraq war that were that were coming via Syria via Iran.
11:17
All of them should have been killed at that point.
11:19
So why didn't presidents from Reagan to George W.
11:23
Bush to President Obama, why didn't any of them do anything about Iran?
11:28
Because unfortunately, those were acceptable casualties to them, because right now the national security documents of the United States says that we are wanting to contain China, that we do not want a multipolar world.
11:46
Uh, though Marco Rubio talked about that during the first couple of months when he was Secretary of State when he called it a multipolar world, the United States would be concerned with the Western hemisphere and others would have their own spheres of influence, whether the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese.
12:03
What this tells you is that was not really true.
12:06
What you really need to look at is the national security doctrines of the United States.
12:11
Um you see is a country that says we believe China is the greatest threat to world stability and peace since Nazi Germany.
12:22
I would make the argument it's seen as even more of a threat, if not equal to than the former Soviet Union.
12:30
Uh, but yet one has to wonder we the Soviet Union was an economic wreck.
12:38
The Chinese are not an economic wreck.
12:41
Um now what's interesting about how the world is is we're we are all interconnected together, not just via the internet or cell phones.
12:51
Economies are intertwined with each other.
12:54
That's why you can possibly strike a massive deal with China the same way you can with India off energy.
13:01
They're both energy starved countries because they're both um their middle classes are growing by hundreds of millions of people.
13:08
Imagine the United States has about, let's call it 350 million people.
13:15
Uh, that's if you take the numbers that are coming out of India and China right now about their middle class growth, you're talking about each one of them have their own United States of growth inside of each country.
13:30
Then let's throw in um places like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam.
13:36
Um, you can make an argument a little bit for Pakistan.
13:39
Uh now you have Syria, which is trying to gain stability again.
13:43
I'm not even looking at any African nations.
13:45
If you could ever bring Nigeria into that sphere, well, what do you see?
13:50
Um, you see that these people are desperate for hydrocarbons.
13:56
They're desperate for oil, whether Brent or crude.
14:00
Uh they're deaf, they're desperate for diesel for jet fuel, they're desperate for natural gas, they're desperate for things like hydrogen, uh, they're desperate for liquid natural gas.
14:11
You can make a case, if I have a country like China that's got 300 at the at the bare minimum, they've got a hundred million people right now who are who are entering the middle class.
14:23
That means when people enter net inner uh middle class in economic terms, that means they start to become consumers.
14:29
Uh, they're no longer people that aren't really consuming much of anything.
14:33
They're going to need cars and apartments and homes.
14:38
Um, they're going to need food.
14:40
In other words, they're going to need all of Maslov's hierarchy of needs, food, shelter, comfort.
14:46
They'll need luxury, they'll need energy.
14:48
They'll eventually need electricity.
14:50
They need all of these things, as opposed to if you are 600 million Africans who are still living without being connected to the electrical grid and many others uh billions more are barely getting electricity.
15:06
You have a country like China who goes, we don't care about our 100 billion dollars worth of investments in Iran right now.
15:12
We don't even really care about the geopolitical influence that we may have.
15:16
What it actually tells you is that you have a country that is desperate for energy, and they're not, they're not even flexing their geopolitical power.
15:26
They're not the real politics in China.
15:28
You can also say the real politics of India is energy.
15:32
It's everything.
15:33
Why do both countries burn coal at copious amounts?
15:39
Why do both countries build coal-fired power plants?
15:42
Um, more are being built than they're even in the world combined, essentially.
15:48
Because coal's cheap and it's easy to store.
15:52
Both of these countries do not be surprised if India gets into this very quickly.
15:56
Um do not be surprised if Pakistan gets into this because they want to counter India and they want to get on the good side of the United States, and they want the United States to get Bagram Air Force Base Pack so they can fight the Taliban.
16:08
But what they really want is they want energy.
16:11
Blackouts play Pakistan.
16:14
If you're ever someone that lives in an economy that needs electricity and that electricity goes away, it crushes every single part of your economy, whether your business base, your industrial base, your consumer base, um, your citizens.
