Michael Weiss: Iran Is Not Likely to Forget about the War

starts a shopping trip.

I'll tell you when the shopping trip is already the first day.

And the platform makes me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one of them. I have the feeling that shopping trip is made of continually optimized. Everything is super integrated and balanced. And the time and the money that I can't invest in there is no other way around.

For all in vaccination. Now, the shopping trip is the point of the day. And it's time to start a shopping trip. With the check-out of the world, you can invest better. That's right.

“The check-out of the world is the best way to invest.”

The legendary check-out of shopping trip is just the shop on your website. It's just the social media and everywhere. That's it for your work. If you're interested in shopping, you can help in shopping.

Let's start with a test-in-the-hole to fill in an EuroPromonat of Shopby5.de/record.

Hello, I'm welcome in board podcasts. I'm your host Tim Miller. We are going deep on foreign policy today with one of our phase. But before we get there, a few housekeeping notes. I got a rant a little bit about Trump's bleets.

I'm going to do a little bit on Trump's bleets. I go on vacation, Trump bleets that he's Jesus. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. The first on the notes.

Our live shows, coming up, and other on-to-live shows, I'm going back to Southern California. We are going to be in San Diego on May 20th and Los Angeles on May 21st.

“Tickets are on pre-sale now for bulwort plus members.”

If you want the good seats, you've got to become a board-class member. Go to the board.com/events to get your tickets today for all the regulars out there. You just love my ad reads, tickets go on sale on Friday. We're working on some fun special guests. Sarah is going to be there with me, Sam.

Are you woke, Bill Crystal? It's going to be good. The board.com/events. Speaking of Sarah, I'll sort of remind her Tuesday night to get the next level podcast. Let me Sarah and JVL coming out, we're going to have a whole show on Trump's disintegration.

How about disintegration? Let's do that. We're going to do a whole show on that. If you want an hour on that, go check out the next level. Here's two minutes.

My buddy Harry Sisson posted an analysis of Trump's bleeds on Sunday night. I was watching Carol G, why this happened. So I didn't get to do it.

“So I appreciate Harry, and I'm going to read this for you.”

Here's what Trump was posting in the timestamp.

949 p.m. He posts the AI Jesus photo, which we're going to get back to. Trump is Jesus with what appears to be a demon over his head. 950 Trump tower on the moon. 1010, he posts the meme.

1032, a news clip, 1053, a news clip. 1243 a.m. He announces the Hormuz blockade, which we're going to talk about with Michael Lys. 235 a.m. He posts about Joe Biden.

236, another article on the Naval Blockade. 237, he posts about Eric Swallwell. 237, he reposts that article about Biden. Maybe forgot that he posted earlier. He did a double post.

238, he posted an article about his ballroom. 410 a.m. in the East, he posted an article on a run. So look, I'm a poster. I like to post a lot.

That is insane. From 949 p.m. till 410 a.m. He was posting 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, a dozen bleets. He's up all night.

He's announcing blockades. He's announcing military actions near 1 a.m. After posting about himself as God, I mean, this is, it's alarming. Like, dude needs sleep. Like, dude needs rest.

He's already extremely old. He's already backed into a corner geopolitically and domestically politically. And I don't know. I'm a little worried, I guess. Let's say.

I'm a little bit nervous about whether the president of the United States has the mental faculties to be making life for the decisions when he's not sleeping and he's posting megalomaniaical AI memes about himself in the middle of the night. Like simultaneously, deposting about updated military strategic decisions. So it's alarming.

The good news though is it isn't landed, well, even with his people. And that's something to give you two examples really quick, because they were the most delicious ones for me personally. Number one, Riley gains tied for fifth place in a swimming competition in college and probably that into a career as an anti-trans activist, because a trans person was also competing

She would have finished fifth on her own instead of tied for fifth. She wasn't happy about the Trump as Jesus mean and posted this. Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he'd post this. Is he looking for a response?

Does he actually think this? Either way, two things are true, one, a little humility would serve him well.

“Donald Trump, these people have been lobotomized, do they exist in the world?”

It's just like, all right, I mean, being for Trump is one thing, at least you can have some respect for the people who are for Trump, we're like, I like that he's a megalomania. I like that he's a big and an asshole and kind of dumb, and I like that he makes the lips cry and I like that he's all about that cash and it has the gold toilet. Okay, not my cup of tea, but that's for you, that's one thing.

Being for Trump and wishing he had humility, I mean, that's the one thing that he doesn't have, any of.

So one thing he's never gonna have, wishing the Trump had humility.

And in case you hadn't learned the lesson, Donald Trump was asked whether he doesn't have deleting the AI Jesus tweet and whether that deletion was in response to the criticisms from people like Riley Gaines and Trump replied, no, I didn't listen to Riley Gaines. I'm not a big fan of Riley, actually, out. So things are bad in the mega Christian influence or space, things were already bad in the

mega nationalist isolation as to America firsts influence or space, so he's losing allies about a minute, but just the anecdote, it's just one little anecdote, okay, it's one anecdote better person in my life, but you're looking for these, you're trying to hold on to that. And I was visiting some folks during vacation and asking them, you know, it seems like things are going well, seems like Trump's losing steam, seems like magas losing steam, but as

any mega person in your life actually said, you know, I'm off or, you know, you were

right about this one or I'm having second thoughts and everybody's kind of like, no, I can't

think about anybody in my actual life. And then I landed home last night and received this text from my friend, his mother and laws of maga. And she had sent him the picture of the meme and with Trump has crossed the line, exclamation point, exclamation point, and he posted it on truth social, he might be the antichrist.

And that is what I'm talking about. That is the kind of flips that I'm talking about. Not only are we upset about the meme, not only do we think it was a mistake, but starting to have second thoughts about the whole operation, like maybe it's possible that Trump isn't just somebody that makes some bad calls every once in a while.

Maybe this has been the devil's work from the beginning. Maybe the devil tricked us into thinking that Donald Trump would be our Savior.

“And honestly, if people need that justification for jumping off, then I'm with them, baby.”

