BIG Civil Wars Could BREAK OUT This Weekend (Uncut) 02-13-2025

BIG Civil Wars Could BREAK OUT This Weekend | Larry Johnson

Abdullah in Jordan and then al-Sisi in Egypt who are very vulnerable politically. So this is, you know, if one or both collapse, then, you know, if we thought what we’ve seen up to this point is chaotic, this will be chaos times 10. And it doesn’t begin to factor in that no longer do you even have a stable government in Syria.

And Bashar al-Assad for all of his faults is still, he still had some measure of government stability there that doesn’t exist. Turkey is, you know, got buyer’s remorse over helping overthrow Assad because they’re not trying to control Turkey and finding it difficult to do. You’re watching Capital My name is Danny and today’s guest is Larry Johnson.

Larry, thank you so much for coming on my friend. You’re most welcome. Yeah, we typically kick off this show talking about what is most topical for the guests.

In this case, I’m presuming it is what transpired yesterday between Donald Trump and the King of Jordan, right? What do you make of that? I mean, just reading the body language from the, from the King of Jordan, King Abdullah, he was blinking rapidly. He definitely felt uncomfortable. And he did appear to kind of buckle up and give into, begin to give into Donald Trump’s request or demands of relocating the Palestinians from Gaza.

What do you, what’s your read on the entirety of that situation? Well, he actually later in the meeting with Trump, he said, yeah, we’ll take 2000 children. We’re going to bring 2000 children to Jordan immediately. Well, actually that, that should have already been underway as part of the ceasefire deal.

You know, sick, sick children were supposed to be allowed out of Gaza and the Israelis have prevented them from leaving. So that, that’s one other area where Israel violated the ceasefire agreement. But then later as Abdullah went up to the Hill to meet with members of Congress, he set out a, you know, I call it the, I call it a shit because if you, if you, the X is, how do you pronounce X? Well, XI for Xi Jinping, right? XI.

So if you put XI with Twitter, you get, so you get shitter. Okay. So he, he put out this message on what I call on shitter and it was, no, hey, the Arabs were all united.

We’re not going to forcibly displace Palestinians. So is he, is that his real position? We don’t know. What we did see though was the Egyptians, Al-Sisi, who was supposed to come to Washington for, I guess, another one of these dog and pony shows where Trump would get to pretend that he had support for his Gaza, your Riviera on Gaza.

Al-Sisi canceled the trip. The, I think, I think Trump has made such a fatal strategic error in pushing this proposal out. Initially, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that I thought it was just a negotiating gimmick, that he wasn’t serious about it, that he was, you know, trying to throw a sop to Netanyahu to keep the Zionist extremists at bay.

But no, no, he’s, it’s clear he believes it. And then what he said in conjunction with it shows that he doesn’t understand a thing about what has transpired in Gaza over the last 15 months. He has accepted the entire Israeli propaganda narrative that the Hamas, the Palestinians have slaughtered Israelis, and this is just Israel in self-defense, ignoring the fact that, you know, he actually blamed in one comment he made yesterday, a remark that it was Hamas that destroyed Gaza.

Oh, wait a second. It was Israeli airplanes dropping U.S. supplied bombs that destroyed Gaza. We helped do that.

And so his refusal to embrace that or acknowledge that just, you know, further, in my view, isolates the United States. And then he’s giving Israel the green light to restart the war in Gaza. So they’re going to, they’ll go back to killing civilians.

Can you continue into this genocide? And it is a genuine genocide, unfortunately. So from what I understand that the ceasefire deal that was negotiated, supposedly through Trump and Whitkoff, there were multiple phases for the ceasefire deal. I think we’re still in the first phase.

Well, no, the first phase ended already. Oh, it ended. Okay.

So it ended. The second phase is supposed to start on Saturday. Right.

