Trump’s reckless war on Iran is threatening global economic collapse.

As the region breaks out into a matrix of conflagrations, Trump seemingly has no way out.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran have inflamed West Asia to the point that it has turned “into a matrix of smaller wars taking place across the region, all of which are interconnected, but all of which have quite separate agendas,” describes Alastair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, a former diplomat who served in the Middle East and who authored, “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution”. In this episode of the Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Crooke explore the wide-reaching geopolitical and economic ramifications of the war on Iran and what options remain for the Trump administration, which has been forced multiple times to walk back its threats of escalation.

The war on Iran has depleted a significant percentage of US munitions, costing tens of billions of dollars so far, and has lowered the US’ strategic petroleum reserves to its lowest level in over forty years. The closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait have blocked oil exports from Saudi Arabia completely, as well as other products that were previously traded through these major transit routes. This has rocked the global economy, sending Japan into a debt crisis.

As countries scramble to adjust to these new realities, there is no end in sight to the crisis. The Trump administration is running out of options. Crooke describes the fall of US military hegemony in the region and how this has changed the mood in Iran, saying, “It’s triggered something much more profound, a memory of Iran as a major civilizational power, as something that has been a dominant influence in the region for thousands of years.” He states that Iran is prepared for and expects a long war as negotiations with the United States are not a reliable route to peace.

Hedges and Crooke discuss the numerous and growing wars in the region from the state of Israel, where leaders are pushing to force Palestinians out of the West Bank ahead of the October election, to the increasingly fragile situation in Iraq, to the hot war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. No country in the region is untouched as even Egypt and Jordan are positioning troops along their borders. The fate of millions of people in West Asia is at stake as Washington scrambles to protect dollar hegemony and risks what Crooke refers to as a “slow tactical nuclear weapons strike,” the destruction of infrastructure that provides the energy and water necessary to sustain their lives.

Transcript:

Chris Hedges:

Donald Trump has canceled a planned large-scale military attack on Iran. This cancellation follows reports that the U.S. has expended large quantities of critical munitions since the war began on February 28th. These depletions include tomahawk long-range missiles that are fired from sea at ground targets. Of the estimated 3,000 tomahawks in the U.S. arsenal, 1,000 have apparently been used. Some 1,100 Jassam air-launched long-range missiles out of about 4,000 have also been used in the war. Some 40 to 70 PRSM ground-launched long-range missiles, of which the U.S. only had 90 in its stockpile, have been fired on Iran, virtually exhausting the entire inventory. The ship-launched ballistic SM-3 missile, which costs $28 million, numbered around 410 before the war. The U.S. may have used as many as 250.

The SM six, also ship-launched, is used to intercept aircraft and cruise missiles. Somewhere between 190 and 370 have been used from a stockpile of 1,160. Of the some 360 THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems, as many as 290 have been fired on Iran. And finally, of the estimated 2,300 Patriot missiles, between 1,060 and 1,430 have been expended.

The depletion of vital weapons systems is not the only problem facing the Trump administration, but also the depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Oil Reserve. Bank of America Global Research shows that the level of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1983, leaving the country with 43 days of crude oil supply. Add to these depletions the inability of the U.S. to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, and you have a war that by any measure the U.S. can no longer afford to prosecute.

Iran’s FARS News Agency is reporting that an Iranian parliamentary committee is reviewing a preliminary bill that would bar US, Israeli, and other ‘hostile vessels’ from transiting the Strait. Iran and Oman, which now jointly control the Strait, said they had formalized shipping routes through the waterway, whose closure has triggered, of course, the global energy crisis.

Trump’s sunny assessment of the war is not new, nor is the walking back of apocalyptic threats to obliterate Iran. For example, on April 7th, he threatened that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again if Iran did not immediately open the Strait,” and then two hours later, before his imposed deadline, he backed down, instead announcing a two-week ceasefire. This pattern of threats and retreats has eroded Trump’s credibility. It has distanced an already skeptical Iran from any proposed negotiations. Iran assumes correctly it cannot trust anything the President says. And it also knows that the U.S. cannot afford to prolong the conflict without suffering tremendous military and economic costs.

Joining me to discuss the state of the current war, is Alastair 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. So, Alastair, let’s begin with where we are at this moment. As I mentioned in the introduction, Trump had threatened a massive bombing campaign. Once again, he retreated. You have this agreement between Oman and Iran. Just set the stage for us, if you can.