I'm with them. The devil didn't trump as the antichrist and we can all move forward to a new future without them. That sounds great, all right, we're going to talk about Iran, Hungary, and the rest and foreign affairs with our in-house out of house expert.

He's an editor at the insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet, author of ISIS inside the army of terror. He writes on sub-secret for an office. He's a gold jacket guest on the board podcast. It's Michael Weiss.

What's up, man? Hey, you know it. I'm doing pretty good. I'm back from vacation. It's nice to see a friendly face, I was off a single day, and it seems like a podcast

was okay without me single day at Coachella. I know I was at Coachella for four days, I just took a single day off the podcast. All I see. Okay. Here you're at well-traveled man.

Well, do some Coachella talk tomorrow night on the live stream. I'll show you and come hang out with me on. I want to talk to you though, about more serious matters of international diplomacy and intrigue.

“And I think we should start with a run while I was in the desert.”

J.D. Vance was in his lawn with bod, trying to go to the clinic.

He's opening scene right before third three, by the way.

Tim's in the desert and J.D. Vance. According to his on account, he called Daddy Trump more than 12 times during the 21 hours of negotiations to discuss the issues. Also, talked to B.B. a couple times, came away with nothing, and we now have a blockade of a blockade kind of though Chinese ships knocked through today, I don't know.

What's the status of the war in Iran?

I don't know. I mean, J.D.'s negative charisma and unlikeability are just highly contagious these days. Wherever he goes, you know, failure seems to stalk not far behind. So what I heard is he did 21 hours in his lawnmobod, Jared and Steve sort of running shotgun to his little operation, the Iranians played hardball.

They agreed to continue to talk, and I think they're going back on Thursday. The rumor that I heard was that the Iranians called it off and went back home, because they didn't trust their communication not to be intercepted from our side, from Pakistan. So in other words, they had to go back to Tehran, consult with the new Supreme Leader, and then come back to whatever their counter proposal was, which now I think is 20 year halt on nuclear.

We want to make it. We want to make it. We want to make it.

We want to make it 12-1/2 and call it good.

Leave it. I mean, Trump will be dead by then.

“We can just leave it up to the next guy, but that's what's working.”

So, you know, this is one of the sticking points, but you know, the other thing to keep in mind at the start of this caper, the only sort of sensible guy to listen to on anything is General Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and he laid out very succinctly. I thought three operational objectives, operational objective number one, eliminate the nuclear program.

Well, obviously, we didn't do that because this way they're putting on the table, you know, five years, and we're asking for 20 and plus they've got, you know, 900 pounds of the stuff buried underground or underneath the rubble and, you know, Donald Trump is talking about the nuclear dust and sending in commandos to come in, actual trade is, so that's one that we didn't quite get.

The second was the missile capability, particularly their medium range missiles, which

have retabric all across the neighborhood, hitting GCC countries, and being responsible for killing American soldiers. We didn't quite get all of that U.S. intelligence assessed that, in fact, they have quite a bit more launchers than we reckoned, and some of those launchers have been kept underground. So that's Mark II and number three, you know, their ability to project power in financing

and arming a manifold terrorist proxies from his ball and Lebanon to Hamas and Gaza to Iraqi. She embellishes, that's kind of TVD, as well as been pretty badly battered by Israel.

“And Lebanon, I remember that was one of the other questions at the start of the ceasefire,”

was Lebanon on the table, was it not the U.S. and Israel said. It wasn't the Iranian said yes, it was. My question, and I don't have a good answer for anybody is, if we are going to live sanctions, start to enrich the Islamic Republic, if they are going to simply get rich by charging tolls for tankers that pass through the straight to foremost.

That's assuming this hour blockade of their blockade is lifted. Are they going to use that money to build schools and hospitals and bridges that we knocked out? Or are they going to use that money to enrich the IRGC and also all of the above missile program, nuclear programs? Yeah, maybe kind of a one for you and a three for me.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So look, I mean, my, my read of this is it's, we have a very interesting kind of split. You get a lot of pro Israel, mega adjacent, mega curious types in the U.S. saying, rah-ra-sus-bomba, we won, Trump, you know, really knocked them down and officiated this

terrible, theocratic regime to the point where they're now willing to put on up or even

“discuss things that they hadn't before, Israeli security hawks, who I think nobody could”

consider to be uninterested in the state of Iran or what kind of future threat it might pose to Israel or the neighborhood, are in shall we say, maybe not high-dudgeon, but they're a little more depressed about the situation. They don't see this as a, as a stunning success because I think they too realize that Netanyahu and Mossad chief David Barnaia thought this was going to be kind of an easy operation.

They legitimately sold Trump, if you believe this New York Times deep dive that came out a few days ago on the idea that you go in, you start pounding them from the air and the Iranians will rise up again. It'll be that protest movement, but on steroids and, oh, by the way, we could do some fun stuff with Iranian Kurds.

So I met with a senior U.S. intelligence official last week before the announced ceasefire. And it's actually true what Trump said, believe it or not, about the Iranian Kurds keeping all the kit that was provided to them. So the idea was the Israelis ran guns and starling terminals to a group called P jack, which is the PKK franchise in Iran.

Our job was to get our Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds of the Kurdistan regional government, to allow this stuff to transit through their borders into Iran. So that kind of happened. And it was like 40 guys and they just kept everything. They did not distribute it evenly to would be in search and scenario, right?

well. And we knew that.

I mean, we've been wargaming a scenario for taking out this regime for years.

And every option that has come back or every result has been rather lackluster.

“And I think, you know, the dividends of that are, I see, now that's not to say that Iran”

is doing great. They think that they've won simply by surviving. They did get a lot of their missile program to destroy their navy, is it, you know, the bottom of the sea, although they have a lot of fast boats and assets kind of unsophisticated ways that they could chivey and do harm to not just tankers, but also the American warships

that have amassed this blockade. But did we achieve all of our objectives? Do we have regime change? No. We did regime to get a reputation, but we got new guys in charge, whether they're more

hard-line than the previous slot. Some Iran analysts seem to think that they are the speaker of parliament. He's not a cuddly character. I mean, this was a guy who was going around bashing people over the head and bedded with the besieged during a protest movement, what almost 20 years ago.