And in each of these phases, you would release a certain amount of hostages in the process. And what doesn’t make sense to me is how can you, it seems like he’s kind of flipping the script now and saying, oh, now let’s release all the hostages and disregard the ceasefire deal that was brokered a few weeks ago. Yeah.

Because Israel is not about to release all of the Palestinians that it has imprisoned. And that’s what, again, the disproportionality of it is what’s so stunning. For every one Israeli hostage that Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or one of the other Palestinian groups may hold, Israel has got 20 to 30 Palestinians locked up.

And it’s not people who’ve carried out crimes or carried out terrorist attacks. They’re just grabbing people and subjecting them to torture and other physical abuse. I mean, it’s just, it’s nightmarish.

And then they wonder why the Palestinians seek revenge. If you were unjustly jailed and tortured, I’d be willing to bet when you got out, you’d seek to punish those that did it to you. That’s, you know, that’s one of the great, you know, popular genres in American film.

You know, the justifiable revenge. How much of this relocation plan, this plan to move the Gazans somewhere else, how much of this was premeditated? Because it seems like he’s just making it up as he goes. Because he had a press conference the other day and they asked him, they were asking about the ceasefire deal.

And he, it seems like he’s just going off the top of his head. It’s like, oh, if they’re not here by Saturday, by noon, then yeah, all hell’s going to break loose. It seems like he’s just kind of making up things as he went.

Well, there’s, there is no plan. You call it a plan, but there’s no plan. So, and he’s contradicts, you know, it’s self contradictory.

For example, he says, oh, look, Palestinians can’t stay in Gaza because it’s going to take years, years to rebuild. I mean, you’ve got to clear out all that rubble and got to diffuse all the bombs that are beneath the rubble that the Israelis dropped that didn’t necessarily go off. It’s years.

So, the Palestinians have to go to these new great locations. Well, A, they haven’t identified the locations. B, they haven’t built a single structure that house the Palestinians in these new exotic locations, supposedly.

So, it is going to take as long, it will take as long to build in Egypt or Jordan to actually come up with a physical plant that could house Palestinians. And then you get to the issue of how are you going to get them out? You know, you’re going to load them up on trucks. You’re going to, I mean, make them walk because there’s no airfield there.

So, they’re not going to fly them. This is, you know, this is an effort of forced displacement that hasn’t even been thought through. They talk about it.

And, you know, the other thing is, it’s so contradictory about it is Trump says, yeah, well, the United States will own it. Oh, we’re going to pay money for it? Oh, no, no. Israel’s going to give it to us.

Oh, but we’ll control it. Oh, so we’re going to put troops in? No, no, no, we’re not putting any troops in. So, how do you own it if you don’t pay the money? And how do you control it if you don’t have troops, police, some sort of security force? You’re correct in your take that he’s just riffing, talking off the top of his head, hadn’t thought this through at all.

Yeah. And this could easily be a powder keg that lights up the region. I can’t imagine the civilian population over in Jordan and Egypt being all too happy, especially in Jordan after that performance from their king, basically just getting humiliated right there in front of the world to see.

And from what I understand, even before that, there was an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction, disapproval of the Jordanian king there. Does Jordan run the risk of falling into a civil war? Should this relocation plan come into effect, especially if they start relocating Palestinians into Jordan? Yeah, definitely. There’s such a large Palestinian population already in Jordan.

And he came off as a very weak man yesterday. He’s polite, he’s cultured. He’s been seen as very, very close to the United States for years.

You know, as a young man, he went through U.S. Green Beret training, special forces. So he’s not, you know, he showed some skill and ability in that regard. But as far as defending the rights of the Palestinian people, he’s not been aggressive on that.

It is, you know, you’ve got both Abdullah in Jordan and then al-Sisi in Egypt who are very vulnerable politically. So this is, you know, if one or both collapse, then, you know, if we thought what we’ve seen up to this point is chaotic, this will be chaos times 10. And it doesn’t begin to factor in that no longer do you even have a stable government in Syria.