16:32
You cannot make investments.
16:34
You cannot plan to make investments.
16:36
You're gonna have a hard time growing food, uh building infrastructure, everything relies on electricity now.
16:45
It's just fascinating to me.
16:48
Absolutely fascinating when you go, this entire thing is about China.
16:53
It's about saying we, we, the United States want to control the oil and natural gas reserves of Venezuela.
17:01
Check the largest known reserves in the world in Venezuela.
17:05
Check.
17:06
Watch and see.
17:06
Next, we're going to go to Nigeria, then we're going to go to Mexico, and then eventually we're absolutely we are going to continue in Iran.
17:16
And we're going to let them bomb all the other Gulf states until all of them join us, because at the end of the day, we are trying to restrict the supply of energy to the Chinese communist party.
17:29
Um, a gentleman named Eldridge Colby is the architect of this.
17:32
He's an under-secretary, essentially for geopolitics within the Trump administration.
17:37
He's spoken extensively on this.
17:39
Um America is tired of dealing with Iran, but more importantly, they're tired of seeing China and they're tired of looking at other American administrations and frankly the business community, which has gone into China, which has allowed China to steal their technology because they want to somehow think they're going to be a part of their markets.
18:07
They're tired of China then um spreading things like the coronavirus or COVID through the world and then being unchecked.
18:14
Uh they're tired of them being in Venezuela, they're tired of them using the Mexican Mexican cartels and asymmetric warfare, killing a hundred thousand military-age men a year in the United States.
18:26
They're tired of all of this.
18:29
Um China also bought about 80% of all of Iran's oil exports.
18:35
Uh, this is this is this is absolutely this is about now Iran cannot finance Hamas, Hezbala, and others that have been used by the Chinese Communist Party via Venezuela, via Mexico, the cartels.
18:55
That's what all of this is about.
18:58
Do not pretend this has really anything to do about nuclear weapons.
19:04
I don't think it has that to do at all at all.
19:07
I think you can see the Israelis obviously know we're just about every sensitive point is in Iran.
19:14
Um, it is certainly known that Massad and the Israeli special forces are as capable and lethal as any force in the world.
19:25
Yes, we're getting to use V-2 bombers and uh next generation fighter jets.
19:32
And yes, we're saying we're we're enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, which is actually part became part of the Carter doctrine, because now President Trump has said that he will ensure that all shipping can pass uh through um they'll be financed by the United States, all insurance will be backed by the United States for shipping through the Strait of Wormuz.
19:51
He's also said the U.S.
19:52
Navy will make sure that all oil uh cargoes and natural gas get through there.
19:57
It will be interesting to see if those things are allowed to go.
20:00
Drop their wares off in China, or if the United States by backing it, backing them will use the soft power of finance to let's say, okay, you were going to get that crude at 45 dollars a barrel.
20:13
Now you're going to get it at $82 a barrel.
20:17
I'm going to go up, what, 100x on you?
20:20
I'm going to use the things a little bit like Reagan used before, where it's like, I'm just going to outspinge you, Soviet Union, and bankrupt you.
20:28
Because it's obvious those three million barrels of oil a day they are getting from Iran is a lifeblood for them.
20:37
Fascinating to think when you think about it.
20:39
Absolute life blood for them.
20:44
There was also a gentleman named uh Zaneb Rabua that talks about um that said the IR, it's called the piece that he did called the Iran question is all about China.
20:57
And he says, Beijing has spent years and billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset.
21:03
Everything that follows the Middle East flows from this fact, which is why Operation Epic Fury is the first American military campaign that threatens to sever that asset by striking Iran directly.
21:16
The Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China's regional architecture.
21:25
Um I think that's why we could look back in June of 25 when Israel uh launched Operation Rising Lion, the 12-day campaign of precision strikes that destroyed Iran enrichment facilities, killed over 30 senior commanders commanders, a dozen of nuclear science scientists, then drew the United States into direct strikes on three other nuclear sites.
