I did Press TV rolling coverage interviews last (Friday) night and again this (Saturday) morning. The topic, naturally, was the “Hormuzian confusion” generated by Trump’s out-of-control mouth. The above video begins with a brief Press-TV-chosen highlight reel from the Friday interview, followed by a complete archive of my portion of the interviews. Below is the complete transcript. -KB

Friday, April 17 interview:

I think this is a historic change. We’ve seen what really amounts to Iran testing its nuclear option by showing its power over the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore its power over the entire world economy, including especially the US vassal states in the region. And Iran has successfully demonstrated that power. And that has apparently forced the Americans to push the Israelis back from doing what they wanted to do, which was to continue their genocide in Lebanon. And so that problem isn’t yet solved, but at least there is a slowdown in this aggression coming from the Israelis in Lebanon. And that was completely done by the leverage of Iran. And so I think this is a very positive development.

And I wouldn’t put too much faith in what Trump says at any given time, because for one thing, he doesn’t appear to be fully in control of his mouth. Sometimes he deliberately lies, and sometimes it seems to be almost an unconscious process. So I wouldn’t consider Trump the best source on any of this. He’s going to be trying to lie his way out of the problem he got himself into by allowing Netanyahu to convince him to attack Iran. So I would listen to the Iranian leadership, and I would also listen to other third parties, including the Chinese and perhaps the Europeans, perhaps to a certain extent the Pakistanis. The upshot is that Iran has emerged from this brutal series of acts of aggression, this series of war crimes committed against it, actually much stronger than it was before. And the downside is that this is not going to play well with the genocidal maniacs in Tel Aviv. So there’s going to be a continued impetus for conflict coming from those quarters. But the good news is that, for now at least, it looks like the Americans might actually be reacting with at least a slight sliver of rationality, which essentially means admitting that Iran has them checkmated, and that’s going to change the region and the world forever.

The blowback from this is obviously immense. And this may go down in American history as the worst decision made by an American leader and the stupidest war ever launched by an American leader. And that would be saying something. Had Trump and his people not decided to go along with the suggestion, or rather the order perhaps, of Netanyahu, and launch this bloody war by assassinating the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran and massacring those schoolgirls, the Iran side would never have done this. It would never have exercised this nuclear option of openly taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. That was always a defensive parameter. It was a defensive option that Iran would be able to use if it were attacked, if it ever suffered aggression at a certain level. And everybody knew this. It’s very strange why the American leadership didn’t get the message. The top military and intelligence leadership understood it, but apparently nobody around Trump was willing to stand up to him. Apparently he’s got a narcissism issue and he doesn’t like to be contradicted. And apparently he’s got a certain amount of influence over him coming from Netanyahu. So the Americans ended up making this very, very bad decision.

Before this, they could convince their Gulf allies, or should we say the vassal states, that they could effectively protect them. And then they could steal protection money from those Gulf states. And that era now is over. This unilateral American control of the Gulf and of its energy resources and therefore of the backing of the petrodollar is now over. Iran has shown that it’s the ultimate power over the transit of energy and other materials through the Strait of Hormuz, and if necessary, the Red Sea as well. And that completely changes the geopolitical landscape, and not in a way that’s favorable to the United States. So the Americans will try to find a way out of this to minimize the damage and minimize the embarrassment. But ultimately this is a huge takedown for the American empire, and that means it’s also a very, very bad sign for the genocidal Zionist entity, which had really better deeply reflect on the course that it’s been taking, because it won’t be around in just a few years if it continues on the path that it’s on. It has always depended on the protection of the Americans, and American power is ebbing very rapidly.

Well, you’re right, the European vassal states usually do anything that the United States orders them to do, no matter how stupid. But this was an exception because it was so stupid that it rose above the level of garden-variety American stupidity to a whole new level of utter and complete idiocy. Like that retired French general said, Trump was the captain of the Titanic selling discount tickets after the ship had already struck the iceberg. That is, they could see that this was not going to be successful by any possible definition. They knew, like everybody else knew, that Iran would likely close the Strait of Hormuz and exercise this nuclear option that would essentially force the other side to back down. And I think they also had maybe better intelligence. Well, certainly they had better intelligence than Trump. Trump’s intelligence was coming from Netanyahu. And what Netanyahu really believes, I have no idea. But in any event, the Europeans, like all the professionals in the field, knew very well that there was no way that murdering some people in a dastardly sneak attack on Iran was somehow going to magically transform Iran into a pliant, obedient Western vassal state that would acquiesce in the genocide of Palestine and in the theft of its materials and economy and resources. No way. It just wasn’t going to happen. And the Europeans knew that, and everybody else knew that.

And apparently the reason that Netanyahu would have been willing to risk this kind of suicidal war from the Western American perspective is that he was gambling on some kind of huge regional war that would allow the Israelis to pursue their plans for greater Israel by massacring and expelling the remaining Palestinian population and completing their genocide, invading more territory from their neighbors and emerging from the smoking ruins of the entire region as supposedly the strongest power. I think that was Netanyahu’s dream, but that was never realistic. And the realistic people in all the other camps, including the Europeans, could see that this was a counterproductive effort from the American and Western perspectives. And also, of course, the Europeans found it absurd that Trump was asking them to send their navies to open the strait, when the American navy, which is more powerful than all of the European navies put together, was afraid to come anywhere near the strait. It was almost humorous in its ridiculous quality. And then Trump’s petulant crying and whining about how the Europeans wouldn’t help him open the strait just added to the irony, or really the dark humor, of the whole thing. So it was no mystery why the Europeans turned him down.

The real mystery is why he thought that they would, and why anybody would ever imagine that they would. And in fact it’s also a mystery why the Europeans have gone as far as they have in listening to the Americans. In this one case they didn’t, but so often they do to their detriment. Why haven’t the Europeans taken Flint and Hillary Leverett’s advice and gone to Tehran a long time ago? They could have opened up productive trade relations. They could have undermined this whole American-Israeli war, and we would never have had this crisis, and they would have made a lot of money, and they would have actually beaten the Americans in this kind of competition for working with Iran’s vast, untapped economic potential. But Europeans may be stupid, they may be vassals of the Americans, but they weren’t stupid enough to buy those tickets on the Titanic after it had already hit the iceberg.

Saturday, April 18 interview:

Well, this isn’t surprising, because Trump is now becoming notorious for saying whatever comes into his head and then contradicting himself the next minute or even the next second. And so it’s really to be expected that the messaging coming out of the top of the American command chain is not going to be consistent and is not going to bear much scrutiny, certainly is not going to reflect reality. So I think we have to basically assume that the Americans are, as the Russians said a long time ago, non-agreement capable. That is, they’re incapable of clearly formulating an agreement and then signing it and sticking by it. They have a history of killing negotiators in the midst of the most promising moments in negotiations. And they have a history of going back on their word. Famously, of course, they promised never to move NATO one inch eastward after the end of the Cold War, and then they just kept on marching eastward, almost up to the gates of Moscow. And so I think they’re just as non-agreement capable with regard to this war on Iran as they were with regard to the post-Cold War war on Russia. And so just as the Russians learned they had to essentially use force and build up the military power and not rely on the word of these American leaders, Iran is le...