Trump, Iran, and the Quiet End to Middle East Madness (Uncut) 04-29-2025

Trump, Iran, and the Quiet End to Middle East Madness | Alex Krainer

The Pentagon, people understand that if they get into a war with Iran, they will suffer very, very high casualties and a lot of damage. And they know that sooner or later, there’s a high risk of clash between Iran and the empire. And they can strike both at US bases in the region.

When Trump and Zelensky met first, you know, when they shook hands, that the words out of Trump’s mouth were, you shouldn’t be here. Hello, and welcome to Soar Financially, a channel where we discuss the macro to understand the micro. My name is Kai Hoffman.

I’m the Edge AR mining guy over on X and of course, your host of this channel. And I’m looking forward to welcoming back Alex Greiner. He’s a geopolitical commentator, market analyst and researcher.

And he was also the guest of our most popular video on this channel that we published about five weeks ago. It’s gotten over a quarter million views, which is absolutely insane for our channel. And thanks so much for the support here.

But I think it was a highly relevant topic that we discussed. It was Israel, it was the Middle East crisis, the Yemen’s resilience, but also Trump’s foreign policy. And as I mentioned in the video at the last time, we need to catch up on a part two here.

This is what this will be today. And look at everything from a European perspective. Alex is based in Monaco, I’m in Germany.

So we have a bit of a different perspective on things potentially as well and how our things are potentially perceived in Europe. It’ll be hugely interesting discussion because we’ve also had just a meeting in London of the US, sorry, not just the US, but EU defense ministers to talk about what to do next with and in the Ukraine. So lots to discuss and lots to catch up on.

Before I switch over to my guest, hit that like and subscribe button. It’s a free way to support us. And we tremendously appreciate it.

Thank you so much for doing that. And Alex, thank you so much for joining us yet again for part two. Really appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me, Kai. Good to join you today. Yeah, lots to discuss in a very short time period, Alex.

You know, last time we talked a lot of things, Middle East crisis, the Yemen situation, but also like Trump’s foreign policy. Before we dive into the European topics and matters, really, let’s catch up on the Middle East real quick. I mentioned to you before hitting the record button, it seems things are calming down in the Middle East a little bit.

Israel and Gaza is a different topic, but we talked Iran last time as well, the Houthi situation in Yemen, and the USS Truman, the second aircraft carrier, is pulling out of the region. What do you make of it? And what is going on? Well, I think that for all the bluster coming out of Donald Trump’s government, I think that there isn’t really a genuine willingness to take on Iran militarily. And this is now the hot topic, you know, Israel is desperate to escalate their war with Iran.

Iran has remained the one nation on the list of seven that we heard General Wesley Clark in 2003, or thereabouts, that was on the list of Middle Eastern nations that the United States wanted to change. But, you know, 20 to 23 years later, Iran still stands defiant, independent and sovereign. And so that is a threat to West hegemony in the region.

And the situation has changed very radically in the last 20 years. You know, Iran is no longer at war with Saudi Arabia. They’re no longer hostile nations to each other.

To the contrary, they’ve concluded peace and their mutual cooperation is expanding. Iran also has now a comprehensive partnership agreement with China and with Russia, which includes some military support from both nations. We see closer and closer cooperation between Iran and Russia.

And that also includes the development of the international North-South trade corridor. So Iran is strategically very, very important to BRICS and to the whole multipolar integrations side of the equation. Western powers obviously want to perpetuate their hegemony and the insecurity architecture that they’ve created over the last 200 years or so, which basically entails all regional powers being constantly on the verge of conflict with one another so that the Western powers can step in as quote-unquote peacemakers, as creditors, as providers of technology, as arms dealers.

And now this is slipping away. But the United States is at a crossroads where they have a choice. And I think it was Larry Johnson who basically formulated this in one of our conversations when he said that the United States has a choice of either being a polite guest at the global banquet or to be a policeman of the world and an enforcer of the so-called rules-based global order.

