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Writer/Producer - The Matt Gaetz Show

[The Conservative Alternative @OldeWorldOrder]

18 days left until the USA's 250th Anniversary 🇺🇸

[One America News @OANN]

“I’ve long complained about Israeli espionage in the United States… Just look at Jonathan Pollard… It wasn’t bad enough that Jonathan Pollard committed espionage against the United States by passing top-secret military information from the Pentagon to the Israelis—the Israelis then traded that top-secret military information to the Soviet Union… thus putting American soldiers' lives in danger.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer @JohnKiriakou shares concern for the heightened risk of espionage by the Israeli government—highlighting previous examples of U.S. military secrets passed along to adversaries.

Watch The Matt Gaetz Show on YouTube TV Today!

[One America News @OANN]

“I’m a little bit amused that the Israeli government is so upset about [the MOU]… We don’t sign a document—an MOU and just cross our fingers and hope the Iranians do the right thing, there is a way to ensure they do the right thing. The Israelis don’t want us to do that because the Israelis really, really want regime change.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer @JohnKiriakou reacts to the U.S.-Iran MOU—noting that the United States has several means of ensuring the IRGC respects the agreement.

Watch The Matt Gaetz Show on YouTube TV Today!

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@POTUS on Israeli military action in Lebanon: "You don't have to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they're not all Hezbollah."

[Nicholas J. Fuentes @NickJFuentes]

If Israel doesn’t abide by the US-Iran deal then we should cut all foreign aid, put tariffs on their economy and suspend military cooperation with them immediately.

Israel got us into this war and now we need to put them in their place to get out.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

The Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat level for Israel amid concerns about eavesdropping on U.S.-Iran talks. https://t.co/U7bB6WOsrg

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

From the article:
“[sect. 224 of the NDAA is] not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue.”
https://t.co/1AMAcZGjp2

[The Maverick of Wall Street @TheMaverickWS]

BREAKING: CBS announces its new host for 60 Minutes

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The Iran War Powers Resolution that I cosponsored (opposing the war) just passed the House of Representatives.

The People’s House is sending a message: end this war.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Pretty much all of the prominent voices who supported the Iran War assured us it would be over by now. None of them will admit they were wrong. Even less will they admit that their initial assurances were based on nothing but their own wishcasting. This whole shitshow has been an enormous waste of time and resources and our country has not benefited from it at all. Its advocates have moved the goal posts repeatedly and have even to this day refused to clearly articulate what constitutes a victory and how we’ll know that it’s been achieved.

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

So, Netanyahu is now openly boasting to the world he doesn’t care what the President of the United States thinks or says. Over to you, Mr President @realDonaldTrump - who’s the boss?

[Acyn @Acyn]

Massie: I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

God bless Thomas Massie.

He walks out of this with his honor intact. He’s a patriot & kept his integrity.

As long as the voters give their votes to whoever can run the most ads we will have politicians who are purchased by foreign governments & corporate interests.

[Shawn Ryan @ShawnRyan762]

Massie: $5.5M raised. Average donor gave $100. His opposition: $32 million. Three billionaires, Secretary Hegseth on the ground, four presidential attacks in one day, all to silence the guy fighting for the Epstein files. Trump calls elections rigged. Look in the mirror. Go Massie.

[The American Conservative @amconmag]

Thomas Massie:

"You can tell that I'm ahead in the polls and they're desperate. That's why they're sending Hegseth to my district tomorrow. That's why the president's losing sleep and tweeting about this. That's why AIPAC has dumped another $3 million into my race."

[🍃 @WolfBlakee]

🐐🐐🐐#Massie4Prez

[Matt Gaetz @mattgaetz]

Big crowd in the rain for @MassieforKY

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.

As a reminder Bob Kagan is:

- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)

- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...

- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today)

- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge

In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.

And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).

So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.

Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (https://t.co/tbnOpdYqux).

Here they are 👇

1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't

He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions.

Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.”

And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”

Same point.

2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage

When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”

He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words.

3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran

He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power.

Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”

On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…

4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz

Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.”

On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”

The exact same argument.

5) Global chain reaction

Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”

6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered

Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”

Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”

Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”

-----------
So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢

Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.

First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map.

For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.

Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.

I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is.

Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!

He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”

The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:

"There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead."

I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke.

Src for the Atlantic article: https://t.co/ItED9WS9Kn

[Joaquin Castro @JoaquinCastrotx]

For nearly six decades the U.S. has voluntarily remained in the dark on Israel's nuclear capabilities.

The ambiguity ends now.

There is too much at stake to accept ignorance. We are at war alongside Israel against Iran without knowing what their red lines are for using a nuclear weapon.

I led a group of 30 lawmakers to demand an end to the ambiguity.

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

On Monday Marco Rubio said that we cannot allow Iran to have control over the strait of Hormuz, picking and choosing who enters and what currency they use.

There is a very important reason why the administration feels this way: because it would be the greatest military defeat in US history.

We lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan in a sense but never like this. If we leave now with the new status quo being Iran controls the strait then we have transformed a relegated, isolated, sanction crippled nation into a global power.

Leaving now is an admission of a tremendous defeat and it’s also the best possible thing to do.

This is the trap that Trump is now in all because he listened to Netanyahu and launched the insane war of choice.