And Bashar al-Assad, for all of his faults, he still had some measure of government stability there. That doesn’t exist. Turkey is, you know, got buyer’s remorse over helping overthrow al-Assad because they’re not trying to control Turkey and finding it difficult to do.

You think that’s really the case? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, this didn’t turn out quite like they thought it would. And, you know, again, the West are, on the one hand, our hypocrisy and inconsistency is just staggering. We’ll condemn Iran as a major terrorist state.

It’s not, just by the U.S. government’s own statistics. But, you know, we put our focus, oh, yeah, we can’t work with it because they’re terrorists. And then we turn around and facilitate Mohammed al-Jilani, who’s the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who’s had a $10 million bounty on his head for acts of terrorism.

And we welcome him and deal with him diplomatically. So it’s just, it’s, you know, we have no consistent policy with, you know, we say we’re against terrorism, but actually we embrace terrorism when it suits us. Yeah.

Back terrorist groups, too. Yeah. It’s a Hegelian dialectic.

In a way, you create the opposition that enables, that gives you enough credibility to go in and topple when the time arises. I can clearly see, you know, these HTS guys that have taken over Syria getting a little too out of control eventually. And it’ll throw Syria into mass chaos.

And then that’ll be another reason to invade Syria, have some sort of intervention in Syria, things of that nature. So it kind of leaves the door open for adventurism like that. Well, what’s happening in Syria is it’s reverting to its tribal roots.

Right. So Syria was in some respects an artificial creation at the end of World War I. And, you know, we’ve got, you’ve got the Sunni tribes is the majority, but you’ve got both the Shia and the Alawites and the Christians. You know, Damascus used to be, you know, what we call Syria used to be really a significant area of Christianity.

It was one of the oldest Christian movements in the world. That’s been slowly wiped out, exterminated. And so this, all of this goes to say that the United States has less control now, and the potential for unexpected actions that are unanticipated that could spin out of control is I think greater, not less.

Yeah. And then you have Iran as well. There seems to be, Iran’s kind of bipolar lately, especially when you contrast their president and the Ayatollah.

The president seems, as well as the vice president, appear to both be very much desiring some sort of negotiation with the West. Ayatollah Khomeini does not. He said the other day in a tweet that there’s no point in negotiating with the U.S. So what’s going on with Iran? Is there really a rift within Iran or is this kind of like a good cop, bad cop? You may have been able to make the case there was a rift six months ago, but actually Pazheskin has endorsed what Ali Khamenei said.

So in fact, you know, I was hopeful as well that in the aftermath of the ceasefire, and there were reports that Whitkoff had made entreaties to the Iranians about opening negotiations and talks. You know, this is where Trump, when the history of the Trump presidency is written, he will go down as having missed one of the greatest opportunities to secure a peace in the Middle East, because he could have really brokered a comprehensive deal that would have required not, you know, if you will, abandoning Israel, walking away from Israel, protecting Israel’s right to exist, but no longer doing the bidding of Israel as the United States has bid, and to have secured a state for the Palestinians, and to have secured a peace with the Iranians, so that instead of this constant war that has been shaking the region now for, you know, all my life, 70 years, that you would have entered into an era of peace, but the Iranians have now made clear, no, they’re not interested in talking. I think the only way that you get any kind of peace talks moving is going to be if Russia gets involved.

That means the United States and Russia got to settle their issues first. Now, there is movement on that front, but the Middle East, it’s a festering wound. Yeah, with Russia, I recall them and Iran signing this defense deal a couple weeks back.

What’s the depth of this defense deal? Does it entangle either country? Should either one of these countries go into a conflict with the U.S. or some other Western force, or is it not that hands-on? How deep does the Russia-Iran, I guess, alliance go? No, I think it’s very significant, particularly when you look at the history of Russia and Iran. They’ve not been buddies throughout history. In fact, the times they’ve been enemies and they have fought.