And it seems to me that Trump’s administration has clearly embraced the idea of becoming a polite guest at the global banquet. However, this is going to face a lot of opposition of those vested interests in the United States, which have benefited the most from the neocolonial relationship to the rest of the world. So I think that they have to tread carefully.

And then there’s especially a complicated relationship with Israel because the thinking about Israel in the United States has been entrenched for practically a century now. The whole idea of Zionism has been very heavily promoted in the United States since the early days of the 20th century before Israel even existed. And so there’s a large segment of American voters, namely Zionist Jews and evangelical Christians who are almost fanatically devoted to Israel.

And this is something that Trump and his team have to be very careful about. On the facade of things, it would seem that Donald Trump’s team is every bit as devoted to Zionism as these two segments. But I think if I were a Zionist, I would be very distrustful of the Trump administration.

We see that they’re trying to negotiate with the Iranians, and they are negotiating with the Iranians. And there’s a lot of upside to those negotiations for the United States. One of them, for example, being that the Iranians need a nuclear power to generate electricity for their economy.

And there’s talks of the United States stepping in and helping Iranians build nuclear power plants. Of course, that would be to the benefit of the United States, of their contractors. But it would also be of benefit to the Iranians because that’s a whole lot cheaper than waging war against the United States and Israel.

And then, by extension, other Western powers and NATO, which would probably step into that fight. US nuclear power is not necessarily competitive because my understanding is, and I know this from people who are tracking this very carefully, is that Chinese nuclear power plants generate electricity that’s about a fifth of cost of what you will get from American nuclear power plants. But still, again, that is better than war.

So I think that even on the Iranian side, there’s a certain rationale to embrace these discussions and to cut deals that would be mutually beneficial. With regards to the Harry Truman Carrier Strike Group, something interesting happened. The aircraft carrier itself, Harry Truman, collided with a commercial vessel in the Mediterranean recently.

And this is bizarre to me because I think, of course, we can’t know that, I’m guessing, but I think it reflects a certain unwillingness among the US troops and commanders to even be enmeshed in this kind of a war because I think that they perceive themselves as being a tripwire force there, that if something bad happens to them in carrying out these orders to bomb Yemen and to threaten Iran, that there’s a possibility that they end up suffering high casualties. If an aircraft carrier gets sunk, that’s about 5,000 sailors that go down to the bottom of the sea. And so we saw already that during the Biden administration, one of these carrier strike groups was being deployed to the Red Sea, that in the Persian Gulf, when they took off, their oiler struck ground and it was unable to continue, which means that the whole carrier strike group cannot proceed on their mission.

That’s one of those things where the troops can’t openly mutiny. There’s a very high cost to disobeying your orders, but you can be creative about this and you can basically sabotage your own equipment to disable the deployment. And I wonder if, because this is very bizarre that an aircraft carrier would collide with a commercial vessel, this is such a rare event, and that two of these events happen in the space of just a few months with the US carrier strike group, strike me as reflecting great reluctance on the side of US troops to get pulled into these kinds of fights.

And I don’t know whether this is clear to the commander-in-chief or not, but I suspect that this is the case, that they are, they don’t want to be in this role. And I think that even if the political class, the ideologues of the Zionists among the political class are dying for some kind of a rapture in the Middle East because of whatever fantasies they subscribe to, that farther down in the ranks at the Pentagon, people understand that if they get into a war with Iran, they will suffer very, very high casualties and a lot of damage. Iran is not the same thing that it used to be 20, 30 years ago.

They have been preparing for this almost as long, and they know that sooner or later there’s a high risk of clash between Iran and the empire. So they’re prepared, and they’re well-armed, and their weaponry is not basic. It’s very sophisticated.

They have hypersonic precision missiles, and they can strike both at US bases in the region, which today have about between 50,000 and 60,000 troops. I think it’s close to 20 military bases, plus the naval assets, and there’s even the base in Diego Garcia could become a target. So there’s a lot of downside risk in the war, and it’s unpredictable because once the war gets going, nobody can know how it’s going to unfold.