Alastair Crooke

Certainly. I thought, though, one of the things was quite striking, you read off this list of missiles and weapons that have been depleted during the course of the war and what is quite remarkable is how little that has achieved. It has not degraded Iran’s missile capability to any great extent. It has not brought a change in posture by Iran. It has failed utterly to change the war. And it really, I think, represents the end of a way of fighting. Over the period we’ve seen since the Second World War, the West has completely moved over to the idea of control of airspace, control of ability to carpet bomb its enemies, and believed it had complete freedom to go where it wanted, when it wanted, how it wished. And that’s come to an end.  And what has brought it to an end is basically cheap electronic components that have allowed states to produce missiles. And so, Iran has actually found the answer to this. You bury your missiles. You bury the production systems. You bury the leadership. It was called a “mosaic system”, but it’s been very effective. And I think you’re reading off of that list underlines just how much it is, both Israel and the United States say that Iran has the same capacity in terms of the missiles. They don’t have an air force, but they have missile air dominance at this stage over the Gulf. And in contrast to the air dominance that the United States has not been able to fully achieve.

You ask where we are. Where we are is these talks. They’re really, just to be absolutely clear, they’re just talks, technical talks. Still at the moment, they are the technical teams discussing the Straits between Oman. America is not involved in it, although undoubtedly certain mediators will be sort of on the phone all the time to the Omanis. But my understanding is basically this. There’s no intention on the part of Iran to open Hormuz in the sense of opening it to all traffic at zero cost. There’s no intention to do that. It may be opened very cautiously, for example, to Chinese vessels and tankers, but it’s not going to be opened in the sense of as it used to be.

Secondly, the Iranians are going to charge fees. Seven percent is mooted, and they are also going to charge 20 percent fines for any vessels that do not stick to the rules set by the new administration for the Hormuz Straits. I think what we’re going to see is, and the discussions are about, the question of whether there are two corridors or one corridor, an outward corridor and an inward corridor. At the moment, there is, if you like, just one corridor because the Iranians have shut the corridor that goes along the coast of the Omani shoreline and exits that way by mining it. So, that one is effectively closed. In fact, I think just this morning, an Abu Dhabi tanker tried to use that exit and was attacked with missiles and damaged and has turned back. So, that is still not operating. The northern route is under IRGC control, I think some vessels are passing to China, but the amount of passages is very few. And so, I think that what Trump will be faced with is the proposal that Iran controls Hormuz, that it will control passage in and out, although passage may be administered by the Omanis under IRGC ultimate control. In other words, all the details of vessels will have to be passed to the IRGC before they are allowed to enter this route. And the process is still going to be completely administered, and it is going to be closed. This is not part of the negotiating team’s remit. The Majlis in Tehran seems to be saying that they are going to produce a law that would forbid in any future time after the war is over that shipping either from the United States or Israel will not be allowed passage through Hormuz.

My understanding is none of this is going to come into operation, according to the Iranians, until after an agreement, after the war is ended, after it’s been established that there really is a ceasefire, that the US blockade is lifted, after sanctions have been lifted on petroleum and oil products from Iran for export. Only at that point will these new regulations fully come into being. But this still hasn’t been, as my understanding, put to the Supreme Leader and passed by the committee that supervises the security. They’re still discussing it at the technical level. And so, it may be a little while until the talks are finished. But I think it will face Mr. Trump with the very obvious dilemma, I mean, either he accepts that this is a loss. Maybe he can accept it. We had Mr. President in just recent hours saying, “Well, Hormuz, it’s actually irrelevant. I mean, in a couple of years, we won’t need Hormuz anyway.” He didn’t mention the Red Sea, and he didn’t mention Bab-el-Mandeb, but he just said Hormuz might be irrelevant.

Is this the beginning of preparation for an exit? It’s too early to say. Who knows? But the question is, is Trump able, after his entire career, after his coaching by Roy Cohn, “Never be a loser, you always must be a winner,” and is he able to stand this or will he try another military action even though, as you rightly pointed out, that it seems there is really not much point to another military escalation because it won’t change anything in terms, it won’t change the posture of Iran, of its determination to control Hormuz and they are not about to open it. And even to start negotiations, they would require from the United States that they make commitments upfront, in advance and only then would negotiations be even possible.

