Dr. Roy Casagranda provides a clear and sobering look at how the petrodollar system turned global finance into a tool for military control. He effectively strips away political rhetoric to show that modern Middle Eastern history is largely a story of oil and debt.
Install our extension to search inside any video instantly.
Oil, Empire & the Modern Middle East – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the PastAdded:
[music] Thank you all for being here today and it's always lovely to see this familiar [music] faces from past episodes and as well from last year's season and I really hope you guys have a wonderful uh session tonight. Can we please have a big round of applause for Dr. Roy? Thank you so much.
[applause] Hi.
All right. So, this is part two, but just in case, I'm going to pull things back a little bit from where we left off because I kind of rushed the end on the last one. And I want to sort of settle you in the [clears throat] postWorld War II period by starting with World War II.
And I I know I've talked about this before, but I feel like it's just such an important moment historically that uh it's impossible to ignore its impact. So [clears throat] the British realize at the end of the 19th century that oil is the new coal and so they decide that they need to have their own access to oil. If there was ever any doubt, World War II ended the doubt about the power of oil. [clears throat] So, as the war is winding down in Europe and it's clear that the Germans can't win, the Germans do an insane thing and that is attack.
Usually when you're in that situation, you just defend and hold out and hope something happens because attacking always is more expensive than defending and lives and personnel and resources.
So attacking in that moment is pure raw insanity. Makes no sense unless you're the verbach and this is what you do. Because one of the one of the things that was the centerpiece of Prussian military strategy was the following. When you're fighting the enemy, the enemy is always bigger than you because the Prussians were an army without a country. They were they didn't have enough soldiers. They never had enough soldiers. So they had to compensate.
One way to compensate was by to have better soldiers. But the other one was a strategy they picked up [clears throat] from the Ottoman Empire, which was attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, and keep the enemy off balance. Never let them organize, never let them get on balance, and then just keep hitting them. So in December 1944, right, Germany will surrender May 7. So five months before they surrender, they launch this insane large counterattack.
And the thinking is insane. Also, like the goal is doesn't make any sense. The goal is to to punch a hole through Belgium and take punch a hole through the American army in Belgium and split the American and British forces. So the British had forces in the Netherlands along with American soldiers there and then the Americans had the stuff to the south. So you'd split the split them into two forces and then they were going to crush the Netherlands. And what they hoped would happen was that the British and the Americans would see the heavy losses and go, "Ah, we really don't want to fight this war anymore. We'll we'll negotiate with you." And what Germany thought would happen then is they would realize, "Yeah, there's the horrible Soviet Union. you could fight alongside us together against the communists and they that the Americans and the British would literally switch sides. So this is insane.
The Germans had been fighting from June 6th, 1944 when Normandy happened. The Germans had been fighting the British and Canadian and American forces that were fighting their way across France with their second line, second rate equipment, second raid soldiers. They, you know, there was like they had one hand holding back the British, the Canadians, the Americans, and they had everything else fighting the Soviets. So their whole strategy in December was to put everything that they had on a train off the eastern front and run it to the western front and just punch a hole.
So they took their best equipment, their Tiger twos, their Panthers, their SS divisions, and they brought them to Belgium and they punched a hole in the middle of the American army. It was a catastrophe. The American army melted.
It just disintegrated.
Turned out that the best German equipment and the best German soldiers were far superior to everything the United States had. And the United States just couldn't hold up except for in one place. At Baston, the 101st airborne formed a pocket. So the Germans were had completely surrounded them and just started going around them because the resistance, the fighting for the 101st was so so intense. But everything else disintegrated.
It looked like the Germans could get to the English Channel, which was their goal, and cut the Western Allies into these two pockets. Well, one pocket and then the rest the rest of the army. It looked like it was going to happen. That was done.
And then the German military ran out of gas.
And I don't care how good your soldiers are. And I don't get care how good your tanks are. If you don't have gasoline for your tanks, your tanks become really useless.
I mean, they become like little pill boxes, but they're not. That's not what a tank is designed to do. It's designed to be mobile, not a pill box. And once they ran out of gasoline, there was nothing they could do. The the German army just stopped. And it stopped cold in its tracks. Ironically, one of the reasons they ran out so quickly was the Tiger Twos. They were overkill. The United States military couldn't take out the Panthers.
So, the Tiger Twos were unnecessary.
They should have left them on the Russian front because the Russians had tank had high quality tanks. United States had garbage tanks. So, you didn't need the really good Tiger 2s and they were gas guzzlers. So, by bringing the better tanks, they actually ran gasoline a little faster. There's a lesson there, but nobody will ever learn it, right?
Because we're always like, "No, no, go for the quality." But quality sometimes is overkill. You don't need it. In any case, they would have run out of gasoline even if they hadn't brought the Tiger Juice. The reason they would have they ran out of gasoline was because, first of all, United States was bombing Europe into the Stone Age.
For the record, air warfare in World War II proved utterly worthless, except if you are attacking oil assets, oil fields, oil refinery, oil storage, oil transportation.
When you bombed a city like Berlin, it didn't accelerate the war. It slowed the war down. If your goal was to end the war faster, bombing cities is stupid.
That's what we learned in World War II.
August 23rd, 1942, the Vermacht, the Luvafa bombed Stalenrad and then the army invaded. It was a catastrophe.
If they if they wanted to invade the city, they shouldn't have bombed it first. By bombing it, they put debris in the streets so the tanks couldn't get through. And then the Russians could use the debris in the streets to create little fortifications. It was like you had just given them a bunch of building supplies and then there's no roofs in the buildings so you can fire mortars out of the buildings. So this the mortar the mortar guys are protected inside the buildings lobbing mortars on your head.
Like everything about bombing a city if you want to slow if you want to speed up the end of a war is stupid.
A lesson human beings are apparently incapable of learning.
