Because We Say So - by Mr. Fish

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America’s newest quagmire in the Middle East is like its old quagmires in the Middle East. It is based, as were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on a gross misreading of our adversaries, a catastrophic failure to understand the limits of imperial power and no discernable strategy. It swells the profits of the war industry, wasting billions of public funds, alienates our allies and erodes the global power and prestige of the United States.

Dying empires, governed by the corrupt and the incompetent, are blinded by militarism and hubris. They are unable to read the world around them. They stumble into self-defeating cul-de-sacs — as we did in Iraq, Afghanistan and earlier in Vietnam — where military adventurism accelerates self-inflicted wounds.

The war on Iran is one more chapter in our precipitous and ultimately fatal decline.

Tehran’s 10-point temporary ceasefire proposal — brokered by Pakistani mediators and presented to the U.S. 40 days after war against Iran had begun — is tantamount to surrender terms. It demands the end of U.S. and Israeli attacks, including in Lebanon. It calls for the removal of U.S. military bases and installations from the region. It solidifies Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. It refuses to abandon uranium enrichment. It calls for the end to sanctions and termination of anti-Iranian resolutions by the United Nations Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency. It also requires release of frozen assets — estimated at $100 billion — and reparations for the U.S. and Israeli attacks.

This is too bitter a humiliation for the U.S. and Israel to accept.

Within hours of the Iranian proposal, Israel — determined to sabotage any agreement — launched a devastating air attack against Lebanon. The attack, which was carried out over 10 minutes, included the bombing of central Beirut. It involved 50 fighter jets and 108 airstrikes that dropped around 160 bombs, killing 350 people and wounding 1,000 others. The lightning and unprovoked massacre, known as “Black Wednesday,” is a potent reminder that Israel has no intention of allowing this war to end. With the U.S. not ready to admit defeat, and Israel’s bloodlust, we are in for a very rough ride.

Iran submitted an updated proposal last week, which Trump said is “totally unacceptable.”

But Iran, with its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, can afford to wait. The longer it maintains its blockade over shipping — roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz — the more global economic pain it inflicts.

There is no good outcome for the U.S.

The Trump administration’s obstinacy and Israel’s determination to resume attacks on Iran ensures that the global economy will barrel towards a global depression.

The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilizers which are produced in the Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz this year if the war continues. This ensures a huge rise in food costs.

Shortages are already shutting down global manufacturing and production. The fragile, interdependent global supply chains are seizing up.

This economic ecosystem, as Iran has shown, is easy to destroy. It will be very hard to piece back together.

Iran suffered devastating blows to its civilian infrastructure and economy — including residential areas, schools, health centers, police stations, churches and synagogues and energy, desalinization plants, steel and pharmaceutical facilities — as well as its military assets, including parts of its navy, air force and missile launch capabilities. It endured “decapitation strikes” against its senior political and military leaders at the start of the war, which included the assassinations of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the secretary of Iran’s Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Abdolrahim Mousavi, among others.

None of the U.S. and Israeli objectives, however, have been met.

The new Iranian leadership — centered around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — is more defiant and intransigent than the previous leadership.

Iran maintains control over the Strait of Hormuz. It charges as much as $2 million for every oil tanker passing through it. These tariffs — which Iran introduced as part of its demand for war reparations — must be paid in Chinese currency, part of an attempt by Iran, China and Russia to break the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Iran also retains significant missile and drone stockpiles and enriched uranium, which it has warned it will increase to 90 percent purity if attacked again.

Iran is the clear winner of Operation Epic Fury. Trump is the clear loser. The dilemma is that Trump’s penchant for inventing his own reality means he is unlikely to acknowledge his blunder and negotiate a way out of the debacle he created.

Trump, without Congressional approval, has already squandered at least $29 billion on the war according to the Pentagon, although analysis by Stephen Semler of Popular Information places the figure closer to $72 billion.

The human cost is already high. U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed more than 3,300 Iranian civilians, including at least 221 children. Over three million Iranians have been displaced, along with over one million Lebanese from Israel’s ongoing bombardment and ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon. There are, at the same time, over two million displaced Palestinians from the genocide in Gaza and another 1,100 killed and 40,000 displaced Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Fuel shortages and supply disruptions are crippling countries in Asia, with Thailand facing panic buying and rationing at some petrol stations. Vietnam and South Korea are scrambling to secure alternative crude and fuel supplies. Japan, which relies on the Persian Gulf for roughly 95 percent of its crude oil imports, has had to dip twice into its strategic reserves since the war started in February.

The rise in price of liquefied petroleum means cooking fuel prices have increased by about seven percent for domestic use in India, but have skyrocketed by around 76 percent in the commercial sector. This has resulted in production cuts and job losses in the garment and textile sector in India, as well as in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

There are shortages of helium, aluminum and naphtha, also transited through the Strait of Hormuz. These shortages have seen production declines, including among microchip manufacturers, construction firms and the plastic packaging sector. Steel mills in India and automakers in Japan have cut production. Tens of thousands of workers across the globe have already lost their jobs.

Asian airlines, along with many on the European continent — including those from Germany, Turkey and Greece — are loading extra fuel at their airports, cutting flights and raising surcharges with the doubling of the price of jet fuel. The United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s richest states with sovereign wealth funds that total more than $2 trillion — has asked the U.S. for a “Wartime Financial Lifeline” in the wake of missile-damaged gas fields and a halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Millions of people, especially in Asia and Africa, are at risk of falling into dire poverty because of the war, according to the United Nations Development Program.

The U.S., which is a net exporter of oil and natural gas, has been relatively insulated from the global shock, although gasoline prices have risen by around 40 percent to more than $4.50 a gallon. The average U.S. diesel price has increased by nearly 50 percent, surpassing $5.60 a gallon. But it is only a matter of time before the breakdown of the global economy ravages the U.S.

The Trump administration is pushing us towards a global depression with all of the social and political instability that comes with a catastrophic financial crisis.

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Trump is desperate. He spews out expletive-laden threats to Iran on social media, writing “Open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards.” He also posts Artificial Intelligence generated images showing the U.S. military obliterating the Iranian military. He has threatened to bomb Iranians “back to the stone age where they belong,” and lambasts his critics as traitors:

“When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement.” He declared on Truth Social, “They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

This screed was followed by an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.”

Before leaving for China, Trump claimed: “We have Iran very much under control… We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”

The rants are pathetic and unhinged. But they are also ominous.

The U.S. is building up troop levels in the region. It has deployed the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit — composed of about 3,500 sailors and Marines — in addition to transport and strike fighter aircraft and assault and tactical assets. It has deployed the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group along with about 2,500 Marines from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit equipped with F-35B Lightning II Stealth Fighters, MV-22B Osprey, tilt rotors and attack helicopters. The U.S. has also sent around 2,000 paratroopers to the Persian Gulf and is reportedly considering augmenting these forces with an additional 10,000 troops.

A resumption of the bombing, coupled with even a limited ground assault, would ensure a long and costly war. It will fulfill Israel’s objective — which seeks to bomb Iran into a failed state — but will be another mortal blow to the U.S. empire.

A ground assault on Kharg Island — which lies 16 miles off Iran’s coast and serves as the country’s main oil storage and export terminal, processing around 90 percent of the country’s oil exports — would send seismic shock waves through the global economy. And if U.S. troops attempt to seize Iranian territory, Iran will deploy its arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, underwater drones and mines, making any occupation deadly.

We are in serious trouble.

The management of the conflict is far beyond the capabilities of the buffoons within the Trump administration. They prefer global misery and carnage to defeat. By the time they face the inevitable, they will have left mounds of corpses in their wake.

The tragedy is not that the empire is dying. The tragedy is that the empire is bringing so many innocents down with it.

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian historian and author, in his new book, “Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine,” traces the long arc of Palestinian resistance to the Zionist settler-colonial state leading to its current form in Hamas. It is resistance, defined by Palestinians themselves, as Dr. Baroud explains, that is the “sole leverage” of the Palestinian people in their struggle for existence, which began before the Nakba of 1948.

In this episode, Chris Hedges speaks with Professor Baroud about his deep personal connection to this struggle. Dr. Baroud’s family lived in the village of Beit Daras before being forcibly displaced to Gaza during the Nakba. In the current war, more than a hundred of his family members have been murdered by the Israeli Occupying Forces, including his sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, who was a physician and community leader. His losses go beyond that. Professor Baroud explains that due to the decades of confinement in Gaza, “everyone who dies in Gaza is somehow family, friend, neighbor, relative, connection of some kind.”

Dr. Baroud describes the “slow-motion genocide” of Palestinians through the blockade of Gaza and regular attacks, cruelly referred to by Zionists as ‘mowing the lawn’, which led to the Palestinian uprising on October 7, 2023. The world watched as the Israeli state waged a full-blown genocide that destroyed 92% of Gaza. Now, Palestinians are being squeezed into an even smaller area without the infrastructure they relied on previously. He describes the situation as more dire than before as “[Gazans] are being asked to engineer a miracle of survival while the world is looking on somewhere else.”

Hedges and Baroud discuss what the future holds for Palestine. Baroud is hopeful that Palestine will prevail given the steadfastness and ingenuity of Palestinians in their fight for survival. In his book, a type of people’s history that challenges the mainstream Zionist narrative, Baroud explains that even though there are divisions in Palestinian society - as there are in all societies and national liberation movements – there is an underlying unity he refers to as the “secret code of Gaza.” Palestinians also have a long history of “scholar-warriors” who have led successive liberation movements and have fostered connections with other liberation movements around the world. The Zionist state can only exist through military force, and Palestinians have demonstrated their powerful abilities to resist. Dr. Baroud admits proudly, “I don’t want to say [we are] super humans in Gaza, but our story speaks for itself.”

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Ramzy Baroud in his haunting memoir, “Before the Flood”, the chronicle of three generations of his family in Palestine, personalizes the struggle by Palestinians to endure British and then Israeli occupation. He details the intimacy of village life for the Al Badrasawis family in Beit Daras and later after the Nakba in 1948, the refugee camps in Gaza. His portrait weaves together ancestral history with the colonial forces that for a century have immiserated and oppressed the Palestinian people. Set against the unrelenting violence of settler colonialism, apartheid, and finally genocide, is the steadfast resistance of Palestinians who cling with ferocity to their land, their culture, and their faith.

Ramzy is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, which he has led since 1999. He holds a PhD in Palestine studies from the University of Exeter and is the author of eight books, including “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada”, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, “The Last Earth”, and “These Chains Will Be Broken”. He is also the co-editor with Ilan Pappé of “Our Vision for Liberation” and the forthcoming volume “Gaza Rising”, which examines Palestinian resistance and political transformation in Gaza, where he is from.

Ramzy, I want to begin with the dedication of your book: “To my sister, Dr. Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud. I write your name in full because that is how it appeared on the white bag that held your remains soon after the bomb was dropped.” I want to begin with that because this is a wound, at this point, I think almost no one in Gaza has escaped.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. I know that you ask difficult questions, but I didn’t realize that you were going to start with the most difficult question. You know, when the people who perish in the genocide, even if you don’t know them, even if they’re not close to you, as a Gazan, we are one large family. And I don’t mean that in a sentimental way, because we are essentially the descendants of the 200,000 Palestinian refugees that made their way to Gaza after the Nakba, and they multiplied within an area that actually shrunk. So, physically Gaza is a lot smaller than it was in 1948, but the population of Gaza has increased by over 10, 11 fold. And yet somehow, we created this space in which we are one family. I doubt that there is a single person anywhere in Gaza in which another family on the other side of Gaza cannot find some sort of a familial connection through mother, through father, through anything. It’s just you can’t create that separation after this much time. So, everyone who dies in Gaza is somehow family, friend, neighbor, relative, connection of some kind. But when the genocide grew in its intensity, it got closer and closer.

So, within the very first few days, you had three Baroud families that were killed in Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the center, in Khan Younis in the south, and in Jabalia in the north. And then, for whatever reason, we started counting. I don’t know why I was counting the dead. So, the number went 33, 55. We reached 110. And then I stopped counting because I didn’t know why I was counting my family that were killed, and then immediate cousins with their wives or husbands and children, aunts and uncles. But for some reason, you just never think that it’s going to hit that hard, so close to the point that it’s your own sister.

And there’s something about my sister that I think it’s important to denote here. She wasn’t just a doctor. And every doctor is very special in Gaza, especially in Gaza. But she was an intellectual. She was a community leader. She empowered so many women in the southern Gaza that they created this powerful clique basically of medical workers. She fought for their rights. She established unions. She seemed in a sense kind of like larger than life. And no matter what happened, somehow you feel like she is safe and you don’t know why. Maybe because she survived many massacres before. Maybe because she was the one who was responsible for dealing with the wounded of the various and previous wars. She told me, at one point she said, “You know, you bring so many children to this life as a doctor and to be the one who pronounced them dead within your own lifetime, it is something so difficult to bear, but that’s the life we live in.”

And just to wake up one morning and to see your sister on the news, there was complete shock and disbelief, but she’s the only Soma. Soma is not a common name in Gaza. She was one of the very few Somas. And how many Doctor Somas? So, I saw it on the Wafa News Agency. I saw the body in a white bag with the full name on it with “D-R” there. And I was like, no, I reported on it as if it’s not my sister. I knew she was my sister, but I wanted to hide it until my daughter came and told me, of course, devastated and crying,” I think Auntie Soma died.” And that’s when I realized, yeah, indeed, Auntie Soma has died and that was supposed to be the end of it, and it shouldn’t.

Chris Hedges: And Israel has targeted, not just journalists and of course many academics, but in particular, doctors and health workers.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: It has and there’s a reason for that. Israel wanted to ethnic cleanse the Palestinians from the very, very beginning. This is not something that Smotrich was talking about separately as if he is operating outside the system or Ben Gvir. This was the Israeli plan. This wasn’t just about killing. Yes, it was. It wasn’t just about revenge, and it was. It was about something much bigger. They thought the Nakba will end here. That chapter, they started in 1948, was supposed to be over now. Push the Palestinians out of Gaza and, by extension, the West Bank that really, for various reasons that we can discuss now or later, did not put up so much resistance would have been an easy target. You push the Palestinians out of the West Bank, you have ethnic cleansing there, annexation, Area C is gone and so forth and so on.

So how do you do that? You target the places that bring people together. You go after universities, schools, shelters and hospitals. This civilian infrastructure, which is, of course, the most obvious war crime ever, it wasn’t just because Israel was committing war crimes. Israel had a strategy - destroy the hospitals, kill the doctors. People have no reason to be in those places. This is why they carried out that first massacre in the Baptist hospital, Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, followed by Shifa, Nasser and all the rest.

When people went from the north to the south, the Khan Yunis hospitals became a place that brought people together and Israel wanted to take over Khan Yunis. So, they systematically started assassinating the doctors of the Khan Yunis, of the Nasser hospital, not only within the vicinity of the hospital, but in their own homes, in the streets and so forth. My sister was targeted by a drone that kept chasing after the taxi that was carrying her with a few other civilians, and they kept going after them until they blew up the car and that was it. So, yes, it was about killing doctors and medical workers. Thousands of doctors, medical workers, civil defense, firefighters and so forth were killed to ensure that people leave the areas that brought them together and go somewhere else further south.

Chris Hedges: Before we speak about your book, let’s just speak a little bit about what is happening now in Gaza. Israel has seized what, almost 60 % of the Gaza Strip? And, we should be clear, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. It is blocking humanitarian aid in violation of the ceasefire, and in particular, materials that would allow Palestinians to construct any kind of dwellings or permanent shelters. It has, of course, destroyed medical facilities. People are drinking water that is unclean, not treated, living next to fetid pools of raw sewage. It’s a slow-motion genocide, which sadly the world has kind of shifted its focus from the horror of the full-blown genocide and is allowing Israel to essentially continue the process that it began on October 7th.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. And the irony in all of this is that this is what really led to October 7th in the first place. There was a slow-motion genocide in Gaza to begin with. 90 to 97 % of Gaza’s water was undrinkable, according to the United Nations. People were dying from easily curable diseases in Gaza. Cancer patients had no access to medicine. People who needed dialysis machines were dying. Once you are at a stage that kidney patients need dialysis machines, you know that your chance of death is a lot higher than your chance of living.

So, Gaza was suffering to begin with. And the Israelis were very clear about this in terms of food, in terms of medicine. The argument that was made, we all remember that infamous Weissglas, the former advisor of Ariel Sharon, when he argued that “We don’t want to kill Palestinians, we just want to put them on a diet.” You know, that’s just a code word for, “We want them at the brink of starvation.” And Israel, in terms of military action, every few years they would go to Gaza to so-called ‘mow the lawn’, meaning to kill a few thousand, wound a few tens of thousands, and just remind Gazans who is the boss and kind of continue this perpetual sense of besiegement, as a result of which the vast majority of the people of Gaza, mostly youth, never stepped a foot outside that tiny little space of about 140 plus square miles.

So, the situation was already dire before the genocide. We can only use our imagination to think about what it was during the genocide, when 92 % of everything that was standing in Gaza was destroyed, with the entire infrastructure of Gaza decimated, and now, with no infrastructure for people to even pretend or try to survive. That is gone. So, now we are back to the slow-motion genocide you speak of, Chris, but the issue is this is different than the one that existed prior to the genocide because at least prior to the genocide, they had somewhat functioning hospitals, somewhat functioning clinics, somewhat functioning schools. There was somewhat of civilian lives that operated somehow because they are amazing people. They are my people. I am from Gaza. We are very, very resourceful in managing under the most dire of circumstances.

But now, they are being asked to engineer a miracle of survival while the world is looking on somewhere else, which is creating the exact same cycle that is going to lead to the same anger, the same rage that led to October 7th in the first place. So, everyone is going to pay the price for this, but sadly, if that is to happen again, everyone is going to point the finger at Gaza and say, “It’s Gaza’s problem or Gaza’s fault. They initiated all of this,” as if there’s absolutely no historical context to any of this.

Chris Hedges: From the beginning of the genocide, Israel, through leaks in the Israeli press, but often public statements, was very clear that the Palestinians in Gaza were to be driven from Gaza. That must remain the goal. Do you see Israel achieving that goal? I mean, that’s certainly what they want.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: I don’t think they will achieve that goal because there’s something that I call the ‘secret code of Gaza’. There is a social code we have in Gaza that you can’t understand via academic research or theory or rational, logical thinking. You have to be embedded in that population, and you have to experience living in Gaza and be one of them in order for you to understand what that code is. I come from a village called Beit Daras, as you saw in the book. And the people of that village are usually associated with having large heads. We say that we have large heads, that we physically have large heads. It turned out that was just a way to say the people of that village are particularly stubborn and we are very stubborn people. But we are also located in a place in which Palestinian refugees from Gaza all are villagers. They are peasants, we call them. We come from the countryside in southern Palestine. We are people that value community, value honor, value bravery, value resilience, value karama, dignity, hurriya, freedom. These are the codes and the little concepts according to which we operate. They are not something you can translate to news soundbites to explain why we do what we do.

And there is a decision that has been made in Gaza, a collective decision, that is uncommunicated, but it’s there that we would rather die to the last of us than leave Gaza. In fact, we have that saying in Arabic, we say, “Hataa akhar qatrat dam,” until the last drop of blood. So, we will fight until the last drop of blood. And now here’s the thing, that is supposed to be a metaphor, but it’s not. For us in Gaza, it’s an actual thing.

We stand our ground and we die in large numbers, but we’ll never abandon our homeland. If Israel could not achieve that over the course of two years of genocide, plus, and ongoing, and ongoing, and they still haven’t. When people applied to leave Gaza for medical purposes, the vast majority of them are just wounded people who needed to go and get urgent medical attention. You did not see a million Palestinian applying to go and leave Gaza. They will not leave. In fact, a lot of them came back to Gaza during that brief transition where some people were allowed to cross the Rafah border. So, as long as the Palestinian people have made that decision to withstand, under any circumstance and they prove that tangibly and practically, I don’t think Israel will possibly succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about your book. I think you do a couple of things in the book that I think are really important. It’s beautifully written, by the way, too. And that is that so often those of us on the outside of Gaza hear the stories of the elites, those people who were educated in the West. We don’t hear the stories of most Palestinians, which come from the kind of villages that your family comes from, that’s number one. And number two, I think what you do really well in the book is talk about the continuum of resistance beginning with, of course, the Zionist militias, and the British, that attack the town in Palestine where you come from and integrating that all the way to the present, including the resistance of Hamas.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. So, I do people’s history. I do micro history. It’s a way of challenging not just the Zionist narrative and the mainstream narrative, which is kind of the traditional academic narrative much closer to the Zionist narrative than it is to the Palestinian narrative. But I dare say that I’m also challenging some in the Palestinian narrative itself that’s the common one, that we are familiar with. And I’m not challenging them because I think that they have made a mistake in their historical narration of Palestine, but because we were pushed into this position, because we were so dehumanized, so neglected, so marginalized in the story, that intuitively we started trying to prove that as a people we existed prior to Zionism, that we are not anti-Semitic. Not only that, we are so humanized. We had a culture before Israel. We had theaters and we had opera houses in Haifa and Yaffa. And we had a thriving civil society. This defensiveness in which the Palestinian has traditionally told his story in Western academia. But the fact is, vast majority of us are actually peasants. We’re falaahun. And we are very proud and we are rooted in our society. And many of us did not, that generation, has never been to an opera house or never been to a cinema and did not necessarily go to libraries. And many of them were illiterate. You see, like my family in Beit Daras was perceived to be middle-class because we had a donkey. Most people didn’t have donkeys.

So, during the Nakba, the privileged ones, of course the rich were the first to leave using trucks because they could afford trucks, but the majority left on foot. And some left on donkeys and we were one of the privileged ones where my uncles and aunties were kind of taking turns on the donkey, kind of circulating around the countryside in Palestine for days until we ended up in Gaza. So, the reason I am saying this is sometimes I feel that when we tell the story, we try to accommodate the so-called target audience so much to the point that we invest so much in humanizing. I don’t think we need to humanize as Palestinians because we are not only, I don’t want to say super humans in Gaza, but our story speaks for itself.

No, my dad, my grandfather did not have the biggest library in Jerusalem. And we did not have a villa. We lived in a mud brick house and we farmed the lands and we lived as an extension for numerous generations of Palestinians who were very close to the land. That story is not told often. It’s always told in the margins, or as footnotes. But the thing is, we are the vast majority of the Palestinian people. We are the refugees. We are the ones who live in refugee camps. And here’s the trick. We are the ones who have fueled the resistance of Palestine from the very beginning in 1948. We resisted during the war of 1948, but when we were pushed out into Gaza, we immediately formed what we call Fedayeen, the freedom fighting groups. These were peasants, had no ideological background. Their sole focus was to find a way back to their homes in Palestine. Some of them just wanted to go and claim some of the harvest that they collected but they did not bring with them in the rush of war and Zionist massacres. The Fedayeen eventually became ideological groups, became the Palestine Liberation Army, became the Socialists, the PFLP, became the Communists, became Fatah, and eventually became Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and the current ideological resistance formations in Gaza. All of this is very, very important context. So, we don’t think about Hamas in isolation. Hamas is the same people, the same demographic made up of all of these groups since the very start of the modern Palestinian struggle.

Chris Hedges: One of the themes of your book, from the beginning, is the divisions within Palestinian society. Those who, for economic or other reasons, decide to collaborate or tolerate with the occupiers, first the British, but then later the Israelis, right up, of course, to the present day with the Palestine Authority. I covered the first Intifada, and I remember the tension in Gaza between the shopkeeping, the bourgeois class, and the shabab on the streets. And that is also something that has been unchanged in this long resistance struggle, and I wondered if you could address that.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: Absolutely. And I don’t think it will change because I think we made a mistake. Many of us made a mistake, at least in what we consider the unit of analysis to Palestinian unity. And many of us also played in the hands of Netanyahu. Remember, it was Netanyahu and others who were saying, you want us to go back to the peace process, Palestinians are not united. How do we speak to people who speak in so many voices?

Of course, it’s underhanded and devious because, in actuality, no national liberation movement has ever been truly and fully united. At the end of the day, we always had classes, even before the British came to Palestine, we had classes that existed and coexisted during the Ottoman era. Then there was new formulation under the British, then under the Zionists. You will always have that. You are going to always have those, and usually the downtrodden and the poor and the working class are the people who are going to carry arms and fight until the very end. But you always have this group of people who negotiate.

I am in the process of reading this excellent book by Amilcar Cabral, from one of the great African national liberation leaders fighting against the Portuguese back in the day. And he was assassinated himself in 1973, I believe. And he talks about the formation of Guinea during the fight against Portuguese colonialism and it’s just incredible. I mean, if you just remove the word Guinea and replace it with Gaza and remove Portugal and replace it with Israel, you’re going to find the exact same thing. You’re going to have those who are fighting and those who are negotiating, the petit bourgeoisie. That’s going to always be the case and will never change.

And they change heads. One day they are working with the Ottomans, then with the English, then with the Israelis. Now they are the Palestinian Authority for today. They’re trying to benefit. They have VIP cards. It allows them to travel, to do business with Israel. Some of them are actually contractors with Israel to build settlements and the apartheid wall. This doesn’t say that Palestinians are particularly bad or they are doing it different. This just says that the course of history is almost predictable and consistent. What really matters is that you have majority of Palestinians who support resistance, who are proving and demonstrating that support in their everyday life. And when I say resistance, I’m not just talking about Kalashnikovs and firing and firepower. I am talking about the idea of resistance that we cannot submit. We cannot surrender, that we will always find a way to subsist, to exist, but to also to fight back. They are the majority. They are the majority of Gaza and the West Bank, but they are, especially people in the West Bank, they are quote “between the Israeli military settlers on the one hand and the negotiating bourgeoisie of the Palestinian Authority on the other” who do not want to lose their privileges. And this is the reality of Palestine. No, we are not divided people. This is just the nature of national liberation struggles.

Chris Hedges: There are two things. One, of course, under international law, the Palestinians have a right to resist, including the use of force. And secondly, when I was in Gaza and I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, they made it very clear to me that this was not primarily an Islamic resistance group. This was a national liberation movement. And I think you also make that clear in your book.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: It’s the National Liberation Movement. Hamas has always been a national liberation movement. Ideology in national liberation struggles in Palestine, it is something that kind of serves as a platform for articulating and pronouncing a political discourse, having a sense of ideological orientation, but it really doesn’t change the fact that it’s a national liberation movement. And you kind of see this. In fact, if you look at the early, early statements made by Hamas, in fact, their very first statement, where they make a reference to the Arabs to come to the rescue. They shame the Egyptian army for actually protecting Israel in a sort of protecting the Palestinians. And they make references that seemed like, yeah, they were Palestinians, but they were locating themselves within a larger Arab, political context the same way that Fatah has done, the same way that other movements have done in Palestinian history. Then there is the Islamic world, the Islamic Ummah. It’s not marginal, it’s important, but it was not the main center or the core of Palestinian political awareness.

But even that kind of changed in recent years, especially during the genocide. I have read every statement made by Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for Hamas who was killed by Israel in the later phases of the war. And you could see how he was actually relocating Palestine very slowly in his discourse. At times, you feel like the Arab and Muslim factor was becoming marginal and he was speaking to the ahrar alealam, the free people of the world. And just because, according to their political dialectics as we could see during the genocide, solidarity was not really pouring in coming from the Arab and Muslim world. A lot was happening in South Africa, in Namibia, in Spain, in Nicaragua and so forth. So, you start feeling at times that the discourse of Abu Ubaida, his language and his target audience began shifting.

So, you see all of these shifts happening throughout the years from the very beginning until now and yet you realize that there is one common factor that never ever changed. That we are Palestinians and that our political identifiers are the Nakba, the resistance, muqawama, hurriya, freedom, the same political identifiers of all other Palestinian groups. So no, absolutely this is not part of some grand Islamic revival project. This is very much a Palestinian national project.

Chris Hedges: In your book, you write about two powerful political forces, one the Arab nationalist movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood. Can you talk about those forces and their importance for the Palestinians?

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: And I think this is very much linked to this is that somehow we, generation after generation, kind of linked our hopes and connected our own existing sense of agency to other movements, leaders, individuals that were somehow kind of rational in their behavior towards the Palestinian cause. Gamal Abdel Nasser seemed to be the most rational choice for Palestine liberation. He earned a lot of credibility during the 1948 struggle, the Nakba, the war. He was one of the last people to leave Palestine during the war as he was besieged, along with other Egyptian officers, with Palestinians fighting together in the town of Fallujah in southern Palestine. The scene of the siege being broken and Gamal Abdel Nasser and the officers kind of marching through Gaza all the way to Sinai is a scene that is repeated in several of my books because it was very iconic. You had basically all the refugees, hundreds of thousands, going to the streets to greet them and to show them gratitude as they were leaving. And I felt like something was cemented at that particular point in the relationship between Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Palestinian people to the point that I don’t think there was a single Palestinian household that actually did not have a poster of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

And you could have been a secularist, a socialist, an Islamist, it made no difference. Gamal Abdel Nasser was a character that nobody disagreed with. He was there and he was always present in our lives until 1967 happened, what we call the Naksa or the setback. And this was an era in which new voices and new ideas began challenging that narrative that existed between 1948 and until 1967. And in fact, until very recently, you have that older generation of Palestinians that wouldn’t even allow a conversation about the credibility of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Or did he have Palestine’s interest in mind or not. They don’t even want to talk about it. But for the newer generation of historians, they started examining the discourses and the politics and realized that maybe there is another way in which we can frame what happened up to that point.

Then the Muslim Brotherhood was rising. Now the Muslim Brotherhood are connected to Palestine from the very start. I don’t accept the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood, with all of the mistakes that they may have or haven’t committed, I don’t accept that the idea that they are an imposition on the Palestinian discourse. They actually fought in Palestine during the Nakba War. And I speak about this in my book. And they left behind this ideology, this political revolutionary ideology that kept them and the rest of the Palestinian nation kind of somehow connected until Gaza happened.

When the Gazans were allowed to leave to Egypt and get education from Egypt, they had this direct channel to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of the early leaders of Hamas studied in Egypt, particularly Ain Shams University, Zagazig University, Helwan even, and of course University of Cairo. And they met, coordinated, discussed, but they built kind of a common discourse. that made Palestine feel, or Hamas, or the early Islamic movement at the time, Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, we call it, they made it appear as if it’s an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, but with Palestinian priorities. And that evolved. That evolved throughout the years until today, where you feel like, in a way, yes, that connection is still there, but it feels as if it’s an entirely different political movement.

Chris Hedges: Well, Rantisi studied in Egypt, he was at Alexandria University, and I believe was very close to the Muslim Brotherhood before the founding of Hamas. You write about Sheikh Yassin and you write about Yahya Sinwar and you write about your amazing relative. I’ll let you talk about all three. I mean this guy is in his 40s and he’s finally martyred, of course. But just talk about those three figures in terms of resistance.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: So these figures are very important to understand them at a micro level and, by extension, understand the larger Palestinian experience. Sheik Ahmad Yassin is the byproduct of a revolutionary generation that existed, in Gaza in particular, since 1948.

Chris Hedges: Let me just stop you to explain for people who don’t know, he was an Islamic scholar. He was finally at end of his life, wasn’t he a quadriplegic? But a brilliant scholar, just to insert that background.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: He was a brilliant scholar and that’s kind of this common character that I try to trace throughout Palestinian history. In fact, I ended up discussing what they call a longue duree or long history that goes back hundreds of years in Palestinian history. There’s this scholar-warrior sort of thing. Izzeddin al-Qassam was the quintessential scholar-warrior in Palestinian history. And he is the one who kind of launched armed resistance in Palestine, more or less, leading to the 1936 uprising and revolution in Palestine that unified the peasants of Palestine, along with the intelligentsia and the urban communities in one continuous uprising and revolution that lasted between 1936 and 1939.