But overall, as you said in the introduction, quite rightly, that Iran just doesn’t believe it’s possible to arrive at a complete settlement with Mr. Trump, with the administration. It is dismissive of the MOU. It sees that the United States is just using this pattern of threats and then talk of a deal. It’s all about the markets. It’s all about manipulation of the oil price. And the Iranians are laughing at this now. Now they’re setting out pieces of paper which show how many futures were sold just before Monday and the whole manipulation is being detailed by the Iranians. And so for them, the MOU has become much less important because they see that it’s really not intended to be a document from which negotiations could develop, could issue forth because really it is all about manipulating markets because Trump’s main concern really now is markets and the oil price and inflation and above all, the bond market.

Chris Hedges:

Well, you have all these accusations of insider trading within the Trump administration. It is possible, I suppose, that like the late Roman Empire, the emperors in the late Roman Empire would go up to Gaul and the Germanic tribes would beat back the Roman legions and then the emperors would just stage a triumphal march through the city of Rome even though they’d been shellacked. That is very much in Trump’s vein. So, reality and loss and defeat may be facts, but they’re not necessarily facts that Trump will acknowledge.

I want to talk a little bit about the agreement because the original agreement was supposed to be carried out in phases. I think it’s pretty clear that Iran will not sign something like that again. This was an unprovoked war. It was a criminal war of aggression under international law and verified by the head of the UN and others. And Iran wants reparations. It wants its frozen assets, about $100 billion released, and that’s the one side, and then of course it wants a guarantee that it will not be attacked again. And on the other side, Trump is facing the midterms, his poll numbers are very low and I think it’s clear the White House desperately wants, even if it’s an interim agreement, some kind of an agreement that they can limp through with for the next few months, certainly until November. And I wondered if you can address those two competing concerns.

Alastair Crooke:

Yes, and I think, what you described is almost a phase of the war that is now behind us in the sense that that MOU is now widely regarded, there’s a small faction that doesn’t see it in this way, but overall, the leadership regards the MOU as a deceit. It was a deceit that was deliberately done because the purpose of it was simply to get Hormuz open as quickly as possible and so it was signed up without any real serious intent of taking it to any sort of conclusion. So, I mean, there is no real sense that this is the building block towards an agreement that will be respected by Trump. It was in their view a deceit and therefore we are in a different phase.

I think that phase is to increase the pressure on Trump by, first of all in the markets, in terms of the Red Sea is now closed. The Houthis again have been attacking Saudi tankers that are trying to enter and go to the Yanbu Port in the Red Sea to load oil and stopping that. So, there’s very little traffic. It’s open to other traffic but not to Saudi tankers. So, the Saudis, I think, this is the first time that they’ve exported no oil at all during this period. Zero oil.

Chris Hedges:

And just to interrupt to interrupt, Alastair, I believe the Saudis were exporting about six million barrels a day through the Red Sea. Is that correct?

Alastair Crooke:

That’s it. And it’s now down to zero. Overall, it’s now down to zero. And the UAE has not been exporting oil during this period either. And so, the main element is that Iran sees it as leverage because you mentioned, if you like, the effects on the oil markets. But actually, what is so important is really the type of oil that is lacking. That is crucial to their thinking in the equation because what Iran and the Hormuz Strait was supplying were basically the middle distillates of oil, not light oil. America has light oil from the fracking fields and Permian and so on and Venezuela has the ultimately heaviest oil, almost like tar, sitting on the other side but the middle distillates are the ones that provide diesel and kerosene for aircraft and those are in drastically short supply. The asking price in refineries to get a barrel today of middle distillates is much higher than in the future. The markets are in backwardation. The crisis is in diesel and in kerosene. And that’s one of the reasons I’m not sure we’d see a major attack on Iran because aircraft, if you’re going to do a major air operation, it takes a lot of aviation fuel to mount that sort of operation. F-15s, F-35s consume it by the gallon, and have to be refueled after 250 miles or so.

