CIA analyst Ray McGovern and independent commentator Garland Nixon discuss Israel's Channel 14 reports that Iran is preparing to expand its offensive with a massive attack on Tel Aviv as Iran's missiles have changed the game in the Persian Gulf. The US Navy and military is in full panic amid evidence that the Strait of Hormuz is fully lost.
Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern on The World This Week. Tensions soar between Tel Aviv and Ankara over their designs on Syria; would Trump really nuke Iran? Gaza and Ukraine updates and the Pentagon punishes Stars & Stripes by firing its editor and publisher.
Description:
Some NATO and Russian advisers think nuclear weapons are a viable option. Would a desperate Israel really nuke Iran? We speak with nuclear weapons expert Peter Kuznick, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and economist Professor Richard Wolff.
Description:
The NATO summit in Ankara this week recommitted to provoking direct war with Russia by 2030, with or without the US it seems. Meanwhile Trump's fruity Iran policy plays in a loop as Israel stands ready to again launch full-scale war.
Description:
Is NATO provoking a direct war with Russia? The ultimate aim of Project Ukraine has always been to weaken Russia and overthrow Vladimir Putin. To launch the economic, information and ground proxy war on Moscow, NATO needed Russia to invade Ukraine. Now it needs Russia to attack a NATO country to justify direct war on Putin.
Description:
Ray McGovern was a CIA officer for 27 years, he chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefs.
Description:
The Russian and Chinese leaders declare unilateral attempts to dominate the world “have failed” and “a new type of international relations” is emerging. Meanwhile Trump loses it over Iran, while he mulls invading Cuba.
Description:
Scott Ritter says Russia has no choice but to strike command centers in Kiev and German and English munition factories after Ukrainian attacks inside Russia have cut Russia's oil exports by 20 percent. Ray McGovern disagrees, saying Russia will continue to cautiously avoid hitting Germany or England to prevent a NATO-Russia war.
Description:
A brash, expansionist Donald Trump returned from two days in China, having been schooled by Xi Jinping in what global stability looks like.
In his January 2025 inaugural address, Donald Trump blared the trumpets of the American Empire, putting the world on notice that the William McKinley era of U.S. territorial expansion was back. Not that the American imperium had gone anywhere under preceding presidents. But Trump would no longer hide it.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” he said, not stopping at planet Earth. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”
At Munich last fall, his secretary of state Marco Rubio, stirred the ghost of Cecil Rhodes, loudly proclaiming Western supremacy was back in control.
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said.
“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, [the territorial expansion] was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.
But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
Trump bullied Greenland. He bullied Canada. He took part in genocide in Gaza. He took control of Venezuela. He threatens Cuba. He twice attacked Iran.
And then he went to China.
This week Xi Jinping spelled it out for him: Put away the tough guy act. You’ve run up against China now. The two of us better get along or the world is in for a lot of hurt.
According to the Chinese readout, Xi asked Trump:
“Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations in the interest of the well-being of the two peoples and the future of humanity? These are the questions vital to history, to the world, and to the people. They are the questions of our times that the leaders of major countries need to answer together.”
As a sort of reversal of the outcome of the Boxer Rebellion, which failed to expel Western imperialists from China, Xi echoed boxer Mike Tyson who said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Joining The World This Week to discuss Mr. Trump’s trip to Beijing, and the week’s developments on Iran and Ukraine, are Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. analyst and Oval Office briefer; and Scott Ritter, ex-U.S. Marines counter-intelligence officer and a chief U.N. weapons inspector.
Description:
1. U.S. Says Iran War Over, But Continues to Fire.
2. Whose Victory Day Is It?
3. Are We Already in a World War?
There was a strange series of events over the past seven days in the war in the Gulf. U.S. officials insist that the war is over. SoS Marco Rubio held a press conference on Tuesday to declare that Operation Epic Fury (some call it Operation Epic Failure) was over.
It “is concluded,” he said. “We achieved the objectives of that operation.” Something we will talk about on this show.
Instead a new operation had begun, the U.S. is now in a defensive posture under Project Freedom, said Rubio. This sounded like a Rubio Ruse to get around the War Powers Act, to pretend one war is over and another, separate one could begin with a fresh 60 days on the clock.
He was asked about that and called the Act “100 percent unconstitutional.” Getting a declaration of war from Congress is constitutional. But the Trump administration didn’t get that either.
A day later, Trump ended Project Freedom too, we later learned, because Saudi Arabia wouldn’t allow U.S. jets to fly over their country.
It’s been a strange ceasefire, which Trump himself still insists is in place, what with Iran and the U.S. shooting at one another nearly everyday now.
Trump is indeed playing with fire if he lets Israel talk him into restarting full-scale war, which is virtually guaranteed to destroy the Gulf’s energy industry and the world economy.
Meanwhile they are still shooting at each other in Ukraine in a war that Russian political analyst Sergei Karaganov says is linked to Iran: the European theater and the Middle East theater in a new world war. A war in which Trump plays with the flames of a potential nuclear conflict (which Karaganov says Russia must prepare for.
The end of the last world war was celebrated in Moscow today. The question is, Whose Victory Day was it? Is it only Russia’s? Where are its allies that helped the Soviet Union defeat Nazi Germany? How does Russia view Germany today?
The Red Square parade went off without incident after Zelensky had said the Russians “fear drones may buzz over Red Square,” which Russia understandably interpreted as “aggressive and threatening.”
From the Kiev Post on Friday:
“President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree excluding Moscow’s Red Square from Ukraine’s target list during the Victory Day parade. The move is framed as a humanitarian step linked to ongoing negotiations, including a prisoner exchange and temporary ceasefire. … The decree, published on Friday, authorizes the parade to take place in the Russian capital and designates a specific geographic area around Red Square as off limits for Ukrainian during the event. The temporary restriction applies during the parade timeframe, beginning at 10 a.m. Kyiv time, and outlines exact coordinates covering the Red Square area.” [Emphasis added.]
Trump then got into the act announcing a three-day ceasefire. But what role did he play in it?
Meanwhile, European Council President António Costa said he thought there was “potential” for the EU to negotiate with Moscow to end the war, and said Zelensky agreed.
“I’m talking with the [EU’s] 27 national leaders to see the best way to organise ourselves and to identify what we need effectively to discuss with Russia when it comes to the right moment to do this,” he told the Financial Times on Thursday.
“We cannot change the geography. We are in Europe, we are neighbours of Russia, and of course we need to talk with them about the future of the security architecture of Europe,” he added.
Is this a real diplomatic opening, to even mention the security architecture of Europe, or another illusion?
Description:
The U.S. is holding off Israeli pressure to restart the shooting war against Iran for now and is turning instead to economic warfare. But how long can that last?