And then later, I kind of look at Ahmad Yassin as an extension of that. He was the scholar-warrior. But what makes his character particularly interesting is that his disability over time reached a point that he was literally reading using his tongue. And with time, they developed a special device for him in which he would put in his mouth and he would move between the pages. So, he was in a constant state of learning. And one element in the scholarship of Ahmad Yassin that I think was interesting, it was this concept of resurrection, that of the resurrection of Palestinian collective intellect. And I think Muhammad Shehada, who was also from Beit Daras, from my village, was one of the kind of those who were communicating that message to young people, that we don’t need to lead ourselves to outside ideologies anymore, that Palestinian liberation has to happen from Palestine itself. And for that to happen, we need to resurrect ourselves as a nation intellectually before anything else.

And in fact, Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic grouping or movement, they’ve been around for a very long time, but they became particularly active after 1967, throughout the seventies, throughout the eighties, all the way until the launch of Hamas in December, I believe it was December 1987. There was like a 20-year process of studying cleansing, resurrecting, these are the terminologies that they have used. Yehia Asanwar was one of the disciples of Yassin and that generation. And his focus was, in the beginning, on kind of cleansing Palestinian society from the collaborators. Because you can imagine after 1967, Israel now has direct relationship with Gaza. They were not outsiders anymore. You had the Israeli military administration in every part of Gaza. You cannot leave, you cannot come back to Gaza without having to go through an Israeli.

Everything was controlled by the Israeli. They called it the civilian administration. It wasn’t civilian at all, it was military. And you had to speak to the Shin Bet about every little thing. I had to go to Egypt to study at one point. I needed to meet with the Shin Bet, that’s the Israeli internal secret service. And then they start negotiating with you. I had an uncle of mine who was with the PLO many years ago and I needed to explain, where is he? I need information. And I was a child, I was a kid. So many people became collaborators, sometimes out of need. And as a result, they became active participants in the Israeli occupation.

And Yahya Sanwar had this group called Majd, Glory, that was dedicated to catching and eliminating these collaborators. Because again, that was their philosophy. You cleanse your own society before you deal with the enemy. And dealing with the enemy started in 1987. And by the way, Chris, I think this is really important that a lot of kind of new scholarship made this horrific mistake of misinterpreting this relationship between Hamas and the Israeli occupation to the point of saying so conveniently without understanding any of that history or context by saying well, you know at the end of the day Israel established Hamas. And I don’t know if you’ve seen people like that, some are very well-respected scholars making that argument. No, Israel did not establish Hamas. Maybe in the minds of Israel at one point they wanted to give some space for the Islamic movements to prosper, to create some sort of the conflict between them and the other PLO faction, but creating Hamas as if that was a deliberate Israeli intelligence operation is completely erroneous and 1987 proved that to be the case. And if that was not enough, what happened during the genocide, kind of really in my mind should end that conversation altogether.

Chris Hedges: And let’s talk about your relative. What is his name? Ehub? Is that right?

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: Ahab is my relative. No, the thing about Ahab is that - it’s funny because I remember him the last time I saw him before I left Gaza, he was a child. He was like maybe nine or something like that. But somehow he was pushed to be a man at a very young age. Why? Because he was very close to another character, another brother, a friend of mine named Wael. Wael was exactly, almost exactly my age, two days separated from my birthday. During the what we called later on, we called it Black Sunday, it happened during the first Intifada, when an Israeli soldier guns down a number of Palestinian workers in Rishon Le Zion in southern Israel, leading to the eruption of protest all across Palestine. My cousin, Wael, was killed during that day of protest. He was shot in the throat, standing outside his house. That was a defining moment for the entire Badrasawi family. Badrasawi family is just that branch of my family, the Baroud family.

Prior to that, they were all cheap laborers in Israel. They were workers. They were people of great honor. There were the descendants of the same people, refugees, fellaheen, freedom fighters. But they seemed to be focused on just trying to subsist, to survive. Then Wael was gone. He was killed. And then Ahab, this child, watching, and I describe in the book this very specific scene in which he almost went mute, just looking at the body of his brother at the Shifa hospital as he was being prepared for burial. And then Ahab went from this cute little child that we will be teasing and playing with into this kind of like, it’s time for me to stand up to be a man. And then Ahab started going to the mosque where Ahmad Yassin was giving lectures. And then Ahab started reading the Quran and Ahab tried to find his salvation in spirituality. But I still remember him as this child with his jeans, they were so poor, he didn’t have a belt to keep his pants together, so he would use a rope. And I just remember that very final scene and I left and I went back to Gaza in 2012 after another Israeli attempt at ‘mowing the grass’ of Gaza, and I meet Ahab. And Ahab was the head of the Northern Command of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, military arm of Hamas. And I could not understand that transformation. He was still as kind, he was still as sweet, he was still as polite and gentle, but he was in that position.

Now later on, he aged, per their standards, and he went back to school. He did his master’s degree in Islamic Sharia. He wanted to do his PhD. He was teaching. He had a Halaqa, which is the religious group in which he teaches other scholars. And he kind of moved on with his life until the genocide happened. And the early days of the genocide, you remember that, Chris, when they attacked the Shati refugee camp. And everybody understood that if this fight for Shati is an easy fight, it’s over for Gaza because that’s where the real warriors of Gaza, kind of in the Northern area of Gaza, are there. And my understanding, and I actually just very recently spoke with his wife at length about this, she said, “The young people of the resistance were scared because the fight is usually happening at the border.” They’re very close to Israel, but it’s rarely enters into the Shati refugee camps. So, they did not know what to do. So, Ahad had to make the decision of going back to the fighting himself and he needed to do something, something so extreme before he dies that he would change the dynamics of the Shati battle. And he did, and I speak about that at length in the book.

Chris Hedges: Well, explain. He walks out into the open and fires on an Israeli tank.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: That’s right. That immediately went in the news. Of course, I reported on it in the news as a journalist, not knowing that was actually Ahab who did it. Only later on I discovered that. And after that, he actually blew himself up in kind of ending it all right there, followed by his son, Abdulrahman, followed by his son, Muhammad, and so forth and so on. So, after that, it seems that there was an Israeli decision, knowing that he is the one who has done that, to completely obliterate the family. There are many members of that branch of the family. In fact, most of my family that were killed during the war comes from that particular branch because they were taken out along with their wives, husbands and children and so on.

Chris Hedges: So, what’s the next chapter? Where are we going? Of course, and we’ve not spoken about it, but there’s horrific violence perpetrated by armed groups of settlers. They’ve been given automatic weapons. I think Smotrich gave them 10,000 weapons. They’ve become murderous gangs, inflicting terror. I think they just uprooted 3,000 trees or something. They’ve seized large sections of the West Bank itself. When I was in Ramallah, a summer ago, you just couldn’t even move between villages. In fact, the day that I was there, the Israelis had come in and burned down all the money exchange shops so people couldn’t get foreign currency or money transfers. Where are we headed?

Dr. Ramzy Baroud: I know it might sound a bit odd to be positive during these times considering the kind of losses and grief that we experience and continue to experience. But in my mind, I believe that Israel is acting out of total desperation as opposed to confidence with a strategy. Israel started with a strategy, Plan D, Plan Dalet, this maximalist settler colonial plan that was not only meant to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of historic Palestine, but to the very end of the Palestinian nation and where Israel exists in total permanency. What happened in the last few years disrupted that plan, disrupted it in a way that no Arab army could have possibly have done so.

I’m not promoting armed resistance. I’m a historian. I try to explain why people make the choices they do and what are the historical timelines and context of why they resist. But if you think about it, Chris, I was thinking about the campaign that we have been doing for years to boycott Caterpillar bulldozers, for example, in the US and globally. But to think about how many bulldozers have been blown up by the resistance in Gaza and in South Lebanon. These are kids in Gaza. It’s not military There is nothing military about it. They create their own little devices underground and they have done more damage to Caterpillar than any other movement to hold Caterpillar accountable.

How many Merkava tanks have they destroyed? The Israeli army just made a very upsetting discovery that it can no longer achieve political and strategic ends using military power. They neutralized Israel’s military. This is why they are killing civilians, because we are talking about the civilians because they want us to ignore what has happened to their military. So, the answer is this, the Palestinian people have one leverage and one leverage only. If they let go of that leverage, then there is absolutely no hope for us as Palestinians. And that leverage is resistance. How do you define resistance? The Palestinians themselves define resistance. Not me, not anyone else. They will tell us what resistance is, and they will have to define it in the way that they find suitable. So, any Palestinian faction, group, authority that behaves outside of that scope, they are conceding to Israel.

As far as the Israelis are concerned, they realize that the current war that they are leading, not only against Palestine, but in Lebanon, in Iran, and throughout, could be the most defining war. And I think Netanyahu, for once, is actually telling the truth. This is as important as their so-called war of independence. They lose, and by losing, I mean they are not able to achieve the political outcomes and strategic outcomes, then they have to make a choice, either to leave or to reach political compromises with the Palestinians that satisfy the Palestinian people. If they win, well, I don’t want to think about that possibility and I don’t see it happening because again, if your military power has been neutralized and Israel is a settler colonial society that can only survive through military power and through physical expansion, then I don’t know what other alternative they still have.

Chris Hedges: Thank you, Ramzy. And I want to thank Diego, Max, and Noel who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

Photos

General Moshe Dayan Sitting with General E.L.M. Burns

(Original Caption) Israeli Army Chief of Staff Major General Moshe Dayan, (left), has announced that he will meet with U.N. Commander Major General E.L.M. Burns, (right), on March 2nd to make preliminary arrangements for Israel’s withdrawal from Sharm el Sheikh.

Palestinians spend time at the sea amid Israeli attacks in Gaza

GAZA, PALESTINE - MAY 12: Palestinian children spend time at the sea to escape the suffocating heat of tents as the Israeli attacks continue on the Gaza Strip, Palestine on May 12, 2026. (Photo by Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israel / Palestine: A refugee camp in the Jordan Valley for Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba (Arabic: an-Nakbah, lit.’catastrophe’), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1947Ð1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 ArabÐIsraeli War. The exact number of refugees is a matter of dispute, but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (50 percent of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes. Later in the war, Palestinians were forcibly expelled as part of ‘Plan Dalet’ in a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Graduation ceremony held for 170 doctors in Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - DECEMBER 25: A view from the graduation ceremony held at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which suffered severe damage as a result of Israeli military attacks, for 170 doctors who earned their specialist certificates from the Ministry of Health on December 25, 2025. A large number of Palestinians attended the ceremony, which was held in the hospital garden. (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (C) is surrounded by Israeli settlers at the end of the resettlement ceremony of Sa-Nur, south of Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on April 19, 2026. (Photo by MARCO LONGARI / AFP via Getty Images)

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Israeli soldiers arrest two Palestinian men during a raid in the Nur Shams camp near the city of Tulkarem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on August 28, 2024. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids and strikes in several towns in the north of the occupied West Bank, a spokesman for the Red Crescent said on August 28. (Photo by JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP) (Photo by JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP via Getty Images)

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A member of the Israeli security forces gestures while patrolling during a military raid in the Qalandia refugee camp, south of Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on May 11, 2026. The Israeli-occupied West Bank has been gripped by almost daily violence since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, involving both Israeli troops and settlers. (Photo by Zain JAAFAR / AFP via Getty Images)

Water crisis continues in Gaza

DEIR AL BALAH, GAZA, PALESTINE - APRIL 30: Palestinians fill up water bottles from a tank and carry them home at Maghazi camp as water crisis continues, in Deir al Balah, Gaza, Palestine on April 30, 2026. (Photo by Adam Bilal/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israel Pushes More Troops To Gaza Border Amid Talks Of Ceasefire

GAZA BORDER, ISRAEL - JANUARY 1: Israeli Air Force bombs explode on Palestinian targets in the northern Gaza Strip January 1, 2009 as seen from Israel’s border with the Hamas-run territory. Israel continues to reinforce its troops amid talks of an internationally-brokered ceasefire. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-WEATHER

TOPSHOT - Displaced palestinians stand on a road after heavy rain in Jabalia city, northern Gaza Strip, on November 25, 2025. The Gaza Strip has been largely reduced to rubble after two years of fighting, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people. Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed at least 69,733 people, according to figures from the health ministry that the UN considers reliable. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP via Getty Images)

13th attempt to break the Gaza blockade by sea

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Palestinian fighters from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, take part in the funeral procession of Marwan Issa, a top Hamas commander killed in March 2024, in the war-devastated Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on February 7, 2025. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images)

Amilcar Cabral, President, P.A.I.G.C. headquarters, Algiers

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean political revolutionary, the founder and president of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, and leader in the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau. at P.A.I.G.C. headquarters, Algiers, February 1967(Photo by Ben Martin/Getty Images)

Senior official of Hamas Abdel Aziz Al-R

GAZA CITY, -: Senior official of Hamas Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi (R) speaks on the phone next the chief of Palestinian Authority Police, Ghazi al-Jabali (2nd R), during the mourning of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin following his funeral 22 March 2004 at a stadium in Gaza City. AFP PHOTO/Pedro UGARTE (Photo credit should read PEDRO UGARTE/AFP via Getty Images)

Palestinian supporters of president Mahm

Palestinian supporters of president Mahmud Abbas and his ruling Fatah party wave the Palestinian and the Fatah flags during a rally in the West Bank city of Nablus as unity talks take place in Cairo on February 25, 2009. AFP PHOTO /JAAFAR ASHTIYEH (Photo credit should read JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP via Getty Images)

Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades’ parade in Gaza

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA - NOVEMBER 11: Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, speaks during a ceremony as part of the anniversary of the prevention of Israeli covert operation on 11 November 2018 carried out in the Khan Younis of the southern Gaza Strip, on November 11, 2019 in Khan Younis, Gaza. (Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Sudan Prime Minister al-Azhari Visits Egyptian Premier Nasser

(Original Caption) Their hands clasped above their heads as a symbol of brotherhood, Egyptian Premier Nasser, (R), and the Prime Minister of the Sudan, Al Azhari, acknowledge the cheers of the excited peasants during an official drive. The Sudanese Premier was on a short visit to Egypt.

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Flags of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan, and other political parties are waved with other protest signs denouncing the US-led Middle East economic conference in Bahrain, during a post-Friday prayers demonstration against US President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century” in the Jordanian capital Amman on June 21, 2019. (Photo by Khalil MAZRAAWI / AFP) (Photo credit should read KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP via Getty Images)

Ahmed Yassin

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the radical Islamic Palestinian Hamas (probably in Gaza). (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas

GAZA, PALESTINE - 2023/04/14: Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip, waves his hand to the crowd during the celebration of International Quds Day in Gaza City. (Photo by Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Palestinian Hamas movement’s

GAZA, PALESTINE - 2021/05/30: Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Palestinian Hamas movement’s political wing seen making victory gestures, during the rally.Palestinian Hamas staged an anti-Israel rally in the northern Gaza Strip, a parade with weapons in the streets of Gaza city more than a week after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Gaza Comes Under Sustained Bombardment By Israel After Hamas Attacks

GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 9: Palestinian citizens inspect the damage to the Al-Sussi Mosque and their homes following Israeli air strikes in the Al-Shati Palestinian refugee camp on October 09, 2023 in Gaza City, Gaza. Almost 500 people have died in Gaza after Israel launched sustained retaliatory air strikes after Saturday’s attack by Hamas. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

ISRAEL GAZA WAR

MITZPE YAIR, OCCUPIED WEST BANK -- NOVEMBER 9, 2023: An Israeli settler watches nearby as reservist soldiers, settlement residents, local and some volunteers from Israel and the United States prepare for a close quarter combat weapons training in an empty building that is still under construction, in Mitzpe Yair, an Israeli settlement that sits close to the town of Susya, Occupied West Bank, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. (Photo by Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Palestinian Children Commemorate Rachel Corrie

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP - APRIL 13: Child members of The Mini Palestinian Parliament burn toy bulldozers as a symbol of the D9 Bulldozers made by Caterpillar Company (CAT) and supplied to the Israeli military, during a rally to commemorate the death of Rachel Corrie, April 13, 2005 in Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Rachel Corrie, a U.S. volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement was killed by an Israel military bulldozer in Rafah two years ago on March 16, 2003 when she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home and during the rally the Palestinian children demanded that the Caterpillar Company (CAT) stopped the sales of the bulldozers to the Israeli army. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-US-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY

TOPSHOT - Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a joint press conference with the US Secretary of State at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on September 15, 2025. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington would provide “unwavering support” to Israel in the war in Gaza as he called for the eradication of Hamas during a visit to the US ally on September 15. (Photo by Nathan Howard / POOL / AFP) (Photo by NATHAN HOWARD/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Clashes between Palestinian factions and Israeli forces

GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 07: Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades destroy a tank of Israeli forces in Gaza City, Gaza on October 07, 2023. (Photo by Hani Alshaer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Join me at 7:00 pm on June 29 for a livestream in which we will discuss Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. If you can, read before joining!

The novel was inspired by a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger called Christ’s Body in the Tomb. The painting was completed between 1520 or 1522. I have a picture of the painting pasted on the inside cover of my copy of The Idiot, which was translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The painting shows the elongated corpse of Christ with wounds peppered along his body signifying the horrific torture he suffered before death. The flesh is in the early stages of putrifaction.

The question the painting poses, one that is central to the novel, is what if Christ was not divine, not the incarnate God? What if Christ was only a man? What if he did not rise from the dead but was left a lifeless, battered and decaying corpse? What if he was simply a “positive beautiful man,” “a moral genius,” and nothing more?

Joseph Frank, the author of the monumental five volume biography of Dostoevsky – the one volume abridged version still comes in at close to 1,000 pages -- wrote that the painting depicts nature as “some huge machine of the newest construction, which has seamlessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being.”

Dostoevsky began work on the novel, which he wrote in Venice, a month after seeing the painting in the Basel Museum. His main character, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, embodies pure goodness. Those around Myshkin, consumed by avarice, lust, a carving for power and social status, envy and egoism, assume he is an idiot.

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Can one live a moral life? Given the dark reality of social relations and human nature, is this possible? If one seeks to live a moral life, what are the consequences?

Frank describes the novel as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions.” It includes many of the details of Dostoevsky’s life including his epilepsy and the mock execution he underwent as a prisoner as well as the moral, religious and philosophical themes that permeate his work and make him one of the world’s most important writers. It was Dostoevsky’s favorite novel.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published May 8, 2026.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Full Text:

Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.

Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

There is a word for these people. Traitors.

These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.

Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.

Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.

“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”

He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.

The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.

Anand Giridharadas, who wrote “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdose they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:

People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

“The Epstein emails, in my view,” Giridharadas writes, “together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.”

“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he continues, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”

“These people are,” Giridharadas reminds us, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”

You can see my interview with Giridharadas here.

The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.

The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing taxes to win this year’s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee. Democratic donors pumped a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris’s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades and be defeated in every battleground state.

The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.

The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.

In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures — Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.

Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.

Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.

Photos:

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

US President Donald Trump speaks flanked by US Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a press briefing in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, shortly after a shooting incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, 2026.(Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)

US President-elect Bill Clinton (r) breaks into a

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US President Joe Biden (L) and President-elect Donald Trump arrive for the inauguration ceremony where Donald Trump will sworn in as the 47th US President in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Photo by Melina MARA / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Donald Trump Delivers Joint Address To Congress

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Leslie Wexner

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Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.

Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

There is a word for these people. Traitors.

These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.

Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.

Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.

“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”

He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.

The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.

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Anand Giridharadas, who wrote “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdose they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:

People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

“The Epstein emails, in my view,” Giridharadas writes, “together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.”

“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he continues, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”

“These people are,” Giridharadas reminds us, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”

You can see my interview with Giridharadas here.

The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.

The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing taxes to win this year’s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee. Democratic donors pumped a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris’s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades and be defeated in every battleground state.

The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.

The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.

In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures — Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.

Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.

Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.

Nothing illustrates the inversion of the international and moral order more than the genocide in Gaza and the shipment of tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel by Western nations, especially the United States, to sustain it. Part of this inversion is the unrelenting persecution of those who denounce the genocide — especially those who risk their lives to halt it and demand the rule of law.

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But the rule of law, it appears, is buried under the rubble in Gaza.

And because of that Israel is able, with barely a word of protest by Western nations – Spain being one of the few exceptions – to abduct 175 activists aboard Sumud Flotilla 500 nautical miles from Gaza and 80 nautical miles west of the Greek island of Crete.

This violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was accompanied by the usual Israeli brutality. Flotilla members from the 22 vessels that were intercepted and then transferred to the Israeli vessel NAHSHON were denied food, forced to sleep on the floor as it was flooded “repeatedly” with water, punched, kicked, dragged across decks with their hands tied and shot at with rubber bullets and live ammunition. Eventually, all but two flotilla members were transferred to Crete, with 36 requiring medical attention.

Two of the leading activists on the flotilla, the Brazilian organizer of the flotilla, Thiago Avila, and the Spaniard Saif Abu Keshek, who is of Palestinian descent and who has organized Palestinian solidarity movements across Europe for over two decades, were not allowed to disembark when the vessel reached Ierapetra Port in southern Crete, although the ship was in Greek territorial waters.

They were kidnapped and taken to Israel.

“Participant eyewitnesses provided harrowing testimony of Abukeshek’s screams echoing throughout the ship as he was subjected to systematic torture, after being separated from the others,” read a communique issued by The Global Sumud Flotilla.

Abu Keshek was blindfolded, forced to lie on his stomach “since the moment of his seizure until this morning” which resulted in “bruising to his face and hands.” Thiago was “dragged face-down across the floor” and beaten so severely that he passed out twice.

When the two activists appeared in an Israeli court there were visible bruises on their faces. Thiago had trouble lifting his right hand.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Since their detainment, the two men have been on hunger strike. They are accused of “assisting the enemy during wartime” and “membership in and providing services to a terrorist organization.”

This is the world we now live in. The moral and the courageous are criminalized. The ruling class weaponizes the law to justify the abuse and atrocities of the lawless.

Here is a link to an interview I did in Italy with Thiago:

Here is a link to the documentary we made in Italy where Thiago, along with Francesca Albanese, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis and the striking Italian dock workers, who refuse to load weapons onto ships bound for Israels, are featured:

We must contact the Israeli Embassy in Washington. We must protest in front of the embassy, as well as the Israeli consulate in New York, to demand the release of Thiago and Saif.

They are the best among us.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The global economic impacts of the American-Israeli war on Iran are already being felt, particularly in Asia, through shortages of fuel and other necessities, the closure of factories and the loss of jobs. We are now on a path heading for a global recession, or even worse, a global depression. To sort out what potentially lies ahead and the likelihood of preventing the worst outcomes, Chris Hedges speaks with economist Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Wolff begins the interview by discussing the weaknesses of the capitalist economic system. Since the 1970s, corporations have been moving production to areas of the world where they can maximize profits. This has created fragile supply chains that are vulnerable to changes in the availability of energy and the fallout of political turmoil.

Research demonstrates that capitalist systems result in cyclical downturns every four to seven years. The last economic crisis was five to six years ago, so we may very well be on the edge of another one. Wolff reports that it is too early to determine if that will result in inflation, stagflation or deflation. For the United States, commitments to greater military spending, a historically high debt of $40 trillion and a declining credit rating will force the government to borrow money at higher interest rates, adding to the burden of an already financially stressed population.

Wolff states, “We are living through the end of the empire and that end has been accelerated and brought closer by everything going on in the Middle East.” The United States faces a critical decision. If it chooses to escalate the war on Iran, the risk of a global depression rises. The future appears to be grim. At this time, there is an absence of a functioning international mechanism through which countries can solve the current crises cooperatively. For the United States, there is also denial about the state of our falling empire. Wolff concludes: “It’s not a question of maintaining your dominance. That’s gone. It’s a question of working things out. Our leaders don’t think or talk like that.”

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis

Transcript

Chris Hedges: The economic fallout from two months of war in Iran is already crippling economies across the globe. Energy prices are soaring. Gasoline shortages and rationing are plaguing countries such as Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand. Japan has had to twice dip into its strategic reserves since the war on Iran started in February. The rise in price of liquefied petroleum gas means cooking gas prices have skyrocketed devastating households in countries such as India. The price of nitrogen fertilizers produced in the Gulf are also rising at an alarming rate, guaranteeing steep increases in food prices. There are growing shortages of helium, aluminum, naphtha, devastating industries, including the microchip industry. Textile mills in India and Bangladesh have shut down. Steel mills in India and automakers in Japan have cut production. Tens of thousands of workers across the globe have already lost their jobs. Asian airlines, along with those in Poland, Germany, and Ireland, are cutting flights and raising surcharges with a doubling of the price of jet fuel. The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s richest countries with sovereign wealth funds that total more than $2 trillion, has asked the United States for a financial lifeline in the wake of missile-damaged gas fields and a halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the New York Times reports.

Millions of people, especially in Asia and Africa, are at risk of falling into dire poverty because of the conflict, according to the United Nations Development Program. The US, which is a net exporter of oil and natural gas, has been relatively insulated from the global shock, although gasoline prices have risen by $1 a gallon since February 28th, but this will not remain the case if Iran does not open the Strait soon. The average U.S. diesel price has already increased by nearly 50 percent, surpassing $5.60 a gallon. Higher fuel prices, coupled with growing shortages and disruptions in supply chains, will begin to take a heavy toll on the U.S. economy as everything we pay for, including consumer products, food and transportation, rise in price. We flirt not only with a global recession, but if the closure of the Strait is not resolved, a global depression with all of the suffering and inevitable social and political instability catastrophic financial crises inflict on societies.

Joining me to discuss the economic consequences of the war is Professor Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. He has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, and the University of Paris.

I want to begin, Rick, by examining something that’s not been widely discussed and that is supply chains. How fragile they are, we’re already seeing of course supply chains being degraded, how difficult it is to resurrect them, and what the consequences of serious damage to supply chains are.

Richard D Wolff: Okay, it’s a really good place to start, Chris, because it allows me to talk a moment about economic history. Particularly since the 1970s, major large capitalist corporations - American but also Western European, Japanese and others - have followed the guideline of profit maximization, the religion of capitalism, to make a long complex story short, to move production around the world from being concentrated in the United States, for example, to being spread all over the world. In 1970, Detroit was the center of the automobile industry for this country and surrounding Detroit were literally hundreds of medium and small businesses that fed the auto industry, but they were all within 20 to 50 miles of Detroit. All of that is gone, with Detroit showing it, its population today, just to give you an idea of the social consequences, is about 700,000 people. In 1970, it was just shy of 2 million people. That’s the demographic, if you like, of what happened to that industry.

Well, it went abroad. And here’s the reality. If you go abroad - to China for one set of activities, to India for another, to Brazil for a third - what you are creating is long supply chains. This is not a matter of technology. That’s often a misunderstanding: modern technology requires. No, it doesn’t. It’s not about modern technology. The technologies installed in China are not that different from the technologies that were installed here. The reality was that the labor cost in China was much lower and the desperation of those countries to bring jobs there meant that they offered very high profits, and American corporations took that offer. No one held a gun to their head. This wasn’t done under duress. This was your normal capitalist investment where the profits are the highest.

The end result, which they did not calculate because they rarely do, was not to take into account all the secondary consequences of long supply chains. And let me go through what they were. But they didn’t count what I’m about to tell you. For them, the higher profit settled the matter. Well, here are some of the consequences. You have to travel long distances to bring the finished product from China or India or Bangladesh or wherever it is back to the United States for sale. That means you are dependent on shipping. That means you are dependent on the shipping industry. That means you’re dependent to take current events on the Strait of Hormuz, among others, Malacca, Panama, Suez. There are many of those, and those are now important in a way that they weren’t before.

Number two, when you ship everything long distances, and you do it mostly by boat, you pollute the ocean. That’s going to affect travel, fishery, water access, all kinds of secondary consequences that, of course, should have been taken into account.

Third, you’re going to be subject to political turmoil. If your shipping route takes you here or there, if you need to have storage facilities along the way, which you usually do in case of all kinds of situations, you have to have friendly locations in which to do all of that. And anybody at any point can hold you up. And if they do, then you are suddenly frozen. We’re seeing that now.

Energy is a basic component, but often even a little component, you know, the carburetor in your car. Well, the car has to have a carburetor, and even if everything else is available, but the carburetors aren’t, you’re stuck. And when you’re stuck, you can’t deliver on time.

Okay, long story short, this is a wonderful example of what in economics is called the difference between private cost and social cost, private profit and social profit. We, as a society, need to know what we are investing in in terms of all of its social consequences. Or at least as many as we can foretell and get some measure of. But the corporation doesn’t do that because it doesn’t count the costs it does not have to cover. It’s not responsible for the pollution of the water. It’s not responsible for the political turmoil that may interrupt. So, it doesn’t have to count for those things. It doesn’t have to set aside funds to manage the contingency. None of it. They just go ahead and make their investment. It has all the social consequences I’ve sketched here. And we, the people, the government, the society, are left to try to cope and clean up whatever it is that they didn’t foresee while they make the profit that comes, not from the intrinsic benefits of the investment, but from the fact that they don’t have to count, let alone cover, the costs, the social costs that are involved. We are now living with that.

The war between Iran and the United States and Israel, whatever you think of it, is an interruption in a long supply chain. And we are dealing with the enormous social costs that you nicely listed some of which at the beginning of the show. And we’re all going to struggle economically, politically, culturally. You know, the UAE just withdrew from OPEC. I saw that literally a few minutes ago. That’s one of the cascade of social consequences of this whole situation that will change the oil business and everything that depends on it for years to come.

Chris Hedges: And so the degradation in the supply chain, which I did kind of illustrate at the introduction - you know a lot more about this than I do - it’s not necessarily, even if the Strait of Hormuz was open today, that supply chain’s going to be disrupted for some time. Am I correct?

Richard D Wolff: Absolutely. And even more, Chris, even more. Every company that has any occasion, directly or indirectly, to utilize the Strait of Hormuz is now calculating, in a way they didn’t before, the risk. And that risk means they will have to, or not have to, but many of them will, decide to change. For example, there’s an acceleration of pipeline construction all over Asia in order to avoid dependence on the Strait of Hormuz for oil, natural gas and so on. Okay, that’s diverting investment from other projects to pipelines. No one is thinking about, “Well, what are the projects that are being put on postponement? What social need were they invented to secure?” And those are now forgone because we have to build pipelines all over the place. Why? Because we are worried about the risk of not doing a pipeline.

Countries are making these calculations and corporations. They have to. That’s the job. The purchasing manager in every company, whose job it is to secure the purchase of fuel, oil and gas at an appropriate price, is now charged by the CEO with finding alternatives that are less risky and balancing that against the relative prices. Of course, we don’t know the relative prices because we’re in the middle of all of this and how the relative prices shift is being determined right now.

Just to give you an example, because Europe is in almost as bad shape as Asia about all of this, the strategic reserve of oil maintained by the United States, about half of it has been used up now. And they’re selling that oil way below market price, mostly to the Europeans. That’s a political game being played by Mr. Trump. But the Europeans don’t know how long he’ll do that. They don’t know whether the tariff wars will be reignited the way he seems to want that will once again lead to trouble between the United States and Europe beyond what already exists. You can see how far that can go by looking at the alienation of Canada and Mark Carney and all of that.

So, everybody’s trying to recalculate, reposition with an awful lot of variables shifting as we talk makes it all very, very difficult. But it doesn’t change the challenge, which I think will eventually be dealt with explicitly. You cannot allow the development of a world economy that ties everybody together without the participation of the mass of people, as if this could be left to the private interests of literally a few thousand corporations who are making decisions based on what’s best for them, granted. But the notion that what’s best for them is what we all need is being blown apart by today’s headlines.