21:50
Think about that.
21:52
Um why do we think protests happened in January of 26?
21:57
Some people say these were um color revolutions that were formated by this by the CIA or other Western governments.
22:09
Uh sure, but they still had the security apparatus, the military to slaughter thousands of protesters.
22:18
Some people say upwards of 30, 35,000 people were killed.
22:22
Um it even caused the European Union to designate the uh IRGC as a terrorist organization.
22:29
Which further isolated the regime.
22:32
So why now?
22:34
Why would you go attack Iran when seemingly the Islamic Republic is weaker than at any point in its history?
22:41
Well, here's why.
22:43
China was putting it back together.
22:45
Um, it was recently reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missile missiles, weapons that were capable of threatening American carriers that are now in the Persian Gulf.
23:02
Also, Chinese suppliers had shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium percolate, a key missile propellant ingredient to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel had spent 12 days destroying.
23:21
When you think about this, okay, let's go beyond the bombings we're seeing.
23:27
Who cares what CNN or Fox says right now?
23:31
You better really look at look at energy.
23:34
Okay.
24:05
You can easily make the argument this is the main reason the Islamic Republic, those butchers did not go bankrupt.
24:14
China is the lifeblood to continue to attack the United States via Iran.
24:21
North you always have to look back to why did Donald Trump in his first term walk over into North Korean territory.
24:30
That had nothing to do with North Korea.
24:32
That everything to do with China.
24:34
You don't walk over there because you want to be friends with Kim Jong un.
24:38
Isn't it interesting that nothing's really come of of any of that relationship since President Trump has come back for a second term?
24:45
One would think that he would have worked off from his first uh first administration five years ago, the success, and made some grand strategic deal with the North Koreans or made that a pillar of his campaign.
24:59
You haven't heard a word about North Korea.
25:01
He doesn't care about North Korea.
25:03
Nobody cares about North Korea or their nuclear weapons.
25:07
North co North Korea is a proxy of our of um of China.
25:12
North Korea would not exist without China.
25:15
Uh the 25 to 30 million North Koreans would die starting with their dear leader, unfortunately, down to the citizens who are butchered and frankly sodomized in every form possible by that mass murdering maniac.
25:35
Unfortunately, all of them would be dead in a year if China um did away with their support.
25:42
Their entire economic lifeline is China.
25:46
Sure, some of their soldiers are fighting in Ukraine, but if they were such a viable uh force and we're told they're so, you know, largest army in that part of the world outside of China.
26:00
100,000 of them have gone to Ukraine.
26:02
Do you think it's done much of a difference for the Russians?
26:05
No, they've been cannon fodder.
26:07
They're poorly trained, poorly equipped, probably poorly fed, malnourished.
26:13
They're cannon fodder.
26:15
Uh they're like raw recruits and put into the front lines of World War II.
26:21
Those were the first ones to die.
26:24
When Trump did that, that's to neutralize China.
26:27
That's to neutralize your proxy.
26:30
This proxy is much more dangerous, the Iranians, because that's a nut that's a fanatical Islamic lunatics, mass murdering maniacs who has a hatred of Jews, Christians, and anything that's not going to bring back the the 12th amman according to their sadistic ideological nonsense based on the war parts of the Quran.
27:00
And I would tell anybody, if you think the Quran, go read it.
27:05
Just go read what it says.
27:07
Now, people can go, well, wait a minute, the Bible has all sorts of crazy things in it, too.
27:11
Okay, I'll give you that.
27:13
But you don't see Christians going around slaughtering people around the world.
27:18
And anyone listening to this, please don't tell me about the crusades.
27:21
Christians lost.
27:23
Solomon uh Salad is who won, uh, a Muslim.
27:28
Uh the Islam, you know, the Temple Mount that at one point had Solomon's um Grand Temple.
27:37
That that's an Islamic, that's an Islamic site now.
27:42
But when you think about all this with China, when you just, oh my gosh, think about what China gets.