Whereas there’s a lot of upside in the peaceful negotiation. And then I would also go back to 15 January, when Marco Rubio had his hearings for the State Secretary post. And during those hearings, he explicitly said that the post-World War II global order was more than obsolete, and that the multipolar integrations are a reality, which suggests that this is probably the government’s policy position, and that the United States government today fully embraces multipolar integrations.

They may not be able to just flush the old alliances down the toilet from one day to the next, and embrace Russia and China and Iran and India as partners overtly and explicitly. But let’s say that it seems to me that once the dust settles, it’ll become clear that this is exactly what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish. Now, it’s interesting.

I think we’re all for peace in the Middle East, one way or another. So I hope that works out. I know Netanyahu is not too pleased.

I think he just said this morning that even a bad deal is worse than no deal with Iran. So we’ll see how that plays out. But as you said, I think the interests are aligned of getting this resolved in a peaceful manner.

I’m sorry, Kai, did Netanyahu said that? Yeah, I just saw a quote this morning. Let me just find that again. Let me see if I can pull that up real quick.

It was in the Times of Israel. Netanyahu, bad Iran deal is worse. Disable my ad blocker, continue to cite.

A bad Iran deal is worse than no deal. And Trump says a deal is going to happen. So that means there are two fronts very, very clearly and sort of exactly summarizing what you’ve been saying all along here.

So we’ll see how this plays out. It was a good overview. I think we can agree that the situation is deescalating in the Middle East a little bit.

We’ll see what Israel wants to do here. I would say, based on what you just said, the ball is in their court. They have a decision to make of where they want to take things.

Is that a fair assumption? Yes, I agree with that. Cool. Because I’ve got a photo here, which is a good segue because we just talked about Trump.

And let me add this to the stage here. This photo circulated the globe over the weekend. We can argue about the blue suit at a funeral, of course, but I think this photo has a lot of symbolism in it.

What do you make of that? What’s your interpretation of this scene here, Alex? I wouldn’t give it too much significance. It was a short encounter between Trump and Zelensky at the Vatican. They apparently spoke for about 15 minutes.

I just read a report or I saw a post on X, I think, where somebody who is an expert lip reader said that when Trump and Zelensky met first, when they shook hands, that the words out of Trump’s mouth were, you shouldn’t be here. I don’t know if that’s correct or not. But, you know, the issues and the respective government’s positions are too big to be undone over a brief, informal meeting between the two heads of state.

You see, there’s no team there. There’s nobody taking notes. This is completely out of the protocol.

And it’s probably correct to say that this meeting shouldn’t have taken place, that it’s even inappropriate to take the occasion of the Pope’s funeral to discuss war and peace, particularly knowing that Vladimir Zelensky is desperate to control the war and that what he wants most from the United States is a security guarantee. And a security guarantee from the United States entails that the United States would have to deploy troops to Ukraine, that they would have to impose a no-fly zone over Western Ukraine, and that there’s a very high risk that that would lead to basically a world war scenario between the two biggest nuclear powers in the world. So for Zelensky to lobby for this on the occasion of Donald Trump’s, on the occasion of the Pope’s funeral is a little bit distasteful.

Well, it’s actually very distasteful and inappropriate. And so I can imagine that Donald Trump sat there, listened to him, whatever Zelensky had to say, that he probably told him, okay, we’ll take that into account. We’ll think about it.

We’ll see where this goes. But that he also strongly encouraged him to sign the deal, the deal that the United States was proposing and to start the negotiations on the basis of, which is very close overlap with the Istanbul Plus process, which means that they have to accept territorial concessions. They have to give up on Crimea.

They have to give up on the four oblasts of the Eastern Ukraine. And this is something that Zelensky has categorically rejected. So what’s a 15 minute discussion between the two of them in the Vatican going to change? I think nothing very much.

Now, I appreciate that, Alex, but let’s dive into that whole Ukraine-Russia situation a little deeper. And before we dive into that, can you give us a really brief synopsis? Like, why are we even in this mess? Catch everybody. I have a really hard time personally finding a neutral source of information that explains both sides and why both sides, I mean, Russia and the Ukraine, are acting the way they are.