Chris Hedges: So, if the Strait remains closed, and I don’t see that Iran has any incentive to open it at this point, and prices continue to rise, i.e. inflation, how does the global ruling class respond? Do they jack up interest rates? What are they going to do?

Richard D Wolff: At this point, I don’t think they have a clue and let me explain why. The National Bureau of Economic Research, one of the major institutions in our country keeping track of economic data, are the place we go to the economics profession to find out about business cycles. A long story short, their discovery years ago was that wherever capitalism settles in as the basic economic system, we have a downturn on average every four to seven years. It’s an average, so sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes it’s longer. And each downturn has its unique qualities and paces and all of that. But it is a pattern that we have tried for three centuries to overcome and we haven’t done that.

There’s even an entire economics Mr. John Maynard Keynes developed to cope with the worst of it, the 1929-30s crash. And we have a whole system of analysis called Keynesian economics, and that has helped modulate them a bit, but overcome them? No. Well, if 4 to 7 is your average, and if the last one was in the year 2020-2021, Well then, we’re due. That’s the first thing to be aware of. We are due for an economic downturn. And if you read the financial press, the articles are full of that. They know that. That’s not a secret. That’s not something that people on the Left believe and others don’t. It is pretty well established empirically.

Okay, so now here’s the interesting thing that needs to be understood. To whatever extent we are on the edge of a downturn, and rising unemployment over the last six months suggests it also, and there are other indicators, it is quite possible, although the press never mentions it, that the kind of shock coming from the oil disruptions out of the Strait of Hormuz could actually produce a serious downturn. And if that happened, it’s an open question whether we would have an inflation. We might still see corporations raising prices. If we do, we get that phenomena economists call stagflation, a mixture of stagnation on the one hand and inflation on the other. But, and let me stress this, it is also possible that the downturn would lead corporations fearful of being stuck with unsaleable inventory, cutting prices. I want to remind people, in the Great Depression of the 1930s, prices fell. And that cushioned the breakdown for many American families. They lost their job. They had very little money. But the prices for food and clothing and shelter were dropping because the downturn was so severe.

Could we have a comparable downturn? Absolutely, yes. I’m not saying we will, but we could, and in that event, we will be looking at an interruption, an oil shock, and a deflation rather than an inflation. The economics of that are pretty well known. There are plenty of examples of it going in that way, and we should be aware that that’s part of the problem. If it is true, as recent statistics suggest, that literally the top 10 % of the American consumers, richest 10%, account for more than half of the whole consumption bundle in this country. Then if the other 90 % are as strapped as the data suggests, then I don’t know what the reaction will be when you have another dollar a gallon to get to and from your job, to get to and from shopping, to or from going to the movies.

And you know, it’s the joke that I hear here in New York all the time. There’s too much month at the end of the money. And in that situation, you will get a deflation because the system will contract bitterly out of all of it.

Chris Hedges: But if, for instance, fertilizer prices, which have rocketed upwards, doesn’t that inevitably mean an increase in food prices?

Richard D Wolff: No, I wish it did. It just as often means that the farmer makes the decision to let part of his fields go fallow. Let them go. Grow weeds, plow them under. That’s another kind of fertilizer. In the long run, you have to do that periodically anyway. The chemical nitrogen from oil is good, but has its limits, like everything else. And the question is how many farmers will take 10 or 20 or 30 percent of their acreage and let them go in order to save on the fertilizer, figuring they can make it up by shrinking their output. If enough other farmers do it and communication is now pretty well developed among them, then the prices will, they hope, go up. But if their prices go down and they’ve cut their acreage, we could see another wave of farmers go out of business.

We should be aware that most of our farmers are badly indebted. They don’t have much slack. Even though we don’t have lots of little ones the way America used to, the big ones can go out of business also. They are also peanut counters. And if the prices of their inputs exceed what they can reasonably expect, and if you add the risk of a deflation in terms of the final output, how many Americans are going to make the decision to go from hamburger to Hamburger Helper? To really begin to eat like poor people? Grain flavored with a little something else, but it’s basically rice or pasta or bread, etc. You know, we’re on our way to that anyway in this country and we can call it all dietetic, so you lose weight, so we don’t have to face that it’s an economic problem. But those are real possibilities that are now shifted from vague in the future to much closer because the Strait of Hormuz, this long supply chain, is disrupted.

Chris Hedges: And what are the effects of this on the empire itself?

Richard D Wolff: Well, mean, this is a sore point for me, Chris, you know me a little bit. I think our empire is over. I think what we are living through, you, me, our generation now, is the very unhappy, unpleasant, scary experience of a declining empire, which the Americans have never had. Our empire, over the last century, was nicely upward. Not for everybody, of course, but for enough of them to give it the quality of an upswing. And particularly after the Second World War, when all the other potential competitors for that role had blown themselves to bits. So, the result was we were ‘King of the Hill.’ And that gave rise to the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, when you and I both know there was this sort of odd celebration of all things American, American exceptionalism, that if you were religious then God loved you more than he loved everybody else, and on and on.

Where did this come from? It was very classic, the failure to understand the particularity of the conditions of the moment and a projection, as if something guaranteed that they would stay the same, or even if they changed, they would somehow continue the odd special position of the United States. And that’s simply not true. And starting 10 or 15 years ago, I think it became palpable. Not the explanation, because we sure live in a country that practices what my wife, who is a psychotherapist, massive denial. It’s a refusal to entertain the very idea the empire is over; and therefore, what does that mean? How do we approach China or Russia or Iran if we’re a declining empire? It’s a whole different mindset.

Then you want to work out how do we go through a decline without blowing ourselves up or blowing the whole world up. It’s not a question of maintaining your dominance. That’s gone. It’s a question of working things out. Our leaders don’t think or talk like that. They talk like they’re still in the 1970s and 80s, when you could make an argument that the United States’ position was extraordinarily dominant. That is over. Vietnam was the beginning of the end, maybe even Korea, but Vietnam for sure, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine now. I mean, unbelievable. We are not in a position to do all the bravado, even the wisdom coming out now that clearly the American government, Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Trump, thought they could do this thing in Iran in a few days, kill the Ayatollah and drop a bunch of bombs into Iran, and it’ll all break apart in our way. That is so catastrophically wrong that it almost takes your breath away. Well for me, we are living through the end of the empire and that end has been accelerated and brought closer by everything going on in the Middle East right now. And because what’s going on from the American side is still premised on the notion - we don’t have our declining empire - it is making one mistake after another, which is feeding into the decline of the empire. But that’s what denial gets you.

That’s what a similar denial in the decline of other empires, the Roman, the Greek, the Persian, the Ottoman, all of them. The pattern is not that different. You start the denial, you can’t believe it, you don’t want to believe it, you decide not to believe it and then you make a lot of mistakes that drive the point home because they accelerate the decline. When I do interviews with the British these days, I invite them, “Help us. You’ve been declining longer than we have.” The American Empire really picked up the pieces when the British Empire was gone, and the British have had to cope with it for a very long time. We’re just beginning, and we’re not doing a very good job.

Chris Hedges: I want to ask about the hegemony of the dollar, Swift and the petrodollar. The Iranians imposing these kind of tolls or taxes, they don’t accept the dollar. They’re accepting the Chinese Yuan and maybe cryptocurrencies. I can’t remember. But anyway, there is this active effort by China, Russia and certainly Iran to free themselves from the tyranny of the dollar

Richard D Wolff: Yes, and there is, if you allow me, a wonderful illustration of the Hegelian notion of contradiction. And here’s what I mean. The Chinese, in particular, understand, to their credit, that they achieved - and by the way I should premise this, I mean you know me so you don’t you won’t worry about it, but I have to say it these days, what I’m about to say is not an endorsement of China. China has loads of problems that would be worth many programs. This is not an ideal society or anything like that. But, having said all that, China’s economic growth over the last 40 years is absolutely phenomenal. There’s nothing in the world that I’m aware of, and that’s my field, economic history. Nobody has achieved that level of economic growth in that shorter period of historical time. So, they are aware that this miracle of economic development, which they can boast about, was achieved at a time of the United States being the hegemon and the dollar being the world currency. And therefore, and I’ve had this conversation with Chinese economists, they are aware that they better tread carefully and slowly because they do not want to kill something that they know has been part of their success. They are not in a rush to see the dollar disappear. They think that would be dangerous to them, let alone to the rest of the world.

On the other hand, as you rightly are pointing toward, they are the competing superpower economically now in the world. There’s no question. It’s not Russia. It’s China. It’s not Russia at all. It’s China. All right? And they know that that’s what’s happening, and they know that the United States gets extraordinary advantages, both out of the role of the dollar in the world currency and the role of the dollar in the oil business, which is part of its role in the world. And they would like some of those privileges, if you like, the benefits, values that come from having your currency play that role. They would like it to play that role for them. So, they are both deferential to the dollar and the US, and that’s the contradiction. They fight against, they don’t fight against. And you can see it in the advice they gave early on to the Iranians, if I’ve read my news reports correctly, they are pushing for the end of the war. They want the Iranians also to make concessions. It’s a little different from the advice I think Iran is getting from Russia. They have their differences too. But having said that, the long-term historical process is definitely one of taking away from the dollar its global role.

And I think you’re going to see, not just Iran, but when the United Arab Republics announced today that they are no longer members of OPEC, that they are going to enter the global oil market in their own way for their national interests, not with the other countries, which is of course particularly important to Saudi Arabia and Iran as other major oil producers. They were also announcing they’re breaking away from the system. They may still trade in dollars, but then again they may not. Or they may split it. They may do some in dollars but some in yuan. We might even see a desperate Middle East get together with a desperate Europe and resuscitate the euro. All of these things are now possible because of the disruption that what is happening in that war now is causing across the board.

Chris Hedges: And so, if the dollar is weakened or eventually removed as the world’s currency, I’m assuming that means nobody wants to buy our debt. And there’s a kind of instantaneous contraction of an empire you can’t afford. Is that correct?

Richard D Wolff: I think you’re correct the way I would put it just to spell it out a little bit, the United States is running spectacular budget deficits and given what Mr. Trump has said: he wants to raise the defense budget up to one and a half trillion dollars. That’s an increase by my arithmetic of six hundred billion dollars on a base of nine hundred billion. That’s fifty percent. It blows the mind. And he also wants to do all kinds of other things, and the Supreme Court has told him he can’t collect tariffs, at least not the ones he thought he got. That means, and I know the American budget, there’s not a new revenue source coming in of any great consequence, and there’s an enormous increase of expenditure being programmed in. And nobody is saying, wait a minute, you’re then going to have to go into the global market, borrow huge amounts of money. You’re a country that already crossed the 40 trillion dollar national debt level this year, and you can’t keep doing this.

For your audience, the three American companies, Standard & Poor, Moody’s, and Fitch, that do the evaluation of credit worthiness, have all now, over the last few years, dropped the credit rating of the United States’ debt from AAA to AA. Okay, still good, but it’s not the best. There are other countries that have 3A. We don’t. The whole world must understand that we are borrowing more than ever when we are a riskier bet than ever. And all of the history of economics teaches us that that situation will produce one or the other of following two events. One, people will stop lending to the United States, in which case it can’t run its deficit. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. Or, they’ll keep lending, but they’ll demand higher interest rates to compensate for the greater risk of lending to a country that’s got a $40 trillion debt. The United States is the most indebted country in the world. Nobody’s close.

So, these are very serious. If we don’t have the ability to borrow, or we would have to borrow but jack up our interest rates, imagine, Chris, a recession hitting us for the reasons we talked about earlier, and then the interest rates, instead of going down to offset it, go up because of the global dilemma of the dollar, we would make the recession worse, but we would have no choice. Why? Because we now rely on deficits, huge ones.

As I try to explain, the wars we have fought, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, if those wars had had to be paid for by raising taxes, we would have seen opposition sooner and bigger. We would pay for wars by borrowing. The irony is the rest of the world lends us the money to fight the wars that much of the rest of the world wishes we didn’t fight. But they are complicit. That’s what a global economy is. That’s how it works.

The Chinese help the people we fight against while we, every year, send billions of dollars in interest to China because it’s the second largest holder of U.S. government debt. So, you and I, our taxes go to China we say is the great dilemma. But we’re helping them finance their military. And people shouldn’t think that this is a secret. It isn’t. It’s all public knowledge. But it is a consequence of the multiple dead ends into which the United States is proceeding. And you put them together and then you get the scary scenarios that come out of it.

Chris Hedges: Let’s say Iran continues a prolonged closure of the Strait. They do let some ships through and Saudi Arabia is able to, through their pipeline, get stuff out through the Red Sea. But nevertheless, it’s a huge disruption. Microchip factories in Taiwan have shut down, et cetera. Explain for us the dark scenario. How could it all go really bad?

Richard D Wolff: Here’s one way. There are unfortunately multiple. I’ll give you one. Mr. Trump continues to build up and makes one of two decisions. Either, A, he actually introduces ground troops into Iran against Iran. Or he doesn’t do that, but instead, bombs wildly their civilian infrastructure. I’m assuming he’s gotten all the military targets that they set out to get. So that’s where they’re going to bomb civilians. The Iranians, for their part, have told us what they will do. A, they will make it impossible for anybody to go through the Strait of Hormuz. but they will tell their allies, the Houthis, to close the other strait up at the top of the Red Sea. That, in case people don’t know, adds another blockage to global trade movements, very, very important for Asia and Europe particularly. So, it’s not going to be the same problem. It’s going to be a worse problem, significantly worse economically. Meanwhile, they send their missiles to do ever more damage on Israel. I don’t know to what extremes they will go, but extreme behavior has now been an Israeli hallmark for some years, so we have to assume it will continue. They will bomb things, ports and other facilities in the Gulf countries.

My assumption then will be that everything is worse, that the shortage of oil will be worse and the shortage of natural gas and helium and fertilizer and the plastics that come out of oil. People should be aware. We haven’t felt all of the impact, even of the interruption yet, because there is storage and there are some inventory and people turn to that. And they’re trying to find alternative sources of oil and gas or even shift more quickly to wind and solar and all the rest. So, there’s a little bit of a slack. But what I just described is the capacity the Iranians have to eat up that slack real quick or to neutralize it. And so, it could get very, very bad.

I mean, in the Philippines, if I’m informed correctly, they’ve gone from a five-day week to a four-day week in both schools and offices and stores. Wow, okay, that’s a constriction. Now they have to decide, are they going to pay the workers for five days or four days? If they only pay them for four days, the constriction of demand and all the consequences of that in a poor country like the Philippines, who knows how bad that’s going to get? So yeah, we have to now think practically that three leaders, if you like, the group around Trump, the group around Netanyahu in Israel, and the group around whoever is exactly in charge in Iran, have in their hands a decision based on all the pressures that they face that are contradictory, of course, but we are all at risk in a way most of us don’t want to face. Hence the appropriateness of your questions. But those risks are very, very real. As real as ever we have had them to this point. You can be destroyed without a bomb falling here or anything else by the accumulation of these interruptions.

And again, I’m always struck when Trump says, “We don’t care. We have oil. We have fracking to give us oil and gas.” This is so naively childish. American oil companies are not going to continue to sell oil in this country at a much lower price than they can get a dozen places in the world. It’s only a matter of time. That’s what a market system is. That’s how it works. And that’s what you’re going to see here. We’re not going to escape the price increases if that’s the way it goes, and we won’t escape deflation if that’s the way it goes. And either of those are now risks that are real.

Chris Hedges: Are we flirting with what some people who have said, a global depression?

Richard D Wolff: Yes, absolutely, because all the leading countries in the world system are wrapped up. That’s what a world system means. Led by the West, no question, because we were the ones in charge as the 20th century evolved into the 21st. We’re the country that had the wealth. We set up the colonies. We developed the colonies in the way we did. They then fought independence, got their political independence, discovered that didn’t give them economic independence. Now, they are slowly realizing and acting on that understanding, but they’re not going to be held back. And so, they are now a real force, the Global South, and becoming more so. And you put together their demand and what their history is and where they want to go and what it means to the United States that it’s a declining empire and what it means to the Chinese, the Russians, and in a way the Iranians, that they’re sort of hegemon in the wings waiting to kind of become the next one, perhaps. You have recipe that each one is busy with their own idea and they don’t have any way to work this out.

World War I was so horrible a war that at least afterwards there was this effort, the League of Nations, to try to get them to get together. Eventually, led by Italy and Germany, they left the League of Nations and we had World War II, which was as horrible again a few years after the earlier horrible, and then we tried the United Nations. And now we see the United States basically withdraw from the United Nations in many formal ways and in informal ways even more. So, you have very little in the way of an even an effort to sit down and try to work out a way that you could accommodate the United States as a declining empire without it having to threaten the whole world and accommodate the Chinese desire to grow without that threatening the world. I don’t know if it can be done, but that we’re not making the effort, that is so terrible a comment on the human race that I don’t go there.

Chris Hedges: Great, thanks Rick. And I want to thank Sophia and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

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TOPSHOT - Signs reading ‘out of stock’ are displayed at a gas station amid rising petrol prices in Manila on March 9, 2026. The price of the main US benchmark for oil surged more than 30 percent on March 9, 2026 over concerns that the Middle East war could create prolonged supply disruptions. (Photo by Jam STA ROSA / AFP via Getty Images)

Bangladesh : Illustration

BANGLADESH, DHAKA - JUNE 17 : The capital city of Dhaka. Small textile factory in the city of Dhaka where employees work 24 hours a day. Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh June 17, 2015 in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Photo by Frédéric Soltan /Corbis via Getty Images)

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A labourer works inside a steel factory on a hot summer day on the outskirts of Jammu on June 10, 2025. (Photo by Mukesh GUPTA / AFP) (Photo by MUKESH GUPTA/AFP via Getty Images)

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FUJAIRAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - MARCH 05: Smoke rises after an explosion in the industrial zone, caused by debris after interception of a drone by air defence, according to the Fujairah media office on March 05, 2026, in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Christopher Pike/Getty Images)

Gas prices surged in Chicago

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - APRIL 30: Gas prices at a Chicago station have surged sharply, with regular unleaded reaching $5.79 per gallon and Supreme+ hitting $6.79.on April 30, 2026. The increase far exceeds the national average of $4.30, driven by the ongoing war with Iran and the resulting blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has severely disrupted global oil supplies. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The United States, in its recent war on Iran, has completely misread the Iranian people and failed to recognize the deep revolutionary spirit that pervades Iranian culture. Rather than inciting Iranian people against their government, the US-Israeli war on Iran has united the population. Rather than promoting democracy in Iran and empowering the people, US economic punishment and aggression have accomplished the opposite and have made life more difficult for most Iranians. Like Cuba, Iran is being targeted because it will not relinquish its sovereignty. As Chris Hedges explains, Iran is being punished for “its refusal to become a client state aligned with American interests in the region.”

In this episode, Hedges speaks with Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, the author of “The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions” (OR Books, January 2026). Ghamari is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. In his book, Ghamari tackles the myths perpetuated by the United States to demonize Iran in order to justify the imposition of severe sanctions and to go to war on Iran twice in less than one year. He discusses the many reasons why the Islamic Republic does not trust the United States to negotiate in good faith.

Year zero in the current struggle, Ghamari explains, was 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom conducted a successful coup of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, described by Ghamari as “the largest, most populous revolution in world history [that] defeated the fifth largest military in the world at the time.” Following that, events such as the Eight Year War, in which the United States provided the tools for chemical warfare on Iranians by Iraq, and the betrayal of Iran by President Bush, calling it part of the Axis of Evil despite Iran playing an instrumental role with the US in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, have created the conditions for “ the transfer of collective revolutionary consciousness generation after generation.”

Ghamari discusses Iran’s support for the Axis of Resistance as a way to create a “Ring of Fire” around it, opportunities to struggle against US and Israeli imperialism outside of Iran’s borders with the hope of avoiding a war at home. He states that initially Iranians opposed the use of resources to support Palestinians, Hezbollah and the defense of Syria, but now they understand the utility. Iranians see themselves in these struggles, and that is why a popular movement has taken the streets night after night against US attacks.

The outcome of the current conflict is uncertain, but Ghamari theorizes, and Hedges agrees, that Iran has a strong hand to play and the best result would be a return to a lifting of the economic sanctions in return for limits on Iran’s nuclear enrichment efforts, as was agreed in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The wildcards are the United States and Israel, who may be unwilling to compromise and may resort to dropping nuclear bombs in desperation.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges: In February 1984, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi was a prisoner on death row at Evin Prison in Tehran. He was alone in an infirmary cell, weak with advanced lymphoma. He had been arrested three years earlier for membership in a radical Marxist organization that sought to overthrow the Islamic Republic. He had been sentenced to death four months after his arrest. Now, to himself and his guards, he appeared to be dying.

The regime of Saddam Hussein, locked in a bitter war with Iran that began in the summer of 1980, was bombing Tehran, an attempt, not unlike the recent bombing by Israel and the US, to disrupt Iranian morale and compel Iranians to overthrow the government. But like most Iranians, Ghamari-Tabrizzi, although sentenced to death, would not transfer his loyalty to a foreign aggressor. In 1985, after the high judicial court annulled his death sentence, he was granted medical parole, left Iran, and was treated at Stanford University Hospital with aggressive chemotherapy. He went on to get his doctorate and was the chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University from 2020 to 2024.

In his latest book, “The Long War on Iran”, he implodes the myths used by US administrations to demonize Iran and impose not only crippling sanctions, but twice in the last year, wage an unprovoked war. “Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has exercised its own sovereign power to extend its regional political authority,” he writes.

The enduring question of the last four decades is Iran’s sovereignty, its refusal to become a client state aligned with American interests in the region. The United States and its European allies instrumentalize the Islamic Republic’s repressive state apparatus, its appalling violations of human rights - though arguably much less so than Western allies in the region - patriarchal legal system, and its limitations on civil liberties to justify their attempts to force Iran to submit to their demands. Joining me to discuss this latest iteration of the long war on Iran waged by Israel and the United States is Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, who is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

Let’s begin with what you write about in the book. The assumption by Western leaders that the use of sanctions and, in the last year, the use of brute military force is an effective method by which Iranians will reject the regime and institute, of course, what they want is a kind of pro-American ruling class

Behrooz Ghamari: First, thank you, Chris, for having me on the program. The logic of sanctions goes like this: that if we put enough pressure on a society and communicate that with the people there, that we are inserting this pressure on you because of the fault of your government, then at some point when the pressure gets too much, people will rise up and overthrow their own government.

Sometimes this logic changes and they say that “We are not actually sanctioning the people, we are sanctioning the state.” But that sort of second logic is somewhat difficult to subscribe to because inevitably when you sanction the state, it would affect people’s lives.

In reality, however, that stated objective never is realized in the way that the proponents of this policy advocated. Possibly the first thing that happens with sanctions is the impoverishment of people of all walks of life - the middle classes would go down in immiseration and lose their means of livelihood, the working class would lose its means of livelihood. And the idea that when people are losing the means of their livelihood, they would then go and mobilize and organize against their own government is just a fantasy. The more people think about their bread-and-butter issues, the harder it becomes to go out and mobilize and form a formidable political movement.

The second thing that happens is that it securitizes society. I’ve had a number of conversations with people in the American government who were promoting this policy, and they always say that we are doing this to help to democratize society. And I always say that if you go and look at the consequences of these policies, you always realize that these policies actually securitize the society and enhance the power of those repressive forces inside the state that you are trying to contain.

Last but not least, it creates a non-transparent form of economy that is the hotbed and a very fertile ground for the emergence of economic corruption. Because the state is not going to throw their hands up and say, “Okay, now you sanctioned us, we are going to submit to your demands.” They’re going to find ways to go around sanctions and operate their economy and their trade. And since they do this in secret, they create this network of cronies who have access to trade and economic resources. And no one knows exactly how this trade is happening and who owns the businesses, corporations and factories. And that’s why we see in the past 15 to 20 years in Iran a very rapid and deep economic corruption inside the state, which, for the most part, is the result of these sanctions. And, of course, people take advantage of the opportunity that is provided to them by these sanctions and distribute economic resources towards their own sort of networks. Nepotism grows and sons and daughters and cousins and all that would benefit from this kind of very non-transparent economic activities.

Chris Hedges: I think a fundamental point that you make several times in the book is the utter misreading of Iranian society and the Iranian revolution, which, of course, was a coalition of groups including leftist university students, Marxists. Yes, those groups were crushed later, actually fairly quickly and fairly brutally by the Islamic regime. But, you make the case that that revolutionary spirit still exists within Iran and, of course, we saw it with the latest street demonstrations in January and a fairly brutal response on the part of the regime and a fairly counterproductive insertion of armed units apparently by the US and Israel into those protests. Talk about our misreading of Iranian society.

Behrooz Ghamari: I mean part of it is intentional - that sort of fabricating and manufacturing a kind of state of being in Iran that justifies the US and its allies’ policy towards Iran - and some of it, therefore, is very intentional. Some of it is a misreading on the part of a lot of mass media and other observers who talk about Iran. They constantly see that every few years - two years, three years, four years - we see a massive protest movement in Iran, and it ends up anytime that this happens, we read that on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, all major newspapers. And that kind of protest movement sometimes suggests that the situation in Iran is so brutal, so unbearable and so difficult to manage that constantly people are pouring into the streets and protesting. I think that’s the source of misunderstanding that there is of course that protest movement and this kind of revolutionary consciousness among people in Iran, but that’s not necessarily an indication that the Iranian state is so extraordinarily brutal and extraordinarily repressive that it forces people to come to the streets as the last resort of expressing their grievances.

Actually, it is always the other way around. If the regimes are so brutal and they don’t leave any possibility of expression of any kind of grievances, we don’t see that often people coming to the streets. Iran, the Islamic Republic, is as repressive as any other country in the region, possibly less than other countries in the region. At least there are electoral processes in elections. We might argue that they are not real, they are fake, they are all these things. But, nevertheless, in no shape or form, Iran is more repressive than its neighboring countries and possibly in most other countries in the world, actually.

And the reason we see this kind of protest is actually that kind of what I call the transfer of collective revolutionary consciousness generation after generation. I think this is possibly the most important achievement of the revolution in 1979 that people came to this realization that they can express their grievances, they can express their demands by marching on the streets. And we need to remember that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the largest, most populous revolution in world history and they defeated the fifth largest military in the world at the time.

Chris Hedges: And let me just interrupt, of the most brutal secret SAVAK, one of the most brutal, largely Israeli-trained secret police networks certainly in the Middle East.

Behrooz Ghamari: Absolutely. Mossad was a major part of the training of SAVAK. The CIA had advisors in Iran during the reign of the Shah. So, that consciousness that people could actually overthrow, for the most part, by nonviolent means. This was not an armed revolution, this was a revolution that asserted its power through the sheer numbers. In 1978, the population of Tehran was around four million people and there were demonstrations, rallies that more than one million people participated in. Basically, one out of four people was participating in revolutionary rallies. And I think, that kind of subjectivity, that kind of collective consciousness we see that has been transferred, at least now, three generations after the revolution. And the reason we see all these protests movement is that that revolution of ‘79 continued in a sense in the mind of Iranian people rather than a reflection of the extreme brutality of the Iranian regime.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk a little bit about Iranian consciousness of Western aggression, which you write about. The fact that the United States - not just the United States - the French and others supplied Iraq during the Eight Year War with Iran. Iraq used, of course, chemical weapons, which the Iranians did not respond with chemical weapons. The numbers were staggering. I mean, probably a few hundred thousand people were affected by Sarin and these toxic, chemical agents. And the West looked away, and not only looked away, but in the case of the United States and their famous visit of Rumsfeld traveling to Baghdad and shaking Saddam’s hand, they funded and sustained this effort. And that’s, even now, embedded into the consciousness, I think, of most Iranians.

Behrooz Ghamari: That is so true. I mean, it always puzzles me when there is a conversation about trust during these negotiations as if Iranians are the ones who need to build trust while the recent historical record actually points to the other direction, that it’s the Americans and their allies who need to build trust for Iranians because that has been repeated over and over again in the past half century that Iranians cannot really trust Americans. And you mentioned the Iran-Iraq War, which was, at the time, of course, Saddam Hussein in 1979, 1980 was a client state of the Soviet Union. But nevertheless, the whole of the countries of the West came to the rescue because once they realized that the war was not going in the directions that they envisioned - Americans, Germans, French, the UK, all Arab countries with the exception of Libya and Syria - they all helped Saddam Hussein

And they delivered even chemical weapons. The German companies delivered the material for chemical weapons. The US provided the means of delivery of chemical weapons. And at the time, even when Iran put a grievance in the United Nations Security Council to condemn the Iraqis use of chemical weapons, the country that vetoed that was the United States. And I think that this has left a scar for Iranians, that every time that they try to think about a rapprochement or a détente - and we see in the recent years that in the middle of negotiations, they attack and in their attack, they are very indiscriminate and they do all these kind of things that amount to war crimes and it’s very openly exercised both in rhetoric and in practice - so, I think Iranians have good reasons to be skeptical of American intentions. And the need to build trust sort of falls in the court of Americans rather than the other way around.

Chris Hedges: Well, you mentioned the fact that Israel and United States bombed in the midst of negotiations, both in Oman and Geneva. It’s not in your book, but you can go back all the way to the Algiers Agreement, which was the agreement after 1979, in which the United States promised not to carry out aggressive policies towards Iran and then immediately violated it. And then, as you do write about in your book, the fact that Iran was an ally in terms of the installation of the Karzai government. Iran has enmity with the Taliban. And then, also the fact that when the Americans were fighting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, Iran physically had troops on the ground, militias on the ground, that were tacit allies of the United States to crush that insurgency.

Behrooz Ghamari: That is so true. And I think that goes back to this idea that one of the justifications of this current war is that no matter how hard Iranians try to change their own situation, they face dead ends, and that the only alternative left was an external intervention, which is far from truth. And we see in the past 40 years, particularly at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian society has gone through major transformations. When 9-11 happened, for example, Iran, both at the state level and at society level, was the only country in the Middle East that had organized massive public mourning for the victims of 9-11 in New York City. And this was not a kind of a veneer with some sort of sinister policy behind it.

Actually, as you mentioned, Iranians helped the U.S. to overthrow the Taliban. And in 2002, in the Bonn Conference, when they’re deciding about the future of Afghanistan, the U.S. delegation was very open about the fact that without Iran, they could not have toppled the Taliban that easily. But this was a kind of a reformist government under President Khatami at the time and there were some high hopes riding on this moment. Iran and the Islamic Republic wanted to show that they’re putting that kind of revolutionary fervor behind and ready to engage the US with mutual respect as equal partners. And then suddenly in State of the Union speech, George W. Bush comes out - this is after Iran was a partner in war and terror - and calls Iran one of the Axis of Evil.

And I think that really, again, we are speaking of the question of trust. That really inflicted irreparable damage to the Iranian reformist movement. Because if you show that much flexibility, if you show that much readiness to engage on different terms with the United States and the result is being called Axis of Evil, then how possibly could you justify any kind of rapprochement after that? I mean, they again justified it. They again tried to try that road unsuccessfully up to this point. And I think again, it’s very important to remember that all these US policies towards Iran, although the stated objective always has been that we want to help democratic elements inside Iran, in reality, every single policy that the US adopted undermine democratic elements inside the Iranian state and Iranian society.

Chris Hedges: Well, and of course, perhaps the most illustrative example of that is the coup that overthrew the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who attempted to take control of Iranian oil, which was controlled by the British. And I think, as I remember from your book, the Iranians didn’t even know how much oil was being exported out of their country. Workers in the oil fields were paid slave wages. Of course, the CIA and the British came and destroyed one of the most vital democracies in the Middle East.