27:50
Okay, here's what we're gonna do.
27:52
We're gonna take a break.
27:53
We're coming back.
27:55
And I'm gonna break down for you everything China gets from Iran.
27:59
And factually prove this has nothing to do with their nuclear war program.
28:05
This has nothing to do with any of that.
28:07
This has every single thing to do.
28:10
Um we're at war right now because we're at war with China.
28:14
My name is Todd Royal.
28:16
This is um geopower, energy, and real politics.
28:20
I'm your host, and we're gonna be right back.
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And with that, back to the second half, this is Todd Royal.
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I am your host of GeoPower Energy and Real Politics.
31:53
I'm gonna let's just jump into this.
31:58
This little this little uh sadistic marriage that's been killing the world now, not just for decades, but certainly the last uh five years.
32:12
China annually is saving billions by getting cheap oil for its industrial base compared to the market.
32:19
So if you're trying to compete against China and their oil, which they then can you put into diesel and jet fuel and other industrial purposes, you're already, they're getting this way below market rate.
32:37
What is that?
32:38
So I'm already at a disadvantage against a Chinese company, which already know they will cheat, steal, lie, do anything they need to win compete.
32:47
Uh just do a little look at the the the electric car industry.
32:54
You're telling me they've taken over the entire thing.
32:56
No, what they did is they cornered the market.
32:58
Sure, BYD is a great is a great product, but that product was stolen.
33:03
Just go do a little search on that one.
33:05
Go look and see.
33:07
Um go read Doomberg, um, who's competed over in China, go listen to some of his podcasts where he talks about where he's competing against them on solar panels, look what they've done with electric vehicles, stolen designs, just flat-out stolen designs.
33:23
Made them their own.
33:25
Well, you can also say, now for the last five years, you've got oil below market rates.
33:31
Um then you have an energy corridor.
33:36
Um Tehran was cut off from every other major economy in the world, but now they've got a billion out over a billion and a half Chinese people.
33:46
Um they've made a 25 year strategic partnership.
33:51
Uh, you know, Western governments have never been able to win Iranians, the Iranian trust.
33:57
Yeah, meaning Ayatollah Khomeini, the IR, the RGG, and the other fanatics that prop up uh that Islamic terrorist regime.
34:08
Um Iran's economy now runs on Chinese money, and both capitals know it.
34:15
Uh, they signed a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership that committed China to invest an estimated 400 billion across Iran's energy, banking, telecommunications, and if infrastructure sectors.
34:31
Um, they now have a freight rail that connects the Iranian city of Qam to Yahoo, China.
34:38
The bigger this integration comes, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran.
34:42
You can't even say that um Saudi Arabia, Qatar, even Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, uh, Bahrain, Egypt.
34:55
Who has influence over the Iranians?
34:57
Do the Russians?
34:59
You don't see Vladimir Putin has offered to mediate this, but you sure as hell don't see him bringing in Russian troops or artillery on the side of the Iranians.
35:12
Think now think about the digital leash that's on this, the technology dimension.
35:16
Highway, uh, H U A, H U A WEI Highway, and ZTE have built significant portions of Iran's telecommunications infrastructure.
35:28
So when you see telecommunications being blown up, you're attacking Chinese companies.
35:33
Um ZTE has signed uh a hundred and thirty million dollar contract to have a complete surveillance system on Iran's state-managed telephone and internet networks.
35:43
Uh, highway became the country's largest telecommunications equipment provider.
35:48
They give uh location tracking services to mobile carriers and give them uh content censorship tools.
35:57
Uh they've now given them AI-enabled facial recognition cameras from firms such as Tandy and Hickvision, uh, deep packet inspection tools, centralized traffic management systems.
36:10
Uh, you're talking about entire network uh that's modeled, basically modeled on the great firewall of China and built with Chinese technical assistance.
36:20
In other words, the Iranian regime was doing was is putting in all the censorship, all the control, exactly as the Chinese Communist Party was.