What triggered it? But really brief synopsis, really, just so we are all on the same level here. Well, Western powers have one, in terms of geopolitics, have one strategic imperative, and that is to maintain and defend their hegemony over the Eurasian landmass. That entails preventing any regional power there that can refuse the diktat of the West.

So Russia emerged as this power. China and Iran emerged as such powers. And so you want to break them up.

And so the West has weaponized Ukraine as a bludgeon with which to destroy Russia. And, you know, maybe they’re not so deluded to think that they can defeat Russia militarily, but what they could do in their thinking is to weaken Russia and destabilize it enough to be able to bring it to a regime change situation, whether through a coup or a color revolution or something like this, and then to bring to power some, you know, some new Boris Yeltsin or, you know, some version of Zelensky or Juan Guaidó, you know, these types of people who would then basically do as Yeltsin did, sign whatever decree was drafted for him by his Western advisors, which would then pretty much turn over Russia to Western interests and Russia’s resource wealth. But then the farther goal would be to partition Russia into three or five or twenty-some smaller constituent republics into a weak confederation or, you know, entirely break it up as a country and thereby eliminate this rival power that can push back against the Western powers and their hegemony.

And I believe that taking down Russia and regime changing it would then be a precursor to turning Russia into an enemy of China and then using Russian military might against China in the same way that Ukraine’s military might was used against Russia. And so this, I think, is crystal clear even to Chinese leadership, which is why they are absolutely supportive of Russia and Vladimir Putin, because they understand that if Putin’s government fell, that Russia could potentially become a threat to them as well. Interesting.

I haven’t even thought that far, quite honestly. The connection with Russia and China is an interesting one. Of course, the Chinese are supporting Russia here.

I think that’s obvious. Yeah, well, you see, if you rewind the clock to before 2014, Ukraine wasn’t on a hostile term with Russia at all. There was no hostility between them and there was no hostility between Ukrainian people and the Russian people.

This was all kind of contrived after the 2014 coup. You know, the foundations were laid beforehand, but it wasn’t going anywhere. And then, you know, that’s what kind of forced the West to orchestrate the coup in 2014 and bring bring to Kiev a junta that was loyal to Western powers.

And that’s where you started having kind of this mass formation psychosis run over Ukrainian population to kind of brainwash them into thinking of Russia as the enemy and a threat to them. And so, you know, this same process, and, you know, if you’re in Russia, you don’t have to go far to find groups who have xenophobic sentiment. And then, you know, you begin the same process, you start cultivating that, you start, you take control over Russian media, you start casting China as the big bad enemy that Russia has to confront one day.

And then, you know, piling troops on Chinese borders and start threatening and, you know, you get the whole show going. You know, the Western powers have been doing this. I mean, you know, these are British empires playbooks.

But they’ve been doing this now for centuries. They are masters of this craft. And I think that this is very, very clear, both to the Chinese and to the Russians.

Very, very interesting. Now, January 2025, a new president in the White House, which now based on what you’re saying, wasn’t really the plan here, because it seems like he’s upsetting a lot of things, right? Which brings me a bit to this article here as well. Because it seems like he wants to make peace, he wants to end everything here.

And he made suggestions to the peace deal. But then also now, it seems like and especially like in light of the conversation with Zelensky here, the mood towards or the attitude towards Putin is slightly, slowly changing as well. He’s going impatient.

What do you think of Trump’s role in all of this now? Well, I would point out that the picture you have on the screen right now says BBC. Okay. So I would, you know, my position would be to simply ignore this because these are psyops.

Let’s get rid of that. They’re desperate to derail the relations between Russia and the United States. And they are desperate to prevent Russia and the United States from becoming friendly and from becoming partners in conducting their global affairs.

But this is exactly what’s happening. So they will use any pretext to sow seeds of doubt. You know, when BBC publishes a headline like this, on the basis of I don’t know what, they usually cite individuals with the knowledge of the situation or unnamed officials.