Behrooz Ghamari: That’s so true. The U.S. and Iran have a long history together, but I think if we want to understand this situation today, I think the year zero is 1953 for Iran and the U.S. And there were a lot of hopes at the end of Second World War that the US was going to emerge as a force for good. Whether that was true or not, at least that was the perception in many corners of the world because the US’s posture was an anti-colonial posture against the British Empire, against the French Empire. But that never materialized. And, and even Mossadegh, at the beginning of this movement for nationalization of oil, thought that the U.S. would support his initiative against the British oil company, which was a very colonial kind of contract. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908 and the British basically controlled the production, distribution, everything. And by the time that oil was nationalized in Iran, the profit that Iran shared of the oil the production was only 18%. 82 % of the profit went to the British. 30 % of that was directed to the British government. And so that really set a kind of tone in the next 25 years for Iran-U.S. relations.

And in so many different ways in my other work, I argue that the Iranian revolution was Iranians’ response to the 1953 coup. And it’s impossible to understand the revolution without having the 1953 coup, CIA and MI6 coup, in mind. Because without that, it’s impossible to understand the Iranian revolution. Without that, because a lot of Americans, the only thing they remember of Iranian revolution is the taking over of American embassy in Tehran, the hostage crisis. And I think without the 1953 coup, the hostage crisis is incomprehensible. Not justifiable. I don’t think it was justified, but one needs to understand the mindset of those students who took over American embassy that they were thinking about the 1953 coup and the possibility of the US and the CIA attempting to sabotage the revolution once again.

But this is so important that year zero is 1953 and we need to really give enough attention to that time in order to understand what happened in the 1979 revolution, hostage crisis, and to a certain degree, what’s going on today. This is basically the foundation of a colonial imperialist relation between the two countries that needs to be overturned. And this is the whole kind of debate there, that the revolution basically changed the map of the Middle East. The struggle, the point of contention today, is to go back to the pre-1979 map of the Middle East with Iran as a client state and Iran as a state whose political authority does not exercise a political authority, does not undermine American interest or Israeli interest in the region.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, very close parallels with Cuba, wouldn’t you say?

Behrooz Ghamari: Absolutely. I gave this talk a couple of weeks ago at the University of Maryland and one of my colleagues there who’s a Cuba specialist, at the end of my talk, he said, “I just wanted to correct you one thing that wherever you said ‘Iran’, you should have said ‘Cuba’” because the similarity is really astonishing that this is the same policy. These are the same points of contention. And as we see in Cuba, what is the result of like 70 years of embargo, the immiseration of an entire nation. And it’s exactly the same. When that happens, you’re actually empowering the ruling classes. You are not disempowering them because you’re empowering the ruling classes and that can continue for decades after decades after decades as is the example in Cuba. And this is the example in Iran as well, that the more kind of free flow of ideas, trade, political relations, the better it is for the emergence of democratic movements in any country.

Chris Hedges: Before we talk about where we are now, you write that Iran’s existence depended on creating a ring of fire around its borders as a deterrent to the American and Israeli ambitions to redraw the map of the region. Explain the ring of fire.

Behrooz Ghamari: For years the Iranian state, the Islamic Republic, argued that helping neighboring countries in Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, is a deterrence for Americans and Israelis to bring the war directly to Iran. I remember when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, there was a conference in Istanbul and the war in Syria had started and she said, “We are in Syria. We are going to clip the wings of the Iranians.” And, particularly after 9-11-2001, it was very clear that that kind of project of “seven countries in five years”, the biggest reward for that policy was toppling the Islamic Republic in Iran.

So, Iranians consciously created that kind of what I called a ‘ring of fire’ as a deterrent to say that “If you attack us, if you pressure us, we have the ability to respond in other places.” And, of course, I say this with a little bit of a caveat there. That doesn’t mean that there was no ideological commitment there as well. I believe that the Islamic Republic is committed to the Palestinian cause. They do instrumentalize it as well. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t genuinely believe that Palestinian’s right to return and statehood must be defended. But, in 1984, I believe, Henry Precht, who was the in charge of the Iran desk at the State Department, in a piece he said that Iranians basically are not interested in dominion abroad. They are interested in security and safety at home. And whatever they do outside their borders is a way of protecting that stability and security at home.

I don’t believe that the Islamic Republic, at any moment, had this kind of expansionist ambitions. And even about the question of Israel that they say, “Death to Israel. Death to America,” but that really did not translate into a specific policy of going towards annihilation of the state of Israel. This was basically a rhetorical gesture and with no actual plan. During the war with Iraq, there was a battalion of Revolutionary Guards who basically crossed the border from Iraq down to go to Lebanon and they said that we are going to just go down to Israel and liberate Palestine. And Khomeini, at the time, who is still alive, immediately said, “Just turn around, turn around. We don’t want to go to Israel. This is all about protecting our own borders. This is not about going anywhere else.” So, they all turned around and so basically at the beginning of the revolution, there was this misunderstanding that when they say that we are going to export the revolution, we are actually going to go and arm and liberate other lands. This was more of an inspirational kind of rhetoric rather than an actual kind of planned military and offensive plan to go and liberate other countries.

Chris Hedges: You’re right. I think you wrote the book, you’re responding to the bombings in June, but they can, of course, it is current for the latest round of attacks. “Fresh in the minds of Iranians was Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Bombing Iranian cities immediately evoked the image of complete destruction of Gazan cities. Iranians knew that the Israelis possessed no inhibition in committing war crimes and acts of genocide. They and their American backers wanted Iranians to have the image of Gaza in their mind, of the atrocities they are capable of, and to force them to surrender unconditionally in the first few days of the assaults. They also had hoped that the attacks would instigate regime change through mobilization from below, led by domestic and diasporic dissidents.” You write a lot about the diaspora, quite scathingly and correctly. “Bombing Evin Prison could be understood as a manifestation of the naive fantasy of the latter option. Raising the prison gates with the masses storming Evin carrying freed political prisoners on their shoulders and celebrating the end of the Islamic Republic in a replay of the fall of the Bastille.” I think that is what they thought and I think it’s probably another example of the complete corrosion or disintegration of the U.S. diplomatic corps. In a sense, you have to rely on diplomats who, to a certain extent, are bi-cultural. But let’s talk about the latest assault. What do you think it’s done within Iran? And what do you think the Iranian regime will do from here on out?

Behrooz Ghamari: The last part of your question is very hard to tell and we don’t know. But I want to emphasize this, that I truly believe that without genocide in Gaza, we would not be talking about this war in Iran.

The genocide in Gaza, I think, was an exercise in impunity. The transformation of the so-called rule-based world order through this genocide in Gaza opened up this possibility of war crimes that otherwise could have been unthinkable. I mean, it was unthinkable to do such a thing, to have a president of the United States openly saying that “We are going to annihilate an entire civilization.” I don’t think we could imagine anything like this five years ago, 10 years ago. And I think that was made possible by the genocide in Gaza. And Israelis, I think, were very much aware of this. And for that reason, I put much of the responsibility of what’s happening in Iran on the shoulders of the Biden administration. Because they had the opportunity to intervene and stop that genocide at its very, very early stages. Not only did they refuse to do so, but they helped to carry that out. And I think that really changed the face of war in the 21st century.

And I think that the word impunity is very key there, too. And Israelis tried it, and I think they tried it successfully, that the genocide that unfolded in front of the world’s eyes could be carried out for two years without any kind of consequences. I mean, there is an ICC indictment, but you know these are really not something that could ever stop that war machine against Palestinians in Gaza. And they knew that the only way they could attack Iran, declare war on Iran, was through a similar campaign of blanket bombing and destruction of civilian infrastructure that they did in Gaza. And that’s what they did.

And even today, they understand that there is no other option. What are they going to do? I would imagine even they might go as far as, God forbid, to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran because what other options do they have? They can’t invade Iran. And the only option they have is to basically what exactly President Trump is saying, to annihilate the entire nation and to do so very openly.

And so, I think, for Iranians this was a moment of a great lesson because for many years, when these kind of protests in Iran were happening and people were very dissatisfied with their own state and there was a lot of publicity about the diversion of Iranian resources to help the Axis of Resistance, the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Syria, and in a lot of these protests, Iranian people were shouting, “No, not for Gaza, not for Lebanon, my heart only is for Iran, I sacrificed my life for Iran.” And now they realize that all those things that the state was saying came to be true, that if they don’t have this fight in the streets of Damascus, they have to do it in the streets of Tehran. It might not sit well with the Syrians who live in Damascus, and for good reasons. But that was the reality that in the absence of Hezbollah, in the absence of Palestinian resistance - I mean, Iran doesn’t have very strong relations with Hamas, and that’s another misunderstanding of this whole thing - but with Palestinian resistance now the war has come to Iran and Iranians have to deal with it. And I think this was a moment that a light went on in many Iranian’s mind that there was some truth to that, that this was a project in the making at least for the past 20 years to bring this war to Iran and as Netanyahu always said, “To cut the head of the snake.” And that ‘head’ is Iran, and that’s the major reward for this sort of re-envisioning the Middle East. And that’s why we see a very strong rallying around the flag in Iran and these nightly gatherings, congregations in public squares in Iran. That started as a state initiative, but then it turned very quickly into a kind of a civil society movement that people show up all night waving flags and with families, with kids, with elderly, with disabled people. Everyone is showing that kind of support.

But where it leads, that’s a major, major question because we really don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of this war. The economic situation in Iran was already very hard. The inflation is between 60 to 70 percent and is going to get worse. Now, there is an estimate that four million people have lost their jobs because of the war. And the unemployment rate was already about 15 % before the war. So, all those economic grievances that started in December and January last year, now I think it’s going to resurface at the end of this war. And I don’t know whether the government has the resources to offer any kind of satisfactory alternative to how they are going to deal with that kind of very grave economic crisis.

It all depends on how the war ends and what kind of agreements they make. And if all the sanctions are lifted, maybe there is a possibility that the government can cope with the economic consequences of this war. But I truly worry about what’s going to be left in those ruins in relation to the state exercising its authority and the people who are trying to find a way to continue their means of subsistence.

Chris Hedges: It does appear that the Iranian regime has a high degree of leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. And of course, if they can get the Houthis to shut down the Bab al-Mandab, that will block Saudi oil that is being shipped through a pipeline and shipped out not through the Strait. And I’m just asking, it also appears to me anyway that there are certain non-negotiable demands on the part of the Iranian government. That is one, reparations; two, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, which are at least $100 billion; some kind of UN guarantee that they won’t be attacked again - they’ve been attacked twice within the last year - and then also this ability to collect tolls, if you want to call them that, usually in Chinese currency, I think exclusively in Chinese currency, which are a kind of backdoor form of reparations perhaps. But just your take on the Iranian position, Iranian negotiating strength. I know, I’m not asking you to predict the future, that’s a dangerous thing to do, but at least the trends.

Behrooz Ghamari: Right. I mean, the last proposal Iranians sent, in which they tried to separate the nuclear question from the crisis of Strait of Hormuz. And they said that, “We lift the blockade of Hormuz and then the U.S. lift the blockade. And then you unfreeze our assets and then we’re all good to go”

But of course, for the U.S., I think that’s a non-starter. I don’t think the U.S. is going to accept separating the nuclear issue from terms of ending this war because if they do, this is a very open admission of defeat for the U.S. because that was the whole idea of this war. Although no one knows what the idea of this war was, the objective of this war.

Up to this point, I think Iranians have the upper hand. They always knew that the Strait of Hormuz is their winning card, and they wanted to save that for a day like this. And now they’re using it and they’re basically holding the whole world economy hostage. And the world also knows that this hostage crisis is caused by the US, not by the Iranians.

I don’t know if you heard the German Chancellor the other day. I mean if the Germans are blaming the US for this, then we can say with a certain level of confidence that the world believes that the responsibility of this situation is on the shoulders of the US. So, Iranians have the upper hand and how they’re going to use this upper hand is not quite clear. And I believe that they’re ready, and they have said so before this war started, to agree to a certain number of years of freezing their enrichment program. And I believe that at the end, this is the kind of agreement that they can sort of work with that Iran would freeze for a certain number of years their enrichment program and the sanctions are lifted and some confidence building and so on and so forth. And then we go back to where we were last year. The painful part of it is that we could have achieved this without all this destruction and death. And now our hope is that we could get to an agreement that is something close to what we could have agreed on a year ago.

Chris Hedges: Great, thank you Behrooz. I want to thank Max and Sophia, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

Photos

Saddam Painting

A large mural showing President Saddam Hussein with a dove of peace and the flag of Iraq, in a Baghdad street, September 1989. (Photo by Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images)

Iranians Capture Al-Fao

A mortar shell explodes behind an Iranian Revolutionary Guard who was helping members of the press with their equipment in Al-Fao Peninsula, Iraq, 15th February 1986. (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

Khomeini Raising Hand to Greet Supporters

(Original Caption) Ayatollah Khomeini, looking approvingly at a mammoth turnout of well-wishers at his temporary home 2/2, raises his hand to respond to the shouts of “Salute to Khomeini.” The religious leader, who drove the Shah out of Iran last month while still in exile himself, plans to announce an Islamic government in defiance of Premier Shahpoour Bakhtiar’s regime.

Iran Hostage Crisis

A blindfolded American hostage with his hands tied up is brought out on to the compound of the embassy by students who stormed the embassy and took all the diplomatic staff hostage in front of the international media on 11th November 1979 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

Protest In Tehran

A crowd of demonstrators carrying a large red banner in a street in Tehran, Iran, November 28th 1979. (Photo by UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Military Concession

An army soldier guarding the SAVAK (National Intelligence and Security Organization) headquarters in Tehran, comes out of an armored personnel carrier, waving to the crowd as a gesture of unity, on the afternoon when the army conceded and the Iranian Revolution was declared victorious, 11th February 1979. (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

Donald Rumsfeld Meets Saddam Hussein In 1983

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - DECEMBER 20: (VIDEO CAPTURE) U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (L) and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein shake hands December 20, 1983 in Baghdad, Iraq. Rumsfeld met with Hussein during the war between Iran and Iraq as an envoy for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. (Photo by Getty Images)

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JULY 17: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein speaks marking the 34th anniversary of Iraq’s revolution which brought the Baath Party to power July 17, 2002 in Baghdad, Iraq. Hussein announced that the U.S. and its allies would not be able to topple his government. (Photo courtesy INA/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-AFGHANISTAN-CONFLICT-TALIBAN

TOPSHOT - Afghan Taliban militants and villagers attend a gathering as they celebrate the peace deal and their victory in the Afghan conflict on US in Afghanistan, in Alingar district of Laghman Province on March 2, 2020. (Photo by NOORULLAH SHIRZADA / AFP) (Photo by NOORULLAH SHIRZADA/AFP via Getty Images)

Agreement Reached At Afghanistan Talks in Bonn

398195 02: (US SALES ONLY) Leaders of the four delegations from Afghanistan (from L) Humajun Dscharir representing Afghan exiles in Cyprus, Abdul Sattar Sirat, representing former King Mohammad Zaher Shah’s Rome contingent, Younus Qanuni, representing the Northern Alliance, and Pir Said Hamid Gailani, representing the Peshawar Afghan exiles, sign December 5, 2001 an agreement on an interim government for Afghanistan after nine days of negotiations. (Photo by Oliver Multhaup/DPA/Getty Images)

Mohammed Khatami

Moderate cleric presidential candidate Mohammed Khatami (C), surprise front-runner, greeting supporters outside polling station on election day. (Photo by Barry Iverson/Getty Images)

Bush Delivers Second State Of The Union Address

WASHINGTON - JANUARY 28: U.S. President George W. Bush (R) delivers his second State of the Union address as Vice President Dick Cheney (L) looks on January 28, 2003 at the Capitol building in Washington DC. President Bush emphasized the importance of disarming Saddam Hussein, one year after he declared Iraq to be part of an “axis of evil.” (Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais-Pool/Getty Images)

Iranian Defendant Mohammed Mossadegh During His Trial

(Original Caption) Tehran, Iran: Mossadegh Looks Defiant. Seated next to a guard, former Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh (Right) glances piercingly at the court during his trial in Tehran.

Hostages Being Led by Blindfold

(Original Caption) Photo shows Hostages photographed inside the United States embassy compound as they are led outside the building, blindfolded on the first day of the occupation, 11/4. The number of hostages is not yet determined. The Islamic revolutionary photographer did not want to give his name.

TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-ENERGY-BLACKOUT

TOPSHOT - People transit on a street without power during a nation wide blackout in Havana on March 21, 2026. A power outage struck the entire island of Cuba on March 21, 2026, the energy ministry said, in the second nationwide blackout in less than a week as its grid struggles under a US oil blockade. (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton li

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens during a press conference in Beijing on February 21, 2009. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said here on February 21 that China was still confident in US Treasury bonds, as she expressed her nation’s appreciation for the investments. AFP PHOTO/Guang Niu/POOL (Photo credit should read GUANG NIU/AFP via Getty Images)

U.S. And Israel Wage War Against Iran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 15: People clear rubble in a house in the Beryanak District after it was damaged by missile attacks two days before, on March 15, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. The United States and Israel continued their joint attack on Iran that began on February 28. Iran retaliated by firing waves of missiles and drones at Israel, and targeting U.S. allies in the region. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

First aid trucks arrive in Gaza after the ceasefire

GAZA CITY, GAZA OCTOBER 12: Palestinians carry sacks of flour and boxes of supplies as they gather amid the rubble to collect humanitarian aid in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, on October 12, 2025. The first convoy of aid trucks carrying essential food, medicine, and drinking water entered Gaza through the Kerem Abu Salem border crossing as part of the cease-fire agreement. (Photo by Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

President Biden Delivers Remarks On Attempted Assassination Of Former President Trump

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 14: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at the White House on July 14, 2024 in Washington, DC. A shooter opened fire injuring former President Trump, killing one audience member, and injuring two others during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Biden was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-HOSTAGES

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem on May 21, 2025. Netanyahu said on May 21 that he was ready for a “temporary ceasefire” to guarantee the return of hostages held in Gaza, of whom 20 are “certainly” alive. (Photo by Ronen Zvulun / POOL / AFP) (Photo by RONEN ZVULUN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran protested in Tehran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 30: Iranians gather in Enqelab Square to protest Israeli and U.S. attacks on their country, carrying Iranian flags and photos of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike, and chanting slogans against the U.S. and Israel in Tehran, Iran, on March 30, 2026. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran protested in Tehran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 30: Iranians gather in Enqelab Square to protest Israeli and U.S. attacks on their country, carrying Iranian flags and photos of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike, and chanting slogans against the U.S. and Israel in Tehran, Iran, on March 30, 2026. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-YEMEN-IRAN-LEBANON-ISRAEL-US-WAR-HOUTHI-PROTEST

TOPSHOT - Supporters of the Iran-backed Houthi movement hold up the Lebanese flag (L), the yellow Lebanese Hezbollah party flag and a portrait of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah (C-R) as they rally in solidarity with Iran and Lebanon in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 17, 2026. (Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP via Getty Images)

Satellite Imagery Of The Strait Of Hormuz

STRAIT OF HORMUZ - 11 JANUARY: A satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. This vital energy chokepoint handles nearly 20% of global oil and 25% of liquefied natural gas exports. Major exporters using the strait include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025)

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published April 20, 2026.

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Full Text:

During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterized by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in “Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace.” “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children. If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralyzing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot – it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy. This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programs to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invalidating or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

Photos

MegaFest 2013 - Day 2

DALLAS, TX - AUGUST 30: Pastors Victoria Osteen and Joel Osteen speak during MegaFest at the American Airlines Center on August 30, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images)

Pastor John Hagee speaking at Harvest Rock Church, Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, Tuesday morni

Pastor John Hagee speaking at Harvest Rock Church, Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, Tuesday morning, before local pastors to support Israel during the apocalypse. June 13, 2006. (Photo by Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Donald Trump Campaigns For President In Georgia Ahead Of November Election

DULUTH, GEORGIA - OCTOBER 23: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena on October 23, 2024 in Duluth, Georgia. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Holds Press Briefing

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 30:White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on March 30, 2026 in Washington, DC. Leavitt discussed a wide range of topics, including the conflict in Iran and funding for the Department of Homeland Security. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Trump Spends Weekend At Mar-A-Lago Estate In Palm Beach

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - OCTOBER 31: The Trump coat of arms in seen inlaid into the marble of the entrance to the Grand Ballroom at US President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on October 31, 2025 at Palm Beach, Florida. Trump is spending the weekend at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

President Trump Participates In Southern Boulevard Dedication Ceremony In Palm Beach, Florida

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - JANUARY 16: Right-wing political activist Laura Loomer attends a Road Dedication Ceremony at Mar-a-Lago on January 16, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida. Florida State lawmakers approved the name change of a portion of Southern Boulevard to “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard.” (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Peter Thiel Visits “FOX & Friends”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 09: Fox anchor Pete Hegseth interviews entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel during “FOX & Friends” at Fox News Channel Studios on August 09, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

U.S. President Trump Attends World Economic Forum In Davos

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND - JANUARY 21: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) attends a bilateral meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (not pictured) alongside (L-R) U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting on January 21, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Portrait of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Being Taken into Custody

(Original Caption) USA: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Indian guru arrested for immigration violations.

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY KAREN LOWE Artists and des

LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES: TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY KAREN LOWE Artists and designers from the Art and Commerce Gallery finish the settings for the show “Applesauce and Pudding” in downtown Los Angeles 19 April. (Photo credit should read HECTOR MATA/AFP via Getty Images)

Reverend Moon Marrying Couples

Unification Church leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his wife marry 2,075 pairs of his followers at Madison Square Garden on New Years Day, 19

Portrait Of Jim Jones

Portrait of American cult leader and founder of the People’s Temple (formally known as the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ) Jim Jones (1931 - 1978) as he poses in his office, San Francisco, California, July 3, 1976. (Photo by Janet Fries/Getty Images)

US-IMMIGRATION-ICE-SHOOTING

US Border Patrol agents stand guard at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026. A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed an American woman on the streets of Minneapolis January 7, leading to huge protests and outrage from local leaders who rejected White House claims she was a domestic terrorist. The woman, identified in local media as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was hit at point blank range as she apparently tried to drive away from agents who were crowding around her car, which they said was blocking their way. (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images)

Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles

Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles are arrested by local police on August 28, 1974. Applewhite is charged with auto theft and Nettles is charged with the fraudulent use of credit cards.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon Speaks

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

At the last minute, Iran agreed on Monday to participate in negotiations with the United States in Islamabad, Pakistan. The fragile ceasefire agreement between the two countries ends on Wednesday. Following the US attack on and seizure of an Iranian cargo ship in the Sea of Oman on Saturday, and contradictory tweets by President Trump in recent days, Iran was understandably hesitant to engage in further discussions with the US. There are additional obstacles to a successful resolution of the US-Israeli war on Iran to consider.

To dissect the challenges involved in negotiating peace and the potential ramifications of a resumption of the war, Chris Hedges speaks with Professor John Mearsheimer. A fundamental difficulty is whether the United States realizes that Iran has the upper hand in this conflict. Mearsheimer explains that if the US chooses to escalate the situation, this would be to Iran’s advantage as they have the capacity to inflict greater harm on the global economy beyond restricting passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which has already created shortages in critical materials needed for manufacturing and agriculture.

The United States will have to make compromises in its demands to reach an agreement with Iran, something the US has so far been unwilling to do. Mearsheimer adds that the Trump administration must balance both the interests of Israel and its powerful lobby in the US, which “has no interest in settling this war,” and the domestic impacts of a global recession if the war continues that could hurt Trump in the midterms. If the administration succeeds in extending a ceasefire, Mearsheimer points out that the Israel lobby “will be working overtime not to make that framework morph into a peaceful agreement.”

The stakes are high and neither Mearsheimer or Hedges are optimistic that the United States has the capacity to navigate the complicated and competing challenges involved in reaching a lasting resolution. Mearsheimer summarizes the situation by stating, “The only thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is it looks like one giant mess that’s going to lead to endless trouble.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Iran, after initially balking, will send negotiators to Islamabad for a new round of talks with the United States, less than 48 hours before the ceasefire is set to expire. Iran, however, has criticized the U.S. for violating the ceasefire from the beginning of its implementation, citing the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz since April 13th and the seizure of an Iranian container ship, both they cite as breaches of the truce as well as international law. Iran says that if the US continues to carry out what it defines as acts of aggression, Iranian forces will respond accordingly. Tehran’s 10-point proposal submitted before the first round of Islamabad talks is the basis for further negotiations. But the 10 points include a number of conditions the US has repeatedly rejected. It demands the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions on Iran. continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East, an end to attacks on Iran and its allies, the release of some $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets, and a U.N. Security Council resolution making any deal binding.

So where are we? Is the Trump administration ready to make concessions in the face of Iran’s ability to strangle the global economy by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz?

What will be the role of Israel, which has threatened to resume attacks on Iran? With perhaps only 5 % of the pre-war, 20 % of the oil and natural gas making its way through the strait, how much more can the global economy already under severe distress endure before it triggers a global economic crisis?

Joining me to discuss the crisis in the Middle East is Professor John Meersheimer. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Meersheimer, who graduated from West Point and was a captain in the US Air Force, is the author of numerous books, including Conventional Deterrence, Nuclear Deterrence, Ethics, and Lytle Heart, and The Weight of History, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, The Israel Lobby, and US Foreign Policy, and Why Leaders Lie, The Truth About Lying.

in international politics. The big question for me, John, is does the Trump administration realize, in your view, that ⁓ this is a game that Iran controls, ⁓ essentially because of their stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, they’re largely going to be able to dictate the terms.

John Mearsheimer: Let me just reinforce what you said, Chris. I think there’s no question that if you go up the escalation ladder, which the Trump administration is threatening to do after the ceasefire ends on Wednesday, that we cannot win. And in fact, I would make the argument that it’s in Iran’s advantage for the United States to go up the escalation ladder because the longer this war goes on and the less oil that comes out of the Persian Gulf and maybe even the Red Sea, the better for Iran. So I think going up the escalation ladder makes no sense for us. The $64,000 question is whether or not President Trump and his advisors understand that. And my guess is that they do. And therefore I think that we will go to great lengths to work out some sort of deal ⁓ on Wednesday ⁓ or before Wednesday ⁓ so that we don’t have to go up the escalation ladder. I just find it hard to believe that the administration would be interested in ⁓ escalating.

But you never know with the Trump administration and with President Trump in particular. So it’s hard to say for sure. But I don’t see them going up the escalation ladder. I think they’ll try to craft a deal. And if they don’t have all of the essentials in place, they’ll just extend the ceasefire. So that’s my surmise as to where this one is headed.

Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about the ten points because many of these points, ⁓ I mean the removal of US military bases from the region, continued ⁓ control of the Strait of Hormuz, these are ⁓ pretty bitter pills for the United States to swallow.

John Mearsheimer: think there’s no question about that. I often say that, you know, if you look at what people are talking about in terms of a settlement ⁓ this week, ⁓ what they focus on is the nuclear issue and what they really focus on is the nuclear enrichment issue.

Hardly anybody seems to be saying anything about things like reparations, sanctions, ⁓ who controls the straight-up Hormuz moving forward, what about American military bases in the region. And furthermore, the Iranians are deeply interested in getting some sort of security arrangement put in place so that Israel and the United States don’t attack Iran again in six months. These are hugely complicated. issues. There are a good number of them, and I think they have to be settled as well as the nuclear issue. But even on the nuclear issue, it’s not clear to me where this all leads. The United States would like to eliminate Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability completely, but it seems quite clear that the Iranians are unwilling to do that. Furthermore, it seems that the Americans or the United States and the Israelis want all of that enriched uranium that Iran has, the uranium that is enriched up to 60 percent. They want it taken out of the country. But the Iranians have said very clearly that that’s not going to happen. Obviously, some compromises are going to have to be made here. But those compromises will not be easy to make.

⁓ I don’t think they’ll be made quickly. And then the question is, ⁓ how is Trump going to sell them, especially to the Israelis ⁓ and to Israel’s supporters in the United States? So what we’re saying here, I think, is that even on the nuclear issue alone, it’s a very complicated matter. But when you throw in all the other issues as well, it’s just hard to see how you get any sort of what one might call meaningful peace agreement.

Chris Hedges: You have the Netanyahu government threatening to resume attacks on Iran, even unilaterally. ⁓ And the other question is how much influence Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, I mean two utterly inept negotiators of course, but two and let’s call them what they are. mean they’re Zionists, Zionist assets. ⁓ You know, are they able as they were with the inception of this war to ⁓ sell the Trump administration on ⁓ resuming, on what Netanyahu wants, which is resuming attacks.

John Mearsheimer: Look, I think even without Kushner and Witkoff, who are Israeli assets for sure, there is so much pressure from pro-Israel forces in the United States on Trump that there are real limits to what he can do vis-a-vis Iran in terms of making concessions to the Iranians. ⁓

But the problem here is that Trump is also feeling pressure from the other side. And what I mean by that is if he doesn’t settle this, and especially if he escalates as the Israelis would like him to do, then we’re heading on a course where the international economy is going to go off a cliff. I mean, the incentive for President Trump to settle this conflict as quickly as possible has mainly to do with economic considerations. There’s a great danger here that if we continue on this path, and again, if we escalate especially, ⁓ that ⁓ this will have disastrous consequences for the world economy, which includes the United States. And of course, that will have disastrous consequences for the midterm elections. So Trump is desperate to shut this one down. So he has that pressure on one side, and then he has pressure from Israel on the other side. And again, we cannot emphasize strongly enough that Israel has no interest in settling this war. Israel wants to see Iran finished, finished off. They want to see Iran decisively defeated. And as we both know,

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

John Mearsheimer: If anyone has won this war at this point and is likely to come out of this war as a winner, it’s Iran, not the United States. Well, given that reality, the Israelis are going to continue to put pressure on the United States to stay at war. So I would argue that even if President Trump is able to extend the ceasefire and get a framework for a future agreement in place, the Israelis and their supporters in the United States will be working overtime not to make that framework morph into a peaceful agreement. They’ll be working overtime to undermine that framework and get the United States back at war with Iran.

Chris Hedges: One of the fascinating kind of subtexts this was Lebanon. ⁓ Israel, almost when the ceasefire began, started pounding Lebanon. But Trump said it had to stop. mean, Israel has a very kind of elastic vision of ceasefires. It’s still attacking Lebanon. ⁓ this was a fundamental demand on the part of Iran. ⁓ They said, well, we’ve stopped attacking GCC bases in GCC countries ⁓ with your allies, so you have to stop attacking our allies. This is a regional ceasefire. they, you know, while Israel has certainly breached the ceasefire in Lebanon ⁓ as they do daily in Gaza, nevertheless it does seem, I don’t know what your take on it is, that that was huge concession on the part of the Trump administration to Iranian demands.

John Mearsheimer: Well, excuse me. The Trump administration had no choice but to get Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah and Iran for a brief period of time at least so that the Iranians would open the Strait of Hormuz. That’s what they wanted. And Trump was able to get the Israelis to make a small concession, which is to say the Israelis agreed to a 10-day ceasefire. Just think about it. It’s a 10-day ceasefire. And I’ve been following it, and it’s not even much of a ceasefire at this 10-day period. But the idea that the Israelis are interested in a meaningful ceasefire is not a serious argument. What the Israelis are interested in is creating a civil war in Lebanon for two reasons. One, to weaken Hezbollah and to take Hezbollah’s attention off of Israel. And number two, to weaken Lebanon overall. This is standard Israeli tactics. And the Israelis will continue to attack Lebanon and Hezbollah in good part, not just to weaken Hezbollah, but in good part to undermine any negotiations between Iran on one hand and the United States on the other. It’s obvious that for Iran, Hezbollah is a very important ally and they want to do everything they can to help Hezbollah. The Israelis fully understand that and the Israelis understand that if they continue to attack Hezbollah and continue to keep the situation in Lebanon as a hot conflict that this will limit how much Iran will be able to concede to the United States. So this is one of the reasons I find it hard to imagine that you’re ever going to settle this conflict in any meaningful way.