There’s, you know, there has been not, there’s not been great commerce between the two. But starting now, five, six years ago, Russia and Iran began cooperating militarily and conducting joint naval exercises, military exercises in the Persian Gulf. Then there was this extended negotiation and putting together this security agreement.

It’s not a defense treaty per se that requires Russia to come to the aid of Iran if Iran is attacked. But the language in it is such that that is, that’s essentially what it says, that, you know, that if Iran is attacked, then Russia can respond in accordance with the UN Charter, Article 51, and which is basically another way of saying it can come to Iran’s defense. But it acknowledges there’s a lot of secret agreements between Russia and Iran in the fields of intelligence and military cooperation, as well as Russia making a commitment to help the Iranian nuclear program, but not for creating a nuclear weapon.

That’s, that’s, in fact, this agreement, if anything, makes it even less likely that Iran will ever try to get a nuclear weapon because of their relationship with Russia and Russia’s willingness to supply them with air defense systems and other, other technical measures for defending themselves. So actually Iran, and then there’s the economic portions of the agreement. So the agreement was extremely important and that’s, that’s why it was signed on the 17th of January, before Trump’s inaugural, inauguration on the 20th.

It was sending a clear message to the United States, we’re, we’re now, we’re not just going steady, we’ve gotten married. Yes, so it just further complicates the situation and Trump recently sent out a tweet a week ago or so saying that he wants to allow Iran to develop its nuclear program insofar as it does not create a nuclear weapon. Right.

What’s, what, what, what is his game plan here? On one day he’s threatening to, to attack the nuclear facilities, the other day it’s the polar opposite. Is this part of his plan? Is this like part of a, like a destabilization, like a psychological operation to destabilize Iran’s expectations or is he just kind of going by the seat of his pants? I think it’s more seat of the pants. It is, you know, I, I guess Trump thinks that he can deal with foreign countries like he dealt with competitors in the New York real estate market.

And you can, you can bully, you can threaten. I posted, I posted at sonar21.com a video of Trump and Vince McMahon at one of those world wrestling federations. Yeah.

And you know, Trump gets in the ring and I’m going to, I’m going to kick your ass. I’m going to, I’m bigger than you. I’m stronger.

You know, it was all nonsense. I mean, it was, it was, none of it was serious, but he’s just talking trash and it was all for the entertainment of the audience. So that that’s been Trump’s approach.

And I guess he believes wrongly, in my view, that that, that he can do that on the international front. And then when the doors are closed and the behind doors and they can talk politely, I would have, I would have said three months ago that Iran was likely going to press forward to get a nuclear weapon in light of the attacks by Israel. But once that agreement with Russia became apparent and then the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated that to build a nuclear device was haram, evil, that Iran’s not going to do it.

And so the United States and Israel keep looking for a pretext to go after Iran, but the US, the US is militarily not capable of doing it. We tell ourselves we are, but we’re, we’re simply not militarily capable of doing it. So this is Trump, Trump’s vision of trying to come up with a broader Middle East deal.

I think he’s making that impossible now instead of a possibility. Yeah. I heard you talk about this on another podcast recently here, Larry, you were talking about the gold price being allowed to get back to free market value or at a higher level to basically prop up the US balance sheet and enable, just create more confidence in buying US treasury, buying US debt.

I want to take this time to encourage my viewers to check out our good partners over at ITM trading for all their gold, silver, and platinum needs if they so, if they so choose. I have a link to that down below to schedule a free strategy call with them. They’ll walk you through what they have, and you’ll get a chance to talk to some of their experts on what works best for you.

Now, the price of gold or silver may be up, may be down by the time you’re watching this video, but that’s really besides the point. Day-to-day action isn’t really indicative of anything substantial. There’s no signal in that.

It’s really the long-term trends that matter. And if you plot gold over a long-term time horizon, you plot silver as well, we’re up 40%, almost 40% year over year. And there does appear to be some geopolitical inclination behind it.