They’re trying to sow doubt in the minds of the Americans and in the minds of the Russian officials, that Trump is actually going to betray them, that, you know, they’re playing a double game and that they shouldn’t trust them. And, you know, kind of, you know, there’s an encouraging encouragement for the United States to come back into the old alliances where, you know, they have such loyal friends as the EU and Poland and Britain and France that the United States can always count with and not to dirty themselves with this relationship with the evil autocratic Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s interesting development because I’m in Germany, right? So we are in the middle of it all and yet we’re not part of anything, right? A lot of fear mongering, a lot of warmongering going on in Europe.

Mark Rutte said we’ll be at war in three years. Here in Germany, they’re starting to count reservists, hospitals are preparing for war. What do you make of that fear mongering? Like, how serious of a threat is Russia to Europe? Because I’m personally, my opinion, this is BS.

Like, why are we scared? Yes, I think that, as you said, the world order is changing. You know, cards are being reshuffled a little bit. It’s been 80 years since World War II.

So there is a change happening, which is absolutely legitimate in my opinion. Like, nothing to do with anything. But should we be worried here in Germany, in Europe? Like, what’s Europe’s role in all of this? This is the underlying question here, Alex.

Well, if the question is whether Europeans should be worried that Russia is going to invade Europe, the answer is 100% no. That, you know, that’s completely idiotic. First of all, why would Russia do that? Russia already has the largest territory in the world, with the highest concentration of natural resource wealth estimated at between $75 and $90 trillion worth, which is still largely undeveloped.

So Russia has plenty for itself to develop. Russia has also reoriented itself towards the multipolar integration, towards trading with Iran, with India, with China, and the entire global south. They don’t need to burden themselves with the impossible burden of ruling over a dysfunctional Europe.

And especially, you know, given that we’re talking about about 450 million population of people who would be hostile to a Russian invasion. So this is just creating fear out of whole cloth. It’s completely unjustified and merit-free.

But, you know, we do have to worry about the intentions of the European ruling establishments, which I think is now beyond doubt that we are ruled by oligarchic dynasties, pretty much the same ones who have been in power for the last two centuries, more or less, and who are, you know, who are clustered around the international banking establishments. And this system of governance, almost without fail, gives rise to colonialism and empire building. And we see that everywhere around the world, you know, not just the Middle East, not just Ukraine and Russia, but also African countries, South America, across the world.

And so for them, you know, Russia defeating Ukraine and imposing its terms of peace, which is what’s going to happen, is pretty much the end of the road. And we have a number of officials of the European powers and the United States who pretty much stated this explicitly, saying that if we lose in Ukraine, we’re going to lose the world for a few generations. Or, you know, Boris Johnson himself recorded himself and posted the video where he says that if we lose in Ukraine, it’s going to be the end of Western hegemony.

This is what they’re fighting about. They don’t give a hoot about Ukraine’s democracy, freedom, human rights. That’s not their concern in the slightest.

They are defending against the loss of their own hegemony. And what does hegemony mean? Hegemony means that they get to decide who controls the resource wealth of countries across the world. And so that, for the last 200 years longer, has been the European powers who have used that resource wealth to enrich themselves and keep all these colonies permanently impoverished.

You know, what’s happening right now, for example, is that they’re trying desperately to undo the coup in Burkina Faso. Ibrahim Traore has just survived 15 assassination attempts. We saw last week General Michael Langley testify in the U.S. Senate and expressing his grave concern that Ibrahim Traore and his junta are using the nation’s gold to protect themselves and to enrich themselves at the expense of the people of Burkina Faso.

Well, you know, Burkina Faso has been under colonial rule since 1896. So the French have started to colonize Burkina Faso in 1890s. So it’s been about 130 years.

And after 130 years of colonial or neocolonial rule, let’s say, you know, Burkina Faso became independent ostensibly in 1960, but still the Western interests controlled the bulk or all of Burkina Faso’s natural resource wealth. And as a result, Burkina Faso has consistently ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries. And the human development index of Burkina Faso ranks them at 184th place of 191 nations.