He's pretty in it to win it, you know, not a reformist. It's not a kind of Gorbachev of Iran type figure. So, yeah, I mean, what can I say? I'm bad at something, okay, I'm bad at getting rid of old clothes. Spring cleaning time, it's really something that I should deal with right now.

I have an entire section in my closet that's just like nostalgia t-shirts that I never

wear, but maybe I bought them at a concert, or I bought them on a vacation, or they're a gift or I wore them, you know, somewhere, and they're just existing in the closet.

“And, you know, it's okay to just move on, all right?”

It's okay to move on and move on to better things and I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to take that on myself, and I'm going to do it with the help of our friends at Quince. Quince's fabrics feel elevated, their fits are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense.

Quince makes high quality everyday essentials using premium materials, like 100% European linen, and insanely soft, flow-knit, active-layer fabric. Their men's linen pants and shirts are lightweight, breathable, and comfortable, basically the perfect layer for spring.

The best part is that their prices are 50 to 60% less than similar brands because they cut

out the middle man. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. I got one of them Quince linen shirts, myself, and it is linen shirt season. I like it, like to wear it as kind of a kind of an over shirt, a little chilly in the evening, or wear it alone with the pearls.

It's Quince linen shirt. If you're on the market for linen shirt, it's like a nice, I'm digging it. Press your wardrobe with Quince, go to Quince.com/TheBullwork for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too, go to QU-I-N-C-E.com/TheBullwork for free shipping and 365-day returns

Quince.com/TheBullwork. Let's talk a little bit more about just the negotiation status of what to play here. So the seats fire, so-called seats fire, is going to end April 22nd since eight days from now. The Pakistani Prime Minister said I want to tell you that a full effort is still on to

resolve the issues before that time. Tyler Pager and David Sangerth and Ear Times reporting that Trump and AIDS obviously want to deal. But they're worried that they'll end up with a deal that looks like Obama's piece of cord.

I can't have that. On the other side of the ledger from that, I mean, Trump, unlike the Iranian parliament speaker, is not in a Tuanet, really, and J.D. Vance is certainly not in a Tuanet, and so the Iranians, the Pakistanis have a counterparty here that particularly in J.D. Vance wants to find a face-saving exit on the Iranians, they might like a face-saving exit.

So there are things that cut both ways a little bit as far as whether this will kind of continue or Peter out. What do you make about that? Look, if we zoom out from the 24/7 new cycle, what's going to happen to

“tomorrow or even next week, I think this is the kind of broad strokes of it.”

We're in for a penny and for a pound. By doing what we've just done, we have wounded this regime, and this regime is not going to forget, and they're not going to just take it like that. They are going to retaliate, maybe not immediately, but down the line. They will have resources and assets with which to do so, I mean, remember, Iran's ability

to project power from the Amia bombing in Buenos Aires and South America, which that's our neck of the woods, right? That's our sphere of influence Western have to do the burges bombing in Bulgaria, where they blew up a bustle of Israeli holiday makers in 2000, something or other. They can do these kinds of operations.

In fact, one of the things I've been worried about, and counterterrorism officials have

They have agents in continental United States.

Good news is we fired all of our on-experts at the FBI and DHS as a big threat right now. And the question is, do they lack the capability to do something, or have they simply

“refrain from doing something provocative or spectacular against us?”

Are you spectacular by and then, by the way, anodine shares sense of a big atrocity designed to get attention, or have they simply refrain from doing it because they didn't want to provoke us into going all in with a full-scale land invasion occupation kind of thing? That said, as time goes by, they may decide that, now's the time to kind of test the waters here and to get our licks at, right?

There's a four-mentioned U.S. intelligence official I met with. I kind of painted a scenario for this person and said, this is kind of how I see things going in future.

You tell me if I'm wrong.

The scenario is tantamount to what the Israelis you've been mystically called, "Mowing the grass," are "Mowing the lawn." In other words, every several months, when they see, on toward activity, weapons transfers, the rebuilding of something that they feel the Iranians or that some foreign state adversary or non-state adversary should not have, they go in and they bomb.

It's not a full-scale war, it's not 12 days, sometimes it's an overnight operation, but they just do that, right? Here it's more complicated for these Israelis because Iran is much farther away than Lebanon's Syria, certainly Gaza, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to help them with refueling

“or even base-sharing rights, or perhaps even joining in some operations like this, right?”

So Iran, right now, it lacks air defense systems.

Its skies are completely vulnerable to our air superiority of not air supremacy.

The question is, does that become the state as well? And do the Iranians just kind of continue to take it as we dull it out to them? And I think the interesting thing here is, you know, it's in foreign policy, it's kind of easy to set a new normal, right? George W. Bush took a decision, Iran must not get nuclear weapons.

And obviously the policy's changed over time. We did sucks in that, we did all kinds of covert operations, the Israelis blew up scientists. They went in and, you know, eventually exhalated the nuclear archival bomb, I had the JCPOA, Donald Trump had the 12th day war. No, this hurt.

We had people inside, but it was a concerted bipartisan multi-year decade, actually, effort to prevent Iran from doing something. My question is, does this now become the new normal, where every successive administration so long as this regime persists, has to engage in some kind of kinetic operation, maybe plausibly denial, maybe covert action, you know, on the ground, things go boom in the

night, simply to keep them from getting back up on two feet again. And this is intelligence-efficient, I spoke to said, this is pretty much how we see it, going forward. Yeah. So here's the counterpoint to that, or maybe not, I don't know, let's talk this through.

Because the geopolitical element in the region is going to determine a lot of that. I mean, we have reporting that MBS was pushing Trump to not do the ceasefire and wanted to go finish the job more, so it's not just the Israelis, it's the Saudis, but it's also, obviously, BB and the Israelis that want, you know, as much as they can get. So it's a out of us, as far as the capitating Iranian regime and their power.