So, I think one part of this is going to be the leverage. The second part that we’re going to see, and change, is also the idea of being shifting, and this is what we’re seeing in this phase. Iran has moved to a more proactive stance. They’re not simply going to wait till the United States attacks and then consider or have already lined up the targets that it’s going to attack in retribution. They are keeping up a quiet level of proactive attacks on the United States, on Gulf states.  And, at the moment, Israel is not involved, but they are keeping up a level of military proactive force. In other words, extending the war, making it extremely difficult for Trump to say he’s won the war, to put pressure on him and at the same time, not to go so far that it explodes the whole situation into a big war but to continue to attack vessels. As I say, Abu Dhabi tanker, Adnok, the state oil company, was attacked just in the recent hours. While these talks are going on in Oman, they haven’t stopped and it’s not in response to an American attack. So, proactive attacks and the sense increasingly is that Trump is under pressure and they think that Iran feels it has the cards, as Trump calls it, that they are in a better position and that they see that if they are going into a long war with the United States, then they have the capacity and control over Hormuz is crucial because they can finance a long war if they have the fees and the passage charges for Hormuz. It’s estimated at about 100 billion a year. You can finance a war in that way. So, the thinking is changing a little bit towards putting more pressure on Trump and not looking to an agreement.

My understanding is we’ve gone back to the sense that Iran has had for some time is that this will not be settled in some sort of deal, that, ultimately, they’ve thought for long time that a war with the United States was inevitable, that that was the only way out of the predicament in which Iran has been trapped for the last 47 years, and that this war was inevitable. It was going to come. And I think that if it comes, they feel they are ready for it and in a much better position than Mr. Trump in Washington. As the pressures on the oil markets bite and also as the military realities of Washington become obvious, the inability to fire standoff weapons, the inability to really do damage to the missile cities. So, what is he going to attack? Pickaxe Mountain? It’s a granite mountain with whatever facilities it has buried a thousand meters under granite. I mean, all that would happen is he’d bounce bombs off it. It wouldn’t hit it. One of their missile cities has now been hit 45 times by American bombing during that process and still half an hour afterwards, it was firing missiles from that same site.

So, I think we’re in a different sort of atmospherics, different phase to increase the pressure on the United States because the appetite for a quick deal is not there and that is very clearly reflected on the ground in Iran. We saw this during the funeral process and others. The Iranian mood has become quite changed. It’s triggered something much more profound, sort of triggered a memory of Iran as a major civilizational power, as something that has been a dominant influence in the region for thousands of years, and is being treated with no respect and discourtesy and called scum. And this has produced a very tough mentality, I think, amongst the young. So, what you saw was not people on the streets saying, “Come on, let’s have a deal. We want to get back to a deal.” I mean, the call is, “We want revenge.” That’s what the young are shouting for. That’s what we saw in those huge gatherings that took place at the funerals, both there and in Iraq. And in Iraq, too, three cities, each one producing four to five million people on the streets to mark the funeral of the late Supreme Leader.

Chris Hedges:

I want to ask about the effects of this war within the region, but before I do, I wondered if you could address the potential consequences of a prolonged closure of both the Bab-el-Mandeb and the Strait on not just necessarily the oil markets, but on the global economy.

Alastair Crooke:

It’s difficult to give you a straight quantitative answer to that because so much is unknown. We are in the middle, or at least the United States is trying to deal with a major crisis in Japan of the Japanese Yen falling precipitously and America trying to bail out, Bessent trying to bail out Japan from its collapsing currency and having to resort to sell off euros in order to buy yen to try and support it. Why is Japan important? Well, because it has $1.2 trillion of U.S. Treasuries, but also because of its strange situation. For decades, it’s had such low interest rates that it has been a boon, of course, to Wall Street because they could borrow cheaply in Japan and lend expensively in the US and it was effortless profits that were made in this way. And suddenly interest rates are rising and they are going up. And much of Japanese economy, about 14%, are really zombie economies, by which I mean they don’t make enough profits to cover their debts. I mean, in other parts of the world you might say they’re bankrupt, but they’re calling them ‘Zombie companies’. That’s 14 % of the economy trying to keep this up without showing any signs of further weakening of the dollar. And so, we’re now doing complicated exercises of saying that we’re going to borrow the Japanese’s treasuries against ultimate repayment in due course, but we’re going to let you have the money for these things now so that you can buy more yen and try and prop it up. But in short what I’m saying is the bond market is in a state of crisis and therefore the markets are in a state of crisis.