So close to dead last. This has been the track record of Western colonialism in Africa, very consistently. And now that Ibrahim Traore is nationalizing the country’s resource wealth, and he’s trying to develop domestically, you know, bring the standards of living of the people in Burkina Faso higher, now all of a sudden we have Western powers expressing grave concerns that he is enriching himself and protecting himself at the expense of the poor Burkina Faso, as though the Westerners care whether people of Burkina Faso are rich or poor.

They do actually. They care deeply that they remain poor. Why? Because if they develop their own economy, they might start to absorb a lot of their resource wealth to develop their own industries, which is, you know, which would make those resources unavailable to Western corporations.

And so, you know, you have corporations like Glencore and and Acacia Gold and a number of about seven British-based mining companies that have lost their toys, they have lost their control over Burkina Faso’s resources. So they’re now desperate to take down Ibrahim Traore and bring whoever will do their bidding, you know, again, somebody like Boris Yeltsin, Alexei Navalny, you know, some African version of of those rulers who will be loyal to the Western powers, who will have their bank accounts in Paris, in Geneva, in London, who will have their homes, who will educate their children at Oxford and so forth. This is how the game goes.

And now we see that the United States, AFRICOM, is setting up, they already set up a command center in Côte d’Ivoire, whose objective apparently is to somehow intervene militarily in Burkina Faso and take down the regime there. Which is really interesting because it really fits in with the gold and the mining narrative that we have here on the channel as well. A lot of the Western mining companies in Orezone, Endeavor Mining, are directly involved in Burkina Faso.

So really interesting developments in that regard, Alex. And maybe it’s just because I have the Financial Times in front of me, but I was chatting with somebody last week about the Congo. Very similar.

M23 making a push for the capital, the president calls for help, calls the U.S., the U.S. and the Congo sign a deal. And the first thing I read this morning as I get my newspaper out of the mailbox is, minor bets on DR Congo, cobalt metals backed by Gates and Bezos is expanding into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was talking about exactly the same thing.

All of a sudden, under the umbrella of the U.S. or the Western powers, we storm in and start claiming resources. Yes, that’s exactly it. Everything else is wrapping on the turd.

The talk about democracy, human rights and blah, blah, blah. Western colonial powers have a two centuries track record of colonizing African countries and other countries around the world. They have not developed them.

They have not improved living conditions. To the contrary, they’ve disimproved them very significantly. It’s been extremely dark, extremely bloody, extremely repressive.

If people there rise up and demand higher wages, the Western powers go with heavy-handed repressions, including killing the labor organizers and community leaders. This has been going on for a very long time. Ibrahim Traore is trying to accomplish what Thomas Sankara tried to accomplish in the 1980s, and Thomas Sankara got assassinated.

We also had the same thing happen in Congo in the 1960s. It’s always to the benefit of the Western colonial powers. Now, it’s interesting.

It’s an interesting rabbit hole to jump into because we could talk forever about colonizing Africa to a degree. What the Chinese are doing in Africa is a bit of a different game. They’re coming at it from a different angle.

I’m curious. Maybe one last question, Alex. On the Congo, do you see the US and China clashing in the Congo at some point? Of course, not directly, but it’s probably pretty certain that the Chinese and the Russians will support Congolese independence movements, sovereigntist movements, and maybe even militias.

I mean, the Russians are pretty much explicitly doing that. I don’t know if they’re doing it in Congo, but they’re doing it in the Sahel. They’re helping these countries beef up their security.

Russian representatives, you know, a former— Wagner Group, right? I forgot the name of the new group now. Former Wagner Group general is now active with groups in Nigeria where the British have control over the oil exports of the country. This is part of the whole conflict because the control of African resources is still a large chunk of what makes Western powers wealthy.

This is still a very, very important chunk of their collateral, which is floating up their financial systems. And so to weaken Western colonialist powers, I think that Russia and China understand that they have to deprive them of that source of wealth. And, you know, a few years ago, I think, before the special military operation in Ukraine, a Russian diplomat pretty much floated the idea among African leaders that if they join the BRICS, if they join the multipolar integrations, that they will not be penalized if they default on their obligations to Western financial institutions, and that they will not be penalized if they nationalize their natural resource wealth and infrastructure in their countries, you know, the mining operations and so forth.