Again, does the US want to revalue gold higher to prop up its balance sheet? Larry, I’m going to let you take this one. What more is there on the bone? Is this a means of combating BRICS, this BRICS-7 currency you’ve heard about? Go ahead. Yeah.

So what’s fascinating about Trump in contrast to Biden, the Biden administration ignored BRICS. They pretended BRICS was nothing. Well, Trump has come in and acknowledged that BRICS is a threat to the US status as a hegemon vis-a-vis the dollar being the principal form of international commerce.

And we see the United States now cutting off all aid to South Africa. But South Africa was not a major trading partner of the United States to start with. But clearly there is a debt, the US has a debt problem.

The federal budget, the federal debt has been exploding, what, 38 trillion now, something like that. And I understand that one of the things that Bessant is looking at is revaluing the gold that is currently in the US holdings, because apparently on the balance sheet it was valued at 40 bucks an ounce. Well, if they revalued it at $3,000 an ounce or even $2,500 an ounce, boy, all of a sudden, I think it’s going to drop one or $2 trillion at least off the balance sheet as far as what the US owes from a debt standpoint.

And I think trying to get the US balance sheet in better shape is another effort by the United States to make the US treasury more attractive, because China has been selling off treasuries and buying up gold, but not just buying up gold to store overseas, they’ve been bringing it back home. And then I saw some, there’s been another interesting phenomenon that’s developing. There’s a, I don’t know if it’s appropriate to advertise another podcast, but I found this guy in China, it’s called Inside China Business.

The guy comes up with eight, nine minute videos, so you’re not watching them all. But he pointed out in the latest one that the explosion, the growth, I don’t want to say explosion, because you start talking about electric batteries and explosion can have not too good an implication, but the growth of electric bikes, and it’s actually having a dramatic effect on the oil market of all places. It’s actually reducing the demand for oil.

And China almost has a monopoly on the production of these electric bikes. Forget about the electric cars. And a lot of people aren’t buying electric bikes just because they’re lazy and don’t want to ride a conventional bike.

They’re actually using it to replace a car in many cases. I joke with a friend of mine, he’s an avid cyclist. And I said, all you got to do is go watch the Amish.

If you’ve ever seen the Amish, they like to ride bikes. You got a lot of overweight Amish people. It’s just a sign that maybe riding the bike doesn’t necessarily help you lose weight.

And particularly now that many of them are riding these electric bicycles. But the point of this is that the economy is shifting in a way that the United States is lagging behind. And so the traditional world, Donald Trump, he’s still locked in a 20th century mentality about the economy.

And the effort to try to use trade pressure on BRICS, China as a major trading partner of the United States, they actually, I would argue, hold more cards against the United States than the United States holds over China. I think China’s got more leverage vis-a-vis the United States. If for no other reason, the production of pharmaceuticals and the critical rare earth minerals that are essential to the US defense industry, which China’s already, I think, gallium and antimony, they’ve already said, okay, you sanction us, you’re not getting that anymore.

But we don’t have an alternative source for it. So I see Trump actually increasing this, let’s call it the war on BRICS, you know, be in a trade war with China, he’s going to try, India as well is going to be a target, and Brazil. So Russia and South Africa are the two countries in BRICS leadership.

But when you look at the expansion of BRICS, Iran’s come in, Indonesia’s coming in, it’s been accepted. Vietnam, you’ve got this movement of the global south where they’re tired of being bullied. And at the very moment in history, when they’re tired of being bullied by the United States, in comes Donald Trump using bullying tactics.

And I think it’s going to backfire. Isn’t this also a means to prop up American production of goods, making America less reliant? Sure, there may be pain when it comes to prices. But if it means incentivizing American manufacturers to start manufacturing things at home, isn’t that more of a defensive protocol? If the American deep state or if the intelligence agencies do see a war coming down the pike of a world war, let’s call it, don’t they have to make sure before that happens that they have to solidify the United States? Is that why we’re going after Canada and Greenland and kind of building this fortress America, trying to build this fortress America in the north, south, in the eastern hemisphere? To me, it seems like they’re preparing for something that’s coming down maybe four or five years down the line, and they’re trying to harden this fortress, so to speak.