Chris Hedges: You wrote the book with Stephen Walt on the Israel lobby. We’ve certainly seen ⁓ diminishing of the power of the Israel lobby in AIPAC. Democrats now kind of run from it, whereas they, you know, couldn’t wait to get key slots at the AIPAC convention. ⁓ Do you think the Israel lobby is ⁓ weakened enough that it’s kind of death grip on the American political system is no longer as effective.

John Mearsheimer: I think in terms of the public discourse in the United States, the lobby has lost. When Steve and I wrote the article and then the book in 2006 and 2007, The lobby was able to basically control the discourse and greatly limit the criticism of Israel, the US-Israeli relationship, and the lobby itself. Those days are gone. The discourse today about the lobby and criticism of Israel, this is all out in the open in ways that are actually hard for me to imagine, Chris, given where we were at back when Steve and I wrote the article in the book.

But that’s at the level of the discourse. At the level of policy, and especially with regard to the Trump administration, which as you know has two more years and nine months in power, the lobby still has a stranglehold Trump administration. And there’s no evidence that Trump has been able to break away from that stranglehold and act independently, to act simply in America’s interests. So in terms of U.S. policy, I think the lobby is as strong as ever. Now, how that plays out after the next presidential election is a different matter.because you see both in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party that there are politicians who are beginning to question the relationship with Israel, who are beginning to question whether associating themselves with AIPAC is a good thing and so forth and so on. But I would still bet that it’ll be, you know, a good 10 years before our policy towards Israel is...not seriously affected by the lobby.

Chris Hedges: So what does that mean vis-a-vis Iran? So if the Israel lobby retains that kind of power, and in a way Trump was even more obsequious because the Israel lobby has been calling for a war on Iran for four decades, and other administrations have resisted for all of the reasons that are now apparent. ⁓ how does that play out? I mean, it looks like a very dark scenario.

John Mearsheimer: Well, it’s hard for me to imagine, that we get a meaningful peace agreement between the United States and Iran because of the power of the lobby. ⁓ I think the only argument against that position is that the economic consequences of continuing this war against Iran will be so drastic hurt the international economy and therefore the American economy so much that we have no choice but to work out an arrangement ⁓ with Iran that recognizes the fact that Iran is the winner in this conflict and that there’s not going to be any more attacks on Iran down the road. That may happen. It’s very hard to say just how this is going to play out over the next few months.

But I think if that doesn’t happen, in other words, if we don’t get to the precipice and we’re not on the verge of falling off the preface, precipice, I think that Israel will make it impossible for us to have a meaningful agreement with ⁓ the Iranians.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the tactic of seizing Iranian ships by the Trump administration.

John Mearsheimer: Well, ⁓ I thought that ⁓ last Friday when ⁓ the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was in place, the Iranians said that they would open up the strait, and in fact began to open up the strait, that...the ceasefire was then fully in place and that we would begin moving forward. ⁓in the negotiations in Islamabad. It looked very promising last Friday when these events took place. Then President Trump said that he was not going to take the U.S. blockade off the Strait of Hormuz, which is another way of saying he was not going to take the U.S. blockade off of Iran. And this is after Iran has just agreed to end its blockade. And he also said that that the United States was going to stop and board ships that were headed toward Iran or were leaving from Iran. And the end result is that the Iranians did 180 degree turn and they said they’re reclosing the Strait of Hormuz. And that’s where we are today.

This is completely counterproductive. Forget the legality of what we did. This is completely counterproductive. You got the ceasefire in place on Friday and you’re talking about having negotiations in Islamabad early this week in the wake of putting the ceasefire in place. Why wouldn’t you just put an end to the American naval blockade on Iran? It just makes common sense.

Why would you say you’re going to keep the blockade on? Why would you say that you’re going to board Iranian ships and then actually go out and board an Iranian ship after you shoot it up? ⁓ It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. And this is, you know, one of the principal aspects of Trumpian foreign policy. It is rather bizarre and doesn’t seem to...comport with what one would consider sort of rational legal behavior. So I, to be honest, don’t understand what’s going on here.

Chris Hedges: Isn’t it in their interest to have Iranian oil on the market? I would think it.

John Mearsheimer: That’s, I didn’t mention that, but you’re exactly right. That’s why we were allowing Iranian oil to come through the strait out into the global market. You’re exactly right. And here they are threatening to cut it off. In addition to the fact they’re making it less likely that the other side trusts you, the Iranians trust you, and that you can work out a deal. It seems that the Trump administration wants a deal. They should want a deal because as I said to you before they can’t go up the escalation ladder and win, number one, and number two they are in danger of taking the international economy off a cliff. So they should want a deal here. And sometimes President Trump acts like he wants a deal. Other times he acts like he doesn’t want a deal. And This is an instance of that. And then you add to it, as you did, the fact that we really do need that Iranian oil out in the global market to do everything possible to keep oil prices as low as possible.

Chris Hedges: Well, the reason great powers have a diplomatic corps is that they’re multilingual, bicultural, they understand their adversary as well as their allies, and ⁓ the Trump administration has gutted the State Department. ⁓ One wonders if it’s just, on the one hand, they may want a deal. On the other hand, they’re utterly unable, perhaps, to read Iranian political power and Iranian culture.

John Mearsheimer: I agree with you. mean, there’s no question that just a very general level, President Trump does not respect expertise. He thinks he’s a genius. He thinks he knows everything. He doesn’t have to rely on experts. And he doesn’t need anyone from the State Department or any area experts inside the government to tell him what to do. He knows what to do. So there is that dimension to it.

But there’s another dimension to this, Chris, that’s even more worrisome. And that is that it sometimes strikes me that President Trump is a mad king. I don’t know if you read the story in the Wall Street Journal about what life is like inside President Trump’s White House in the course of this war against Iran.

And the story is told in there, and the White House has not refuted this story, that after those two pilots were shot down ⁓ earlier this month, and President Trump was told about this, he was hysterical. He was hysterical for a few hours. He was just beside himself with rage to the point where his aides had to keep him outside of the room while they decided how to deal with the problem. And occasionally one of the aides would go out and brief him on what was going on. He wouldn’t just think about what’s going on here. Here is the president of the United States. in the midst of a serious crisis. An American fighter has fighter plane, an F-15 has been shot down inside of Iran. There are two pilots who are missing. They have to rescue them. And this is gonna take some careful planning. This is a crisis. The President of the United States is throwing a tantrum, an hours long tantrum, according to the Wall Street Journal. Again, to the point where he has to be taken outside of the room. ⁓

Can you imagine this happening with JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis? It’s unimaginable. It’s unimaginable to me that any president would act this way. And it’s very interesting how little attention this episode has got in the mainstream media. But it, I think, speaks volumes about the dangers that we face with President Trump in control.

If we get into a really serious crisis, something beyond the actual war that’s now taking place, that threatens to escalate, that involves maybe China or Russia, and he’s in charge, this is a very frightening thought. And I would imagine in that circumstance, he’ll be pushed out of the room again and his aides will take over. But what does that tell you about the United States? And just one final point on this. You want to remember that President Trump, is the kind of person who thinks he knows everything and therefore even his aides don’t matter that much. He is the ultimate decider, period, end of story. And if this is our ultimate decider, if this is our sovereign ⁓ in an extreme crisis, I think we’re in real trouble.

Chris Hedges: Well, he was reportedly against the advice of his military and intelligence chiefs. believed the Iranians would not seize the Strait of Hormuz.

John Mearsheimer: absolutely. I mean, I think if you go back to the original decision to ⁓ attack Iran and you read— there were two New York Times stories on this whole matter. The second one was just filled with details. It’s very clear that—except for Pete Hexeth, who really doesn’t matter very much, because I don’t think anybody, even President Trump, takes him that seriously. But all of his other advisers— very, very skeptical, if not opposed to this operation. They understood full well that this was playing with fire. But nevertheless, President Trump dismissed their concerns and he went along with the Israelis who basically sold him a bill of goods. It was the head of Mossad. ⁓and David Barnea and ⁓ Prime Minister Netanyahu who convinced President Trump that we would win a quick and decisive victory. And then just to build on your point, therefore we wouldn’t have to worry about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. We would win very quickly. But the fact is if Trump had listened to his advisors and he had carefully examined them as to why they were.reticent or opposed to going to war against Iran, he might not have done this. In fact, I think it’s highly likely he would not have done it. But again, he didn’t really care what they had to say and he was willing to listen to the Israelis. And he should have understood that the Israelis were selling him a bill of goods, but apparently he didn’t.

Chris Hedges: talk about the global economy. you know, I guess some oil is getting out. Not a lot. I mean, an estimate, maybe 5%. Countries, India, Japan, mean, there are all, Philippines, they’re already in serious trouble. And this, if it’s not a total blockage, this trickle, is already having seismic ramifications. ⁓ So talk a little bit about where we are now in terms of the global economy and potentially where we could go. And then there’s all sorts of other factors like fertilizer, ⁓ which is ⁓ also passed through the strait because it’s an oil derivative ⁓ and the effect on food prices.

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I mean there are number of dimensions to the economic catastrophe that’s staring us in the face and again, I like to talk about this is the Titanic hitting the iceberg and it’s important to emphasize the Titanic has not hit the iceberg and although there’s no question that serious damage has been done and will be done. Catastrophic damage will be done if we hit the iceberg. And of course, this is why President Trump is deeply committed, I believe, to shutting this one down as quickly as possible because he does not want to hit the iceberg. ⁓ First of all, there is the helium, as you point out. There’s a significant helium shortage in the world because the Strait has been shut down. And helium is very important for producing ⁓ microchips. Furthermore, there’s been a significant slowdown in the amount of aluminum coming out of the Gulf. And aluminum really matters as well.

Then there are the fertilizers. ⁓ 30 % of the world’s fertilizers come through the Gulf and hardly any are getting out. And this is going to have huge consequences for ⁓ the production of food around the world. ⁓ Remember we had this thing called the Green Revolution and the Green Revolution ⁓allowed countries around the world to produce sufficient food to feed almost all of their people. And that food, that green revolution was heavily dependent on the coming of abundant fertilizers, right? You used to have to rely on manure and compost ⁓ instead of fertilizers, but once you get fertilizers and lots of fertilizers coming out of the Gulf, that facilitates the green revolution.

And then furthermore, you mechanize ⁓ agriculture. And when you mechanize agriculture, that means that agriculture is dependent on gas and oil and what have you. And therefore, if the amount of oil coming out of the Gulf, the amount of ⁓ fuel coming out of the Gulf is reduced significantly, that is, along with the fertilizer, going to have a significant effect.on the amount of food that’s produced and the price of food. So I think the food crisis that’s looming is great and it could be even worse if this conflict isn’t shut down sooner. And then with regard to oil and gas, the Saudis have to some extent got around this problem by shipping ⁓ oil across a pipeline. ⁓that crosses Saudi Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. And they’re exporting oil through the Red Sea, and quite a bit of oil too. And that’s alleviated the problem somewhat. ⁓

The great fear here is that if this escalates, the Iranians working with the Houthis will shut down the Red Sea at Bab al-Mandab Strait, and that will really ⁓ do disastrous things to the world economy. So at the moment, ⁓ the damage has been limited somewhat because Saudi oil is getting out.through the Red Sea. And as you pointed out before, Chris, Iranian oil has been getting out as well. So I would guess that 20 % of the world’s oil comes out of the Gulf. That’s about 20 billion dollars a day, about 20 million barrels a day. And I think Probably now about 10 million barrels is getting out, or when Iranian oil was getting out, it was a total of about 10. So only about 10 million barrels were being held up.

But you can imagine a situation where if this war escalates, we’ll go back to where 20 million barrels are not coming out. And that will have devastating consequences. So what I’m getting at here is a great deal of damage has already been done. Most of it in Asia at this point in time. But almost everybody agrees that the effects, the negative effects are working their way toward Europe and eventually will work their way towards the United States. But in Asia, there’s huge problems. already. And there is a real danger that they will get even worse if this war escalates, so to put it in slightly different terms, if this war isn’t settled quickly. And one thing I forgot, by the way, is diesel and jet fuel. That’s where there is a bigger crisis looming than even with regard to normal oil and gas.

Chris Hedges: I think European airlines have about six weeks left of jet fuel.

John Mearsheimer: Yes, and then they’re in real trouble. And that problem has already manifested itself ⁓ in Asia.

And as I say, the problem is beginning to move into Europe and it’ll eventually move into the United States. And again, this is why President Trump has a deep-seated interest in shutting this war down and doing everything he can to minimize the damage and minimize is the important word here. There’s been a huge amount of damage done and almost everybody agrees that there’s going to be ⁓ significant damage in the years ahead, that this is not a problem that can be fixed immediately, but you can minimize the damage. And if President Trump doesn’t cut a deal with the Iranians and get the strait open and get oil flowing, get diesel and jet fuel flowing, doesn’t get fertilizers flowing, and we’re in the same situation, you know, five months from now that we’re in now, I believe that the consequences will be catastrophic for the world economy.

Chris Hedges: So you have Trump’s ⁓ idiocy and impulsiveness. You have, in your words, the fact that the Israel lobby still has a stranglehold on the Trump White House and US policy. And of course, the Israeli government is dead set against ⁓ any kind of agreement with Iran. You have demands ⁓ by Iran.

And let’s be clear that Iran has been targeted for 47 years through sanctions. And I think it appears that Iran has said enough. This is going to end. These are big demands for the United States. ⁓ How do we limp forward? How does it go forward?

John Mearsheimer: don’t know. You raised these issues at the beginning of the program when you started talking about the 10-point plan of the Iranians, which President Trump has said would be the basis for the negotiations moving forward. ⁓

I mean, just think about Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, which effectively means they’re going to treat it as a pathway that has a tollbooth, an Iranian tollbooth on it. Yes. Are we going to tolerate that? Kind of hard to imagine, but maybe we’ll have to swallow on that one. Then there’s the subject of sanctions.

Are we really going to take sanctions off Iran? And are we going to pay reparations to Iran? If that happens, isn’t Iran over time likely to recover from the punishment that we have inflicted on its economy? And won’t its economy flourish? And won’t this lead to it becoming a more powerful state in the Middle East?

And how will the Israelis react to that? ⁓ We’re not going to do away with their nuclear enrichment capability in total. I mean, they’re going to keep some nuclear enrichment capability. The Israelis and the Hawks in the United States are never going to be happy with that. President Trump, at best, I think is going to get an improved JCPOA. Can you sell that? ⁓

Furthermore, how do you convince the Iranians that you’re not going to pay them a return visit, that there’s not going to be a third war? What do you do in that regard? What do you do with American bases in the region?

Are we just going to leave the region as they’d like us to? Or are we going to stay there? And if we stay there, are they going to greatly increase their ballistic missile force? I think so. I think one could argue that even if we leave, they’ll greatly increase their ballistic missile force. What are the Israelis going to do then? So you can go on and on talking about all of the really difficult issues that have to be solved. And the question is, how do you solve them? Some sort of meaningful peace agreement here. And even if you don’t get a meaningful peace agreement, how do you work out a frozen conflict? What does a frozen conflict look like? And how stable is that frozen conflict moving forward? I I wish I could give you clear answers to this, Chris, but when I look at it, I find it kind of mind boggling to try and figure out where this is all headed.

The only thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is it looks like one giant mess that’s going to lead to endless trouble.

Chris Hedges: Do you limp forward with a ceasefire, a frozen conflict? Is that perhaps at the moment the best that we can hope for?

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I think that that’s true. As I said before, the one possible factor that offers hope ⁓ is that if we are headed towards the iceberg, and it looks like we’re going to hit the iceberg, and we have one last clear chance to veer away from it, ⁓ we may then put tremendous pressure on the Israelis to just... ⁓not say anything to just accept what we do and then we cut a deal with the Iranians. But that deal we would cut with the Iranians would be a deal that’s very favorable to them. The key point here is that the Iranians are in the driver’s seat. This is why I said you can’t go up the escalation ladder and win against them. You want to remember we came into this war with four big demands.

They had to do away with their nuclear enrichment capability completely. They had to stop supporting the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. They had to get rid of their missiles. And furthermore, there was going to be regime change. Those were the big four demands, the most important of which I believe was regime change. Because if you got regime change, then in their story, you could achieve the other three goals. But those were the big four goals. We have failed on all four counts.

You just don’t want to lose sight of this. We have failed to achieve any of those goals and in fact one could argue Chris that we have made the situation worse

In terms of missiles, would seem to me that the major lesson that the Iranians should take from this conflict is that they should build lots of missiles, lots of launchers, and hide them in missile cities. In terms of the nuclear issue, one could argue that they, if anything, they should have learned that what they need is nuclear weapons, and this could be pushing them further in that direction. And then there’s the whole question of the Strait of Hormuz. And it’s important to emphasize that in addition to failing to achieve our four objectives, we’re now in a situation where the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz and have a tollbooth ⁓ inserted in it, ⁓ which did not exist on February 27th. And this is likely to remain in place. It’s hard for me to imagine them giving up the toll booth or giving up control of the strait. Maybe they will because they’ll get some other ⁓ goodies in the deal that has worked out. But we have failed here. This has been a colossal blunder. And Trump is again now in a position where he’s got the Israelis. hemming him in on one side and he has the potential of hitting that iceberg hemming him in on the other side. He has hardly any maneuver room and it’s hardly surprising therefore to see him behaving in more and more erratic ways, looking more and more like a mad king because he has put himself in an untenable position.

Chris Hedges: Is this our Suez crisis or are not there yet? Does the Suez crisis happen once we hit the iceberg?

John Mearsheimer: It’s not our Suez crisis. mean, to understand what happened at Suez, you have to remember that Britain was a declining great power. The decline started around 1900, and it’s pretty much all downhill from 1900 up until the present.

Britain in 1956 was not even a great power. You remember well, Chris, we referred to the world that we lived in during the Cold War as a bipolar system. There were two great powers in the system. We called them superpowers. Those two great powers were the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain was not even a great power. And you remember in 1968, this of course is 12 years after the Suez Crisis, the British basically abandoned all their defense commitments east of Suez, east of the Suez Canal. And this is because, again, Britain is a declining great power. It’s losing its military might. Its power projection capability is greatly reduced. This is not what’s happening to the United States. There’s no question that the United States now has a peer competitor in the system, which is China. And Russia is also a great power. We’re now in a multipolar world.

So the United States does have to deal with two other great powers, but the United States is still a great power. It has a tremendous amount of power, and that power is not going to go away. What’s going on here is that the United States, especially under President Trump, but even under President Biden, has lost its ability to employ that power in smart ways. We behave in remarkably foolish ways. And this is true not just under Trump, it was true under Biden as well. You want to remember that Joe Biden is the president who embraced Prime Minister Netanyahu after October 7th.

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

John Mearsheimer: and fully supported the genocide in Gaza. And there were a number of other policies, including US policy toward Iran, where President Biden misbehaved or behaved in foolish ways would be a better way to put it. But the point is the United States is incredibly powerful. And that’s what makes President Trump so dangerous. And it’s also what allows President Trump ⁓ to whiplash allies and adversaries alike to ignore international law and international institutions. He can get away with all of this because we are so powerful. We’re not, in my opinion, going to get weaker with the passage of time. The United States is going to remain a very powerful state on the world stage. And the only interesting question is will we get our act together and act in responsible ways, which we have not been doing for a long time. I don’t hold out much hope in that regard. But I don’t think it’s a Suez moment. I think the Suez moment was just one giant step in the gradual decline of British power over the course of the 20th century.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you, John. And I want to thank ⁓ Max, ⁓ Sophia, who produced the show. can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

Photos

John Mearsheimer in Washington

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TOPSHOT - Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) greets US President Joe Biden upon his arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on October 18, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. B (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

Holy Shit - by Mr. Fish

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During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

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Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterized by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in “Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace.” “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children. If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralyzing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot – it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy. This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programs to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invalidating or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

On April 16, the Trump administration forced the Israeli military to cease its attacks on Lebanon as part of an agreement with Iran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz. This marked another victory for the Axis of Resistance and the Lebanese people. However, Israel has a long history of violating its ceasefire agreements, and it is unlikely to give up on its fundamental goal of occupying Lebanon by attempting to foment a civil war between Hezbollah and the Lebanese military.

In this episode, Chris Hedges speaks with Free Palestine TV journalist, Laith Marouf, who is reporting from southern Lebanon. Marouf describes the “massive destruction” he witnessed there, but also the determination of Lebanese people to hold onto their land. He reports that despite warnings to stay away, as soon as the ceasefire was announced, “people [were] coming back joyfully, dancing outside their homes.”

This victory was won because of the heavy losses in equipment and soldiers that the Israeli forces suffered at the hands of Hezbollah. Marouf explains how what Hedges calls ‘the resurrection of Hezbollah’ following the Israeli pager attacks and assassinations of its leadership surprised everyone. He predicts that, despite the fact that the Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and his family have a long-term history of aiding the Zionists, a civil war in Lebanon is unlikely due to the military superiority of Hezbollah over the Lebanese army.

Marouf marks this moment as a historic shift in the balance of power in the region, stating that “What we are seeing today is the end of Western hegemony as a whole.” Not only were Israeli forces evicted from Lebanon, but they also failed in their last attempts at a psychological victory in this conflict. Marouf explains that Iran is rising as a powerful pole in this new multipolar world while the United States and Israel’s hegemonic power are ending.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Milena Soci

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Israel, without warning, launched Operation Eternal Darkness on April 8th against Lebanon. In the span of 10 minutes, Israel hit more than 100 sites across the country, killing more than 300 people and wounding over 1,000. This act of state terror took place as the regional ceasefire, agreed to by Iran and the United States, took effect. Israel carried out a Gaza-like obliteration of villages in southern Lebanon driving one million people, a fifth of the Lebanese population, from their homes. The current ceasefire declared on April 16th is likely to prove as elusive as all previous ceasefires. Israel has not ceased its bombing campaign in the South and its random bombing attacks in Beirut even during this ceasefire. Ceasefires mean nothing to Israel, which has threatened to resume the attacks on Iran with or without the United States.

In the seven months following the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in November 2024, Israel continued to occupy territory in southern Lebanon and pound Lebanon with airstrikes, killing at least 250 people. Israel’s goal is to turn Lebanon, like Syria, into a failed state and set the weak Lebanese military against Hezbollah, precipitating a civil war. This objective is not new. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, it began a 22-year occupation in the South. Israel carried out a full invasion of the country in 1982, which would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians and birthed the resistance movement Hezbollah.

Joining me to discuss the crisis in Lebanon and how it will affect regional stability is the journalist Laith Marouf from Free Palestine TV. He is based in Beirut and is covering the Israeli assault on Lebanon. Laith, you just came back from southern Lebanon. What did you see and what did you report on?

Laith Marouf: Well, thank you very much, Chris, for having me on your show. And I would like to send my congratulations to the Lebanese people, the Iranian people, people of the Axis of Resistance on the successes to force the United States and the Zionist colony into a ceasefire.

What we saw today, we actually started our travel down to the south around midnight last night when the “ceasefire” came into effect. We drove down. There was already thousands of people, not waiting for permission from anybody, trying to get down to their villages.

In fact, even though both the Speaker of the House, Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement, and officials of Hezbollah issuing statement telling people, “Don’t go down because the Zionists are a vengeful enemy and you cannot trust them. Wait till the morning.” People still went down. As we were driving down, there was thousands of people lined up on the streets on almost every intersection up to Nabateih town, which is the largest city in the central sector of the border region between occupied Palestine and Lebanon. And then we started driving around, trying to check on those cities and towns and villages that were abandoned under the bombardment of the Zionists.

It was massive destruction. But to see all those people coming back joyfully, dancing outside their homes, sitting down in the rubble smoking shisha, and this showed us how much the connection of the people to the land is in Lebanon. There were a few things that we saw that I don’t think anyone has reported on yet.

One of them is we got to the Beaufort Castle, it’s a crusader castle just outside Nabateih city. It’s called Arnun Castle in Arabic. And when we got there, there were locals that were removing Israeli flags from top of Beaufort Castle. In the beginning, we didn’t understand how these Israeli flags made it into the Crusader Castle. This is like north of the Litani River. And what we were told is that in the early hours of this morning, the Zionists sent four, not quadcopters, those drones that have eight actual blades, huge ones, each one of them carrying hastily made rods with tripod legs and Israeli flags and one that had actually a surveillance dome. And they landed with these drones on top of the Beaufort Castle, which looks over the whole of the south of Lebanon and much of the area around Nabateih City, in order to make people feel or lie to themselves that they made it north of the Litani River. We saw those flags. The locals threw them off the cliff.

Remember just last week, the Zionists fell into an ambush at the bottom of the valley under Beaufort Castle when they were trying to cross the Litani River. They were ambushed and they lost many of their soldiers, many injured, and they abandoned all their equipment including very heavy machinery, three heavy machineries, all these canoes, all these temporary bridges that were trying to build over the Litani River.

So, it’s clear that that ambush that they fell into it etched deeply in their hearts that they wanted to come and make this fabricated win by planting these flags by the use of these drones. Another location that we visited that we thought was very telling about the battles that happened over the last 45 days was the town of Dibbin, which is just one town north of Al-Khiyam. And Al-Khiyam is a very famous village directly on the border with occupied Palestine and the Houla Valley. And during the 45 days, the Zionists were unable to capture Al-Khiyam or enter it. So, what happened is that they went through a Christian town that is mainly controlled by the Christian supremacists Phalanges and Kataeb Party that didn’t have any Lebanese resistance Hezbollah members in there to protect it. Those Kataeb, Christian supremacist parties let the Israelis go through Marjayoun to get to Dibbin and try to cut the supply route for the resistance into Khiam. Now, what has happened is that the Israelis were scared of sending an armored column, so they sent in a special force, infantry special force, into Dibbin, but they were already spotted by the resistance, and the resistance lured them into the village. And as soon as the special forces entered into two homes to begin stationing themselves in the village, they were bombarded from all sides by the resistance. And there was a literal massacre of the invading forces. And that required huge waves of bombardment from air by the Israelis to try to extract their trapped invading force.

And in this crazy bombardment, Dibbin has a historical castle in it, and also a graveyard for French soldiers that perished in Lebanon in 1941 during the uprising across Syria and Lebanon against French occupation. The Israelis dropped a bunker buster, the largest size of these bunker busters, onto the graveyard hosting these French dead soldiers and wiped it off the map. There was a crater that is at least 40 meters wide and 20 meters deep. And the marker for these graves, there’s even a statue there for these soldiers, all destroyed. It’s almost 80 years since the death of these French soldiers and the Lebanese people, although they fought the French to leave, still respected those graves but it was the Israelis that destroyed them.

So, in general, what we understood from looking at the few scenes of battles that we visited was that the Israelis had huge losses. This is also of course proven with the videos that Hezbollah released over the last 40 somewhat days, at least around 200 tanks destroyed or out of commission, above and beyond all their other heavy equipment that they lost - the armored vehicles and jeeps and what have you.

So, we look at this and we can wait to see more and more of the videos that are going to be released for sure right now by Hezbollah since they don’t have the worry of trying to bring the videos through a battle zone to the editing teams. So, we will see more of that in the next few days.

The last thing I would say about what we saw there is that the Zionists were trying to still destroy and detonate houses in villages that they still occupy right now before they had to leave. Throughout the day, we were hearing huge explosions of houses that were being detonated in villages across the border that the Israelis are still stationed in but will be leaving soon.

Chris Hedges: Well, they erased, virtually demolished, isn’t it 20 villages in the South, just entire communities?

Laith Marouf: Yeah, there were already a lot of villages that were destroyed during the 66-day war in 2024 and the so-called ceasefire that followed, about 15 months of ceasefire. And the villages that they have destroyed now were all partially destroyed already.

I think the most important thing that the Zionists were trying to do over the last few days of this war, before Donald Trump forced them to end their movement in Lebanon, was to try to capture Bint Jbeil town. Bint Jbeil is in a second line or third line village in the central zone of the border with occupied Palestine. It’s very famous for the speech of martyred Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah that he gave in the year 2000 after the liberation of Lebanon where he said, in the soccer field of the town, “The Zionist colony is as weak as a spider’s web.”

And so, they were trying to achieve some emotional or psychological victory. And again, to attack Bint Jbeil, they were unable to reach it except after the treasonous collaborationist Prime Minister Nawaf Salam ordered the Lebanese military to withdraw from three Christian villages that are right south of Bint Jbeil, where then the Israeli military entered those three villages and surrounded Bint Jbeil. And the battle for Bint Jbeil was almost 35 days, and the Israelis were unable to enter the main parts of the city and lost tens of tanks and soldiers in this battle. And again, they were unable to achieve that symbolic victory that they were trying to hurry up before Trump forces them into ceasefire. Remember this, they refused to accept the ceasefire a week ago when Iran and the United States reached that deal just because they wanted to reach and occupy Bint Jbeil, and they failed miserably.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about the tanks. So, we’ve seen images of Israeli soldiers leaping from their tanks and fleeing. We don’t know a number, but it’s certainly significant, the tanks that were disabled or destroyed by Hezbollah. We also saw Israeli columns of tanks almost bumper to bumper. I know from covering war, you never do that. You space your tanks out. I’m curious why Hezbollah was so effective in taking out tanks. I believe they were taken out by drones, is that correct?

Laith Marouf: Yes, so Hezbollah was using drones, FPVs that, like the ones that have been used also in the Ukraine war, the ones that are very simple with an attached bomb at them and you just drop it, that’s one way. They had also all these suicide drones that would crash into these tanks and have shells attached to them. They also were using their ATGMs, and Hezbollah is considered the most expert military force in the world in the use of ATGMs.

Chris Hedges: Explain what those are for people who don’t know, Laith.

Laith Marouf: Yeah, anti-tank missiles like RPGs, but much more advanced that there is a camera on the nose of this missile and it’s guided by hand and can evade any attempt to take it down. And we watched throughout the 33-day war and the solidarity front with Gaza in 2024, all those amazing videos of Hezbollah fighters hitting pinpoint little cameras on the bases of the Zionists looking into Lebanon.

So, the Russian military who built those ATGMs were saying clearly that they don’t even have soldiers that can reach the expertise of Hezbollah fighters in those shoes. So, there’s two things that can confirm to us that the Zionists had huge losses. One, of course, is that in the admittance of the Zionists in June 2025, they said that they lost 1,000 tanks in both the battlefield in Gaza and in the battlefield in Lebanon. And of course, the Israeli military has around only 2,000 tanks. And the other thing that proves to us that they’ve lost even more since this battle happened is that we started seeing Merkavas, not the latest versions, the Merkava IV, but Merkavas III. Those are like almost 10 years old, so clearly the best tanks that they had were very much hit in those battles in Lebanon and Gaza in those two and a half years, and now they were having to use older stock.

The other thing about those columns that you described, Lebanon is blessed with a topography in the South that makes it just that topography and geography of the south a defense mechanism. It’s not a flat territory like Gaza, and it’s a huge territory. It’s not a small strip like Gaza also. And when we look at the geography of the South, there’s clearly a few paths that any armored columns can go through. It’s not like they can fly these armored vehicles. They have to go either through the valley or try to go on top of ridges of mountains. And the ridges are full of villages and so forth. So, they have no choice but to go through specific paths. And Hezbollah was ready for them because it’s the logical path. It’s not a genius thing that they have to come up with some new ideas of how to invade South Lebanon. It’s the same repeated tactics that they’ve had to use since the 1970s, as you mentioned. And Hezbollah had prepared a lot of ambushes, a lot of mines, a lot of IEDs and they managed to destroy these columns as they were advancing.