And so that was a very, very strong signal supporting the individuals and organizations like that of Ibrahim Traore to say, okay, enough of this dependence on the West, we’re going to chart our own course, and we have an alternative. This alternative didn’t exist, you know, back in the 1980s, when Thomas Sankara staged a coup in Burkina Faso. And there’s another thing, another element to this, which I think is extremely interesting, is that today we see more and more African people take an active role in the social media.

So you’re finding a lot of reports on X, on YouTube, from Africa, by African journalists and observers and bloggers and YouTubers, reporting on what’s going on. And so this is, I think, catalyzing a sort of a movement in the direction of decolonization. And we see now that there’s all this rumbling about taking down Ibrahim Traore, that the people of Africa are kind of rallying in support of him.

And depending on what happens in Burkina Faso, because Traore has now become not just a, you know, president, the leader of Burkina Faso, he’s become kind of a symbol of the whole fight against the neocolonial relations between Africa and the Western powers, and the movement for a re-establishment of sovereignty of African countries and sovereign control over their natural resource wealth. So depending on what happened there, this could spark a broader, stronger movement in that direction on the whole continent. So this will be very, very interesting to observe, what will happen over the next weeks and months in Burkina Faso.

I think that if the current regime of Ibrahim Traore and Burkina Faso manages to survive all these attacks and to continue to develop Burkina Faso, it’ll be a very, very stark case study, example of how much wealth the West has extracted from Africa while leaving the African people impoverished. I think that within a generation we could see Burkina Faso become, you know, a prosperous middle-income country at the very least with well-developed infrastructure, government institutions, and an emerging middle class of people with some purchasing power and a rising standard of living there. I think it’s a discussion all by itself, but Botswana is a really interesting example of how it could work well, and we can probably discuss it maybe in part three, and we can go down that rabbit hole because we got a little sidetracked.

Now I wanted you to continue, and I didn’t want to interrupt you because I personally find it interesting coming from the gold space, what sort of the situation in Western Africa is, because you’re the first guest on that talks about West Africa in general and Ivory Coast. I haven’t been to Burkina Faso, only the airport on a stopover, so it doesn’t really count. Alex, the last five minutes we need to talk about Europe again real quick and the role within NATO and the role of NATO itself.

How do you see Europe moving forward from all of this? Like we talked about the Ukraine situation, the end of Western hegemony, you know, is under threat here of course. Europe is beefing up its defense spending dramatically, Germany in particular. What do you see Europe’s role being going forward here? It used to be US, Russia, China, multipolar world, and nobody ever mentioned Europe.

Do we even have a chance to have a seat back at the table here? Well, Europe as in European Union, I would say no. I think it’s already an obsolete concept. The idea of Europe as being, you know, something like the United States, you know, the United States of Europe, a large prosperous dynamic market, the most developed area in the world, blah, blah.

I think we’ve taken the wrong road. I think it’s deteriorated in something resembling more and more the old Soviet Union. And I think that as such, it’s going to disintegrate.

It’s only a matter of time. It’s not going to change course because the entrenched interest, the vested interests that are controlling Europe are far too entrenched and have this ossified thinking where, you know, the whole juggernaut is being managed in a very top-down control, you know, from the Politburo, Central Committee Politburo, and then everybody else has to observe. We see that we’re losing industries, we’re losing competitiveness, and so that’s not going to work.

But I think that what you’re going to get instead is re-emergence, and we’re already seeing this happening. It’s just not like it’s going to happen at some point in the future. We see a growing momentum towards individual nations of Europe re-establishing their sovereignty.

Just this morning, I saw the video of a speech by Marine Le Pen in France. I think that was yesterday that she gave that speech. It was a very large crowd, and they were very, very boisterous in their support of her, you know.

It was very loud, and in the crowd, all you saw was French flags, not a single European flag. This reflects the mood of the people. There’s a deep disappointment in the European Union.

You know, I’m Croatian. Croatia became a member of the European Union in 2013, so 12 years ago. It is clear as day that we are much worse off today than we were in 2013.