Well, let’s first deal with the production. We’ve seen the US steel industry has been decimated over the years. You probably heard me talking with Nima as well about, my dad started off as a foreman at Sheffield Steel back in 1952 in Kansas City, Missouri.

And then that was bought up by Armco Steel. And then somewhere in the 70s, Armco went away. The steel factory closed down there in Kansas City.

They weren’t producing steel. And why do you produce steel? Well, you produce steel because that steel is used to build, it was used in cars, it was used in other manufacturing processes. Well, the United States has exported so much of its industrial base overseas that rebuilding that, it’s not impossible, but rebuilding it is not an overnight task, and it’s nothing that’s going to be accomplished even in five years.

Then you get to the global supply chains. Again, this is not 19th century where either a country could be really self-sufficient or there was only one source for something. The global supply chains have become very complicated.

And really the one country that is in a position that can be self-sufficient just by virtue of its size is Russia. Russia really is about the only country in the world that’s not dependent upon some rare earth mineral or some other resource that’s produced in another country in order for it to run its factories and plants. Plus Russia has not eliminated its industrial base like the United States has.

The United States shifted a lot of that to China and to Mexico, among other places. So rebuilding that, it’s not an easy task. And maybe that’s, I don’t doubt that that’s Trump’s goal, desire, but it’s not going to happen in his presidency.

Expectations versus reality, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it ignores what the global South and the British nations, they’ve got a voice in this too.

We’re not the monopolist. We don’t get to control it. We’re ultimately going to have to negotiate.

So we’ll see when at some point reality is going to intrude into this. And we’ll see if the U.S. economy continues to move forward or if it’s going to suffer. People have been predicting a major financial crash.

Keep predicting it, maybe eventually get it right. I don’t know. Yeah.

Before we wrap up here, Larry, I want to get your thoughts on these negotiations, these talks between Russia and the U.S. Are we getting closer to ending this war in Ukraine? Yes. If you’ve seen, so in the course of the last week and a half, Trump has sent some very clear signals. One, they kicked the chairmanship of the Ukraine Defense Group, which would meet with other 50 other countries.

So it wasn’t limited to just NATO. It was other European countries that weren’t part of NATO to get everybody on board to support Ukraine. The U.S. used to chair that.

They gave it to the UK. Here, you take it. And in giving it to the UK, it wasn’t just Trump, but it was Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, as well as then Pete Hegseth has also gone on the record saying, going forward, Ukraine security is Europe’s responsibility.

So no longer the United States isn’t on this as long as it takes. We’re with you to the end, buddy. We’re done.

We’re done. Then Trump said, yeah, you know, Ukraine wants, they want some tanks. They want some jets.

They want some artillery. Pay for it. Rare earth minerals.

You got $500 million worth of rare earth minerals. You got to give that to us. And, you know, Trump, I don’t know if he intended to make this point, but what he highlighted was in the course of the last three years between the United States and NATO, they’ve almost spent a half trillion dollars in Ukraine.

For what? I mean, what has been achieved? Nothing. Russia’s winning the war. Then it was announced that at the Munich conference, which is, I guess, going to take place next week, that Hegseth, because normally at previous Munich conferences, the Secretary of Defense would be basically in charge and would run it.

Hegseth is just going to be there more like a silent observer. So Washington said, Trump is sending very clear messages to Europe. We’re done.

You know, I described it as like, you know, when you’re at the blackjack table and the dealer’s done and changing over, he goes, Trump’s just done that to Ukraine. And there was an interview last week with Putin where he basically said that now that Trump is in office, the Europeans will bow down to the master. I think that implies that he’s not interested in negotiating with Macron.