And also, when we look at the videos of Hezbollah taking out these tanks, it’s clear that from all sides, Hezbollah had spotted and knew the advancements where they’re coming. The last thing I would say is that today, as the Israeli military was leaving the outskirts of Khiam village, they walked into a minefield or an IED field - improvised explosive devices - and it blew up on them. This is after the ceasefire. And, according to Israeli sources, they have many wounded in this battalion, including those who have lost limbs. I would say every time the Israelis admit something like severe wounded or so forth, it means that they have dead, but they’re not truthfully telling about it.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about, maybe you would quibble on the word, the resurrection of Hezbollah, because you had these exploding pagers that Israel used to maim hundreds of Hezbollah, not necessarily fighters. They might be accountants. But I think Israel kind of wrote, perhaps the United States, wrote Hezbollah off after that. Explain that incident and how Hezbollah proved so resourceful and effective in countering this latest invasion by Israel.

Laith Marouf: Well, the first thing that we need to point out is that according to international law and the laws of war, the booby trapping of civilian objects is a war crime. So, we know the Zionists are very proud of their war crimes, and they considered this a huge win, booby trapping these pagers and intercepting the production lines of the companies that were selling these pagers. Having said that, as you pointed out also, hundreds of non-combatants were injured or killed in those attacks. The pagers are used heavily, of course, within the medical field. Doctors and nurses use pagers to receive their calls in the environments with no cell phones allowed. And although it is a big loss and a lot of suffering happened - children that were around these pagers were also injured or killed - we saw videos currently throughout this war released by Hezbollah of wounded men that survived the pager attacks, that were actually on the front lines firing missiles, firing drones. And this shows you how much pride there is and how much conviction the Lebanese people and Hezbollah members have.

Now, we look at the decapitation attack that happened against the leadership of Hezbollah.

Chris Hedges: This is the assassination of the head of Hezbollah, Nasrallah.

Laith Marouf: Yes, and much of their commanders…

Chris Hedges: And much of their command structure.

Laith Marouf: Yes, in 2024. And we can think of two things. One is that Hezbollah, during its engagement in Syria trying to stop the Wahhabi death squad hordes that were thrown by the CIA and Mossad on Syria. In that battle, it had to restructure itself, and it became a semi-military with tanks and APCs. It also meant that in that 15-year war, that every other intelligence agency in the world was able to draw up a chain of command for Hezbollah in those battlefields - the names of the commanders, their faces and what have you. So, by the end of that 15-year war in Syria, those intelligence forces that are allied with the Mossad and the Zionists knew practically the military structures of Hezbollah. And that is how the Israelis were able to assassinate the leadership of Hezbollah in 2024.

Now once that happened, Hezbollah had to switch back to being a guerrilla organization. Therefore, the structures had to be shifted back from a semi-military format to cell formations with leaders that are unknown, with three-member cells, and with a kind of non-hierarchical dispersed commands everywhere. In fact, during the 15 months of the ceasefire, we saw a continuation of the Israelis assassinating known Hezbollah commanders. And those commanders were out on the streets in their cars, normally and so forth. And this is only because Hezbollah had literally retired them, right?

Anyone that had any public face that was discovered during the war inside Syria had to be retired and new structures and new leaders had to be put in. And this is what drove the Zionists crazy right now. And it also allowed Hezbollah to play this ambiguity very well and hide its capabilities.

The Zionists, and the United States behind them, thought that they had destroyed the structures of Hezbollah and that they had somehow destroyed all its military capabilities. And lo and behold, Hezbollah actually surprised them and surprised even the Lebanese people with the huge amount of ammunition that it still had and the very well-organized defense lines and defense structures that played out here during this war.

Chris Hedges: Two things I want to ask: first about the Lebanese government. They have expelled the Iranian ambassador even before this current assault. The Lebanese government has been quite obsequious to Israel, calling for negotiations, even before the negotiations that have apparently begun. I want you to talk about the role of the Lebanese government. And then, I want you to address the long-term demand by Israel that the Lebanese military disarm Hezbollah, and you can comment on this, but at least it’s always been my understanding that that is because they are seeking to create a civil war within Lebanon.

Laith Marouf: Well, for the viewers, let’s start with the basics. I think it’s very important to understand that there is no state called Lebanon. There has never been a state called Lebanon. And the way we can judge states is a state has a monopoly over the use of force in its territory and control of its borders. And those things never happened since 1942 and the Declaration of Independence and chopping off Lebanon from Syria.

Another thing is that Hezbollah, in the year 2000 when it liberated Lebanon, it became the first liberationist movement in the world, in the history of humanity, that liberated a country and didn’t take control of the state. And that was a choice that Hezbollah did, although it had the right as the liberators of the country to do so. But it decided not to take the control of the government because it was hoping not to trigger any civil war right after spending decades fighting the occupation.

Chris Hedges: And let me, just for people who don’t know, Lebanon is a mix of Christian, Sunni, Shia -Hezbollah is a Shia organization, but there’s quite a heavy ethnic mix within Lebanon.

Laith Marouf: Yes, and the other thing is of course that the confessional sectarian makeup of the government, the parliament, and what have you, was imposed by the French in 1942 as they were leaving. And the number of seats per sect - Christians, Druze, Sunnis, Shias, what have you – is according to the percentage of the population in 1942. And the country has not been allowed or did not want to have a census since then because actually today, as we are speaking, at least 50 % of the population are Shia. And if there’s a census done, even if the confessional sectarian constitution is maintained, Hezbollah will have 50 % of the seats along with this Shia partner, Amal, and then you add to it all the other parties that are allied with it and it will govern naturally. So that’s one thing.

The other thing that we need to understand about the current Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. This man comes from a multi-generational treasonous family. His grandfather, Salim Salam, which was one of the elite of Lebanon at the end of the Ottoman era, went and bribed Ottoman land registrars and defrauded the landowners in what is now the Houla Valley, the panhandle of Palestine that sticks up north, and changed the ownership of those lands to his name. And he was trying to do the same for much of the south of Lebanon. And, fortunately for the Lebanese people, World War I broke out before he was able to defraud the rest of those villages that we’re talking about, Bint Jbeil, Khiam, and others. And so, once that happened, Salim Salam tried to sell those lands in the Hula Valley to the Zionists, the Jewish colonists. But because the Hula Valley was still part of Lebanon at that point, or the French mandate, the French authorities refused because the Hula Valley has a lot of the water coming out of the Golan Heights. And so, he ended up, Salim Salam, working with the Jewish Colonization Agency to bribe the French authorities, brought a bag of $30 million, handed it over to the French occupation, where they redrew the land, the map, and handed over the Hula Valley to Palestine and the British Mandate in Palestine. And eventually he sold those lands to the colonists. And now we know Kiryat Shmona and all of those were built on the land defrauded by that grandfather of Nawaf Salam.

Chris Hedges: Let me just interrupt there because going back to documents from the early 1920s, the Zionists have always coveted southern Lebanon because of the water supply and because of the very fertile land. And they always talk about this security zone up to the Litani River. This is over a century-long project on the part of the Zionists. I just want to historically throw that in.

Laith Marouf: Yes, you are right. Now comes Nawaf Salam, the grandson of Salim Salam. Nawaf Salam, according to East German intelligence files, was recruited by the Mossad in the 1970s, late 70s, and infiltrated the PLO youth wings in the universities to try to get them information. And eventually was on the team of the president of Lebanon that came on the Israeli tanks into the presidential palace in 1982, Gemayel, and Nawaf Salam was on the negotiating team at that time in 1982-1983 to sign the normalization and surrender and peace with Israel.

So, Nawaf Salaam has been an agent himself since his student days throughout the occupation of Lebanon by the Zionists and now was brought back on again on the top of an Israeli tank and an American jet to finish the job that he attempted to start in 1982. And, by the way, the president of Lebanon at the time, Gemayel, his life ended with a bullet to his head by Habib Shartouni, a very famous Lebanese resistor, and when you walk around Lebanon there’s all these posters that say, “For every Gemayel, there’s a Shartouni in Lebanon.”

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about this Israeli policy of fomenting civil war. That has just been a constant. I was actually in southern Lebanon with Lahad, and you can explain who he was, an Israeli proxy. And when they talk about negotiations, the iron demand that Israel has is that Hezbollah be disarmed, knowing that that would provoke what they want, which is an armed conflict. And let’s also characterize the Lebanese military because it’s very weak.

Laith Marouf: Yeah, well, look, the Zionists may dream that they can have a civil war in Lebanon or that they have a partner for such a civil war. Maybe they’re still living in that delusion of the 1970s. But, when we look at the possible opponents of Hezbollah, let’s start with the Lebanese military. The Lebanese military, more than 50 to 60 percent of the soldiers are Shia. Although the head of the Lebanese military is always appointed as a Christian, currently the Commander in Chief is General Rodolphe Haykal. And although he’s under a lot of pressure, he has refused up until now to try to disarm Hezbollah. And this is because he knows that if he attempts to do such a thing, that there will be a mutiny within the military and it will collapse.

And in any case, Lebanese military is very lightly armed. It doesn’t have tanks. It has APCs. It doesn’t have missiles or drones. And it cannot last in a fight even if the whole Lebanese military is unified behind the leadership, which it is not. So, although there’s been multiple recordings or testimonies about meetings between Nawaf Salam and Rodolphe Haykal, those meetings almost descended into fistfights because Haykal is not willing to sacrifice the military for the aims of Nawaf Salam.

Looking at the Christian supremacist parties in Lebanon, the Phalange or the Kataeb, these parties are a shadow of what they used to be. Their main backers are the Saudis. This is the crazy part. The Saudis are the main backers of the Christian supremacist parties in Lebanon. And they don’t have much arms. They don’t have many men that are ready to fight and therefore they’re not a possible opponent to Hezbollah that can challenge them. The last possibility is to somehow instigate Wahhabi death squads, as happened in Syria, to create trouble in the country. And we already saw a few attempts of that, an invasion from the outside in the north of Lebanon, right on the border of Syria.

After the collapse of the Assad government and the takeover by Al-Julani in Damascus, they attempted to invade in the north Beqaa Valley, the special forces of HTS, known as the Red Bandanas. And at that moment, the Lebanese military just withdrew and opened the door for these Red Bandanas - this is in 2025 - to advance onto the Beqaa Valley. And what we saw is that the local clans, not even Hezbollah, picked up arms and repelled the Red Bandanas, defeated them, and advanced into Syrian territory, took over three villages, and were almost reaching Homs.

And at that point, the Lebanese army came and cut the route of the Lebanese clans in the north of the Beqaa Valley, and the Israeli military sent its air force to destroy the supply routes of the clans in the north of Lebanon to save the HTS Red Bandana. So, I don’t think that even Al-Julani and his death squads can defeat Hezbollah even if they bring them all to the border here with Lebanon.

Chris Hedges: Where do you see this going? I’ve covered many, many ceasefires established by Israel. There’s not one that they don’t violate. You mentioned pressure from the Trump administration, but it’s pretty clear from the rhetoric out of Netanyahu’s office that they’re not done. What do you see happening?

Laith Marouf: Look, this has been an ongoing 100-year war, and it is anchored in Jewish supremacy, and it’s anchored in imperialism that maintains that Jewish supremacy on the land of Palestine. The Jewish colony wouldn’t be able to last one day in front of the children of Gaza if there isn’t a non-stop financial, political, and military support for this Jewish colony.

And what we are seeing today is the end of Western hegemony as a whole. And everything that we saw with the genocide in Gaza and the wars since October 7th, where the apex of this 100-year war in terms of the projection of power of the West and the Zionist colony, and from this point on, it is retreat for both the Empire as a whole and its favorite lapdog.

Now, does that mean that it’s going to end tomorrow? No. Does that mean that we’re not going to have more wars? No. But it just means from this point on, it will be the Jewish colonists and their sponsors that are going to be suffering more than us. And with every new wave of this battle, it will be more suffering for the West, more suffering for the Jewish colonists and less for us until we’re fully completely down from the apex moment that we saw with the threat of use of nuclear weapons against Iran, which the United States had to retreat from.

So, when we look at this moment, because we saw all of this 100 years before, sometimes we’re unable to see what’s coming. We feel that there is a routine, a repetition. But you know what? Iran controls the Hormuz Strait right now. It controls 30 % of the oil output and gas output of the world. Iran forced a ceasefire in Lebanon before it opened the Hormuz Canal, and we have a new superpower arising. Does that mean that Israelis are going to just give up, or the Americans are just going to give up? That’s not what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is that we are living right now a historic moment. Probably the only comparative moment that we can look in our history to is that moment of the Tripartite Attack on Egypt by the French, the British, and the Israelis in 1956, which ended with the defeat of that Tripartite invasion and...

Chris Hedges: You’re talking about the Suez crisis.

Laith Marouf: Exactly, and the end or the demotion of France and England, the UK, from being superpowers to being secondary powers under the control of the United States. What we’re seeing today is the end of the superpower of the United States, but there is no other European pole that can fill that gap. What is rising right now is a new world, multipolar world, that Iran is going to be one of the central poles of it and the Axis of Resistance, including members like Hezbollah or Ansarallah in Yemen, are going to be the victors in this, the ones that are going to pick the fruits of this battle.

Chris Hedges: Thanks, Laith. And I want to thank Malena, Sophia, and Max, who produced the show. You can find me on chrisedges.substack.com.

Photos

The aftermath of an airstrike, two days after the attack on

DAHIYEH, LEBANON - 2026/04/10: The aftermath of an airstrike, two days after the attack on a residential building killed dozens of people. All-out war between Israel and Hezbollah restarted on March 2, after Hezbollah fired rockets towards Israeli territory, following a 15-month ceasefire where Israel continued to attack on a near-daily basis. (Photo by Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

10-Day Ceasefire Takes Effect In Lebanon, Amid Wariness That It Will Hold

NABATIEH, LEBANON - APRIL 17: Neighbors going back to check the aftermath of their businesses and houses on first day after a ceasefire agreement on April 17, 2026 north of Saida in Nabatieh, Lebanon. At 00:00 on April 17, a 10-day ceasefire took effect that is meant to pause fighting between Israeli forces and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.(Photo by Adri Salido/Getty Images)

10-Day Ceasefire Takes Effect In Lebanon, Amid Wariness That It Will Hold

BEIRUT, LEBANON - APRIL 17: A man sits in a tent at a displacement camp on April 17, 2026 in Beirut, Lebanon. At 00:00 on April 17, a 10-day ceasefire took effect that is meant to pause fighting between Israeli forces and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)

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Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike on the village of Mayfadoun in southern Lebanon as seen from nearby Marjeyoun (Marjayoun) on March 31, 2026. Lebanon was drawn into the Middle East war in early March when Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to the killing of the Iranian supreme leader during US-Israeli strikes on February 28. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-LEBANON-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT

TOPSHOT - Israeli military tanks patrol close to a concrete wall along the border fence separating northern Israel from southern Lebanon on November 24, 2025. Hezbollah held the funeral on November 24 for its top military chief and other members of the militant group a day after Israel killed them in a strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs. (Photo by Jalaa MAREY / AFP via Getty Images)

(FILE) Israel And Lebanon Retrospective

ZABKIN, LEBANON - MARCH 3, 1978: (FILE PHOTO) This archive image provided by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) shows Israeli soldiers on patrol during Israel’s Operation Litani March 3, 1978 in the village of Zabkin in southern Lebanon. (Photo by Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images)

Israeli Forces Invade Lebanon

Israeli soldiers in an armoured vehicle on the streets of the Lebanese port city of Sidon during the Israeli army invasion named “Operation Peace for the Galilee” in Sidon, Lebanon, in June 1982. (Photo by Bryn Colton/Getty Images)

Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militants para

Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militants parade with a missile as the Palestinian (R) and the movement’s (back) flags flutter during an annual parade in the southern city of Nabatiyeh on January 10, 2009 to mark the sacred day of Ashura, the holiest Shiite rite. AFP PHOTO/MAHMOUD ZAYAT (Photo credit should read MAHMOUD ZAYAT/AFP via Getty Images)

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Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri presides over the first session of the newly-elected assembly at its headquarters in the capital Beirut on May 31, 2022. (Photo by ANWAR AMRO / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY PATRICK RAHIR P

Nabatiyeh, LEBANON: TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY PATRICK RAHIR Picture taken 21 August 2006 shows Beaufort Castle in Arnoun village near the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh. (Photo credit should read OUSSAMA AYOUB/AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-LEBANON-IRAN-US-WAR

TOPSHOT - Israeli soldiers try to tow a tank stuck in the mud on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon, in the Upper Galilee in northern Israel on March 21, 2026. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz warned that the United States and Israel would intensify their strikes on Iran in the coming week starting March 22. (Photo by Odd ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images) /

Israel Intensifies Attacks Across Lebanon Despite US-Iran Ceasefire Deal

NABATIEH, LEBANON - APRIL 08: Paramedics and civilians rush to a building hit moments earlier by an Israeli airstrike on April 08, 2026 in Nabatieh, Lebanon. Israel has stepped-up its attacks on Lebanon following President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire agreement between the US and Iran, conditional on shipping being allowed to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Hezbollah Political Party Rally Ahead Of Lebanon’s Elections

BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON - MAY 13: Hashim Safi Al Din (center) senior Hezbollah leader and maternal cousing of Hassan Nasralla, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, sits in the front row ahead of his speech at the Hezbollah Political Party Rally on May 13, 2022 in Baalbek in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. On May 15 Lebanese will be heading to polls for the first time since the financial collapse and the protest movement of 2019. (Photo by Francesca Volpi/Getty Images)

Lebanese president names ICJ judge Nawaf Salam to form new government

BEIRUT, LEBANON - JANUARY 14: International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge Nawaf Salam gives a speech after his meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (not seen) at Baabda Palace in Beirut, Lebanon on January 14, 2025. Lebanese president named ICJ judge Nawaf Salam to form new government. (Photo by Houssam Shbaro/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israel Continues Ground Operation In Gaza

SOUTHERN ISRAEL, ISRAEL - SEPTEMBER 17: An Israeli soldier walks near tanks as they are stationed near the border with the Gaza Strip on September 17, 2025 in Southern Israel, Israel. Israel launched its major ground offensive on Gaza City yesterday conducting heavy air strikes overnight forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee to the centre of the Strip to join the hundreds of thousands who have already fled. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)

ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-ARMY-DRILL

Merkava battle tanks of the Kfir brigade’s Shimshon (”Samson”) battalion drive during a military exercise at the Tzeelim army base on July 3, 2018 simulating urban combat in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP) (Photo credit should read MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-LEBANON-ISRAEL-IRAN-US-WAR-BAALBEK

TOPSHOT - This photograph taken during a media tour organised by the Hezbollah shows a man installing a flag of Hezbollah on the balcony of a damaged building at Nabi Sheet town after an Israeli military operation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, on March 7, 2026. (Photo by FADEL itani / AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-IRAN-LEBANON-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT

TOPSHOT - Iranians lay flowers beneath a billboard bearing a portrait of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 27, during an anti-Israel protest in Palestine Square in Tehran on September 30, 2024. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)

Lebanon

Lebanese citizens and Hezbollah fighters in front of Khiam prison after the Israeli Army withdrew from southern Lebanon in Khiam, May 24, 2000. (Photo by Yannis Kontos/Sygma via Getty Images)

LEBANON-GOVERNMENT-POLITICS

Lebanon’s new prime minister-designate Nawaf Salam delivers a statement at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut, on January 14, 2025. Lebanon’s President on January 13 picked international jurist Salam to form a government to pull the war-scarred country out of economic crisis, after two years of a caretaker government. (Photo by Anwar AMRO / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)

LEBANON-GOVERNMENT-POLITICS

Lebanon’s new prime minister-designate Nawaf Salam delivers a statement at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut, on January 14, 2025. Lebanon’s President on January 13 picked international jurist Salam to form a government to pull the war-scarred country out of economic crisis, after two years of a caretaker government. (Photo by Anwar AMRO / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)

Phalangist Militia during Lebanon War

Phalangist Forces Leader Bashir Gemayel (Photo by Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-LEBANON-CONFLICT-PROTEST-HEZBOLLAH

TOPSHOT - A member of the Lebanese Army riot-control forces fires a shotgun as they try to disperse a Hezbollah-organised rally to block the road to Beirut International Airport over a decision to bar two Iranian flights from landing there, in Beirut on February 15, 2025. An AFP correspondent said tear gas was fired to disperse crowds on February 15 after again blocking amidst calls by the Iran-backed group for a sit-in. (Photo by IBRAHIM AMRO / AFP) (Photo by IBRAHIM AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)

EGYPT-LEBANON-DIPLOMACY-CONFLICT

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty (C) poses for a group photo with commander of Lebanon’s Armed Forces Major General Rodolphe Haykal (C-L), commander of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces Major General Raed Abdullah (C-R) and representatives of participating countries during the preparatory meeting for the international conference in support of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF) in Cairo on February 24, 2026. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-SYRIA-CONFLICT-ANNIVERSARY

TOPSHOT - Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa waves to the crowd at the gate of Aleppo’s Citadel during celebrations marking one year since an Islamist alliance, led by Sharaa, entered the northern city and swiftly took control of it, on November 29, 2025. Sharaa visited the northern city of Aleppo on November 29 as the country marks a year since a lightning Islamist-led offensive that eventually toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad last December. (Photo by Bakr ALkasem / AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump Meets With Israeli PM Netanyahu At His Palm Beach Estate

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - DECEMBER 29: U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his Mar-a-Lago club on December 29, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. The two leaders are scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting to discuss regional security in the Middle East as well as the U.S.-Israel partnership. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Strait of Hormuz/Iran-Oman April 7, 2026

STRAIT OF HORMUZ, IRAN/OMAN -- APRIL 7, 2026: Maps4Media processed and enhanced Sentinal-2 satellite imagery shows a broad view of the Strait of Hormuz between southern Iran and Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, including surrounding islands, coastal terrain, and turquoise shallow-water zones at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. (Photo enhanced and published by maps4media via Getty Images)

Suez Crisis 1956 : French Parachutists

EGYPT - JANUARY 01: A troop of French parachutists verifying their position during the Suez crisis in 1956. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Friday April 17, at 7:00 - 8:00pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X. We will discuss the war with Iran and the ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the antiwar organization CODEPINK, speaks with Chris Hedges about her recent visit to Cuba as part of one of the many humanitarian delegations that have visited the island in response to the severe economic blockade imposed by the Trump administration. Benjamin describes the current situation as “dire”, the worst she has experienced in her 50 years of solidarity work with Cuba, referring to the escalation of the blockade as a “medieval siege.”

The fuel shortages have had deadly impacts, imposing nationwide power outages. Sanctions and the blockade have created shortages of food, medicine and other necessities. Benjamin recounts, “People can’t go to work because the buses aren’t working or if they got to work, there’s no electricity or no materials.” She says that doctors and teachers are leaving the country because their salaries are too low to survive.

The U.S. media blame the hardships in Cuba on its communist government, but Benjamin shares the advancements that have been made since the Revolution, despite enduring more than sixty years of U.S.-imposed sanctions. A poor country of ten million, Cuba created a once-enviable universal healthcare system and an excellent education system that is free to residents. Now, many of those gains, such as reductions in infant mortality and improvements in life expectancy, are deteriorating under the boot of American imperialism.

Delegations have traveled to Cuba from all over the world this year to bring solar panels, medicines and other necessities. Palestinians participated in the delegation that Benjamin helped to organize, and they witnessed many similarities between Cuba and Gaza. In addition to the shortages, another similarity is the growing power of the Cuban-American lobby that supports the blockade, which is modeled on the Israeli-American lobby, AIPAC.

Despite this, the situation in Cuba is so severe that even many members of Congress can no longer deny the cruelty of the situation. There are two new pieces of legislation in Congress that CODEPINK and other Cuba solidarity organizations support. Benjamin urges people to take action in any way that they can because she believes Cubans will not be able to endure the hardships of the blockade for much longer.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges: The Trump administration, after targeting Venezuela and Iran, seems intent on overthrowing the Cuban government. It has orchestrated a siege of the island, cutting off vital Venezuelan oil shipments three months ago. This has left Cuba’s economy without imported oil, as well as diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and liquefied petroleum gas. Cuba relies on those shipments for about 60 % of its energy.

Cuba is now enduring massive power outages, including two island-wide blackouts in recent days. Trump’s executive order of January 29th, 2026, states, “The policies, practices and actions of the government of Cuba constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy.” The order charges that the Cuban government blatantly allows Russia and China, which reportedly has four listening posts on the island, to base sophisticated military and intelligence capabilities there that threaten US national security. It notes that Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States. The Trump White House has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which empowers the US to impose tariffs on foreign countries that “directly or indirectly supply oil to the Cuban government”.

This has resulted in transportation shortages, reduced working hours, flight cancellations, along with shortages, not only of fuel, but of food, medicine, and vital equipment, including medical equipment. The Justice Department has indicted several Cuban officials and entities for their alleged involvement in drug trafficking, a tactic that is also being used to target Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro. “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon,” Trump announced. “They want to make a deal. And so, I’m going to put Marco over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now, [he meant Iran]. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready after 50 years. I’ve been watching it for 50 years and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me, it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap and we’re doing very well.”

The goal is the reassertion of US imperialism over the island, which the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro vanquished in 1959. If Trump fails to achieve his objectives in Iran, which increasingly seems likely, he appears ready to shift his focus to Cuba. With the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has few allies that can come to its aid, although a Russian tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil appears headed to Cuba.

Joining me to discuss the war on Cuba is Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, who just returned from a trip to Cuba where she and other solidarity groups delivered humanitarian aid and supplies, including medicine, solar panels, bicycles, and food. So, Medea, you were slammed in the Washington Post. Although I think this says a lot more about the Washington Post than it does about you. The title says: “Useful idiots visit Cuba right on time.” I’m just going to read a couple sentences and let you respond:

“Communism has impoverished the island. American Leftists only care now because they can blame Trump. Leftists from around the world descended on Cuba over the weekend for a ‘humanitarian trip’ [in their quotes] aimed at protesting the United States’ oil blockade and they played the role of useful idiots perfectly. Nothing says solidarity like going to an impoverished country and staying at a five-star hotel.” Further down: “The best way to help the Cuban people, of course, would be to free them from a dictatorship that has failed to meet their needs for more than half a century. Yet the roster of attendees was more interested in bashing America. And then, while the socialist tourists might blame American sanctions for the island’s decline, Cubans overwhelmingly believe the people who have run their economy since 1959 are at fault.” And the last line, “The truth is that these activists only care about Cubans now that they have an excuse to rail against America. The shtick might have been more convincing without the parties.” I’m sure you were partying night and day in Cuba. But let’s just, I just couldn’t believe it. It sounds like something out of the National Review, or maybe the Onion, I don’t know.

Medea Benjamin: Or the New York Post.

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

Medea Benjamin: So, you want me to react to that, Chris?

Chris Hedges: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s such a slam and it’s such a distortion of history. I mean, we’ve been strangling Cuba since its inception.

Medea Benjamin: Well, absolutely. And you know, it was interesting that it was such a multi-generational group. We had 170 people in our charter plane that we took with all of these medicines. And some of them were young Cubans, “Cuban Americans for Cuba”, they’re called. Some of them had never been to Cuba before. And many of us older folks have been doing work around Cuba for many decades. So, to say we just came at this to bash Trump is kind of funny because I’ve been going to Cuba since 1979 and trying to change US policy since then. So, that’s one thing.

The other is this issue of putting all the blame on the communist government. You know, there’s such an easy answer for that, Chris, which is, well, lift the sanctions and then you can blame everything on the communist government. We’ve been saying that for years after years after years, but they don’t want to do that because they want the Cuban economy to be in tatters so they can say communism doesn’t work, people rise up, let’s put U.S. golf courses and Trump Towers all over the island. And in terms of us staying in fancy hotels, I find that one pretty funny too because there is a list that we could scroll, it would go on and on and on of hotels that the US government says we are not allowed to stay in because they say they’re somehow connected to the Cuban military. So, there’s only five hotels that we are allowed to stay in. They are all “luxury hotels”, and they are all owned by foreign companies.

We stayed in the one that was called Iberostar. It’s a Spanish-owned company. And we also stayed there for, well, two other reasons. One, they gave us a very good price, and two, it was centrally located because the others are farther away and we didn’t want to use buses. We didn’t want to be consuming much fuel. So, we only used buses to get from the airport to the hotel and back to the airport. And for most of the time, we walked and walked and walked in the hot sun. And it was very good for people to do that because this is something the Cubans do every day. When we had breakfast in the hotel and we would ask the workers, “How did they get there in the morning?” They’d say, “I walked three miles. I walked four miles.” So, we tried to have a gentle footprint, but I guess that didn’t impress the Washington Post.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about where Cuba is. I mean, Cuba has been beset, of course, by sanctions for decades. And, just quickly, all sorts of attempts by the CIA to overthrow the Castro government, the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, which was foiled by Cuba during the Kennedy administration. I think there were seven concerted assassination attempts against Castro himself. I mean all sorts of weird stuff like exploding cigars, if I remember, and, I don’t know, poison pieces of coral or something. I don’t remember what it all was. But this war on Cuba has never abated, although in many ways what’s happening now, and I’ll let you comment on that, is perhaps the most severe.

Medea Benjamin: Yes, I mean it did abate a little bit during Obama when there were some openings and some of the sanctions were lifted and we saw a flowering of private enterprise and of tourists coming and the economy really picked up and it was good for US people and it was good for Cuban people, but unfortunately, the Trump administration rolled that back, and the Biden administration didn’t do anything to improve relations, and then we’re stuck with Trump again. Now, when you say it’s worse than ever, yes, that’s absolutely true because of this bragging by Trump that not a drop of oil has reached the island in over three months. The U.S. Venezuela not to send oil, it forced Mexico not to send oil. We’re going to see what happens with this Russian tanker, and that should be interesting. But, as you said Chris, this is not new.

And I just want to point out some of the ways that the U.S. has sabotaged the Cuban economy for so long. One is, this is a Caribbean island, and in small countries like in Central America and the Caribbean, one of the main sources of income is remittances, what people from those countries move to richer countries like the United States or to Spain and send back to their relatives. The U.S. has made it very difficult to even send money to your family on the island.

Then there’s the issue of tourism. Also, a mainstay of Caribbean countries. The U.S. has made it so hard for tourism to thrive on the island. You can’t go as a tourist to lie on the beaches. You have to fit into one of the categories to be able to go. That’s not very hard. People think it’s harder than it is, and that’s why so many people don’t go. But, our European friends, they can’t get the same US visa if they’ve been to Cuba. And since COVID, tourism has really taken a dive. And now, with Donald Trump, the conditions are even difficult for tourists if you can’t get around, if the buses aren’t functioning, that kind of thing. So, tourism has really been impacted.

And then there’s one source of income that I always thought was brilliant for Cuba and the world. And that was the medical professionals that they were sending around the world. These Cuban doctors and nurses that went to both poor countries that was often paid for by UN agencies, and went to wealthier countries, like Italy during COVID, that was paid for by the countries themselves. That became a major source of income for Cuba. And the US government went in there and systematically threatened countries to not accept Cuban doctors, to expel Cuban doctors that were there, even telling countries not to send their students to study for free in the medical school in Cuba.