And so, okay, let's say we get into that type of new status quo that you're talking about, they have some kind of ceasefire, it's their conflagration set that sprout out over the next three years while Trump is in power, and, you know, just like, we bond the last year and then we came in, the next year we got to do something, the next year we got to do something.

I mean, it's not out of a question that both parties end up having a nominee in 2028 that are running on, we need to decouple from Israel, and we need to separate ourselves from this.

“So I think that that might cause a new normal, right, but it also might cause a backlash”

year in the country. It's not going to just be the Israelis asking for this now, it's going to be the Gulf States as well. So the Emirates have been very outspoken, interestingly, I saw one official quoted in the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago saying, you know, for all the storm and drying

about, oh, you know, this is a disaster for the region, and, you know, Israeli pro Israel opinion in the United States has, has cratered across both parties, right? He said that we see it differently. We see the new state as quo being, we must keep the Iranians down, and, oh, actually, we want the Americans in more in our neighborhood, and we want the Israelis in more, too,

to ensure this. And the level of cooperation, not just by the Emirates and the Saudis, I mean, I don't put very high estimation on these talks between the Israelis and the Lebanese, which little Marco is overseeing. He gets the fun profile, right?

He then goes to Pakistan. He does ultimate fighting, and he's like, stays in DC and makes, you know, two ambassadors

However, however, I do think that there's a recognition that, as I said earlier, you know,

we cannot allow Iran to reassert itself in any way shape or form from what it had been able to do up until this point, right? Because now we've gone to war with it, now it will be seeking revenge.

“I mean, there's a pretty clear, we killed this debt on day one within hours, right?”

With our intelligence, these Israelis bomb the shit out of, you know, not only him, but this sort of conclave, the access to resistance, somebody on Twitter said it, they love two things. They, you know, they love death to America, chanting that, and they love, like, all hands meetings, right?

They just show up together from an HR perspective, very, very bad decision. They needed to have the dedicated survivor. They didn't learn from the state of the union, that there needs to be, like, a cabinet official, like Doug Burgund, that doesn't go.

And so you know, who's the earliest online of success?

Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the new Supreme Leader Feminis son is himself a creature of the IRGC. So the idea that the IRGC has been engaged in the creeping takeover of the state, replacing the clerics, that's been something that's kind of been in the background for many, many

years. Customs of the money, the general that we lacked in 2020 in Iraq, who was the head of the Codesforce, their expeditionary unit, who himself was kind of the architect of these proxies across the region. There's a lot of muttering and speculation that this guy was kind of, you know, either

one day wage a coup or simply takeover as a military commander.

“So now I think we have facilitated that process in killing the previous lot.”

And the question is, are they going to be, as I say, you know, they're going to be more pragmatic and amenable to some kind of accord with us. Maybe some joint racket, you know, Alex Wittkov can get into that. Yeah. It depends on how much money you're on.

Any foreign minister and, you know, crypto farms in Krasnodar, you know, minting stable coins to charged holes. I don't know. I mean, you know, it's possible, but I don't see it quite going that swimmingly. Yeah.

I mean, Trump does have the superpower of just being able, the superpower might be waning right now. But he has in the past been able to say to his base, you know, eat this shit sandwich and call it the golden age, right? Like he, that is what he was built to do.

Okay. And so maybe you can do that again here. Like, are you going against this and for, you know, the piece starts going bad and they're being more escalation just goes back to that New York Times report that like, it's hard to see how they come out of these negotiations with anything that looks better than the

JCPOA and, you know, anything where the Iranians are making money. Well, they want sanctions relief, right? And any sanctions relief given what it took to cobble into place, this sanctions regime over time. I mean, there were some that came with the JCPOA rather famously and notoriously

depending on, you know, perspective. But, you know, they stand to make billions and they certainly are interested in making billions right now. So, yeah, but again, you know, there's going to be enormous pressure on Trump not to take, you know, some sham or, you know, Fugaisy deal that's going to make him look like, you

know, a Trump or worse than Obama, right? You're going to get the FDD crowd, you're going to get APAC, you're going to get BB himself coming to DC saying you mustn't. You're going to get the, the Arabs Gulf States also putting pressure on him not to do this.

You know, we're going to live in, like liberty and Levant on the weekend, prime time, I mean, he has shown, you know, I mean, if you, you just look at what Tucker is now doing in his social media and his marketing campaign, low IQ hats, right, putting up on the daily caller, you know, old magga, you know, all the white area and blue-eyed Christians and new magga practitioners of the Shinto religion, perhaps, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's

Mark Levin, it's, uh, Laura Lumer, uh, Ben Shapiro and Trump, I mean, basically denounced

Tucker, Megan.

“Well, Tucker said that he was a slave to Israel, right?”

Yeah, Tucker, you know, that it's hard to live as a slave. Yeah. And it is fine that even in this moment where Tucker is now in full-out war with Trump, like even at this late of date, he is still doing the thing where Trump doesn't have agency himself.

Well, there's just a thing. And he still won't go all the way there to say, right, it's Trump himself that has been alive. Even now, he has to be a slave to the, you know, mysterious Jewish forces. These really have been advocating for years, uh, starting with, with W, please go in and

take care of this for us for years. And every administration has said no, Trump said yes, because in his mind, taking at Iran, and not just the nuclear program and his mind accomplishing that, which could not be done by Jimmy Carter on, would be his legacy. It wouldn't matter.

He's been in peach twice. It wouldn't matter, you know, that he's, his mental and moral faculties are non-existent.

The price of gas at the palm of the economy, runaway corruption, war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I took out the Ayatollah. I destroyed the Islamic Republic. That's me.

So yeah, don't, don't, don't, don't Trump is, is in the cockpit here.

Mark forces on the internet, like to think that, you know, the Jews are at once all powerful,

but also kind of weak and pathetic. I mean, it's how he calls in his announced a publishing imprint, which I thought we controlled the media. How is he able to do this, you know, his first author is Russell Brown, that guy who's been accused of rape and sexual assault, who wants to declare how he can become a Christian

in seven days. Nice work if you can get it, you know, truly, man. I love this. It's just like, which, which religious hockster do you want to go with?