So, joining the European Union, contrary to the expectations, has actually been a very large step back, where, you know, standards of living have deteriorated. The economy is in the worst shape. We’re up to our eyeballs in debt.

We have a lot more homeless, a lot more poor people. We are in something of a demographic collapse as a country, same as the Baltic states. So, the whole thing has been a profound disappointment, and I think that on the street, among ordinary people, there’s a deep, profound disappointment with the whole thing.

So, it no longer has popular support. There’s no enthusiasm for the European Union, and the European Union is being led by the same caliber leaders as the Soviet Union was in its late stages. So, you know, you have these old ideologues with not a day’s worth of real experience on any kind of job, career politicians, career diplomats, all ideologues, all completely cut off from the realities of daily life.

Absolutely no clue what’s going on in the countries that they pretend to govern. So, it’s only a matter of time before this whole thing collapses in a similar way as the Soviet Union did. You know, it’s going to be a gradual erosion for a while, and then a sudden dissolution.

Scary, but you’re probably not wrong. I tend to agree, and I’m seeing, like, it’s not openly been discussed yet here in Germany, at least from where I’m at, but I think the narrative is slowly changing, and how we’re installing politicians without elections, like Ursula von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock, like one of our former, I think she was the Minister of the Exterior, which is awful in Germany, but she’s got a prominent role now in the UN and EU as well. I keep track, I don’t keep track of these people.

Like, I’m happy when they’re gone out of the mainstream media here, to be honest. No, you’re probably not wrong. Other guests have sort of said that as well, that we either need to properly unite and get rid of all the borders, or we split up again.

Yeah, you know, uniting and getting rid of all the borders is going to be very, very difficult, given the abuse of uncontrolled mass migrations that was imposed on European countries by the European Commission. So, you know, even if you wanted to do that, you’ve already created a very, very strong resistance to it. And now, you know, if you want to win elections anywhere in Europe, you have to say, I want to stop migration, and people say, yeah, we support that.

But of course, you know, then we have other tools, as Ursula von der Leyen says, we have tools to make sure that, you know, these bad candidates can never win elections, and they’re using these tools, as we see in Romania, in France, in Germany. I’m not, you know, I don’t know this, but I suspect that the last elections in Germany were probably rigged a little bit. And then, you know, if none of that works, then they have other tools like they used in Slovakia, when they tried to assassinate Robert Fico.

So it’s getting ugly, but, you know, you can’t go against the will of the people. That has a very short half-life. And so it’s going to collapse.

It’s only a matter of time. And on that bombshell, Alex, we need to wrap it up. I know you have a hard cut off here.

So really, really insightful. It was a great pleasure having you back on here on Soar Financially. And if we get enough likes and subscriptions to the channel, we’ll bring you back for part three, Alex.

No, but I really enjoyed this, because especially the part about, you know, colonization in West Africa and the geopolitical trends, they are really, really interesting. Also, from our perspective here at Soar Financially, where we look at mining a lot as well. Alex, it was a great pleasure.

Where can we send our audience? Where can they follow your work? The three places where I’m most active is X, where my handle is at Naked Hedgy. And I have two publications of Substack, on Substack. One of them is my personal newsletter called Alex Craner’s Substack.

And the other one is a daily market newsletter called iSystem Trend Compass. Perfect. Perfect.

Alex, really, really appreciate your time. It was phenomenal having you back on. We’ll have to do this again.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me, Kai. Greetings to all your viewers and listeners.

Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you everybody else. Thank you so much for tuning in.

If you enjoyed this, as I said, it really helps us if you click the like subscribe button, as we can, you know, generate more visibility for our guests. We can bring high quality guests like Alex onto the program more regularly. Maybe follow up part three here.

What is happening in Africa right now? Really interesting from a geopolitical point of view. I touched just briefly on the Congo. Really, really interesting dynamics here at play.

If you enjoyed this conversation, leave a comment down below as well. Helps increase visibility too. Thank you so much for tuning in.

We’ll be back with lots, lots more. Take care.