But [clears throat] you go after the oil assets, you can make them run out of oil. And that's exactly what we did. One of our first bombing raids was on the Pesti oil fields. Germany had one oil field. So note to self, if you're going to start a world war, make sure you have ample access to oil fields.
Um, that first raid we lost 25% of our bombers.
They were just blasted out of the sky.
Think about it. I mean, that wasn't that 25% of the crews died cuz a lot of them parachuted out and some of them escaped and some of them were captured. But if I told you there's a one in4 chance you're not coming back because you're going to end up in a P camp or dead, I think that qualifies as a suicide mission.
But that's how important it was to start hitting their oil fields. And that's what we did. So that by the time we got to December 44, they were hosed.
So the next month in the aftermath of this disaster, President Roosevelt meets with the king of Saudi Arabia on a ship in the Suez Canal and they make a deal.
And the deal basically is that the United States and Saudi Arabia will be best friends for all eternity. That's the deal. All the Saudis have to do is keep the oil flowing. Make sure that the United States is never in the situation that Germany was in in December 44. We we realized in that moment we wanted the other guy to be in that situation, not not us. By the way, Germany, one of the reasons why Germany lost the war, there's so many reasons. They they were doomed to lose it from the beginning.
Like it was a dumb war to begin with.
But one of the reasons was they decided to try to capture the Russian oil fields in Cheschna, Dagasan, Grazmi, Azarbajan area. That's where most of the Soviet oil fields were. That's why they do the battle of Stalenrad was to secure the left flank so that the German military could go grab it. The Russians just blew everything up.
So the Germans got there and then they tried to put the equipment back together. Maybe they pulled enough oil out of the ground to compensate for the oil that they spent to get there. So at best they broke even, but then they lost the sixth army, right? Like they didn't break even in any way, shape or form. It was a catastrophe.
And so that set the US mindset because that was the chief lesson the US walked away from in World War II. Not that blowing up cities didn't make sense.
That you don't want to be the guy that runs out of oil. That's that. So everything from that point on the the US had in its mind is oil had to be a centerpiece of foreign policy. There was no way around it. One of the deals that was made with the Saudis was that all oil transactions on planet earth would be done in US dollars because you got remember the original Saudi Arabia was the United States but the United States is anticipating that Saudi Arabia will start to outproduce it at some point down the road.
Interestingly enough, United States is number one again. Interestingly enough, one of the reasons why the United States wasn't number one for a long time was the thinking in the 70s was, "We'll leave our oil in the ground. We'll buy from you. You'll run out. We'll still have oil in the ground." But then subsequent generations of leaders went, "No, let's pump it all out of the ground now. We don't care about the future.
We'll just burn it." And so that's why we're number one is we're pumping it out of ground as fast as we can and we'll run out before everybody else does.
Well, actually probably the Russians will run out first, then we'll run out.
But the Gulf will still have plenty. So, right, that's a fail to remember the lesson of December 44. But it's okay.
One of the cool things about history is every generation completely forgets all the lessons. And then we'll do the same mistakes over and over and over again.
And then you're like, "What happened? I thought we had this figured out." One of my favorite moments was in 2009.
In 2009, Allan Greenspan ended up in front of Congress, and he was asked, "How did the 2008 economic downfall take place?"
And Alan Greenspan said, "I don't know.
we deregulated the economy and and it was like that that's it. You just gave the answer. By deregulating the economy, you triggered the 2008 collapse. And he said, "Nobody could have seen this coming." And it was like no. Every lesson that the Great Depression taught us said you had to regulate the economy to avoid depressions. Everybody should have seen this coming. He was alive during the depression. You would think there would be like some kind of visceral memory, but it's not because it's like we have amnesia because we want to believe something more than what the evidence points to.
That that's what's important to us.
Anyway, so [clears throat] 1946, Syria gets its independence from France.
It has a fledgling democracy.
It elects a man named Shukri al- Kawati and Syria's off to a good start. Things are looking promising for Syria. It's got a robust economy. It came out of World War II and out of the French Empire in in decent shape, highly educated population.
You know that like the future was good.
Three years into independence, the CIA overthrows Shukri al Kawati and Akur deta. Over the course of the next five years, Syria has six governments because they're doing coup after coup after coup.
By the way, the I I said this last time, I couldn't remember the guy's name, but I remembered on the way home. Miles Copelan, the musician, was the CIA operative who overthrew the government.
Uh, I think if I remember correctly, two of his sons are musicians. One of them is the drummer for for Sting. So, uh, for the police, which is like so weird.
Your dad's probably a war criminal, but he's a fantastic musician, so we can forget about it.
[clears throat] Anyway, another twist. Miles Copelan ended up becoming friends with Gumlab Daser.
So, he overthrows the Syrian government.
is like, "Hey, uh, you want to be friends?" And offic's like, "Sure."
So, Syria plunges into chaos.
Four years later, the CIA launches another coup d'eta. And this is actually essentially where we left off last time.
I I talked a little bit after this, but and it's in Iran. And this guy, the the guy that leads that coup d'eta, of course, is Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Kermit Roosevelt attempts a coup d'eta. It fails and then he and then he comes back after getting advice from Norman Schwarz senior. The cool thing about US history is you just need to memorize a few names because they keep repeating because everything's hereditary.
But we pretend it's a meritocracy, which is hilarious. Um, and then we point at the hereditary societies and go, "That's so wrong. Even Hollywood is hereditary."
Like your favorite actor or actress, look them up. I bet their parents were in Hollywood. Like that everything is hereditary. The professorships are hereditary.
[clears throat] Everything. It's hilarious.
So um Kermit Roosevelt pulls off this coup d'eta overthrows Mustad right after what happened in 1952. There was a revolution in Egypt. Okay. To understand the 1952 revolution though, I got to I got to pull you back to something we talked about last time, but I'm going to I want to flesh it out a little bit more.