“If you want to take the JD Vance, like Winnie the Pooh in the Tuxedo religious hockster,”

I came to Catholicism at the same time, I came to the church of Trump, that does feel like it's a little bit of conflict, but both conversions happen simultaneously, or you have the Russell Brand kind of, you know, tabloid version, the, the, the front of the grocery store version, cheap and easy seven days, seven days to heaven. Yeah.

You got it. You can, you can sexually assault young girls, but as long as you read my book, and you go on the Tucker Carlson podcast, no means yes, according to the Nazarene, and please, you know, sign up for my sub-stack. That's, that's the new, the new state of our public intellectuals.

Donald Trump is in the cockpit, but boy, he is also a pliable and malleable person, and if Donald Trump was in the cockpit and somebody, it was in the, you know, it was riding shotgun, given on the hard sell on Greenland, we might have been invading new instead. So I'm saying, like he, he is very susceptible to it the last person said, I don't know what doesn't do.

It doesn't mean that there's a puppet master, a secret conspiracy, but I just, I, be, obviously, foremost, but also MBS and his business partners in the Gulf States, got us into this in a big way.

“But for all that, I mean, it's important to realize there is kind of a through line”

with Trump, you know, he's been down on NATO for decades before he decided to run for president. He's kind of had a soft spot for Russia to put it mildly for as many years when he went there to Moscow in 1987, you already do being in the former ambassador to the U.N. famously paid him that visit at Trump Tower and polished his throne, oh, your, yours was the first

building we saw coming from the airport and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he went, you know, to the Soviet Union and God knows what happened to him there. He's been talking about the state of our moves for many, many years, you know.

I mean, I, I've, I've always said when he threatens military action, people forget that

taco, you know, Trump always chickens out that was coined by Wall Street analysts and traders over his backing down on tariffs, but he usually does not back down when he threatens to not go to war per se, but to engage in some kind of military confrontation. For him, it's not about war. I mean, it is war legally speaking, but he doesn't like sending in troops.

He's not in it for the long haul. He would never do a full-scale occupation, which is why frankly. So things go boom. Yes.

“And you know, I, I'm, I'm very glad of the fact that we're not sending marine expeditionary”

units to Cargallon because every marine I've talked to said, we were going to lose lots of people. This is, you know, it's, it's a kill box that, that's sort of in, if it be a assault kind of thing. And it's also people who have no experience doing it in combat because these are young

kids, right? These are not veterans from the war on terror. So, you know, if a blockade is sort of the second tier operation, all right, I mean, find to see if it works.

The Iranians, by one analysis, stand to lose $435 million a day by not being able to move

their oil. You know, China gets 40% of its oil through the straight-of-form moves about 13% of it comes from Iran. So I'm very curious to hear what Trump's conversation with Gene next month is going to look and sound like.

Can we talk about China on that front just a little bit more, because this reports that least one ship that we already have sanctioned because they are taken around the oil violated the blockade, just went straight to the straight, and on to China, that happened over the weekend. Another report out there, from CNN, that China's preparing weapons shipments to its

friends in Iran, if the ceasefire breaks down. They've been sharing intelligence with the Iranians just as the Russians have. The Russians are keen not to move it away from China, but you know, I spend more time focused on Russia. The Russians are very keen to, they put on the table, we can send the Iranian to us, we

will enrich it for the Iranians. So let us do a favor for Trump in pursuit during, in facilitation of our grand reproach mom with the United States. You know, live sanctions on Iran, yes, yes, yes, but let's, let's, let's sanctions on us to let's end the war and Ukraine on favorable terms to ourselves.

Yeah, I just think it's worth sitting on this for a second, he is kind of an a corner on the threats to China, again, not in the, in the cheap version of Taco, but just in

civilization. It's like, I really don't want to do this. I mean, he's making these threats on China that he doesn't really want to do. I mean, he doesn't want to interact the Chinese ships, like he was doing in Venezuela. It's easy to interact those ships, and it's in our territory, it matters to like the

impacts on the American homeland are going to be great if things get dice in the Gulf. Like if we really get into a confrontation with Chinese ships carrying Iranian oil, like that has massive implications, and if he goes back to the liberation day style tariffs on China for doing this, that has massive implications when we're already seeing inflation go back up.

Like he doesn't want a confrontation with China right now. No, and China has been all too happy to watch the United States burn through some of

its critical munitions going after Iran.

I mean, I just saw a report. You posted this that we fired our entire stuff. Yeah. So the prism is basically the next generation of attack homes. It's longer range.

It's more powerful. One of the reasons we were able to give Ukraine attack homes after this big back and forth

“about should we shouldn't we, is we were phasing them out, right?”

The prism was the new the new game in town. I don't know, I have to talk to my weapons being counter friends, how many we had in our stockpile. There's obviously classified stocks as well.

But it seems like on in the first few days of this thing, we launched all of them.

To say nothing about our expenditure of Patriot missiles, you know, the Ukrainians were staring mouth the gate, watching us fire Patriot interceptors at fucking Iranian shahids. When these guys have their own drones that take down shahids, that they've manufactured at scale, simply because they needed to. And they use shotguns to take down shahids and key for Christ 6.

So the United States is learning on its feet how to wage 21st century warfare. And I'm sorry to say this, you know, the first casualties, fatalities, I'm sorry, that we suffered in Kuwait. That was simply because the military facility, the blast walls that were constructed were constructed for what purpose, keeping suicide bombers on vehicles out.

But they weren't constructed to withstand strikes from drones that could easily navigate their way, you know, better than missiles can. So we've got a lot of updating to do in our arsenal and in our force posture.

“And I think the Chinese, I mean, they're watching all this on satellite, you know, footage.”