36:32
Um certainly we can see the January 2026 massacres uh where Tehran basically shut down the internet.
36:40
Um, remember, Chinese firms helped to construct the surveillance technology enabled the IRGC to track, identify, and suppress dissidents.
36:51
Um, this is the same companies that perform uh identical functions for the Chinese Communist Party.
36:57
Basically, Beijing provided Tehran with the tools to survive its own uh population's rejection is doing so for the same reason that it buys oil.
37:07
A dependent Iran is a very useful Iran.
37:11
Okay.
37:11
What about the Red Sea?
37:13
And let's talk about that.
37:16
When Iran's Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Bob L.
37:21
Uh Mandeb Strait in late 23, those consequences went over the entire global economy.
37:28
Uh, container traffic to the Red Sea fell by 90%.
37:33
Uh, goods worth roughly a trillion dollars were disrupted in the first seven months.
37:38
You had to reroute ships through the African Cape of Goodhorn.
37:42
You added nearly uh two weeks to the to it and about a million fuel costs.
37:48
What do you think uh that did to freight rates to Asia to Europe?
37:51
What do you think that did to inflation rates throughout uh where all that shipping had to pass through to Europe to the United States to uh Asian nations that let's say uh Beijing is less than friendly friendly then and the United States bore the heaviest cost.
38:08
Um the United States then was supplying interceptor missiles that cost about a million to four million.
38:16
Chinese flagships, though, of course, sell right through, needed no protection, no attacks.
38:25
And Chinese satellite companies were providing the Houthis with intelligence to enable the targeting their commercial vessels.
38:32
This war has nothing to do about a nuclear program.
38:36
This has to do with a Chinese communist party that is just like a Nazi Germany.
38:42
They are about one thing only, and that is control.
38:46
That is to suppress all human rights, all freedom, and they're they're doing they were doing all of that through Iran.
38:54
So remember, this entire, whether you're downing um an Iranian plane, you're taking out a ship, you're hitting uh you're killing uh the former Ayatollah.
39:08
What you're actually doing is you're going after China.
39:11
That's who you're going after.
39:13
So then if you think about all the China, just Chinese China's more embedded, more embedded that every dollar the United States spends defending the Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarines, uh, for submarine production, for anybody being in the Pacific, and certainly for Taiwan contingency planning.
39:36
Every carrier group that is stationed the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific Pacific.
39:44
All of Iran's proxies, whether the Hoof Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, um, the Shia paramilitary forces.
39:54
All of this has been armed and supported by Iranian intelligence.
39:59
And they put this.
40:00
Dysfunction, what this is, it's a mechanism to kill America through strategic to through a strategic attrition.
40:08
I would counter that Venezuela had just as much ado about kicking out China and kicking out Hezbollah as it did about gaining those crude reserves.
40:17
Because then now those crude reserves are no longer going to China, except you sell those to them and now a premium.
40:25
You go to you go to Z or Z, have you always forget how to say his name?
40:30
The president of China, or as a lot of him XI, and you go, we'll sell you Venezuela, uh Venezuelan heavy crude oil.
40:39
Again, you were buying it at 025 a barrel.
40:42
It's now about 63 a barrel.
40:46
Oh, and by the way, you're going to pay all the shipping costs.
40:50
And uh you're gonna bear all the insurance, all the shipping, everything.
40:55
So when it's all said and done, you're paying about 72 a barrel.
40:58
You go, but I tell you what, how about if for the next 100 years, you're gonna be the ones to give 100 billion dollars worth of loans to rebuild, or we're gonna say about 300 billion uh to Exxon Mobile, Chevron, and others to completely rebuild uh the Venezuelan uh oil infrastructure, but we're doing it.
41:20
You can grant us the money.
41:22
We will then give you the crude oil under a hundred-year contract at said price.
41:28
So for all of your years of killing Americans, um, of causing havoc in the Middle East, of arming all of these proxies, we believe we'll put that at a 500 billion dollar grant, but we'll give you a hundred, and you pay for all the shipping and insurance, and we'll give you a hundred-year contract at $60 a barrel.