In 1919, Egyptian revolutionaries met with Irish revolutionaries and Indian revolutionaries with the goal of launching three rebellions against the British Empire at the same exact moment.
The thinking was if you did that, the British couldn't manage all three. They they'd probably lose one one of the three would break away for for sure almost. Maybe you'd get lucky and get two. Nobody believed you'd get all three. But also something to think about, the Indian activists who were involved in this almost certainly knew that the British would die before they'd let India go because India was the heart of the British Empire. Not not England, it's India, right? The heart of the Spanish Empire wasn't Spain, it was Mexico.
The heart of the British Empire was India. So if the if the British had to sacrifice something, it was going to be Egypt and it was going to be Ireland and they were going to hold on to India.
What ended up happening is hundreds of people die in Madan Tahir in Cairo fighting the British. The British rolled out with tanks and they're shooting people with machine guns from the tanks.
The people fought back. Hundreds of Brits die. Like this isn't like, you know, this peaceful protest. This was a violent event. Ireland, same thing.
violence. The British are killing. The Irish are killing back. It's brutal. In India, there's also violence, but then Gandhi says, "No, I don't want the violence." And goes on a fast to protest against the violence. And in the end, the British realize this is it. We can keep India because Gandhi is going to kill the revolution there, and we'll just let Ireland and Egypt go.
But not totally, right? Because the that's the cool thing. When the British surrender, they always they always leave a hook in you. It's never complete.
So when [clears throat] the United when the British surrendered to the United States in 1783, it was on the condition that a the United States never ever ally or trade with an enemy of the British. So once France and Britain went to war, United States had to cut off all ties with France, economic and political. And B, that United States would stay in the British Empire economically. So British business interests could go to the United States and operate as if they were still part still part of the United States.
To this day, the British are still the number one investor in the United States because why why would you leave the empire?
The United States never did. Right? By the way, did you see King Charles II's speech? It was fantastic. I was blown away. It was awesome. Um, so [clears throat] the Irish get to go, but without Olter.
So it's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland because the British keep a piece of Ireland. Egypt gets to go, not completely. It'll still be within the British sphere of influence, but without the Suez Canal because, right, the British need the Suez Canal to get to India quickly. I mean it you you you send empty ships to India, you fill it up with wealth, you bring it back to England, you dump it out. It's nice to go through the Suez Canal both ways. Then you send an empty ship back to India, fill it with wealth, bring it back, dump it out.
Hasn't it ever struck you as odd how rich England is? There's no reason on earth for it to be this rich.
Every English person should thank India every day. Just like, thank you. SP, we are so enjoying your wealth. Thank you so much. So in [clears throat] 1919, when you're if you're going to do a revolution, you really want an ideology.
You need something to back it up. So for the record, I'm on the record as revolutions don't succeed. So just to be clear, I'm not endorsing revolution. And I'm just giving you the pathway for how you can fail miserably cuz name one. Name a revolution that made the world a better place afterwards. Even the American Revolution you can't point to because in the end all we did was change who plundered the United States. Instead of it being London, it's Washington DC. So it's like that's not actually better. French Revolution almost almost. But then Napoleon derailed it. If you were a communist, you could say the So, oh, then there's Stalin. Well, oh, well, bad. Because I really want revolutions to work. Just they don't. There's no point in holding on to something that's a bad tool, right? If I have a broken hammer, I probably shouldn't keep using it. But we will. So, anyway, because we don't learn from our history, um, [clears throat] you need an ideology. Here's why. If you're going to ask a group of people to go into a dangerous situation, they need something to rally around, something to make their possible death or the violence they might possibly unleash make sense. So in 1919 in Egypt, an ideology did form and that ideology was panarab secular socialism.
Now, at the in the beginning, the core of the guys who were making this ideology were actually Coptic Egyptians.
But of course, it very quickly became an inclusive thing. But the reason I needed to point out the Coptic Egyptians is because they had an incentive in making it secular and pan-Arab.
They [clears throat] clearly read James Madison's Federalist paper number 10.
So, here's what they were thinking.
First of all, the goal wasn't to create something like the United States. It was to create something like the European Union. The goal was to create a confederacy of Arab states, not a union of Arab states. Obviously, that got changed and I'm going to show you how. But in the beginning, that was the goal. The thinking went if you brought if you had a state like just do Egypt since that's what it was at the time. was 25% Christian, like 3% Jewish, and the rest were mostly Sunni.
If you had a state like that, the Sunni are the overwhelming majority. So, you could get into a situation where you have majority tyranny over the minorities.
Also, there's a Nubian population and a tiny Berber population. So, you could get in a situation where the Arabs tyrannize the Nubians and the Berbers because once you're a majority, there's literally nothing to stop you from doing that.
So [clears throat] the way to fix that, the thinking went in 1919 was make it so that everybody was a minority.
If you had a state that included Moratana and Morocco and Chad and Sudan and the Gulf States and Iraq and Syria and Palestine, then there'd be no majority. Egyptians would be the largest major minority at 25%.
But they'd still be a minority and only 25%. And then it was religiously diverse. There was a significant Jewish population, right?
Coptic Orthodox, Christians, Marinites, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Armenian Orthodox, like you name it. Like everything you could think of. There were Circasians and Georgians and Italians and English and French. Like it was this incredibly diverse place in 1919. And the thinking went if you could make it as diverse as possible and there was no majority you could have you would never have a situation where you had majority attorney because people would be competing with each other too much for that to set it and then you wanted to make sure it was secular not just because if you're a Christian you're worried about Muslims tyrannizing over you because when you think about it that's not what the Islamic Republic does. The Islamic Republic has rules for Christians and Jews and and and Muslims right? So that's not the problem. The problem was fear that if you made some a state that had religion mixed in it, then the state would tell you how to worship. The state would shape how your religion was supposed to look. And the fear was when has the state ever had the interests of the people totally at heart.