They've got human assets in play. The Iranians are sharing with them in real time what they're doing and how we're responding. And, you know, all I shift to Taiwan now, right? Yeah. It was not exactly a far-fetched scenario that in the middle of this thing, the Chinese could

just say, well, the Americans are, they're bogged down over here. Let's go, let's go do it, you know, and Taiwan now, but we're lucky they didn't. On to the Ukraine thing, and then we'll kind of take that back into Hungary. Yeah. One other thing I saw that you posted that Zelensky posted over the weekend was an

announcement for the first time in war and enemy position was captured entirely by ground

robotic systems and drones without any infantry, a robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions. I saw those interesting anecdotes that ties to kind of what you're talking about here about the ways in which, like we hadn't quite adapted to the changes in weaponry. I retweeted that because it's interesting him standing there.

It looks like the set of Terminator 2, you know, with these kind of fancy robotics. I want to put an asterisk on his comment. There is a misconception that in Ukraine they can make up for their manpower shortage and relation to Russia with technology. drones, fiber optic cable drones, you know, he's self-propelled, robotic artillery systems,

whatever. Not true.

“They need infantry, all wars need to be fought with soldiers, right?”

Whether or not, you know, the heavy lifting in this case was done by unmanned systems, probably, there's truth to that. But at the end of the day, you're not going to hold to rain with -- It's a frenzy from the Jetsons with robots, you need soldiers in place, correct? So I would take that with a little bit of a pinch of assault.

However, it is absolutely the case that Ukraine is now the world's leading innovator in military technology. One of the interesting developments, if you're looking at the American criminology of who's on top and who supports what? So Jady Vance's guy, Dan Driscoll, in the Pentagon, who is being considered evidently

as a possible replacement for our Chinabartist friend, P. Hexeth. Driscoll has actually become more pro-Ukraine because he's gone to keep, he's seen what the Ukrainians have done, and he wants some of that. I mean, our military requires Ukrainian ingenuity and no-how, and it is, you know, it's ridiculous that Trump was shitting all over Zelensky because Zelensky was traveling to

I mean, the Emirates, for Christ 6, you know, it's impossible to tell where Emirati intelligence

ends and Russian intelligence begins according to the CIA. The Emirates are going to decrain it and saying, "Help us." That's a big deal. And that's a net win for Zelensky. You know, Kathy Young did a great piece in the bulwark about, and I said this at the outset.

It was like, "Oh, you know, oil prices are going to skyrocket. We're now lifting sanctions on Russia. Sure." But, you know, the geopolitical correlation of forces, if you like, actually favor Ukraine here, because going to war with a Russian partner, which was Iran, if not a client state, that's

not a good thing for Moscow. And whatever sugar high that the Russians received as an economic benefit from lifted sanctions, was mitigated by the fact that Ukrainian just kept bombing the shit out of Russian oil. And they're criminals, and they're energy infrastructure.

“And also, for the first time, in, I think, over a year, maybe more, the Russians, their offensive”

has ground to a halt. They had not taken any substantive terrain on the battlefield. So Ukraine hasn't come out so badly in this war. I'm not saying that's a reason to have done the war. Sure.

You know, let's just have a little sense of perspective here. And Zelensky has done what he needed to do as a statesman, which has cut bilateral deals with partners in the global south that had wanted absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine. The one country that still won't do anything with him is Israel, because BB is terrified of trouble.

To that point, I'm hoping that Pete Hakseth allies in the Pentagon are not monitoring this podcast, because they're going to be clipping that little bit about the end just going to come into Ukraine head and sending it up to the White House, making sure you're all done. He Trump can see it, because Hakseth's worried about the coup.

I like to so fit men, paranoia, where I can. What can I say? Okay. The other thing that is, I mean, this was kind of happening anyway, but marginally benefited Ukraine was the result of the election in Hungary, because the blocking of the funds from

the EU that Hungary was doing, the US trial was essentially kind of working their way around that anyway. But now, officially, that there won't be any block on the funds from the EU to Hungary. Talk about that. And then I just give us a bigger picture take on the result.

Yeah. I mean, if it's nothing short of breathtaking, you know, or upon a spent 16 years doing everything he can to foreclose on exactly this contingency, which is to say, "Gerrymandering

“up the Wazoo," I think today, what two days after the election was the first interview”

that the new incoming Prime Minister Peter Mayer has done with a public broadcast in Hungary.

So state media had basically blocked out, had banned all opposition.

So this was a guy who just traveled the country, went to six, seven, eight different towns and villages in a day, shook hands with everybody, had to go door knocking to make his presence known and to make his policies understandable to Hungarian voters. There were other controversies. I'm very happy to say that I played a part in some of them, including intercepted phone calls

between the Hungarian, soon to be former Foreign Minister, Peter CRTO, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. These phone calls were what? CRTO, feeding Lavrov in real time, sensitive information or intelligence about EU negotiations over sanctions packages to punish Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, feeding

him documents, giving him briefs on the discussion about Ukraine and Moldova's accession talks with respect to the European Union, asking his Russian counterpart, give me talking

“points I can use in Brussels to dress up a pro-Russian initiative as serving the Hungarian”

national interests. We showed that the transcripts of these calls to Western intelligence and counterintelligence officials, and they said it read like a case officer, Lavrov, handling an agent. CRTO, and you had chance in Hungary of Russians go home, Russians go off, CRTO is a spy.

Yesterday, the new Prime Minister-designette said we finally found Peter CRTO because he had

disappeared after the election results came in for a day or more. He's in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shredding documents related to sanctions. So he's certainly behaving like a fifth columnist, and this guy was just, I mean, he was a functionary. He was an agent of Victor Orba, who himself professed that I am but a mouse to Vladimir Putin's

attack, right? So the end of a Russian satropy in Central Europe, the end of Russia's sort of backdoor entry into the European Union and NATO is nothing short of extraordinary. And look, that's be clear. The new government, he's a led by Peter Mayr. This is not some ultra-left Marxist-assant, you know, woe conspiracy.

more stringent than the outgoing fee-dash party.