41:50
See what they say.
41:53
Lay it out, lay it out for them and go.
41:56
Otherwise, what we are going to do is literally obliterate that entire country, and we're going to take over all of Iran's hydrocarbon reserves, which they have some of the largest uh gasoline and uh oil reserves in the world.
42:12
And we also say, oh, by the way, we're we're all going to head back into Iraq.
42:16
And by we, we mean the oil majors.
42:19
And when the oil majors assemble different places, they typically get what they want.
42:27
How do you think that would go over?
42:35
These are not conspiracy theories.
42:38
Because what you're looking at right now is what you are saying is we know you want to take Taiwan.
42:44
We also know that they supply the world's semiconductors.
42:48
And we and you know, and I know we have a horrible environmental problem here that's by crazy environmental leftists of the Democratic Party that are backed by uh university educated students and baby boomers that are in all of our blue urban cities.
43:03
But things are changing.
43:05
You show them demographic reports that are showing that uh young people, Gen Z are becoming more conservative.
43:12
They're attending church services more, they're actually looking at more orthodox religions, which means they're gonna vote more conservative, probably more Republican.
43:21
Maybe look at the Marco Rubias of Rubo Rubios of the world, which means America becomes more patriotic, which means America builds up its military and space program, which means America lessens its regulatory burden, builds more nuclear power plants, more AI, more military weapons, more onshore of manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, and go, China, give us about 20 years from now, we'll have all the rare earth metals and minerals we'll ever need.
43:51
We will then re-compete with you on all the processing, refining, and mining of all that's needed for from rare earth metals and minerals.
44:00
We will then bring back all of our Western countries.
44:03
We will try to do the same thing to you that we've done to Russia and try to bankrupt you, but more importantly, we will take over all hydrocarbons in the world, or you can join the global economy as a good actor.
44:16
It's your choice.
44:18
You saw what happened to the Soviet Union.
44:20
Do you really want to be bankrupt again?
44:22
Do you really want to be the hermit kingdom again?
44:24
Do you really want to go back to when Mao killed 100 million of you people?
44:29
Your own uh dictator killed 100 million of you.
44:33
Do you want to go back to that again?
44:35
Because if you do, you and I both know it kills your economy.
44:39
So I tell you what, you stop what you're doing in Iran, we'll stop bombing it.
44:44
You immediately help us kill every leader of every Mexican cartel you've ever dealt with.
44:49
You give us 500 billion dollars as a grant to rebuild Venezuela, you then sign a hundred-year contract, and you stay on your side of the world, and I'll stay on my side of the world.
45:04
And you'll get all the crude oil you need, and you can feed and clothe and house the 100 to 400 million of you that are entering the middle class.
45:18
And oh, by the way, you're gonna have to deal with an ascendant India that's now more closely aligned with the United States after the recent US India um trade deal.
45:29
Do you really want us back in Bagram Air Force Base?
45:32
That means we are a hop skip and a jump by you.
45:34
Do you want us back in Diego Garcia?
45:37
Do you do you want the Seventh Fleet to just continue to stay right there in this Pacific?
45:42
Because that's what we'll do.
45:47
You're you're you're also you're looking at them going, okay, let's talk about your allies.
45:55
When China also, the Gulf monarchies, when China has so grossly entangled themselves in Iran, it's a threat in a very obvious way.
46:10
Um, it generates deep anxiety to the monarchies in the Gulf Arab states, because now they have to forge a relationship with America to take on Iranian aggression backed by China backed by the Chinese Communist Party.
46:26
Um, in their defense, the traditional relationship they had with the United States eroded under uh Barack Obama's administration when he did it when he did that horrible nuclear deal with Tehran.
46:40
Um, it deepened after the muted response to the 2019 Eric Aramico attacks.
46:46
Um, certainly when Joe Biden left uh Afghanistan, all the monarchies said what's going on.