Every state on earth has a moment where it has conflict with its people. If you're a good state, those moments happen very rarely and you you fix them by changing policy. You adapt. You figure out a way to put happiness in front of other things like greed, right?
I think we can all think of at least an example of this. But every state is going to have a point where its interest doesn't necessarily match the interest of the people. So how do you safeguard against that? And the thinking was we got to have a secular state. They stay out of religion and we'll let the imams and the priests and the rabbis figure out the religion.
But the third part was well I need to go back to the panarabism. So I didn't really cover that yet. I I kind of did, but I didn't I didn't go into another piece of it. Um, but I'll go to I'll go back to a second. But the third part was socialism. And the belief was that capitalism, which was inherently intertwined with imperialism, was all about plundering the wealth of the working class, plundering the wealth of foreigners. So the only real solution in their mind was to push back against that and go for socialism. For the record, not communism. They were very clear.
They were socialists, not communists.
Right? Sweden is socialist.
When you really boil it down, so is Germany and Austria and the Netherlands, they're socialist capitalist hybrid states. Um, what we think of as the Western European democracies are all socialist capitalist hybrid states.
So, Canada fits in that model. New Zealand, Australia. Um, so that's what they were thinking. That's that was their goal. The Soviet Union had already had the revolution. That was 1917. They saw it and they went, "No, not that."
Which is Sweden. That's that's what we want to do. Okay. I said I would go back to the panerism. So there there's a there's a piece that confuses people here and it's the word national nationalism, national liberation.
Just because you want national liberation doesn't mean you're a nationalist. They're not the same thing.
Nationalism is the belief that your nation is superior to all other nations in the universe. In other words, all other nations in the universe are inferior to yours.
Right? So if I say I'm a nationalist and I I'll pick one of my nationalities. I have too many to ever be an I have to be an internationalist. like I would have to hate myself. So, I'll just go with my Finnish ancestors. So, if I if I say I'm a Finnish nationalist, it means I think Swedes are subhuman and Arabs and Nigerians are also subhuman and so are Mexicans and Canadians, right? Because that's what nationalism believes. Bel you believe your nation is better than everybody else.
If you're fighting for national liberation, that doesn't necessarily mean you're a nationalist. You could still be an internationalist. It's just you don't want your people to be oppressed in an empire.
When those guys were coming up with this pan-Arab secular socialism, they weren't coming at it as nationalists.
They didn't want anything to do with nationalism. They didn't think they were better than anybody else. They here's what they thought. They believed that Arabs would always be the victims of imperialism as long as Arabs were divided against each other. And the only way to fix that was to create some kind of confederate system just like Europe will do decades later. They were before Europe in their thinking. Right? The EEC isn't created until after World War II.
So these guys are thinking ahead of Europe. One of the reasons Europe did this was so that Europe didn't become a victim or would at least have the means to resist US and Russian imperialism.
at least economically if not militarily, right? Because Europe suddenly realized, "Oh, wow.
I think we just got conquered in the east by the Soviet Union and conquered in the west by the United States. Uh, how do we navigate this?" And then they went, "What if we work together instead of murdering each other?" And then, "Oh, that's weird."
And the next thing you know, Italy, Luxmbourg, Belgium, Netherlands, France, and Germany are like, "Hey, let's talk.
Let's start hanging out more." And of course, the original thing was a deal on iron and coal. But as time went by, they evolved into something spectacular because even if you think the E the EEC, which turned into EC, which turned into the EU, hasn't fully lived up to its the its promise, it came way closer than I think most people expected it to.
So that [clears throat] ideology is planted like a seed in 1919, but it doesn't really go anywhere. The closest that anybody came to pulling it off was there was an Arabian kingdom that included the Hijazz, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Its capital was in Damashk. Its king was Fil, the Hasheite king. And in 1920, the French invaded. There was one battle and that kingdom disintegrated and it was over. It lasted two years. It was the result of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire that the British armed and then undermined because the British didn't want that state to exist because the British wanted to fulfill Richard the Lionheart's dream of a crusader occupation of Palestine.
And they wanted the oil in Iraq because Sykes Pico when they were originally doing this, Britain was going to get southern Iran. They knew it had oil.
They knew Iraq had oil. The French were going to get Iraq. Britain was going to get southern Iran. But to get southern Iran, divide and conquer. The Russians had to get northern Iran because the British didn't think they could take Iran by itself. Well, the Russians had a communist revolution and said, "We hate imperialism. We want nothing to do with this." So that meant the British couldn't invade Iran. So they went to the French and said, "Sorry, Iraq is ours. We need the oil more than you."
And the French were like, "Wait, what?
No, we Anyway, oh well, it's nice to be number one. You get to push everybody else around."
[clears throat] By the way, the British then said to Fa, "I hear you're unemployed. You want to be king of Iraq?"
And he went, "Okay."
[clears throat] So, all right. I've laid this out. 1952 then there's a popular uprising against the monarchy in Egypt and that turns into a stalemate and eventually the military steps in.
And the military ends the stalemate and what ends up happening is four colonels who met each other in the Sudan [clears throat] who became really good friends. Mohiden, Abdul Kimar, Sadat, Naser, you should know at least two of those names. Um, ended up sort of taking over Egypt, but they were like, we're colonels, really need a general. And so, um, they got a general named Muhammad Najib to be to become the first ruler after Farukq and the royal family were kicked out of Egypt.