He’s not interested in negotiating with Keir Starmer. The only person that matters in this situation is Donald Trump. Well, yeah.

And why should he? There’s not a single elected leader in the UK, France and Germany that was elected with a popular mandate. Not one, at least right now. So none of them, in fact, Keir Starmer’s party has now fallen behind Nigel Farage’s party.

Both the Tories and Labour are now, you know, bringing up the rear. But still, it’s a minority party. The same thing you’re seeing even with Marine Le Pen’s growth in popularity.

They’re still a minority party. And then in Germany, AfD, you know, Alternative for Deutschland, they’re a minority party. They have a plurality, but nobody’s got a majority.

So why is Putin going to talk to them? Trump at least had a popular mandate. You know, he can go that route. And Putin’s certainly not going to talk to Zelensky, because Zelensky’s not a legitimate president in the view of the Russians, because Zelensky violated the Ukrainian constitution and suspended elections.

So the negotiations, Putin and Trump have talked, I guess, at least two times. And they have secured some interesting developments. You know, this one professor, you know, he was sort of a hippie professor, showed up in Moscow or St. Petersburg with his medical marijuana.

Well, it’s illegal in Russia, and they arrested his ass, put him in jail. Oh, you know, what’s funny is, we’re getting all Americans, oh, this is outrageous. Well, we’re locking up drug addicts all the time over here, okay? Just, you know, there’s no consistency with it.

So he gets out. Nobody focused on who, what did the Russians get? And then I just learned that there was a Russian co-founder of a Bitcoin exchange that the United States had arrested. We’re releasing him.

So, you know, Putin’s not just giving these guys up for free. The word is being circulated that Trump is reportedly going to pardon Edward Snowden. I would hope that that’s the case.

That would be a proper thing to do. But Trump and Putin are talking, but Trump showed up at those negotiations with false information. He showed up thinking, man, Vladimir Putin is broke on his ass.

He’s got the creditors at his door. He suffered major losses. He’s going to want a deal.

And Putin said, no, it’s just the opposite. We’re not suffering catastrophic losses of soldiers. And instead of you thinking our economy’s in the tank, the Russians just announced last week that they achieved 4.1% growth in 2024.

And even the World Bank and IMF came back and revised their predictions and said, yeah, one said 3.8%, the other said 3.9%. Well, 3.8% to 4.1%, please. That’s not a huge difference. Russia’s got some issues with inflation, as do we.

But Russia’s in a better position to manage their inflation than we are. So, you know, Trump showed up with that as the negotiating position. And, you know, Putin just told him, I think, very directly, you know, politely, we’re not interested in a ceasefire.

There’s not going to be a freeze in place. I’ve already made clear our position. We want all the Ukrainians out of Russian territory, which includes Zaporizhia, Kharkiv, you know, Kherson, as well as Donetsk and Luhansk.

And that’s non-negotiable. They got to get out. And they have to stop attacking us, number one.

And no more NATO for Ukraine at all. And then we’ll negotiate how much of an army Ukraine can keep intact, which was one of the subjects that was raised at the Turkish summit back in April of 2022. But so I think, you know, Trump learned that, well, OK, he may have to change his negotiating posture.

This Keith Kellogg, it turns out he’s compromised. His daughter is running basically a quote charitable foundation, which is involved in supporting the Ukrainian war effort. At least from a family standpoint, Kellogg’s daughter’s got an incentive to keep the war going.

More of this Washington insider grift, that’s what we’re looking at here. And so maybe Kellogg will wind up being sidelined. We’ll see.

Yeah, definitely. So many things happening, seems like every day. It’s a challenge to keep, it’s a challenge keeping up with all of it.

But thank you so much for coming on here, Larry. Anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up that we didn’t get into? Well, I think we’re going to see the restart of the war in Gaza come Saturday. So both Trump said, you know, if they’re not released by noon, all hell will break loose.