I think in some ways Netanyahu let the cat out of the bag when he came back from Washington. Yes, he said, “Look, this was the best meeting ever. Everything was wonderful.” Netanyahu’s fighting an election campaign. That’s what that’s all about. But then he said, “Mr. Trump is trying to prevent an economic collapse.” That’s what it was. And I think he hit the nail on the head that the focus very much is now on preserving the economy, on preserving the dollar hegemony, on preserving the petrodollar, on preserving that whole structure of credit, provision of credit and finance, which underwrites the US military presence around the world, which finances wars and finances the weapons that fight the wars. And keeping that going is probably the highest priority. And Iran is threatening that very process. The petrodollar is threatening the hegemony, it’s threatening that whole Gulf construct, which is actually a sort of an element of that Wall Street financialized world plunked down in the Gulf States right next to Iran and is exactly the sort of threat that the Iranians would like to see gone. The financial threat, the financial structures there, the new economy for the Gulf states is data centers. They want the data centers and of course Iran knows why, cheap energy and also it will be able to monitor everything in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and America. They don’t want that and that’s why they destroyed the big data center, the Amazon data center, just recently.

Chris Hedges:

So, let’s talk about the region. This has shaken the foundations of US military hegemony, obviously, throughout the Gulf state. The Gulf allies were not consulted about the launching of this war, yet they’ve paid a terrific price in no small part because of the precision strikes that Iran has been able to carry out, presumably with the help of Russian and Chinese satellites and intelligence. Before going on the air, you described the region as fragile. Talk a little bit about the effects within the Gulf states.

Alastair Crooke:

OK, well, but first I would say that the key element of uncertainty is the recurrence of war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. This is now a hot war. In the last hours, in the last day, the Houthis have fired missiles in Mandeb and Hadhramaut province in Yemen, at the forces and the mercenaries assembled there to attack the Houthis by the southern government. And there are images, we can see that the mercenaries just fled. They’ve been completely destroyed by the Houthi missiles.

Chris Hedges:

Alastair, let me just interrupt. These mercenaries are both armed and funded by Saudi Arabia, is that correct?

Alastair Crooke:

Yes, they are proxy forces on behalf of Saudi Arabia were proxy forces on behalf of Oman, but now proxy forces on behalf of Saudi Arabia. And so, they’ve been sent running by the Houthis. It is believed that the Houthis destroyed the big Aramco refinery that lies just adjacent to the Saudi’s Red Sea port, Yanbu. This big refinery was not just any refinery. We’re used to hearing about refineries hit in Russia and so on and are repaired quickly. This was the BN, be-all and end-all of refineries, all dancing, all singing. This was the latest refinery in the world and it’s been destroyed and that was the terminal of the pipeline coming from the East to the West to the Red Sea and at the same time the Aramco facilities, the pumping element, on the East side, the Hormuz side, if you like, was destroyed too. So, the pipeline was completely destroyed that transports Saudi oil from their main fields to the Red Sea. And the Saudis said not that it was the Houthis that did it, but they said it was the Iraqi resistance, the Hashd al-Jahan, that were responsible for this. The Hashd al-Shaabi denied it completely and said, “No, it wasn’t us that did this.” And it is likely that it wasn’t because it’s the Arba’in in Iraq. This is a celebration. This is a solemn, if you like, period of 40 days that marks the anniversary of death of Imam Hussein in Karbala. And it’s a religious period, not one of conflict and war. But the Saudis and America attacked them, the Iraqi resistance, killing many and killing some Iranian forces of the IRGC. And then Iraq has begun an attempt to try and purge some of the resistance under the name of saying it’s an anti-corruption group. But there are signs that the resistance has been moving up onto the borders of Saudi Arabia, moving closer towards that, and the Iraqi government is trying to stop that and to try and contain that and threatening the groups.