Uh for one of the fun things I keep hearing people say is Muhammad Najib was the first black ruler of a white country. Uh so Muhammad Najib's mother was Sudanese and he was a very dark man in the United States. He would definitely be identified as black, but I don't I don't think Egyptians would be identified as white. Like if they were, oh, is that a white person? I don't I'm thinking he was the first black president of a brown country. This just just so we're clear. Um, it's in US race law, Arabs are white. That way you can not get the benefits for being a minority but still get discriminated against that you get the best of both worlds, right? And then because everybody aspires to white, you're like, "Did you hear that, hun? We're white."
And you get so excited. It's welcome.
[clears throat] And then you go to a Middle East studies department in a university and it's 100% South Asian. You're like, "Wait, there's nobody from the Middle East in this."
Yeah, well, South Asians are Asian. We can check it off. Yeah, but there's like no Arabs, Turks, or Persians in this department. Yeah, it's okay. What?
India, Egypt, it's the same.
You can't tell them apart. And one of the reasons was in the 80s when it was really popular to make Arab-hating movies where Arabs were always terrorists, Arab actors in Hollywood were really reluctant to take those roles. But Indian actors were a lot less reluctant. So there's all these Indians running around dressed as Arab terrorists. And then Americans were like, "Oh, that's what they look like.
Now I know whom to hate."
Sometimes you should be careful with the roles you accept in Hollywood.
I'm just [clears throat] saying.
[laughter] So, [clears throat] in 1952, Egypt has a problem. It's just had a revolution. The military is in control.
The monarchies ended. Now, what? Now, what do you do? Like, they needed a plan. The CIA came to the rescue. They brought bags of money, walked into Muhammad Najib's office and set them down and said, "We'd like to buy you."
And Muhammad Najib went, "How much?"
You know, that's that's enough. Consider me purchased.
Naser found out. And Muhammad Najib disappears.
And if you ever been to Zamalik or to Cairo, there's this really beautiful tower on Zamalik that's shaped like a lotus. That's what Naser did with the money. He built a TV and radio tower out of that CIA money. Uh he didn't keep it.
So I I always thought that was lovely.
There's a neat rotating restaurant in the top. I've been in it in 1975 and in 2023 and I hope to go again sometime. Uh it's [clears throat] no it's totally iconic CIA money. It's well spent finally. See the CIA isn't all bad. They did one thing right. You know like they they didn't predict the fall of Soviet Union.
Like how did you not see this coming?
What were you doing? They didn't predict the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Like, whoa, what was happening?
Follow the Berlin wall. They didn't see that coming. Like, are you guys do you have any purpose, any use? Oh, you so chaos. I understand the role of CIA.
So, it's 53. Nasser has basically taken out the president of Egypt and he goes, I guess I'm it. I'm in charge. and they spend the next three years still trying to figure out what to do. Finally in 56 they come up with a plan. They create a constitution and they they announce it and they launch it to the world. They pick up the secular panab socialist agenda and decide that's going to be Egypt's cause. By the way, it goes way past that. Nasser also decides his cause is going to be freeing all of Africa from British, French, and from the Belgians, from Spain, anybody who had a colony in Africa. And 2020, right, hindsight is 2020, he spent way too much of Egypt's wealth doing this, and it had a long-term consequence of of actually hurting Egypt's economy.
Um, also it was a bad investment. Not because Africa is a bad investment. Ask the Chinese. Africa is a fantastic investment. It's because I'll give you an example. Egypt spent a lot of money helping the Belgians. Sorry, helping the Congolese kick the Belgians out. Uh, the Belgians are of course genocidal maniacs who killed 5 million plus congalles in their psychotic invasion of of Belgian Congo. So, Egypt poured money into this and they they succeeded. The Democratic Republic of Congo was born. Uh, Patrice Leumba ends up in a position of power.
And if you know anything about Patrice Leumba, there's one thing. He had promised like he might have been the real thing. I think it was nine months into his time in office, the CIA killed him. And so next thing you know, you have Mobuta Cesco and he just lets the French plunder Democratic Republic of Congo. He renames it Zire and it becomes this awful tyranny that ends in disaster and everybody's sad, right? And then years later uh Lauren Kabila has to do a revolution to overthrow mutes and they re they change the name back to Democratic Republic of Congo. But you can see the condition the Democratic Republic of Congo is in is today. It's the consequence of this constant overthrowing governments and not caring about the people always thinking about how can I plunder the the raw materials in this place.
So [clears throat] Egypt sets off on this course shortly after Eisenhower was elected president.
For Eisenhower, this becomes a moment of uhoh, I don't like this. First of all, it's the United States. They hate socialism. The workers exist to be plundered, not not to be happy, not not to have healthcare, not to not to be fulfilled. So having the Arab world go socialist like Western Europe was doing was not something he wanted to see happen. But his biggest fear was that if the Arab world did create something like a Confederacy, by the way, the name of the Confederacy was supposed to be United Arab States. I know some of you are thinking, wait, no, I thought it was United Arab Republic.
That's a different thing. I'll talk about it in a second. The original goal was United Arab States because states are fully sovereign entities. So if you have a confederacy, you have states. If you have a federal government, you have provinces. So the United States is a federal government with 50 provinces that call themselves incorrectly states because they're not fully sovereign. The European Union, on the other hand, all the members are fully sovereign and Great Britain proved it. What's the ultimate test of sovereignty? The ability to remove your membership. If you can walk away, you're fully sovereign. So Brexit proved that the members in the European Union are fully sovereign. It is truly a Confederacy, not a federal government. Right? If if the European Union could have said, uh-uh, no, then it was federal. That's the difference. So you're like, well, the United States was meant to be a Confederacy. Well, then what happened in 1861 proved it wasn't [laughter] because 11 states went, "We're leaving."
And the other states went, "No, you're not." And 620,000 dead people later, the argument was resolved because everybody knows might makes right.
Right.
We can fight to prove it.
I don't I don't I wouldn't last anymore and falling apart.
It's okay. It's just old age. So stupid.
Hate old age.