46:54
And Gulf leaders are probably correct in saying they can't rely on America anymore.
46:58
I mean, you look at our political system.
47:01
We know that if the Democrats regain the house, the first thing they do is impeach Donald Trump.
47:07
Um, if I'm one of the Gulf leaders, I'm sitting there myself and going, what I'd probably do, I'd try to go nuclear.
47:15
You can't rely on it, you can't rely on America because we have too many crazy leftists, too many crazy ACOUs, too many crazy environmental organizations, too many crazy MS, you know, MS now platforms, our media, our law, um, our NGOs, our nonprofits.
47:33
We have billionaires who hate America, no kings protest, the you know, the Alice Waltons of the world, the Tom Styers, Steve Jobs' widow.
47:46
Um Jeff Bezos ex-wife, these are crazy people who give to left-wing causes that want to kill America, and they somehow think Donald Trump is the enemy.
47:58
And yet you look at what Barack Obama did, you can also say that all of them are still reacting to uh that ridiculous uh Iranian nuclear deal from years ago where you thought, oh, I'm going to give them hundreds of billions of dollars of money to not do a nuclear program, and then wonder why they've armed to the teeth, not only themselves, but their proxies.
48:22
The foolishness of Barack Obama, the little zero understanding of real politics, no understanding of geopower, somebody like Ben Rhodes, I think he was a uh a playwright, uh like a literature major, English major, being in charge of geopolitics and power and having no understanding what he was doing.
48:48
It boggles the mind that anybody ever voted for him and never questioned people like Ben Rhodes.
48:55
So when you think about this, why did Trump launch Operation Epic Fury?
49:02
Well, because Washington spends a lot of time managing Tehran.
49:07
Um it's another year that Beijing gets to buy in the Pacific, and the administration has decided that trade is not worth it anymore.
49:14
Um the orientation of the Middle East, you can make the argument will determine whether U.S.
49:19
can prevail in the defining confrontation of this century, and that's gonna be a Chinese move against Taiwan.
49:27
You want to know why the United States wants a 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget?
49:32
Whether there is obviously there is rot and waste, and the Pentagon can't even do an audit.
49:40
Trillions of dollars are missing that was uncovered by Doge.
49:43
All of it is true.
49:45
Um, the gross incompetence of the Pentagon and the defense, the Department of Ward to not be able to understand where monies have gone.
49:55
All true.
49:57
But do you want to live under the specter of the Chinese?
50:00
Communist Party.
50:02
Did you?
50:03
Because if you don't, if you didn't confront Nazi Germany, you see what happens.
50:09
We're all real lucky right now.
50:11
We're not speaking German.
50:13
We're all real lucky right now in a lot of ways that the United States was not defending itself from Nazi attack on the East Coast and Imperial Japan on the West Coast.
50:27
Because the last time we decided, oh, we're not going to build up our armies and navies and just allow these these massive fanatical belligerents, free, free reign, and free will.
50:40
If you really understand the attack of Pearl Harbor, what they actually should have done was walked right onto the West Coast of the United States.
50:48
Just go look at the history.
50:52
Japan could have walked right into San Francisco if they'd wanted to.
50:56
Probably could have gone into Seattle, Los Angeles, and other uh coastal cities.
51:01
How far could they have got?
51:04
Think about that.
51:05
What happens if they took over the uh San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two ports?
51:09
Just the ports.
51:11
What happens?
51:12
What happens if you take over the rail systems of those of those two major uh U.S.
51:16
cities at that point?
51:18
Uh, what if you take over?
51:20
Oh gosh, the farmlands of California, send all that, send all that back to Japan into troops.
51:28
Imagine if the Imperial Japanese would have had from Seattle down to San Diego, or even if they just had from LA to San Francisco and farmland in between.
51:42
Just imagine it.
51:44
Imagine if imagine if Hitler wouldn't have been so grossly incompetent, and they actually do take over Russia.
51:50
They do take over the Romanian oil fields, the Caucasuses.