You will know, and I, just for listeners to understand Iraq, approximately there are, we have no exact numbers, but is roughly 60 % Shia. 40 % of the others are split between Sunnis and Kurds. So, the Sunnis are quite a small proportion, and the Shi’i are the largest proportion. The Hashd are always referred to in Western media saying, “Oh, but these are just Iranian proxies.” And so, as if putting pressure on them would put pressure on Iran in the Hormuz dispute. They’re not that. I mean, I know them. I’ve met the Hashd. Put straightforwardly, these Iraqi nationalists. They are strongly Iraqi nationalists. Yes, they are Shi’i. And yes, Iran is the sort of mothership of Shi’ism, but these are Iraqi nationalists and they’ve been tagged. And they also, for the majority of them, accepted and followed the Supreme Leader who was assassinated on the 29th of February as their source of emulation, their Marja. And so, they are deeply angry about his death. He was their religious leader too, not Iran’s. And so, they’ve said there will be retribution. They’ve given the Iraqi government a little leeway, but from what I see is that there are, if you like, movements on both sides of the border and maybe it will be contained, but it is a very fragile state. Some Iraqi security people have said actually it wasn’t the Hashd, the Iraqi resistance, that attacked the Saudi oil facilities, it was Ukrainian groups that were doing it. I don’t think we have to attach too much importance to that, but it comes at a time at which an Iranian ship was struck and struck by Ukrainian missiles in the Caspian Sea. So, that is very much heating up between Saudi Arabia and Iraq and the United States and Iraq. The Hashd are clearly mobilizing but have not yet taken the decision.

At the same time in Iraq, the Iranians have moved into Erbil. That is the Kurdish part of Iraq, Kurdistan if you like, and attacked the Kurdish forces there, assassinating some of their leaders, attacking their supply lines, their fuel and ammunition, because there were reports that the United States was trying to sort of see if it was possible to revive a sort of plan, which has already failed, for Kurds to sort of invade into Iran and establish a sort of mini-state. We saw that in Russia, in the Kursk region, to put more pressure on Iran. And so, they are taking preemptive action there to stop that. We’ve also seen a gas tanker attacked by drones in a port in Egypt in these recent days. It’s not clear who was responsible, but the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is getting much more intense. And I think the reason that the Saudis blamed the Hashd in Iraq for the attacks on the Aramco facilities was probably because they didn’t want to exacerbate the war with the Houthis.

The Houthis are a formidable fighting force and, in the past, they’ve delivered a huge defeat in the army of Egypt when they ended up killing, I think, 20,000 Egyptian soldiers. This was in the past, a long time in the past, not present. But this is the sort of sense that Saudi is not anxious to get into this war, but at the same time, Saudi now has no money. I mean, it’s getting no revenue. It was anyway short of money. And it hasn’t got that far with the Abu Dhabi, but the Gulf states, too, are short of money. So, all of this is becoming very much, the hot plate is getting hotter and hotter, and there’s a misjudgment here, like the misjudgment of Ukrainians trying to attack an Iranian ship in the Caspian. Could he easily change the whole nature and the whole dynamic of this war and make it more profound?

But my main point is Trump is talking about trying to find a solution to the Iran problem. Look what’s happened. The whole thing has become a matrix of other conflicts. I haven’t even mentioned Lebanon in this process with the threats that Washington has been trying to encourage the Sharia from Syria to come and take part in the disarmament of Hezbollah or to attack the Shia villages that lie on the border between Lebanon and Syria. And Turkey, who has considerable influence over the forces in Damascus, says they’re not unopposed to Syria being involved in Lebanon. But as soon as that happened, we had more reaction from the Iraqi resistance that said to Sharia, “You go near Lebanon and we come into Syria and we’re going to attack from that side.” And so, the whole thing is getting more and more mixed, and we have the potential Black Swan flying. And I do think we need to take it seriously, which is that the far right in Israel, I hate the word far right, but the messianic right shall we say more correctly, BenGvir, Smotrich, but particularly Ben Gvir is saying that they would like to see a crisis in the West Bank, a big crisis, perhaps on Temple Mount, perhaps in a war in the West Bank. They want to have the crisis that will force an exodus of Palestinians from the West Bank, and it will help win the election for them.

It’s about the elections but it’s also a double motive to provoke another 48-type situation with Palestinians fleeing for their lives from the West Bank. So, they are preparing it. They’re making no secret of it. The election is going to be an existential election. This is due to take place in October. And it’s not clear what’s going to happen. And it’s not clear that it will not end up in violencece in Israel because the two sides are really at loggerheads at the moment and the future of Netanyahu is by no means certain. But to set fire to the West Bank at this time has been a long-standing aim. I remember Smotrich talking about this some years ago in a talk he gave to the Likud when he said, “Listen, this is our plan and the Arabs are going to go.” And he said, “But what we really need to implement this plan is a big crisis or a big war. And during that war, the plan will be finally operational.”