So, these are just some of the ways that the U.S. has been sabotaging. And of course, being on the State Sponsor of Terrorism List means that you can’t use the international financial system, the SWIFT system, which means you can’t trade in the international arena. So, this is not new, but not getting fuel is a whole new level. And nobody can say right now that there’s not a blockade on Cuba. Everybody can see it now, and it’s devastating.

Chris Hedges: The island has only 10 million people. Why throughout its history has Cuba been seen by the United States as such a threat?

Medea Benjamin: Well, I think at one point it was a threat of a good example, a threat because it did have a thriving health care system that led Cuba to have a lower infant mortality rate than most places in the United States, a higher life expectancy rate, a family doctor system that was the envy of people around the world. I mean, imagine, Chris, having your doctor in your neighborhood. It was one doctor to like 125 families. They would actually know you. They would know what your health condition was. They would visit you in your home. I mean, it was a beautiful system. It’s so frayed right now because the poor doctors are earning a miserable salary and many are leaving the profession and they don’t have materials to work with. But it still remains a totally free system. And that’s a threat to all the people in the U.S. that profit from making our health care for-profit lousy system.

The other thing is that in the beginning the educational, the literacy program was really a major, major breakthrough in taking a poor society with a high literacy rate, turning it into an educated population where you could get free education up into a PhD.

It was also seen as a threat because of the relationship with Russia, which even after the Cuba Missile Crisis, U.S. maintained relations with what was the Soviet Union until the time that it broke up in 1991.

And then, there are all the Cuban Americans, and I shouldn’t say all because it’s actually a small group of Cuban Americans, that left the island after the revolution and have been outraged ever since that they lost some of their properties and have been constantly pushing the US government to overthrow the Cuban government so that they could get their properties back. And then they’re finally, I want to say that this Cuban-American group has become very powerful. They have modeled themselves after the pro-Israel lobby group called AIPAC, and they are a very, very powerful foreign lobby group for such a small population. They get millions of our tax dollars. They get them year after year to spread propaganda against the Cuban government. They have elected Cuban-Americans to office like Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Gimenez, Díaz-Balart, whose entire careers are built on this anti-Cuban government policy. And so those are some of the reasons.

And then finally, let me say that there has been a contest for Florida between the Democrats and Republicans, and the Democrats have thought that they could win back some seats in Florida if they took this hardline position. It hasn’t worked out for them, but they continue to think that it’s in their favor to be not only bashing the Cuban government, but hurting the Cuban people.

Chris Hedges: So, the response of the Cuban government has been to offer concessions. I think they’ve even said they would negotiate with Cuban exiles over reparations for their property. They’ve talked about loosening restrictions on foreign investment. Can you speak a little bit about how the Cuban government is responding?

Medea Benjamin: Well, the Cuban government has always been open to talks and actually having talks with the US about migration issues and about drugs. And the Cuban government has been very helpful in combating drugs in the Caribbean. But these issues now about investment, Cuba has opened to private enterprise, not in a big way, but in a very significant way. You can have private companies. You can hire up to 100 people. I would say most of the Cubans now are working in some form or another in the private sector because the government sector has collapsed in many ways. And the Cuban Americans are allowed to support enterprises in Cuba. And in fact, every small store that you see as you walk along in the streets, not only in Havana, but other cities, are mostly there thanks to investments from their relatives in the United States.

But what the Trump administration wants is big stuff. It wants to own land. It wants to be able to build whatever it wants and have U.S. companies come in and take over things that have been nationalized.

So, those are things, actually, that the Cuban government is willing to talk to. And as you said, they recently said that they’re willing to talk about compensation. Now when the Cuban government started to nationalize foreign properties in the early 1960s, all of the other countries negotiated and worked out a deal with the Cuban government. The U.S. was the only country that refused to work out a deal. But the Cubans are saying right now, let’s work it out. Let’s have normal trade relations with the United States.

Chris Hedges: What are the consequences if this siege continues, which I assume it will, what are going to be the consequences within Cuba?

Medea Benjamin: You know, Chris, I can’t even imagine this siege continuing because it is really breaking down the ability to have a normal life. People can’t go to work because the buses aren’t working or if they got to work, there’s no electricity or no materials. So, what are you supposed to do? The children are having a hard time getting to school. Many of the teachers have left because their salaries are so bad. The hospitals are barely functioning. The doctors there are heroes, still holding on, still trying to attend to their patients with the little that they have. But when you don’t even have access to hot water in the hospital, much less analgesics and all kinds of things like sutures, basic things needed for operations, the government has said there are 60,000 people waiting to get operated on and 11,000 of them are children.

The infant mortality rate is rising. The cancer patients can’t get their treatment. Diabetes patients can’t get their treatments. So, this is causing severe misery in Cuba right now. You see the garbage piled up in the streets because they don’t have the gasoline for the trucks. In the hotter months, that led to an outbreak of three different mosquito-borne diseases that affected one-third of the population. How long can this last? I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t see this going on for another six months, for example, because people are just desperate.

And I’m hoping that there are talks between the US and Cuba. And we hear that there are, but I don’t know what they are. But I hope that there are, because something has to give. And I’m also hoping that more and more people are starting to realize how dire the situation is in Cuba, how medieval this siege is on the Cuban people, how hypocritical is to say that you care about human rights in Cuba and yet you’re denying the people the basics of life. So, I’m hoping more people are becoming educated and active.

We just came back from our trip to Cuba and I ran into Congress today to be with a group of 10 people that were going around asking them to support a War Powers Act saying that Trump does not have the right to invade Cuba, but also an act called the US-Cuba Trade Act to lift these restrictions. And as we went to the offices, we started out with the Democrats, and they were extremely sympathetic because they had heard about the conditions on the island. So, I think people are waking up to what is happening, and I’m hoping that we can apply some significant pressure on our government.

Chris Hedges: Although every attempt by the Cuban government to reach out is rebuffed by Marco Rubio.

Medea Benjamin: Well, certainly that has been the case, but you know, like we’re seeing in Iran and we saw in Venezuela, there’s not always a 100 % agreement between Marco Rubio and Trump when it comes to policies. I’m sure Marco Rubio wanted to overthrow the entire government in Venezuela, but Trump was content to kidnap Maduro and his wife and to keep the rest of the government in place as long as he could get greater access, because there was already Chevron working in Venezuela, but greater access for US companies.

The same might be true in the case of Cuba, where Marco Rubio definitely wants to have the historic opportunity to overthrow the Cuban government, but maybe Trump is content with some lesser kind of agreement in Cuba where there would be a greater openness to investments. So, we shall see. I don’t think we should think that Marco Rubio has the absolute word on what will happen with Cuba.

Chris Hedges: How likely do you see the possibility of an actual ground invasion?

Medea Benjamin: The U.S. keeps saying they are not contemplating a ground invasion in Cuba, yet we can’t take our government’s word for anything. I can’t imagine a ground invasion, but I couldn’t imagine the U.S. invading and starting this war with Iran either. I think the Cuban military would be very hard pressed to defeat a military attack by the U.S. But a ground invasion would be a different story. And I don’t think Cuban Americans really want to see their relatives bombed, although many of them seemed okay with seeing them starved. So, I don’t know what the likelihood of a military invasion would be.

Chris Hedges: When you were in Cuba, what surprised you the most?

Medea Benjamin: What surprised me was the level of resignation that many people had. That even though they hated the idea of Trump saying he was going to take over the country and do whatever he wanted, many people I talked to on the street said, “Whatever, just get us out of this misery. We can’t keep going like this.”

And so that is something I haven’t seen. And I want to say, Chris, that I’ve been going to Cuba for many years. This is not the Cuba that I knew. There are so many people begging in the streets. I never saw beggars when I first went to Cuba. There are people, not a lot of homeless, but there are. I didn’t see that before. And the level of inequality is so great because the salaries are $20 a month, $25 a month, and the prices are so high for local people. And so, it’s a similar situation that we see in a place like Gaza, where you see food in the marketplace, but people don’t have the money to buy it.

On the other hand, those people who have relatives overseas are in a much better position, and there now are very wealthy Cubans. And one of the things that our speakers talked to us about was the increase in racial disparities because those with relatives overseas that have money to send back tend to be white Cubans. And so, the ones who tend to have the businesses inside Cuba are white Cubans. And it’s the black Cubans who tend to bear the brunt of this economic strangulation.

Chris Hedges: When you talk about the buses aren’t running, how severely impacted is transportation? Are the streets empty?

Medea Benjamin: The streets are unbelievably sparsely, cars, there are some cars. There are some electric vehicles. There are some vehicles that have managed to get gasoline on the black market, which was very, very expensive. And what they’re coming up with is some very innovative electric vehicles. There are something called the Tricicletas, three-wheelers, electric and they can fit six people in the back and they’re used for transporting goods as well as people. There are electric motorcycles that people have, And the few cars that are in the road, people are hitchhiking and the people with cars are very sympathetic and are constantly stopping to pick people up. We asked our guides, “How do you get here?” And one of them said,” I hitchhike back and forth every day.” She sometimes has to wait quite a while for a car to pick her up.

But there is this solidarity economy where people really help each other. So even though in a country where there is not that sense of collectivism, you would see a lot more hunger, a lot more misery, and Cuba, they’re managing to get by because of this kind of solidarity. I’ve been to the eastern part of the island recently. There was even less traffic there. But what I found in Holguín, for example, was a revival of the use of the horse and buggy. And the carts were taking people around. The carts were also picking up garbage on the street. And that made it much cleaner than in Havana. But I asked about horses in Havana. And I’m sure there are some restrictions, but people told me there’s not even enough food to keep the horses healthy enough to provide that kind of transportation.

Chris Hedges: And this effort was multinational. There was a flotilla that left from Mexico, but there were all sorts of nationalities that participated in this attempt to bring, it ends up being symbolic, but attempt to bring in humanitarian aid and protest the siege, is that correct?

Medea Benjamin: You know, our presence really boosted the spirit of Cubans. We couldn’t walk around the street without people coming up to us and saying, “Thank you for your solidarity. I saw you on television. Thank you.” So, we were coming from all over Europe. There were delegations from Italy, from Spain. There were people from Colombia, Brazil, a lot of people from Mexico and there were a lot of us from the United States. There were 170 in our group, but there were also groups coming with different organizations, the People’s Forum, Global Exchange. There were people there from the National Network on Cuba, this group of Cuban Americans that I mentioned, the Cuban Americans for Cuba. So, we were hundreds of people and it was wonderful going around town and seeing people and lots of high fives and solidarities and it really was a boost. And the boats we had a problem with, because the insurance companies did not want to insure boats to go to Cuba. And they were also afraid of the threats from Trump. So, we did manage to get one boat that carried about 30 people and then a couple of sailboats. And the bigger boat just arrived in Cuba today to a really wonderful welcome. And there were people on that boat coming from all over.

And one of the real connections that was made was the solidarity movement around Gaza and Palestine and in Cuba. On our delegation, we had Palestinian professionals, we had Palestinian writers, we had Palestinian health workers, Doctors Against Genocide, and they met up in Cuba with the Palestinians who had been studying at medical school and some who had already graduated. And that was a beautiful coming together.

And also on the boat, we have a lot of people, and also in our delegation, who are part of the Global Sumud Flotilla and will be part of the upcoming Global Sumud Flotilla that will be happening in April. So, there were a lot of connections between people who have been advocating for the Palestinian people and now many of them newly aware of the problems in Cuba and many similarities that the Cubans and the Palestinians face.

Chris Hedges: When you meet with lawmakers, if they are sympathetic, what are you asking for?

Medea Benjamin: So, there’s this War Powers Act in the Senate and in the House starting today, and that is a bill that says that Trump without going to Congress cannot invade Cuba. It’s very important, even symbolically, to have that kind of vote. And of course, we’re pushing all of the Democrats and trying to get some Republicans to be on board as well. Things are so partisan in Congress, and the Republicans are so afraid of going against Trump.

But we hope we will get some of them on this as well, because many of them are not happy with what’s happening in Iran. And this would be a chance for them to show that they don’t support the US sticking its nose in all these other countries. So that’s one.

And then there is another bill that was introduced recently by Jim McGovern. It’s House Resolution 1721, the US-Cuba Trade Act, which would lift the embargo and would allow U.S. companies to trade with Cuba. So, this is what we’re asking for.

And I must say that today we got a lot of sympathy. I managed to speak directly to some members of Congress and they say, “Oh, I’m just so, so upset about what is happening in Cuba and glad there’s finally some bill that they can show their support for.” Of course, these people could have introduced their own bill a long time ago and didn’t. But I think we will get quite a good support in Congress.

Chris Hedges: Is there anything else you want to add, Medea, before we go?

Medea Benjamin: Yes. We also are trying to have trips to Cuba on a regular basis, going and going and going, because we found that people who couldn’t get on this trip, they really want to go. So, you can check the CODEPINK website for the next trips. And the other thing is to do your own fundraisers for Cuba. It’s a great way to bring people together, to talk about what’s happening, to raise some money, to give it to one of the many organizations that is raising money for solar panels or for medicines to Cuba. So those are other things that people can do.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you, Medea. And I want to thank Sophia, Thomas, and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com

Photos

CUBA-US-ENERGY-BLACKOUT

A truck drives along a dark street during a blackout in Matanzas, Cuba, on April 6, 2026. Matanzas is one of the Cuban cities most affected by electricity shortages, at times going more than 24 hours without power, despite being home to the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, one of the country’s most important. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

CUBA-US-ENERGY-BLACKOUT

A woman prepares a wood fire to cook food during a blackout in Matanzas, Cuba, on April 6, 2026. Matanzas is one of the Cuban cities most affected by electricity shortages, at times going more than 24 hours without power, despite being home to the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, one of the country’s most important. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-ENERGY-BLACKOUT

TOPSHOT - Children look at a cell phone on a dark street during a blackout in Matanzas, Cuba, on April 6, 2026. Matanzas is one of the Cuban cities most affected by electricity shortages, at times going more than 24 hours without power, despite being home to the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, one of the country’s most important. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

Cuba - Oil, Matanzas, Nodding Donkeys, Crude Oil Is Extracted And Used By Sugar Refineries,

Cuba - Oil, Matanzas, Nodding Donkeys, Crude Oil Is Extracted And Used By Sugar Refineries, (Photo by Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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A woman cares for her child at the William Soler Pediatric Cardiocenter a beneficiary of the humanitarian aid brought by the Nuestra America flotilla from Mexico in Havana, on March 24, 2026. (Photo by Yuri CORTEZ / AFP via Getty Images)

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MIAMI, FL - JUNE 16: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about policy changes he is making toward Cuba at the Manuel Artime Theater in the Little Havana neighborhood on June 16, 2017 in Miami, Florida. The President will re-institute some of the restrictions on travel to Cuba and U.S. business dealings with entities tied to the Cuban military and intelligence services. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro waves to a cheering crowd upon his arrival in Havana, Cuba, after dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island.

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HAVANA, CUBA - MARCH 21: U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Cuban President Raul Castro review troops before bilateral meetings at the Palace of the Revolution March 21, 2016 in Havana, Cuba. These are the first direct talks between Castro and Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba in 88 years. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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IN FLIGHT - OCTOBER 27: U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Trump is in route to Japan after attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Malaysia, and will travel on to South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

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CARACAS, VENEZUELA - NOVEMBER 28: Cuban doctors work in a free health care clinic named “Mission Inside the Barrio” November 28, 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

CUBA-ITALY-HEALTH-VIRUS

Doctors and nurses of Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade are bid farewell before they travel to hard-hit Italy to help in the fight against the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, at the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation in Havana, on March 21, 2020. (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP) (Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images)

Fidel Castro

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Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a fearless Palestinian-American journalist whose writing and reports are defined by unparalleled integrity, depth and eloquence, was arrested on March 3 in Kuwait.

He is charged with spreading false information and harming national security.

His arrest took place following his reporting of the shooting down of three U.S. fighter planes by the Kuwaiti military in an act of friendly fire during the US-Israel war with Iran. Ahmed, along with other news outlets such as the BBC, published footage of a US F-15 E Strike Eagle crashing in al-Jahra west of Kuwait City.

I fear Ahmed, a graduate of Columbia Journalism School who has worked for The New York Times, PBS Frontline, Al Jazeera English, Vice on HBO, The Huffington Post and appeared on numerous news outlets including the BBC and CNN, will be charged under new, draconian security laws instituted in Kuwait, which have already led to dozens of arbitrary arrests.

You can see an interview I did with Ahmed when we were with Francesca Albanese, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis and striking dock workers in Italy in November to protest the genocide in Gaza here. Ahmed is also featured in the film we made about the protests, Resistance 101.

Kuwait has desperately tried to maintain the fiction that it did not serve as a staging area for U.S. attacks on Iran.

Iran repeatedly attacked Kuwait, including strikes on Kuwait International Airport, the Ali Al Salem Air Base, the U.S. garrison at Camp Buehring and an operations center that saw six U.S. soldiers killed and dozens wounded. Iran also attacked the Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery and a Kuwaiti oil tanker.

France 24 broadcast a video of HIMARS missiles allegedly being fired from Kuwait into Iran. Ahmed’s reporting also undercut the lie of Kuwaiti neutrality. The Kuwaiti authorities will, I expect, for this reason, seek to turn Ahmed into an example for the rest of the press.

Please contact the Kuwait Embassy in Washington today to call for Ahmed’s release.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The whole world is watching as negotiations begin today in Islamabad, Pakistan between Iran and the United States following an agreement to cease military action for two weeks. The negotiations are based on a ten-point plan outlined by Iran and approved by the United States as a basis for the talks.

Israel has not been invited to the negotiations, which are being conducted indirectly and with a great deal of skepticism by the Iranian team. The outcome of these talks will impact the entire global economy and the fate of millions of people in West Asia, six million of whom have already been forcibly displaced by US and Israeli aggression in recent years.

Chris Hedges discusses the peace talks with former British Diplomat Alastair Crooke, writer of Conflicts Forum, who has participated in past negotiations between Palestinian groups and Israel and who studied the rise of Islamic groups in the region. Crooke explains that the current Islamabad talks are rife with contradictions and are impeded by a failure of the West to understand that the goal of Iran, in the defense of its sovereignty, is “to blow up the existing paradigm” that has plagued Iran for nearly 50 years, which Crooke describes as a “revolutionary objective” that has both financial and cultural elements.

Many factors have led to Iran maintaining a position of strength throughout the recent US-Israeli aggression, which gives it an advantage in these talks. Meanwhile, Israel is in a position of weakness as it fights on multiple fronts with a military in a state of collapse and a population in distress. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a court case, which could result in his imprisonment, and an upcoming election.

And for the United States, Crooke explains that its miscalculated war on Iran has backfired, leading to the rise of the Chinese Yuan, the decline of the petrodollar, significant losses of its infrastructure in the Middle East and a conflict that, like the Vietnam War, is being fought on difficult terrain for which the US is not prepared. Hedges compares this situation to the Suez Crisis in 1956 that accelerated the decline of the British Empire. When asked if the US is likely to restart the war on Iran, Crooke responds with “What’s really left to the United States militarily to do that would be a game changer?”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Milena Soci

Transcript

Chris Hedges: The Trump administration and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire and two weeks of negotiations, which began today in Islamabad following six weeks of warfare. The basis of the negotiations will be a 10-point proposal put forward by Iran, not Trump’s vaunted 15-point plan, that include a call for cessation of all hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon where Israel has been carrying out punishing airstrikes, reparations paid to Iran, the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets, a withdrawal of U.S. military bases in the region, the lifting of all sanctions on Iran, and a permanent and formalized end to hostilities. The agreement calls for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s daily oil and gas shipments are transited.

Iran, however, has so far refused to open the Strait, insisting that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon must first end and the billions in frozen assets must be repatriated to Iran. While Iran has clearly suffered devastating blows to its infrastructure, manufacturing, and military assets, including naval and air assets, while it has seen senior leaders, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated, none of the objectives set out by Israel in the US have been met. The Iranian regime remains in power. It controls the Strait. It retains significant missile and drone stockpiles, and it still possesses enriched uranium.

Iran is the clear winner of Operation Epic Fury. The US is indisputably in a weaker position than when the war began. Trump has, at the same time, caused incalculable damage to America’s moral reputation by taking part in an unprovoked attack on Iran and openly advocating war crimes, including a call to obliterate Iranian civilization and take out civilian infrastructure, including power plants. He squandered an estimated $39 billion on the war, costs that will be felt at home, especially with rising prices. The global economy remains in crisis, and even if hostilities do not resume, it will take months to recover.

Iran, most importantly, is now the indisputable master of the Strait, charging tankers $2 million to transit through the Strait. It has a stranglehold on the global economy. The new Iranian leadership, centered around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is more defiant and intransigent than the old leadership killed by Israel and the U.S. in targeted assassinations. This is bad news for the U.S. and especially Israel.

US and Israeli strikes killed more than 1,700 Iranian civilians, including 254 children. Three million Iranians have been displaced from their homes, along with one million Lebanese. Add to these numbers the two million Palestinians displaced by the genocide in Gaza. Six million people rendered homeless.

Joining me to discuss the war on Iran is Alistair Crooke, a former British diplomat, who served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU Special Envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian resistance groups. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of “Resistance, the Essence of the Islamist Revolution”, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.

I’ll just begin, Alistair, with a very broad question. Where are we at this moment?

Alastair Crooke: It’s a very broad question. It’s a very good question because this is not really clear at the moment. First of all, although we call it a ceasefire, it is not really a ceasefire, in the sense that a ceasefire normally has some prior understandings that underpin a ceasefire. We do have a halt of, if you like, military activities across, or supposed to be across, all fronts. Although in the introduction you pointed out that Israel was attacking Lebanon causing many deaths and casualties in the process in a deliberate act to exclude Lebanon from the whole process.

What’s happening at the moment is that there are two delegations in Islamabad. They are not meeting directly; they are meeting indirectly. They are quite big delegations because there are delegations of experts that are involved in this process. It is hinged on the 10-point plan or framework that Iran insisted there should be. The precondition for the meeting to take place was that the United States should agree that this was an acceptable basis for discussion. The Americans agreed to that.

Now, where we are at the moment is, as I understand it from Islamabad, is that nothing really very much is happening. There are the general discussions, but the Iranians believe that the United States have not fulfilled some of the undertakings they gave to Pakistan. Particularly, there seems to be hitches on the release of the frozen assets. And there are other elements that are taking place that are not very clear at the moment. I think it would be better to describe this, particularly from an Iranian point of view, this was an effort, if you like, to have at least a halt in the military side of the war to explore whether there was any room for maneuver, politically.

I mean we call that in the Middle East a Hudna rather than a ceasefire. It’s a temporary truce, if you like, really to explore if there is political will to move forward. And as I understand it, at this moment, that is not clear. So, it’s not clear whether the negotiations will continue past today or whether they will end today.

I don’t think that there is any great expectation of an agreement, certainly from the Iranian side. And I think that we may find that we finish the day with nothing really solid emerging from this. And the continual prospect that there will be military action initiated by Israel either again in Lebanon, where Israel is insistent that it should not be included in this process and that this is quite separate and that they’re in discussion with the Lebanese government in order to have the demilitarization, the disarmament, of Hezbollah, and that’s a separate issue and can’t be included.

The Iranian position is very simple. It’s going to be either a ceasefire for all or a ceasefire for nobody. If the Israelis insist that Lebanon is outside of these agreements and outside of these discussions, then in that case Israel can be outside of these discussions and Iran will continue the war on Israel.

So, I think it’s unclear how far we are going to get, but the expectations, as I hear or judge from there, are not very optimistic that something will emerge. And it’s not surprising. I mean, I don’t think it’s surprising. I’m sure it isn’t surprising to you because there are enormous contradictions in this whole process. They are the differences in the interests of the United States and of Iran and what Iran’s objectives are, which are very poorly understood, I believe, in the United States and poorly understood more generally in the West, how serious they are, the objectives for this war.

I mean, in a nutshell, the objectives of Iran are to blow up the existing paradigm. That is a revolutionary objective, to blow it up completely in order that they can escape, if you like, from the cage in which they’ve been held for 48 years, surrounded by US military forces, besieged by tariffs, by restrictions, UN resolutions, political isolation, economic, cultural, if you like, boycott. So, this is what they are trying to break out from. It’s not the same cage that the Hamas and the Palestinians are in in Gaza, which has got a literal fence and drones and monitoring of it, but Iran is intent on breaking the paradigm. And the key to breaking that paradigm, of course, is the Hormuz and their control of the Hormuz, which is the centerpiece of their strategic objectives.

Chris Hedges: Do they have the capacity, in your view, to break that paradigm?

Alastair Crooke: Yes, I think they have moved in that direction. I noticed what you said in the introduction about the devastation that had been visited on Iran, and I know this will seem counterintuitive to many of your listeners, but in fact Iran has emerged from this one month of war or so in a much stronger position than it did from the ‘12-Day War’ in June. It is in a much stronger position.

There is a lot of propaganda on all sides in this war, but there are some things that one can say very clearly that Iran has effected enormous damage on American bases in the Gulf area. It has destroyed all the radar abilities. I think altogether something like seven radars have been destroyed in the first phase of the war. They have not only destroyed that, they have complete control over the Hormuz and they have still, at this time - of course, Iran doesn’t have an air force and therefore cannot have air dominance, but instead of which they have created missile dominance over the airspace of the whole region, including Israel. The damage to their missile capabilities has been grossly overstated by the old tactic of just counting, this goes back to Vietnam, counting air strikes. And one of the things that has been most notable in this period is before the war, Iran bought from China a huge number of decoys -decoy planes, decoy missiles - and one of the things, not only are they very effective in their appearance, but I didn’t know until recently, is they have a heat source in them. So, they are hot. And so of course that shows up on the American sensors and the Israeli sensors as a real target, a real plane, a real missile when it’s really only a decoy.

The missile systems are buried deep in mountains. A main missile is 800 meters under a granite mountain. It has a whole railway system in the mountain and that carries the missiles from the cities, from the magazine, along a railway track to an entrance. A door opens, the missile is fired from the railway line, and then the door shuts.

And, although it’s been bombed innumerable times, part of that 16,000 strikes we have made on Iran, it still functions. Half an hour after the airstrike, the missile comes out and continues. The mountain is getting slightly damaged and black, but nothing is affecting the missile cities.

Their command system is functioning, thanks to the mosaic decentralization of command, disbursement of command. It’s created almost a sort of mechanical structure that snaps into action as soon as Iran is attacked or as soon as there is an attempt at a decapitation strike. I mean they started instituting this after what they saw in 2003 with the American attack on Baghdad that they had to find a way of countering this and countering the air attacks that took place in Baghdad.

So, I mean, it’s impossible to give precise figures, but I believe that the amount of deaths in Tehran are probably less than in the ‘12-Day War’. They did this simply by - they learned from the ‘12-Day War’ -empty every public building completely. So, universities, everything, are completely empty. All the government offices are empty. And so, Israel has been destroying those, counting those up as a huge damage caused to Iran.

And the most significant thing, I would say, is the financial aspect of it. In the first month of this war, Iran has earned double from its oil sales and tankers, double what it has earned in any month for several years past. It’s earned double. If you take just one case about a week ago last Sunday, there were five tankers loading in Kharg with 7.7 million barrels of oil. That, on one day, earned Iran 850 million dollars in the sales. Then, of course, they are earning from 2 million from every tanker and vessel that passes through Hormuz as part of the toll that they are insisting that ships have to pay.

So, the economic situation is, one can calculate from these figures, not just me but others have done that, that on this basis, Iran could earn a little short of a trillion dollars a year through the control of the Hormuz. But it doesn’t stop there. And I will explain why, because it’s also about supply lines. It controls supply lines - helium, sulfuric acid, all of these essential elements to our supply lines for manufacturing technical items and also for manufacturing chips and things. The chip factory in Taiwan is almost at a standstill now because they need helium and they need liquified gas in order to make chips. So, supply lines, food, fertilizer. This is it.

If you compare it to what happened with China when Trump imposed a huge tariff on China, 155%, I think, at one point it was. And the presidency said, “Well, okay, but I’m putting some restrictions actually on rare earths and other commodities. And so that’s going to be what you’re going to have to do without.” And of course it changed. And so, really that the Chinese tactic is also part of the Hormuz structure. It’s not just the sale of oil, not just the tolls, but it is about supply lines and it is also something much more complicated, which is the insistence that the cargos be paid in Yuan.

And this is a part of, if you like, the attempt to deculture the whole of the GCC area, which has always been the central hub of dollar hegemony. This is the center of the petrodollar and it was encouraged from ‘73 when it started to keep the oil price up because all of the proceeds go to Wall Street. Wall Street then leverages it in the financial world. And so, you have in the Gulf States a highly financialized type of economy with all of the data centers and others there. And Iran is telling the Gulf states, “If you want to enjoy a relationship with Iran, you have to get rid of Microsoft, Amazon. You have to get rid of these. What do you need? This huge 30 billion data center in the UAE. You have to get rid of this.” This is, if you like, part of, I wouldn’t call it a cultural revolution because it’s a financial cultural revolution that the Iranians are seeking to establish. That’s what I mean by breaking the paradigm. I’m sorry it’s a complicated explanation, but it’s bigger than just can ships go up or down. It’s a much bigger, more ambitious plan than is properly appreciated.

Chris Hedges: Some people have described this as the equivalent of our Suez Crisis. That was 1956 when the British and the French, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. They tried to take it back. It was a fiasco. They had to retreat, well, along with the Israelis. Would you agree?

Alastair Crooke: Yes, I would say it’s the same because there’s really, if anyone knows the geography of Hormuz, I mean the literal what it looks like, the landscape of Hormuz, it’s very evident that there is no way that the Americans, as things stand, this has been planned for a long time by the Iranians. The whole of that Hormuz sea-line is bordered by caves. It’s cliffs, and in those cliffs are anti-ship missiles. Under Hormuz, they have submersible drones. We haven’t seen them used yet, but these submersible drones have tunnels under the Hormuz’s waterway so that the drones can come out under sea, not visible, can’t be seen by anyone. They have lithium batteries that can last for four days. They have the ability to loiter and they have AI capacity to then choose and select targets. Then they have surface drones, very highspeed drones with explosives.

And what is unnoticed, but is crucial to this, is they have these mini submarines, two-man submarines, small submarines, but they can operate in the shallow waters of the Hormuz Strait and the Hormuz Waterway. And they are equipped with anti-ship missiles and also with these drones too. It would be a suicide to try and put a landing craft down the Straits. The Straits themselves are under fire control because on the other side of Hormuz that is a sort of bend around the peninsula and then behind that are mountains and they are riddled with caves and emplacements of artillery. So, the whole of the Hormuz Straits, you don’t need to have drones or missiles, they control it by artillery fire. It’s within range. And that exists right up to Kharg Island. So, any ship trying to go up this waterway will be sunk or damaged and told to leave.

And if you land forces on the Iranian side, how do you get them there? How do you sustain them? How do you resupply them? How do you exfiltrate them? You’re going to land them on Iran. It’s desolate, that part of Iran. There are no forests. There are in other parts of Iran, but this is just desolate. And Kharg Island is a very small place. I’ve been to Kharg Island. It is just a small, flat area where the terminal for the pipelines from inside Iran come and load tankers.

If you take it, what is that going to do? And anyway, even if you stop the Iranian oil from flowing to Kharg, then all Iran has to do is to close Hormuz for three, four weeks and the pain in terms of oil price, inflation, markets, valuations, will be felt very quickly. So, it’s going to be very hard to see. This is one of the aspects of these negotiations is the United States has very few cards to play and has one huge disadvantage, which is that ultimately, as we saw in terms of Lebanon, the key player in this is not in Islamabad and that is Israel. And Israel, overall, has been very clear. We follow the Israeli press very closely, the Hebrew press. And their aim in the attack on Lebanon was first of all, to force more time from Trump in order to continue the attack on Hezbollah. Just to be clear, if a few Hezbollah have been killed in this, there been hundreds and altogether many more hundreds of casualties of ordinary Lebanese civilians who have got nothing to do with Hezbollah.