[clears throat] Somebody fix that.
Instead of making new bombers, why don't we like I don't know, figure out a way to inject something to give you back 20 years or something.
Like I And you're like, "No, it'll kill you." Yeah. You know, like if you had a quality of life improvement, but you had to check out at 70 instead of 90. I I'd be open to that. You know what I mean?
Like I'm not sure why go to Oh, nothing works. I'm 90. I can't even get up to kill myself. Um just not sure that's as great as it sounds.
So, it's 1956. Egypt has set itself on this course. The Eisenhower administration is freaking out. The Sudan was a colony of Egypt.
Egypt made the Sudan in an effort in the in the 1800s in an effort to imitate Europe. They were like, "Oh, look what they're doing. That's so cool. Let's do it." And they conquered all the way to Uganda. They actually owned a piece of northern Uganda at one point. They they actually there were Egyptian outposts in Somalia. like Egypt had this grandiose they they were thinking maybe we'll even get Ethiopia like it'll be this big northeast African empire when the British invade in 1882 they tell the Egyptians we're going to rename Sudan and Egypt goes oh what were you thinking Anglo Egyptian Sudan doesn't that have a ring and Egypt goes what does that mean well we're going to co-rule it and the Egyptians Oh, uh, you're like, you're going to pay half the cost. Oh, no, no, no, no. The cost is 100% on you. We're going to get half the benefit. And agent went, wait, what? And so that's that's what that was. So now that Egypt is out from underneath the British Empire, the Sudanis, too. So the Sudin approach Egypt and the the Nasser government and they go, "We don't want to be your colony anymore. We want to go in alone."
And Egypt went, "Okay." And so in 1956, the Sudan breaks breaks away, which when you think about it, if your goal is to bring the Arab states together, that's a setback. In Noster's mind, it wasn't because he's thinking down the road the Sudan will then join the Confederacy because he doesn't think anybody's ready for the Confederacy yet. It's a long-term project and it it'll be you'll join peacefully. Nobody's going to be in by force. So to make this work, you have to let the Sudan go so that they can come back of their own free will later.
So that's that's the plan.
[clears throat] Egypt has a a couple of problems. One, its military is not in great shape in terms of equipment. So, one of the reasons why the army hated King Farooq so much is Farooq bought a bunch of equipment that was that didn't work. So, there were literally rifles in the Egyptian army that didn't shoot. As long as Egypt doesn't go to war, it's no problem. But Egypt went to war in 1948. Well, 1949 when Israel invaded Palestine. When that happened, Egypt was one of the countries because they went peace meal, right?
Nobody, you know, Syria attacked, Jordan attacked, but they all did it at a different time instead of doing it all at the same time. Their goal was to defend the Palestinians, but by doing it peace meal, it allowed the Israelis to fight one at a time. The Egyptians when they went in, there were whole units that surrendered because their rifles didn't shoot and they were they were like, "What was this?"
Uh, the Egyptian military bought Stewarts. So, My uncle that I'm named after was in the United States Army and his job was he drove Stewarts. So I'm not going to trash Stewarts. They were a terrible tank. I'm not going to trash Stewarts because of my own personal connection to them. They were awful. Uh they had very little armor. They had a little itty bitty 37 mm gun on it. In World War II, the nickname for the 37 millimeter was the door knocker because it the shell would hit the other tank and go bang and then alert the other tank to your position and then you that other tank would then turn its turret with its 75 mm gun and blow you up. The Stewart was fast though, so it was small, so it was a little harder to hit. It was fast. It couldn't do anything because it had a 37 millimeter gun and if it got hit, it was finished. Well, Egypt, King Farooq bought a bunch of those from the United States. But here's the tragedy.
The United States didn't repair them.
They just delivered them straight from the battlefield in Europe. So, some of them like the left tread couldn't didn't function correctly, so you could only turn to the left. You couldn't also turn to the right. Or some of them the machine gun didn't work. or some of them the 37 mm gun didn't work. So like the Egyptian mate goes into this war with bad equipment. So Nasser knows because he was one of those Egyptians that ended up surrendering.
Nasser [laughter] knows he can't ignore this really bad problem with Egyptian military.
So he uh starts looking around for equipment. He has another problem and it's is it a problem? He felt it was a problem. Egyptians felt it was a problem. Every year the Nile floods and so every year you get flooding. And the thinking was as long as that happens, Egypt could not fully modernize. That the Nile had to be tamed.
And so Egypt first built the 1905 dam during the British Empire. But the 1905 dam didn't stop the flooding. It didn't control the flooding. It it mitigated the flooding. Egypt still flooded. So, there needed to be something bigger, like a lot bigger. If you ever go to the Swan High Dam, face uh the Mediterranean, face north, look down, and you'll see the 1905 dam. It's still there. It's just this tiny little thing below it. and you go, "Wow, they're not like is one is a hill and the other one is Mount Everest." Like they don't they don't compare. They're not on the same scale.
To build the Swan High Dam though, it was a an incredible economic feat. Uh it was going to require a massive amount of tech that Egypt didn't have, a massive amount of equipment that Egypt didn't have, and somebody to design the thing, and Egypt didn't know how.
So Germany came to the rescue. Brand new bornag again Germany. Germany as in uh Bundes republic Deutseland, the Federal Republic of Germany. Born in 1949 from the ashes of World War II. Uh Israel was one year old by the time and was the second country on earth to recognize West Germany. Is that ain't that cool?
couldn't wait.
Zap. The United States obviously being number one.
Germany had to pay Israel billions of dollars in reparations because the world decided that even though the Holocaust survivors weren't really going to Israel, a lot of them stayed in Europe, some of them ended up in Canada, that Israel would become the representative of the Holocaust survivors, which was a catastrophic mistake because they're not related in any meaningful way.