51:55
That's what this is about.
51:57
Um, this is about energy.
52:00
This is about uh force posture.
52:03
The US, the U.S.
52:04
can't fight a tooth, a two-theater war.
52:07
Um, we've certainly seen now that Iranian weapons are consuming massive amounts of America interceptor uh stockpile.
52:17
Um I mean, all of our ships and aircraft and munitions, those are needed for Pacific deterrence, but you first got to take care of this middle, this Middle Eastern issue.
52:31
You have got to restructure it towards stability.
52:34
You have got to say, no matter how grotesque many of these regimes are, they're not going around.
52:40
Uh, they may brutalize their own citizens in the name of Islam, but they're not looking to blow up the world.
52:46
They're not looking to kill a hundred thousand Americans a year via fentanyl.
52:50
They're not looking to arm Hamas via the Palestinians and go rape and slaughter Israelis to the point where they were cooking babies alive and usbit in ovens and raping to death women.
53:07
That's all that is all Chinese money that did that.
53:11
That is money that went to Iran, which then went to Hamas that is then cooking babies alive.
53:18
Don't ever be surprised if the Israelis decide to strike the Chinese for this.
53:23
The Israelis have a long memory.
53:25
Don't ever be surprised if one day uh nuclear power plants suddenly go offline.
53:32
Uh, there's a meltdown or two, and we find out years later that was the Israelis who are getting back at what happened to them on the October 7th rape and massacre of innocent uh men, women, children, and babies.
53:47
Read about some of the women that are survived, or they said they were raped over and over and over again.
53:53
I don't know how they survived.
53:56
You can make the case, those women were raped by Chinese money, Chinese surveillance, Chinese weaponry that all went to Iran that then used it to foment sadistic revolutions and just instability, all in the name of Islamic fanaticism.
54:16
No, it's all really about power and control.
54:19
That's what it's all about.
54:25
If God forbid if China actually does go into Taiwan, well, the United States then will need not just deterrence, not just a Middle East whose restructured stability has killed the Iranian proxy architecture.
54:44
Uh, the Gulf partners are aligned.
54:47
All of it can be managed with a much lighter footprint, bringing decisive combat theater for the Pacific.
54:54
What you'll also need is nations to impose punishing costs on China through sanctions.
55:00
I don't know if that will happen.
55:02
They'll also need financial exclusion and tech technology denial.
55:07
Let's say if Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others are so deeply engaged in the Chinese economic system that they refuse to curtail oil sales to Beijing during the Pacific War, the entire sanctions architecture will collapse.
55:22
In other words, everything is about energy.
55:29
You can talk about all your high-minded human rights and freedom.
55:32
Great.
55:33
I believe in all of it.
55:35
But what you're going to need is Gulf nations that say we will not allow shipping from the Strait of Hormuz to go to China.
55:43
We will not sell oil and natural gas to China.
55:48
Because as you're seeing right now, it does not take much for uh Beijing to freak out.
55:57
For all the reasons I've just talked about, and let me add this to Chinese satellites provided Tehran with real-time intelligence on American force deployments, including detection of the F-35A, the F-15E, the A-10C and the THAAD uh THAAD systems.
56:17
Um at the at Air Force bases in Jordan.
56:26
Tehran, the fanatical Islamic Republic.
56:31
Let me quote, has been the central pillar of a regional order that Beijing assembled, and Operation Epic Fury is now cracking that pillar.
56:40
But the strikes, remember, these are not the end.
56:43
They are just the opening act against a larger strike against China.
56:49
Because Iran is exactly where all of Beijing's tyrannical architecture is located.
56:59
If you can through strategic attrition, mute, uncover blind, and ultimately deplete the American military arsenal and even diplomatic soft power, you can go attack Taiwan and get away with it.
57:18
You can then go take everything that Taiwan does, which by the way, they're doing stupid things like relying on renewables and closing down nuclear power plants.
57:26
That's a different story.
57:36
And God bless.
57:37
Thank you very much for it.