Well, all hell will break loose. Yeah. Do you see this spelling out into any neighboring countries as well? Yes.

Yeah, I think this has the potential. Once Israel starts attacking Gaza again, the Houthis are going to start lighting off the missiles and they’re going to shut down the Red Sea. Red Sea’s basically been open for the last four or five weeks.

Houthis said, hey, you got to cease fire. Okay, good. We’ll stop.

Same with Hezbollah. So Hezbollah, Houthis, it’ll be back on. And now you’ve got Turkey who’s, they’ve got political pressure at home about marching on Israel.

So even though Erdogan’s gas bag, there are serious elements in Turkish society that want to attack Israel. Now, I don’t know how sincere this comment was, but even Jelani said that he came out in opposition to this relocation plan too. Yeah.

No, no. I think, hey, you got to take him seriously. It’s just this, again, how the West has tried to clean this guy up and pretend that he’s not a stone cold killer.

You know, he was a jihadist extremist. And when he was part of al-Nusra, they were working on that. They were the ones working on chemical weapons back in 2013.

And when the United States claimed that Syria was carrying out chemical weapons attacks against the rebels, no, that was al-Nusra. So yeah. I think it’s a fatal mistake.

People tend to have kind of drifted away from Syria, but the situation is still very unstable over there. I mean, they have infighting with some of their moderate former al-Nusra people versus their more fringe al-Nusra people. So it’s anything.

The entire region is a tinderbox. And this could very well be, you know, for people who voted for Trump to fix the domestic issues, the border, the economy, this could be the quagmire that just sucks him in. Yeah, no, I agree.

And stops him from accomplishing the goals that people elected him on. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been very happy with what he’s been doing domestically.

And, you know, he’s, but he’s getting ready to make some fatal, I think, fatal errors on the foreign policy front that will end up diverting him from his domestic agenda. You know, this make America great again is not make America the number one entity in the world that other countries have to fear. Let’s just clean up our own act at home.

Let’s have the, let’s have the best educated population, which we do not. Let’s graduate the most STEM graduates, which we do not. Let’s start building jobs and factories that are going to employ people with things where they can actually earn a good solid middle class living and afford to, to buy things and to, you know, visit restaurants, etc.

This is, you know, you’re too young. But when I grew up, even though we lived, we had a modest home, you know, a three bedroom home with four kids, one bathroom, you know, you haven’t lived until you had to stand in line to get into a bathroom. But, you know, back then my, my dad made enough money that he could buy a new car about every two years.

And we could take family vacations, you know, and it was, you know, there was a middle class life. That’s sort of become a thing of the past for the current generation. And if, if Trump can re, you know, reinvent an economy, which, which creates opportunities for people, you know, and I think he’s trying to do that, like with this proposal, that service workers who rely on tips, that you don’t tap tax the tip income, you know, that may be a step in the right direction where people, people who are in the 20 to 30 year age range, can actually start building up some money, instead of, you know, massive debt.

Okay, good, because, you know, they’re not buying new homes, because most of them are too pricey out of their, out of the league can’t afford. So yeah, yeah, totally. Well, hey, Larry, it’s been a pleasure having you on.

For those who want to hear and see more of you, obviously, sonar21.com, you have it there at the bottom of your name tag there. But any, any other socials you want to, you want to put? No, that’s it. Go to Sonar 21.

I’ve got all the other links to everything else. And that’s where I get to vent my spleen. Awesome.

Well, check it out, guys. If you’re interested, also like and subscribe, so you don’t miss an episode. Type go Larry go.

If you agreed with what Larry had to say, if you disagreed with anything, however, do let me know. I do read the comments. Very interested in getting your takes here, guys.

Are we on the mark? Were we off the mark? Let me know in the comments. Also, check us out on Substack at capitalcosm.substack.com, where you can get all my interviews early and ad free as well as uncensored for those that weren’t, for those that warrants it. And so with all that said, I will catch you in the next episode.

Bye all.