So Germany now is on the hook to pay Israel this giant paycheck as if somehow money would compensate for the Holocaust. Like it's a the whole idea is just preposterous. It's an insult to humanity. Germany needed to do something way better than give money out to fix to a tone. Right? I I'm part German. I'm saying this as a person who feels tremendous shame for the Holocaust.
A check isn't sufficient.
What's the value of a human life? What's the value of 5.1 to 5.4 million lives?
Like I don't I don't I don't even know how do you.
Anyway, the Germans came to Egypt and they said, "We know you want to build us on high." And Nasser was like, "Yeah, we're ready to design it for you." And Nasser went, "Okay, that's amazing.
Why?" And Germany went, "We just messed you up in a way you have yet to discover. Your lives have just been upended in a way it will take decades for you to recover from. And we feel actually double guilt now cuz we feel guilty for what we just did to the Jews. We feel guilty for what we just did to the Palestinians. But we also feel guilty for what's about to happen to Egypt. So we want to make a design that swan higham. We're the greatest engineers on the planet. You used to be right Egyptians were for thousands of years the greatest engineers on the planet but not in that moment. It was the Germans and they went we'll do it for you. We'll design it for you. So they design it. It's brilliant because if the Germans took into consideration the mass of the stone and and then the fact that the thing would automatically leak because right there's no way to not let it leak and they put all of that into the mathematics like the the design is elegant.
And Egypt went when you break ground and Germany went what? No what? Well, you're going to build it for us, right? Germany goes bankrupt. Our cities are in ashes are in ruins. And we just the only money we have we just gave to Israel. We can't build anything for ourselves, let alone you. You're on your own. Here's the plans. Good luck. So the So Nasser went to Britain and the United States and went, "Will you help us modernize?" And Britain, United States went, "Yeah, we'll we'll do it. We'll fund the Swan Haiden."
So that was the plan.
Then Nasser goes to the British and says, 'I need to buy a military equipment to modernize the Egyptian military because I know half the equipment doesn't work. Britain goes, never under any circumstances will we sell you anything. Because the fear the British had was Nostra would then use it to take the sw the Suez Canal from the British. So the British are like, "Nah, we lost India. That's bad enough, right?" In 47, India finally it's partitioned in an act of vicious cruelty. Sadistic vicious cruelty but it's it's independent now. And it's ironic because India is named after the Indis River and the Indis River is 100% in Pakistan. So the thing India is named after isn't even in India.
It's just fool but brilliant. Divide and conquer. Pit people off who are allies. pit them against each other, then watch them fight and then laugh and laugh and laugh and go, "We have quor and flaunt it."
Ah, anyway, but who does it belong to? Is it Iran, Afghanistan? Like, I wouldn't even know what to do with it. I'm not saying the British should keep it. I'm just saying I don't know who the owner is. I I would It needs to be in some kind of international thing somehow. Not in Europe. Some international thing. Oh, you know what would be cool? I have an idea. Pakistan.
Should they have I have an idea. What if Middle East and South Asian states began to cooperate with each other?
Then you could just like have it take turns. Like it could be two months in Iran, two months in Afghanistan, two months in Pakistan, two months in India.
I don't know what to do with the other four.
Put it on tour. Send it to museums. I don't something. No. Oh, it's ours.
Every national said, okay, so um [clears throat] this one higham is going to be built by whom? Well, that's the British and the and the Americans. Nasser wants weapons.
The British say no. So Nasser goes to the United States to Eisenhower. I want to I want to buy weapons from the United States, but this time I want to buy weapons that work. And Eisenhower goes, what do the British say? And Ner goes, the British said no. Eisenhower said, then then I say no.
Nasser went, "Wait, what? Why?"
Then Nasser asked himself a fantastic question. Who made the best tanks in World War II?
Germany. Well, not in the beginning. The German tanks in the beginning of World War II were awful, but by the end they were the best. By the way, there's a rule of thumb. The side with the better tanks will lose.
Battle of Poland, the Poles actually had slightly better tanks than the Germans.
The Poles lost. Battle of France. The French and the British definitely had better tanks than the Germans. The French lost in the initial invasion of Barbar Roa.
The Germans had 5,000 tanks. The Russians had 22,000 tanks. The Russians had 2,000 tanks better than the 5,000 German tanks.
In a fair match, those 2,000 tanks should have wiped out the 5,000 German tanks. By the end of Barbar Roa, the Germans with their inferior crappy tanks that were se severely outnumbered wiped out the 22,000 Russian tanks and still had like three and a half thousand left to show. The side with the crappy tanks won every Kursk. The Germans lost. They had the better tanks. They had fielded the Panther finally.
It's just this is really really weird.
Isn't that weird? Because we're taught the better technology always wins.
Apparently not.
Apparently some Battle of the Bulge, the guys with the better, but that's cuz they ran out of gas. Um, don't run out of gas. I feel like that should be our the slogan for our planet. Like the United Nations building should just have that right above Cyrus the Great Bill of Rights. just don't run out of gas. It's bad. Especially because you think about it, our farm tractors, what do they use?
It's not like they're electric power.
Um, solar powered farm tractors aren't really a thing yet. Uh, so how are we going to eat? This is going to be an interesting next few months. I'm very excited to see how it rolls out.
[clears throat] Yeah. And because, you know, the Gulf also provides 30% of the world's fertilizer. [laughter] Woo. It's gonna I'm actually looking forward to it. I need to lose some weight. So, uh, this is It's a good thing I have this emergency reserve.
Skinny people are going to really be sad.
[clears throat] I never thought it was useful till now.
The officer goes, I'm going to buy German equipment. Problem, Germany isn't allowed to sell it.
But Czechoslovakia was really weird twist. A lot of the German tanks were actually manufactured in what is today Czecha, the Czech Republic, the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, because checks were really good at building transmissions. And if you make a tank, you want a reliable transmission. Like the checks and the Americans made the best transmissions.