They’re trying to keep it apart by coming to an arrangement with the Prime Minister of Lebanon. That this is a separate issue. We’re going to negotiate the disarmament of Hezbollah with them. Therefore, it’s not part of the issue. And as I say, the Iranian position is very, the equation is very clear. The equation is: it’s a ceasefire on all fronts or it’s a ceasefire on none.

And that’s what they will be saying to the American delegation in Islamabad.

Chris Hedges: Doesn’t Israel seek through Lebanon? Trump initially agreed that a ceasefire in Lebanon was part of the deal, then he had a phone call with Netanyahu and immediately backtracked. I also want to note that when Israel carried out this massive attack, I think over 10 minutes, there was no warning. I think the numbers of civilian dead are up to 2,000. I mean to describe it as a terror attack is probably not far. But it seems that this is Israel’s, and you’re right, Israel is not in Islamabad, but it was also not a party to the ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan. Is this Israel’s tool to essentially sabotage any kind of agreement?

Alastair Crooke: Yes, it’s very clear that, and from the Hebrew press it’s expressed. For example, Alon Ben David said, “Of course, you know, the attempt now to insist on the disarmament of Hezbollah is likely to provoke a civil war in Lebanon.” But then adds afterwards, “But that’s been the aim all along.” And similarly, I noticed that, I think it was yesterday, the deadline for the disarmament of Hamas has ended. So, if Israel decides to leave Lebanon quiet for the moment, it’s just as likely that we’re going to see a massive military operation in Gaza and in the West Bank again.

The objective is quite clear when you read the Hebrew press. And these are serious political correspondents. We’ve been following them for years. We know the ones who are close to the leadership and the ones who are in the opposition. And the ones that are close to the leadership are very clear, “We want the war to continue.” And in public opinion, that is also the case. 93 % of the Jewish residents in Israel want the war to continue.

So, this is what is being pursued, how to put the pressure on Trump to continue the war because they want Iran destroyed, not just into some sort of agreement on nuclear issues or something. They want it destroyed. They want to set up a whole series of ethno-sectarian mini-states on it - Baluchi State, Kurdish State, Azeri State, whatever - set them at odds with one another and have a completely weakened Iran. So, Iran is not going to go back into that paradigm. Why should it under any circumstances? They can see that and now they are in the process of trying to make a strategic push, a shift to change that paradigm and to get out of this and to have sanctions lifted.

One of the points of the Hormuz exercise is because people are paying tolls and those tolls are, if you like, breaking the sanctions siege on Iran. And that’s the only way you get your tankers out. And increasingly, states are coming and agreeing and trying to make arrangements with Iran, particularly Asian states. Of course, India and Pakistan, but also South Korea, Japan, they’re all making arrangements to pay the toll and to be able to access energy through Hormuz.

So, I mean it is breaking, in a small way, but breaking the sanctions. But they want sanctions lifted completely. And they are using the Yuan, the imposition of the Yuan, and also the attempt to tell all of the Gulf States that they have now to abandon their close economic ties with the United States if they want to have a relationship with Iran. And it’s not just the American bases, but it’s also the Microsoft, the Amazon, that part of the structure that has created an environment, an economic culture of the whole Gulf which is inimical to Iran.

Chris Hedges: I know this is a difficult question, but how do you read the Trump administration? Do you think that they are aware of how cornered they are?

Alastair Crooke: No. I don’t think so. I think this has been a complete misreading, first of all, of the nature of Iran. I think they thought that Iran was a house of cards and was going to collapse. We saw that very clearly from the New York Times account of the 11th of February meeting, which incidentally is only half the story because we were following in the Hebrew press on the 29th of December when Netanyahu came and had the summit at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, it was there that he laid down very clearly to Trump first and he said, “Forget the nuclear issue. You’re not to pursue that. You have to concentrate on the one issue, we have to end the missiles, end them because the Iranians are not just replacing them, they are creating an entirely new umbrella, a new paradigm. And if it isn’t done, they will be inviable. We won’t be able to attack them again in the future. So, you have to put that as your first priority and not the nuclear issue.” “And if you try to get out of this by doing the nuclear issue,” Netanyahu told him, quote from many sources in the Hebrew press, “We won’t give you a kosher certificate for that. We’re not going to accept another sort of JCPOA type solution. So, and if you don’t have that, you won’t have the support of the right in the United States. So, you have to do this and there has to be this attack on Iran.” And according to all of the newspapers, that was agreed in principle on the 29th of January, well before the 11th of February meeting that the New York Times has described. And again, during that it is clear Trump was convinced this was going to be a very short war, days at most, you know, one weekend, started on Saturday and by the time markets open on Monday, the Supreme Leader would be dead and the whole thing would be moving toward a regime change in Iran And it very clearly hasn’t happened that. In fact, something quite different is happening. It’s very hard to describe this correctly. This isn’t wishful thinking on my part, but it’s quite clear to me that there is a spirit of the Iranian revolution in its new form has come back, particularly amongst the young.

You can see it when Trump threatened to end the Iranian civilization, everyone streamed out onto the bridges, onto the nuclear power station and said, “Okay, here we are. If you’re going to kill us, you kill us.” I mean, this reflects a deep readiness to accept sacrifice, personal sacrifice, in the interests of your community, in the interests of Iran as Iran, a civilization, a symbol of civilization. So, there is a powerful thing, particularly amongst the young people now. They are much more fired up after the killing of the Supreme Leader and much more fired up. Young women, boys, men, it is something that is quite important and in my belief is having an effect not just in the region, which it is, the success of Iran in this period, but in Russia and I’m told in China too.

The Chinese thought Iran would manage, but they’ve been quite surprised at the success that Iran has had and its planning, its thinking, and the asymmetric war that they’ve been planning for two decades. So, it’s having an effect in China and in Russia too.

Chris Hedges: Just as a footnote, we should add that the Persian civilization is 7,000 years old. It’s lasted a lot longer than the American experiment. But does the Trump administration, at this point in Islamabad, realize that they don’t have many options left? That Iran is basically holding all the cards? Or do you think that they are foolish enough to get sucked back into a resumption of the war?

Alastair Crooke: I think, first of all, the most important element in this, of course, is Israel because it is quite likely that Israel will pursue the war. Whether it will do it first of all by Lebanon or whether it will do it in Gaza or it will do it directly, but as far as they’re concerned, the war is unfinished business.

Now, this is a paradox, a real paradox, because at the same time that I’m saying 93 % pursue and support war on Iran and the destruction of Iran in the polls. It’s even higher on the right, this is an average, the 93%. At same time I’m saying that there are signs of great distress inside Israel too. The chief of staff of the army has said, “IDF is on the point of collapsing.” He went to the last security cabinet meeting and he said, “I’ve got 10 red lights for you gentlemen because we cannot survive with this. We are losing heavily, many men in Lebanon.” They had, in that very short period they were there, nearly 100 Merkava were destroyed.

Chris Hedges: This is the Israeli battle tank you’re referring to.

Alastair Crooke: Yes, sorry, the main battle tank and many of them with their crew. Some crew got up, many did not. They’re losing troops when they tried to invade and form a buffer line in Lebanon. They were routed.

There is a new Hezbollah. It has gone dark. You don’t see it. The Israelis complain they’re like ghosts. They appear and they vanish and you don’t see them again. They’ve evolved. They’ve changed it and they fire their missiles straight across to Tel Aviv. So, there’s a big fight in Israel because the defense minister wants a buffer line. They want to level all the houses for 7-8 km in the south of Lebanon, just destroy them like Gaza, and have that as a buffer line. And the defense staff say to him, “This is stupid. What are you doing this for because Hezbollah has most of its missile capacity north of the Litani?” The Litani is a river that divides Lebanon about just less than halfway to the North and they have them north of it. The South has always been seen as more of Shia preserve.

And this is where the crisis is. On the one hand, the population wants the war to go on. On the other hand, the military side in Israel are saying very clearly, “We have achieved none of our objectives in Iran. We haven’t seen the state collapse. It wasn’t a house of cards. We don’t believe there can be a color revolution in Iran. We haven’t ended the nuclear process. We haven’t got the enriched uranium back. We haven’t caused any real damage. They still are able to fire missiles at us regularly and with very damaging effects. So, we have failed in Iran. And we have failed clearly. We all thought that Hezbollah had been completely decapacitated by the killing of its leadership and Hassan Nasrallah. And now we find that, actually, they’ve emerged even more effectively than they were. Very effective, new leaders and new structures. And in Gaza, who’s running Gaza? It’s Hamas still running Gaza, and they are re-equipping and they are re-preparing for another conflict with Iran. So, all of this has failed and there’s going to be no grand victory.”

So, there is this great confrontation, and it could be that it is Israel that calls for a ceasefire first, just as they did in the ‘12 Day War, after four days started asking for it. So, it’s possible because of the strains and the strains on ordinary people. Yes, they support the destruction of Iran wholeheartedly, yet they are not ready to go on going down to the shelters and spend every night for 10 hours in a shelter, day after day after day, and so the strains on the civil population are great.

So, I can’t give you a very simple answer as to what’s going to happen from all of this, but don’t forget there are elections coming up. And Netanyahu still has a court case which is about to resume, I think, tomorrow, and he has to win these elections to avoid the outcome of the court case, which might mean imprisonment. And so, he’s desperate to keep the war in Iran going, to keep the fantasy now or the imaginary victory of a war in Iran. And partly that was what he was doing in Lebanon. He is saying, “Look, okay, we haven’t won against Hezbollah, but look, we can really hit them. And we hit them.”

So, it’s very complicated, the situation in Israel, as a consequence, and very complicated in the United States. I mean, I’m speaking to you from Europe and you’re in the United States, but you will well understand. I mean, the problem is that Trump needs to clear the decks if he can before the summer because the midterm elections are coming. The economic situation could turn very nasty. As I say, within even three weeks, the supply line shortages may show up. The price of oil is still high, the price of gasoline is high and so an economic crisis in the debt markets or elsewhere, because we know very clearly that there’s been a huge move out of the dollar, people seeking other forms of secure assets at this uncertain time. Certainly, we see that in the Gulf. I mean, much of the money has been moving out of the Gulf but not back into the dollar, it’s been moving into Yuan and going to China. And Russia has been pursuing this and telling the Europeans, “If you want any Russian oil or gas, you have to pay in Yuan.”

And now European banks are not giving Panda loans. Deutsche Bank, a major bank, is now saying, “Well, we’re not giving dollar loans. Now we are issuing bonds. Panda bonds in Yuan, either a digital Yuan or classical Yuan.” And things are changing and the process geopolitically is shifting. And Iran is gradually, in its small way, emphasizing and working on these rifts in the geopolitical structures to gain leverage for their main demand, which is, “We want the paradigm over. We’ve had 48 years of being in a cage and we are breaking out.”

Chris Hedges: If the ceasefire talks break down, how likely do you think it is that the United States will resume its aerial campaign against Iran?

Alastair Crooke: From what I understand, the Iranians don’t think that America is about to resume the war. America. They think Israel is a different case. But they don’t think America is likely to resume the war because they don’t really have any cards to play. Already, the Iranians have pushed the naval assets 1,000 kilometers from the coastline by firing drones as warning and pushing. So, the carriers have been pushed beyond the range of their deck strike aircraft to be able to overfly Iran without refueling, and you can’t refuel over your target. It’s not an advisible thing to do. They pushed that up. They’ve destroyed most of the bases in the Gulf states. Heavy damage. The radar systems have been destroyed. Some of the AWACS have been disabled.

So, apart from the ability to just simply blindly bombard basically civil infrastructure - houses, residences, hospitals and things like that - in Tehran and elsewhere, all, by the way, not necessarily by aircraft flying over it because they largely don’t, these are standoff weapons, cruise missiles, others that are used to do these attacks. So, what’s really left to the United States militarily to do that would be a game changer? What? Bomb again Nantaz?

The only thing that is particularly worrying is in this period, Nantaz, the nuclear facilities that was bombed in June by President Trump, has been bombed again by Israel. But Israel has also put into a missile very close to Bushehr. And just so your viewers are clear about it, Bushehr is a working nuclear-powered power plant, which is a joint venture with Russia. So, it’s half-staffed with Russians. About, I think, 135 of them have now been withdrawn. But then there was another missile, which actually hit Bushehr. Not much damage, a little damage. But what’s the signal coming from Israel, from that, on the nuclear target? And I think the signal is not so much to Iran, but to the United States.

Chris Hedges: And what are they saying to the US?

Alastair Crooke: Keep the war up or else we might decide that we are going to resort to practical nuclear weapons.

Chris Hedges: All right. Great. Thank you, Alastair. And I want to thank Milena, Sophia, and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

Photos

U.S. Vice President JD Vance Leads U.S. Delegation In Peace Talks With Iran In Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - APRIL 11: U.S. Vice President JD Vance (C) walks with Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces and Chief of Army Staff Field Marshall Asim Munir (L), and Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar after arriving for talks with Iranian officials on April 11, 2026 at Islamabad, Pakistan. (Photo by Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-LEBANON-ISRAEL-IRAN-US-WAR

TOPSHOT - A fireball rises from a building hit by an Israeli airstrike in the area of Abbasiyeh, on the outskirts of the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, on April 8, 2026. (Photo by Kawnat HAJU / AFP via Getty Images)

Satellite Imagery Of An Oil Tanker Ablaze In The Strait Of Hormuz

STRAIT OF HORMUZ - 18 MARCH 2026 : Satellite view of an oil tanker ablaze in the Strait of Hormuz north of Oman. The blaze, triggered by a projectile strike amid the Iran conflict, sends a thick plume across the Gulf’s vital shipping energy corridor. Imaged 18 March 2026. (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2026)

Iran Calls Israeli Strikes ‘Declaration Of War’ As Region Braces For Escalation

TEHRAN, IRAN - JUNE 15: Fire and smoke rise into the sky after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot on June 15, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Stringer/Getty Images)

Iran Holds Presidential Election

TEHRAN, IRAN - JUNE 28: Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addresses the media after casting of his ballot in the presidential runoff elections in Tehran on June 28, 2024. Iran’s Guardian Council had approved six candidates for the June 28 election to replace president Ebrahim Raisi, who died last month in a helicopter crash. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

President Trump, With Secretaries Of Navy And War, Makes An Announcement From His Mar-a-Lago Resort In Florida

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - DECEMBER 22: U.S. President Donald Trump takes questions as he announced the creation of the “Trump-class” battleship during a statement to the media at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on December 22, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

U.S. And Israel Wage War Against Iran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 8: Cars drive down a highway as smoke billows after overnight airstrikes on oil depots on March 8, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

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People, mostly Iranians who crossed from Iran at the Kapikoy border crossing, pull luggage in Turkey’s eastern Van province on Friday, March 6, 2026, as the Iran-US-Israel conflict drove a rise in cross-border travel and displacement. (Photo by Murat Kocabas / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - Displaced Palestinians walk towards Gaza City as they cross the Netzarim corridor from the southern Gaza Strip on January 27, 2025. An unending stream of people marched up the coast of Gaza on January 27, carrying their belongings in plastic bags and repurposed flour sacks through the central city of Nuseirat after Israel reopened access to the territory’s north. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images)

INYT/Energy Intelligence Oil & Money Conference - Day 1

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 29: Alastair Crooke from Conflicts Forum, appears on stage on Day 1 at the International New York Times/Energy Intelligence Oil & Money Conference at The InterContinental Hotel on October 29, 2014 in London, England. (Photo by Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for The New York Times)

Satellite Imagery Of The Strait Of Hormuz

STRAIT OF HORMUZ - 2 OCTOBER 2024: Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global energy supply, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. This vital maritime route facilitates the transportation of goods, including oil and natural gas, between the Middle East and the rest of the world. (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025)

Iran launches missile strike on U.S. Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain

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Engineers of United Microelectronics Corp (UMC) push trollies with front opening universal pod (FOUP), containing 25-piece wafers inside, at the 12-inch UMC wafer factory in Tainan Science Park, southern Taiwan, 28 April 2006. AFP PHOTO/Sam YEH (Photo by Sam YEH / AFP) (Photo by SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)

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Guests look at a model of the largest data center in the UAE under construction in Abu Dhabi as the Stargate initiative, a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI, during the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC) in Abu Dhabi on November 3, 2025. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP via Getty Images)

British forces leave Port Said during the Suez Crisis, December 1956

Suez Crisis 1956 - The last troops to leave Port Said at Dusk were the 1st Battalion The Royal Scots led by their piper. 27th December 1956. (Photo by Manchester Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

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Iranian military personnel place a national flag on a submarine during the “Velayat-90” navy exercises in the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran on January 3, 2012, the End day of ten-day war games. (Photo by Ebrahim NOUROZI / JAMEJAM ONLINE / AFP via Getty Images)

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A picture taken on March 12, 2017, shows an oil facility in the Khark Island, on the shore of the Gulf. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)

ISRAEL-POLITICS-CABINET

Prime minister’s spokesman Boaz Stambler (R) whispers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, on November 6, 2016. / AFP / POOL / ABIR SULTAN (Photo credit should read ABIR SULTAN/AFP via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands as they arrive to speak to journalists during a joint press conference at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 29, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump Meets With Israeli PM Netanyahu At His Palm Beach Estate

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - DECEMBER 29: U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his Mar-a-Lago club on December 29, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. The two leaders are scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting to discuss regional security in the Middle East as well as the U.S.-Israel partnership. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Demonstration for Iranian students killed in US-Israeli attacks

TEHRAN, IRAN - APRIL 07: People attend a demonstration for students killed in US-Israeli attacks on Iran, in Tehran, Iran on April 07, 2026. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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Israel’s newly appointed armed forces chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir (C), visits the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem on March 5, 2025. Zamir said during his inauguration on March 5 that Israel’s mission to defeat Palestinian militant group Hamas was “not accomplished”. (Photo by Menahem Kahana / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)

ISRAEL GAZA WAR

BE’ERI, ISRAEL -- OCTOBER 14, 2023: Israeli Merkava battle tank units regroup near the border of Gaza, in the southern part of Israel, Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023. Israel was caught by surprise after Hamas launched an unprecedented assault on communities near Gaza which led to the deadliest bout of violence to hit Israel in 50 years that has taken more than a thousand lives on both sides. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

Israel Intensifies Attacks Across Lebanon Despite US-Iran Ceasefire Deal

SIDON, LEBANON - APRIL 10: A man works to clear rubble at the Al-Zahraa mosque that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on April 08, killing six people including Shiek Sadek al-Nabulsi on April 10, 2026 in Sidon, Lebanon. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

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Palestinian Hamas militants arrive to secure the area as Egyptian workers accompanied by members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), search for the last two remaining bodies of hostages -an Israeli soldier and a Thai national- from under the rubble of the Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern of Gaza Strip on December 1, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the district court in Tel Aviv for his hearing on corruption charges on December 10, 2024. Netanyahu, the first sitting prime minister of Israel to face a criminal trial, testified for the first time when his corruption case resumed on December 10 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases. (Photo by Menahem Kahana / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Concrete Batch Plant and Tunnel Adits Near Natanz - September 16, 2025

NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY AND UNDERGROUND COMPLEX NEAR PICKAXE MOUNTAIN -- SEPTEMBER 16, 2025: 02 -- Vantor satellite image shows concrete batch plant and central adits to underground tunnel complex near Natanz nuclear facility. Please use: Satellite image (c) 2026 Vantor.

Natanz Facility And Pickaxe Mountain - November 14, 2025

NATANZ FACILITY, ISFAHAN PROVINCE, IRAN -- NOVEMBER 14, 2025: 08 -- Vantor satellite image shows an overview of Natanz nuclear site and adjacent Pickaxe Mountain mining area in Isfahan Province. Please use: Satellite image (c) 2025 Vantor.

IRAN-RUSSIA-NUCLEAR-BUSHEHR

Iranian technicians walk outside the building housing the reactor of Bushehr nuclear power plant at the Iranian port town of Bushehr, 1200 Kms south of Tehran, on February 25, 2009. Iran’s first nuclear power plant, which was undergoing tests on February 25 after construction was completed by Russia, has been delayed for more than three decades. AFP PHOTO/BEHROUZ MEHRI (Photo by BEHROUZ MEHRI / AFP) (Photo by BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP via Getty Images)

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published January 19, 2026.

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Full Text

NEW YORK: “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” like all great pieces of art, takes a straightforward story — the battle to save the life of a 6-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car in Gaza surrounded by murdered family members — and elevates it to an archetype. This story is as old as time. It lies at the heart of all religious and moral literature. It pits the cruelty and heartlessness of power against the empathy and compassion of the powerless. It asks us what kind of a life we want to live. Is it a life defined by hubris, domination and violence? Or is it a life defined by compassion, justice and self-sacrifice? These are moral, not political questions.

To nurture, preserve and protect the lives of those demonized in war is to be branded a traitor — a subversive, the enemy. It is to risk death. War, and especially genocide, is the quintessential expression of what Sigmund Freud called Thanatos, the death instinct that drives humans towards the destructions of others and themselves. Those who fight for Eros, for life, are eliminated. This schism is at the core of the film. It is the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. And, as so often happens in war, Thanatos prevails. This almost certain defeat gives unquestioned nobility to those who defy the forces of death.

Israel and its supporters do not want the outside world to see the bureaucratic machinery that perpetuates its mass slaughter, but I suspect, even more, it does not want the world to see the humanity of the Palestinians who resist.

It was hard to find a screening. I traveled for over an hour to see it at the Film Forum in New York City, which had just one showing at 4:45 in the afternoon. I understood why. Despite critical acclaim, an Oscar-nominated director and industry heavyweights like Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix behind it, the film — directed by Tunisian filmmaker, Kaouther Ben Hania — faced major difficulties in getting an American distributor — reportedly out of “fear” and disagreement “with the film’s politics,” according to a report by Deadline.

It is not only devastating, not only a cinematic masterpiece, but it rips back all the layers of rhetoric and propaganda to expose the fundamental struggle between the Israeli occupier and the occupied. The struggle is, yes, a conflict about the theft of Palestinian land. It is, as well, a conflict about a violent and lethal occupation, one that has become full-blown genocide in Gaza. But it is also the ancient struggle between the forces of life and death.

Anyone who follows Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza knows the story of Hind Rajab. On Jan. 29, 2024, the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza. Six members of the Hamadeh family, along with their 6-year-old niece, Hind, crammed themselves into a black Kia and attempted to flee. They did not get far. An Israeli tank fired on the car, killing everyone except Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan. Layan was able to contact the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) on her dead father’s phone.

“They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me,” Layan tells the PRCS dispatcher, Omar Alqam, an emergency medical worker based in Ramallah.

“Are you hiding?” asks Omar, played by Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees.

“Yes, in the car, we’re in the car, the tank is right next to us,” Layan says.

“You are inside the car?” Omar asks.

There is the sound of gunfire — 62 shots in six seconds — as Layan screams.

The line goes dead.

“Hello? Hello?” Omar says.

There is no answer.

The PRCS immediately calls back.

Hind picks up the phone. She tells Omar that Layan has been shot and everyone in the car is asleep. Hind is trapped in the vehicle surrounded by her dead relatives, who are covered in blood.

It is raining.

For the next three hours, frantic emergency workers seek permission from Israeli authorities to approve a route for an ambulance — which is eight minutes away — to rescue the girl. The film focuses on the frustrations, desperation and hopes of the rescue workers who try to move a boulder up the Sisyphean hill of Israeli occupation.

Rather than recreating the horror of a small, terrified girl trapped in a car with the blood-soaked bodies of her dead relatives, the film uses the recording of Hind’s voice — shown on the screen as a spectrogram — to tell the story.

The focus is on the Red Crescent workers who try to reassure and comfort Hind. They plead desperately with the Red Cross and later the Palestinian Ministry of Health, who act as intermediaries with a unit from the Israeli Defense Ministry known as Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), for a safe passage for the ambulance into an area designated a restricted zone. The phone line with Hind repeatedly cuts. Red Crescent workers are frantic, fearing the worst.

The frustration and trauma of the powerless rescue workers, living under the humiliating and oppressive boot of Israeli occupation, is overwhelming.

The emergency workers release audio from the calls and photographs of Hind on social media, with English subtitles, in hopes of eliciting international outrage. But, as is true for the genocide, Western governments are indifferent to the slaughter of Palestinians, including Palestinian children.

While Hind is on the line, we hear bursts of gunfire.

Rana al-Faqih, another dispatcher — played by Palestinian-Canadian actor Saja Kilani — assures Hind she will be rescued. She helps her recite verses from the Quran in an attempt to comfort the girl.

“I’m so scared,” Hind says. “Please come, come take me.”

The car where Hind is sheltering is near Fares petrol station. The sun sets. Gaza City is shrouded in darkness.

“I’m scared of the dark,” Hind tells Rana.

“Is there gunfire around you?” Rana asks.

“Yes,” Hind says. “Come get me, please.”

After three hours, the IDF gives paramedics permission to rescue Hind, with a map of a route the ambulance must take.

“Hind!” Omar announces on the phone. “In one minute, the car will reach you. It’s just moving slowly.”

The ambulance’s paramedics, Ahmed al-Madhoun and Yusuf Zeino, approach the area. They get within 162 feet of the vehicle.

“Can you see the car?” a dispatcher asks.

“I can’t see a thing here,” one paramedic responds.

“Do you have your siren and flashing lights on?” the dispatcher asks.

“Just the lights, not the siren…oh there it is — ”

There is the sudden sound of gunfire and explosions.

The paramedics can no longer be reached.

Omar asks Hind if she heard an explosion. She responds that she has.

“I’m so scared, please come,” Hind repeatedly pleads.

There is a long period of silence.

“Why aren’t you speaking?” Rana asks Hind.

“I’m not speaking because my mouth is bleeding,” Hind says.

“Wipe it with your hand and then tell me if you’re still bleeding,” Rana says.

“I don’t want to get my shirt dirty, so I don’t trouble my mom,” Hind replies.

“It’s okay, wipe your mouth and I’ll wash it, my sweetheart,” Rana tells her.

“Okay,” Hind says.

Her voice fades away for the final time.

Wissam, Hind’s mother, waits anxiously at the hospital. She desperately searches every incoming ambulance for her daughter.

The Israelis seal off Tel al-Hawa. Palestinians are unable to reach the car until 12 days later. When they finally enter the area, they find the burned-out shell of the ambulance that was sent to rescue Hind.

By that time, Israel has destroyed 80 ambulances, usually killing their crews.

Further up the street from the ambulance, they find Hind’s decomposed body in the back of the car with her relatives.

There are 335 bullet holes in the car and the windows are blown out.

What were Hind’s final thoughts? Did she see the flashing lights of the ambulance? Did she believe she would be rescued? Did she watch the tank shells rip apart the ambulance and see the paramedics die? Did she see the Israeli machine guns before they opened fire on her? Did she cry out in pain? Did she linger, bloodied and wounded, like her cousin Layan? Did she realize she would not be saved? Did she utter any final words, alone, in the darkness and horror?

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” reminds us that indifference is complicity. It mocks the rhetoric used to dehumanize Palestinians. It unmasks the petty and deadly tyranny of military occupation. It illustrates the powerlessness, indignity and savage violence of occupation. It exposes the fundamental nature of war and genocide. It is a testament to what is good and what is evil.

It asks us to make a choice.

Photos

Israel Continues Gaza City Offensive As UN Confirms Famine

GAZA BORDER, ISRAEL - AUGUST 22: IDF soldiers prepare tanks on August 22, 2025 in Gaza border, Israel. Today, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared Phase 5 food insecurity — its highest and most severe level — in parts of Gaza including Gaza City. Earlier this week, Israel launched a new ground offensive in an effort to capture and occupy all of Gaza City. (Photo by Elke Scholiers/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-GAZA-DAILY LIFE

TOPSHOT - A Palestinian boy plays with a donkey in the sea at sunset in Gaza City on July 3, 2017. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)

West Bank Barrier

Palestinian youth play football next to a section of Israel’s separation barrier, in the west bank village of Abu Dis, in the outskirts of Jerusalem Monday June 12, 2006. From June 9 to July 9, the 32-nation World Cup tournament will be held in 12 German cities. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Film Forum

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PEOPLE’s Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Gala

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 19: Joaquin Phoenix (L) and Brad Pitt attend PEOPLE’s Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Gala at The Shrine Auditorium on January 19, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for PEOPLE)

2025 Winners Photocall - The 82nd Venice International Film Festival

VENICE, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Kaouther Ben Hania poses with the Grand Jury Prize for “The Voice of Hind Rajab” during the winners photocall at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on September 06, 2025 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

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GAZA CITY, PALESTINE - APRIL 08: Palestinians, including children, wait in line in front of a bakery to buy bread in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Palestine on April 08, 2026. Palestinians are forced to wait in long queues every day to buy bread due to severe shortages of fuel, gas, and flour caused by imposed restrictions, as well as limitations on the entry of humanitarian aid. (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Canadian soldiers practice night-time sh

Kandahar, AFGHANISTAN: Canadian soldiers practice night-time shooting with Night Vision Goggles at Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team base in Kandahar, 26 April 2006. AFP PHOTO / JOHN D MCHUGH (Photo credit should read JOHN D MCHUGH/AFP via Getty Images)

98th Oscars - Arrivals

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 15: Saja Kilani attends the 98th Oscars at Dolby Theatre on March 15, 2026 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Cold weather conditions negatively affect Palestinians in Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - FEBRUARY 13: A general view of heavily damaged and partially collapsed buildings as Palestinians, who continue to life among the collapsed buildings after the ceasefire, try to warm themselves by the fires they lit and protect themselves from the cold in Sheikh Ridvan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on February 13, 2025. The cold weather and harsh conditions in the region negatively affect the Palestinian residents of the area. (Photo by Anas Zeyad Fteha/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - An ambulance drives down a road in the Al-Saftawi neighborhood, west of Jabalia city in the northern Gaza Strip on December 10, 2025. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB / AFP via Getty Images)

6-year-old Gazan child found dead after days of uncertainty

GAZA CITY, GAZA - FEBRUARY 10: Palestinians look at the damaged car in which 6-year-old Hind Rajab and five members of her family died, whom Israeli forces targeted 12 days ago in Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on February 10, 2024. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Daily struggle of Gazans with power outages

GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 13: Palestinians struggle with power outages due to Israeli attacks that destroyed the infrastructure in Gaza City, Gaza on October 13, 2024. (Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

It is highly unlikely, unfortunately, that the ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan will endure. This is due to two principal impediments.

First, Israel is adamantly opposed to a cessation of the bombing of Iran’s infrastructure. This bombing campaign is part of the Israeli effort to turn Iran into a failed state. Israel has the ability to sabotage the agreement. Indeed, Israel is already doing so by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon.

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Secondly, the minimal demands being made by Iran remain unacceptable to the U.S. and Israel. The demands will only be achieved by creating more pressure, which Iran can generate by continuing to block oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and targeting vital infrastructure in the region.

Iran is demanding a permanent and formalized end to hostilities, control of the Strait of Hormuz, an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, a withdrawal of U.S. military bases in the region, reparations for war damage, the right to carry out nuclear enrichment and the lifting of all sanctions on Iran.

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I don’t see Iran backing down on these demands, especially as it has the ability to force the U.S. through prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz to concede. This means more war and a strangulation of the global economy.

This is Iran’s war to win. And the Iranian regime knows it.