“I mean, Mayr was himself a loyalist, Orba, who then defected from his apparatus and wage”

this kind of dark horse campaign. But that's a good thing because Hungarians went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly. This is now a super-majority. So a lot can be undone that has been done in the last 16 years from packing the courts to, you know, giving media outlets to your preferred cronies and so on and so forth.

They went to the polls because the state of Hungary's economy was enruined. The relationships that Hungary had created with next-door neighbors, Poland, Ukraine, but also with Brussels and also, frankly, with the United States because it was really creepy. What Orban has done? I mean, Mayr has said that, or alleged that CPAC was financed by the Hungarian state.

That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? You know, I mean, this kind of nexus between Maga and what was seen as the hub or ground zero of the populist reactionary right in Europe, that's now over. So just bringing the temperature down on some of these interactions is going to be very, very helpful.

And, you know, it means that sanctions packages will not be blocked. The Hungarians will not shake down Brussels for subsidies. The Hungarians will not do the bidding of the Kremlin. The Hungarians may even have good bilateral relations with Ukrainians. Orban was his sole campaign was my opponent as a Ukrainian agent.

And if you vote for him, it's World War III. Just a couple other points to add to that. David Behr, his written for us a bunch, about Hungary's over there, was Texan football crystal and made a little bit over the weekend. I just got one of the things I'm going to flag, but the importance of this.

“Magic was blocked out, as you mentioned, of all the state media interviews, right?”

Like, Orban had a complete control. The independent media really did spring up though in Hungary. And like, it should be mentioned, and those folks should be, should be acknowledged. Like, it was a lot of online stuff, but if there was, I believe, one weekly paper. And if you kind of look at the districts like where that was distributed as one of areas where

he overperformed particularly well, that it is important in this modern world, reality and facts confined away, maybe it takes too long and it takes time, but eventually stuff gets out there. And I think there's like a lesson to, for us, obviously, in that, as Trump tries to consolidate control with his friends, ahead of these media and technology companies, that the stuff

is beat backable. It is, yeah. I mean, so vsquared.org is one of the outlets that was responsible for kind of breaking these stories about, you know, Hungarian Russian collusion, Shabby Paniay who's my colleague had to flee the country because his reporting, exposing this relationship between C.R.

To and Lebrov, led to Orban and his government accusing Shabby of being a Ukrainian spy. And there was an investigation open to him, and they had already put Pegasus software on his phones. They had already surveilled him. They treated him as an enemy of the people, right?

And now, you know, with one vote, this guy, the best investigative reporter in all of Hungary can return home to Budapest and continue to do what he does. And, you know, he said the first thing I plan to do is report on the new government. You know, he's, I mean, he's like, I just want normal politics. I just want to be in a normal democratic state of it.

So yes, media played a big role in this. Yeah, to the other point, I was trying to make this a matter of, like, yeah, it's center right conservative. I forgot who posted this, I started to give them credit, but I laughed at one post on when the results were coming in on social media, which is like in Hungary, these election results,

center right party, 55 percent, right party, Nazi curious, 38 percent, right party, Nazi

enthusiasts, seven percent, and it's like, those are the options. But, you know, bear was talking about how his campaign was very much infused with a little

“like small, liberal values to, like being a center right guy, which is, which is important,”

different. And there's a viral threat going around if you shared a bunch of people shared from a low and vulgarity, to Mar, who I don't, I don't know, but she was talking about the importance of Hungarian who lives in a stony, yeah, by the way. Yeah, she was talking about the importance of campaign and to share out this, is he a

center right person? Yes. And nobody cares. He believes in a democratic state in the role of law and his job is to take Hungary back there is declarity does not care what one believes in or whom one loves as long as they

love Hungary. And I do think that there are, like, again, important lessons to that about how the sort of reinvigorating, just the small, liberal values. And, you know, we can hash out, you know, tech, marginal tax rate differences later. Well, exactly.

That was great. That was great. You know, just to put this in American terms, right, and this is not a perfect

technology because the person about to invoke was never a loyalist to Donald Trump.

Trump and actually built a coalition behind him to take down Donald Trump politically.

“Would anybody be batting an eye or questioning the fact that he is infinitely greater a person”

to be president at its states? And of course not. Sure. So, you know, the choice is not, you know, it's a fascist or a communist. I mean, unfortunately in European history, that has very often been the choice.

But sometimes it's better not to have somebody who's saddled with whatever you want to call it, the woke mind virus or, you know, LGBTQ ideology or, you know, I mean, this is a guy who every Hungarian sort of nationalist cultural conservative can say, yeah, he's fine. And that's what they need it.

That's what they need it. And the gaze were kissing in Booth. And the gaze were kissing in Booth. And the gaze were kissing in Booth. You know, so you could get both.

You can have both. That the other thing I want to bring up about this as it relates to lessons back home is the importance of optimism and belief and persistence, yeah, because the degree to which Oregon gained in rigged their electoral system is far more advanced than when where Trump is here.

And far because it's a smaller country, you know, and so it's easier to, you know, control sorts of bureaucratic lovers, apart because he'd been in power 16 years. The Hungarian system versus our system, like there are a bunch of reasons. And yet, you know, all of the little games been ship, he tried to do didn't work in the end to backpired and it worked for a while, but in the end it didn't work.

I get very frustrated sometimes with people in the so-called pro-democracy side that speak and fatalist terms about the way that Trump has broken into democracy. And I definitely think that there's a bunch of stuff that's permanently broken that we're

never going back to, but like the ability to win at the ballot box over, you know, more

radical proposals that you hear out there, the Hungarian people like Demonstrated, not only is it possible, but it's dual conflict and he can do so in a overwhelming fashion. Well, and also I would say that the kind of hyper-reality of online discourse really didn't matter, you know, the Russians were on the ground and Hungary, at the same time, J.D. Vance was there rallying for a war-bond, dialing in Donald Trump on speakerphone.