And so, as I say, these are some of the possibilities, all of this together. It makes it very volatile. But that’s not my point. There’s no clean binary deal available to Washington. It’s now turned into a matrix of smaller wars taking place across the region, all of which are interconnected, but all of which have quite separate agendas – the Lebanese war, the Yemen, the Syrian circumstances – all of these things have got completely different agendas. The possibility of Washington coming to a comprehensive solution now seems to me close to zero.

Chris Hedges:

The Egyptians and the Jordanians have moved their military up – the Egyptians in the Sinai, the Jordanians along the border with the West Bank – to prevent the kind of ethnic cleansing that Smotrich and others have openly advocated. I think they call it ‘voluntary transfer’ or something. So, if they try and push the Palestinians out of the West Bank or they finally decide that they want to make that kind of push in Gaza where about two million Palestinians are now huddled in fetid overcrowded tent cities, in a third, Israel’s already seized seventy percent of Gaza. How does that play out? I mean, doesn’t that create a military confrontation between Israel and either Jordan or Egypt?

Alastair Crooke:

It could break out in many different ways. I mean, this is exactly what I’m trying to say. It’s incendiary. The whole region could be one match here, another match there, another killing in Lebanon, a mass killing somewhere else. It’s very volatile and can easily be set off. But particularly the Palestinian things could erupt. There could be from the consequences that could bring Iran back into the conflict directly with Israel. It could bring Iran into directly striking into Israel in the Northern Territories. That’s the territories from the south of Lebanon down to the Galilee. All of this is possible. Iran is expecting a conflict with the United States, and one could easily be triggered. The Iranians are ready for war not only with the United States, but I think they expect that it will include Israel at some point. They are prepared for that. I just underline that because I think quite often people misunderstand and say, “Well, Israel is so strong, isn’t it?” Actually, in terms of their infrastructure, which they say they want to attack in Iran, it’s the Israelis who have won. They have two refineries, effectively, just two, and they have a small country and so their power plants are centrally located, concentrated. Whereas Iran is a big country and its power structures and all of its infrastructure is dispersed. It’s been dispersed, as I say, for 20 years, precisely in anticipation of a coming war with the United States. So, it’s not so clear.

Does Israel want a war with Iran? No, it wants Trump to wage a war with Iran and to destroy Iran, to destroy its infrastructure so that the state can no longer provide the services to the citizens. That’s a quote of what they say they would like to see. Of course, I mean, to demand that the state should be so destroyed that it is unable to provide any services to its people really amounts to a slow tactical nuclear weapons strike instead of a big one because it means without water, without electricity, at this time of year without fuel, I mean this would be impossible to survive. And if this happens, the Iranians will strike back at the water purification plants of Saudi Arabia and at the Gulf states, and they’re very vulnerable in that. Iran is less vulnerable in water purification. Only 3 % of their water comes from purification.

Chris Hedges:

And let me just throw out about seventy percent of desalination plants provide water in Saudi Arabia. I think the UAE is over eighty percent. If Iran took out these desalination plants, that would instantly – I think all of Riyadh, for instance, depends on desalination – that would create a humanitarian crisis throughout the region.

Alastair Crooke:

Absolutely. But is that in the calculus in Washington? I mean of course it’s understood in parts of Washington, but how much is this put to Trump when he’s in the right sort of state of mind to hear this and to understand it and not to go on saying, “Iran is defeated, it’s broken, we’ve won the war.” This is the uncertain part of this. What might happen anywhere in the region, but a mistaken decision taken could blow it up across the entire region because all of these things are interlinked and somehow they will be connected. Hezbollah will not stand by if Palestinians are being thrown out of Gaza or thrown out of the West Bank. It’s all interconnected and what happens in Syria, what happens with the Hashd, the Hashd might come into Syria. All of these things are in the air.

How much of this is really thought through in Washington and understood? You have to say at the end of it, I mean, this is what they brought on themselves because all of this was an attempt to find, “Okay, we can’t put military pressure on Iran, so we’ll put on pressure from Iraq and we’ll put pressure from this region. We’ll disarm, threaten to disarm the militia in Iraq. We’ll threaten to disarm Hezbollah.” And all of this is done is to make the thing ten times more complicated, ten times more complex to resolve. There’s no simple binary silver bullet that is going to be fired.

Chris Hedges:

Great, thank you, Alastair. And I want to thank Diego, Thomas, and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.