And, you know, the GRU group, I know quite a lot about, they brought in all their political technologists to so-disinformation to push these conspiracy theories to blame Zelensky for, you know, blowing this up, or the, you know, mayor was a Ukrainian spy, and at the end of the day, all of that cynicism, all of that brainerot, didn't matter, because people you know, they want more, of a better life, they want more income, they want affordability,

“they want, you know, it's kind of the materialist conception of history, that's what drove”

this thing, right? And yes, they're exhausted by having their country be the focal point of everything wrong in Europe. There is no reason. I mean, Hungary belonged to what's known as the Visicot IV, another Visicot IV, I think

it's the catastrophic failure of a lot, right? It was, I think, second-lowest wages in Europe

arguably one of the poorest countries, if not the poorest country in the European Union. There is no reason, Hungary could not be Poland, you know, Poland will overtake Japan in terms of GDP per capita, I think, next year. Poland, dispending, is Will spend 5% of its GDP on defense, you know, there's daily mail headlines about polls who went to live in work in the UK, pre-Brexit, returning to Poland because

the economy is better there than it is in Britain. There's no reason, Hungary can't have the same thing. So I think for a lot of Hungarians, this is going to like a Pepsi challenge, you know, do we want to live in, you know, trash canis stand, Stephen Cotkin once called the Post-Soviet's

“base, or do we want to live in what Rumsfeld, I think, quite rightly once called New”

Europe, because it is, New Europe, the center of gravity has shifted eastward. So it's center of Europe and Eastern Europe, I mean, you look at the Baltic states, you look at Scandinavia, you look at Poland, these are going to be the countries that will define security going forward in the 21st century, because if Russia is allowed to get back up on its two feet, if it does, God forbid, win this war, I don't think is going to win

the war, but you know what I mean, if it's allowed to reconstitute itself, it doesn't suffer a strategic defeat in Ukraine, these are the frontline states that will be doing the heavy lifting for all of us.

Well, it's ties us back to the first topic, which again is why I've just been so gobsmacked

by the idiocy of Trump's choices with both the tariffs, but then this war and Iran and the economics. And if Trump was actually just singularly minded on gaining as much authoritarian power as possible and, you know, keeping his popularity as high as possible, and he could have done a lot of what he did beginning the first term, just keep jacking up the debt, next

guy can pay that, just, you know, flood the country with as much money as possible, don't do the stupid tariffs or just do a few of them and call it a big deal, you know, pick a

He ends up in this place where we have an energy crisis now, we have inflation, economic

“stagnation, I mean, that is the death now of these guys.”

The real tragedy here, the missed opportunity, is a Republican president coming in in 2024. There was a lot of capital to work with here. It's a good thing that, you know, we set this new benchmark for NATO 5% spending of GDP on defense. I'm not going to say that he was wrong to do that.

His tactics were miserable, he threatened to go to war with a NATO ally, and next their territory, he treated another NATO ally as the 51st state, I mean, the some kind of colonial possession in rating for the United States, I mean, it just idiosy. However, you know, Europe stands there waiting to rearm, to invest heavily in its own defense, to take basically post-called war security architecture seriously, perhaps for the first

time.

And they're not doing it because we're encouraging them and saying, you know, we will always

be with you. We will always be by your side, but we need you to take on a greater share of their responsibility. They're doing it now because they realize we're going in the opposite direction. You're abandoning them, you know, I was in Stockholm with the former Lithuanian Foreign

Minister and the current Swedish Foreign Minister on a platform in August of last year. And I said, you know, actually quoting Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany who had used this term decoupling from the United States. When I said decoupling, again, not my own coinage. I was citing the Chancellor of Germany, I mean, gasps of horror throughout the room, NATO officials,

“other, you know, the, I think the, the princess of Sweden nearly passed out.”

Everyone said, no, we, we, we can, we mustn't do this. This is impossible. The United States has to be here. And then after this whole fan dango with Greenland, all of a sudden decoupling is not such a radioactive term.

People are beginning to say, why don't we do this long time ago, you know?

So I, I want to be very careful, I always say this because this kind of shit that goes viral

in a bad way, but, you know, there is a way to instrumentalize anti-Americanism as it exists now, which is really anti-Trumpism in Europe for the greater good. There is a benevolent form of it. And I am very encouraging of this, this effort. The European should tell us, go fuck yourself, every time we do something stupid or immoral

or unjust or we threaten them, and they should prepare, they should prepare for a world without us. Okay, my older audience about to come in for a second, but also you hear the European leaders start talking about, you know, the value of deregulation. Like it's part of decoupling is making sure they can, you know, stand on their own two feet

economically too. I'm hearing more of that kind of talk when, you know, you're listening to speeches from a crone, etc., when we come to economic development, getting companies to build there, instead of here, etc., no, it's going to be our detriment in the end.

And you know, I play these kind of weird reindeer games online about, you know, Marco

is up, fans is down, Marco has, you know, the stink of this whole thing attaches to him. He went to Munich, he gave a speech, didn't go down so well. He went to Budapest, he endorsed Orban, too, but I will say, every European you talk to, meaning Europeans in political power, they know the cut of his trip, closet reignite is what

they say. And they don't think he believes. Well, they know the cut of vans is direct. Correct. The more importantly they know the cut of vans is direct.

The more importantly they know the cut of vans is direct. If it's Rubio, who's the heir apparent for 2028 versus whatever Democrat, things are not so bad versus JD vans, you know, who may get it early, if Trump chokes on a cheeseburger in the oval. Yeah.

“Well, unfortunately, Michael, I think Trump's going to take both of them down with him,”

and it's going to end up being so even worse. So we'll save that for another day. That is Michael Weiss. I always appreciate you. Thank you for my pleasure being on the brief.

Our audience, but also me since I was, I was glancing at the hungry stuff from the concert. I do. I can admit that. We're not sure again. What's not to like?

Yeah, exactly. I was trying to check out of the Iran more stuff. But I wanted to happiness. Once I heard it was happiness, I did do a little bit of happy scrolling, but I appreciate the briefing.

And we'll be talking again soon. All right, brother. Good to see you, man. Hi, for everybody else. We back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

We got a new guest. I'm excited about it. We'll see you all then. The board podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Loots and audio engineering and

editing by Jason Brown.