The American tanks were terrible, but they had fantastic reliable transmissions. The Russian tanks were so terrible, the transmissions, that it was standard equipment to have a a sledgehammer inside the T-34s because you as you're trying to shift gears, sometimes it would stick and you would take a sledgehammer as the driver and smash the gear into position like [laughter] But the checks smooth. I recently I'm going to do an ad. I am not paid by this company yet, but they really need to think about me. I recently rented a Scod and uh I loved it. You like But you didn't rent a Lambo, man. That Scod had such fantastic handling. I am I'm actually like, "Wow, why am I buying these stupid expensive cars?" Like German. What? No. Check. They can know how to make transmissions.
Um, isn't owned by Volkswagen?
I Oh, well. So, that there goes that idea. I'm It's still a German car. It's like everything. Have you noticed the Germans have bought up like almost all the manufacturing that isn't chi Chinese or Japanese? Like they even made the mistake of buying Chrysler at one point and then they were like, "Oh." And they just jettisoned it. They just we didn't they just they didn't even like sell it.
They just spun it off like and then Fiat's like, "Oh, is that for sale?
Whatever." [laughter] Why did Fiat buy it? Cuz in the United States, you have to sell your car through a dealership. Chrysler had deals with the dealerships. So now you could sell Fiats through the Chrysler dealership. See, it's not the Italians are stupid. It's genius. How else are you going to get Fiats into the United States marketplace?
Anyway, the Germans were dumb. They thought they could turn Chrysler into something. The Italians just bought it for the dealerships. They knew it was useless.
Italy, they're practical. They know how to function in a Are they third world or first world? I can never tell.
[clears throat] And that's actually how I like it.
Like it's my comfort zone. Like, oh, I get this.
Like you I lived in Germany 5 years.
There were times where I was like, this isn't this isn't me. It's too orderly.
I need a little like I think I would love to visit Japan, but I think I would die if I live there. I think I just h What is happening?
Even the flowers are obeying.
>> [clears throat] >> So Nasser makes a deal with Czechoslovakia to buy these tanks.
Britain loses its mind. You're dealing with the communists. They're evil.
They're on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
And they they're like, "That's it. We're not going to fund this." Swan Higher is like, "Okay, I need to make sure the United States is okay." He goes to Nasser and he's to Eisenhower and he goes, "The British have pulled out, but you're not going to write." And Eisenhower goes, "How can you fund half a dam?"
And Naser's like, "I'll figure it out.
Don't this isn't a thing. We'll figure it out." And N Eisenhower is like, "No, if the Brits are out, we're out."
Now NASA has a real problem. His modernization program has just fallen apart, although he has German military equipment. So, I'm going to do something horrible. Is my son here? 67 there. Now, it'll go viral. He told me if I did that, nobody would ever watch my videos again. So, this is this is a challenge. I want to see if it's true.
I'm that kid that your my mom would tell me, "Don't step in the puddle."
So, he should have figured this out by now. I'm that parent. You don't tell them not to do something because they will definitely do it. Um, so Nasser has a problem. How does he fund the Swan High Dam? And the answer, of course, ironically, is staring him in the face. It's the Suez Canal.
So, the irony is the British are scared he's going to grab the Suez Canal. And they do everything to push him to grab the Suez Canal. All right. And you'd think the Brits would have learned this from their own history. Henry VIII wanted a son.
He's married to Katherine Nadagen. She gives him a daughter, Mary, and that's it. He goes to the Pope and says, "I need an anulment." The Pope is scared this will upset the Spanish. So the pope says no because the pope is worried that the Protestant Reformation will that the he had two Catholic states that were loyal, England and Spain and if he does this that alliance will break up and then he won't have this force to fight against Protestant Reformation. So he says no. So Henry VIII goes Protestant.
The English are scared that Egypt's going to grab the Suez Canal and does everything to and you think, dude, just read your history about Henry VIII. How did you not learn this lesson? Anyway, Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal.
France, Great Britain, and Israel attack. Israel goes first. They paradrop into the Sinai.
There's they had a goal. It's 1956.
The goal was to draw the Egyptian army into the Sinai because the British and the French who had been talking to the Israelis were planning to attack Bured and then run south along the Suez Canal until they got to Suez, trapping the Egyptian army in the Sinai and then it would be out of supply and obviously you can't supply yourself in the Sinai. So you just wait a few days and the Egyptian army will have to surrender. So Israel parad drops in the Sinai and the Egyptian army doesn't move and the British the French and the Israelis are like wait what? And you know, the Israelis are like dancing.
Come, come, don't you want to fight us?
And Egyptian army just stays there on the west side of the S Canal, not moving. Well, the British and French don't know what to do. So, they go ahead and invade. They they land in Burade.
When they do, Eisenhower shows his true colors.
So, up until now, it looks like Eisenhower is the friend of the British.
They overthrow Mosed to help the British. When Egypt wants weapons, they refuse to sell because the British refuse to sell. When Egypt wants to build this a high dam with help from Britain, United States because the British pull out, United States pulls out. Eisenhower has played this interesting game with with dad.
And now he pulls the rug out from underneath France and Great Britain.
Eisenhower goes to the UN and basically gets the UN to vote that the British and French invasion of Egypt is uh against international law and mobilizes an international peacekeeping force of Norwegians with blue helmets to land in Burai and drive the British and French out of Egypt. And it becomes clear that if this happens and the Norwegians are shooting at the British and the French, then the United States will have to mobilize on the side of the UN against Britain and France.
And the British and the French are like, "What what what just happened? H what are you doing to us? We're in this together. We fought World War II together." And Eisenhower was like, "Yeah, so did the Soviets. Look at how we're treating them.
We're incapable of showing loyalty to anybody. This is about us. We're the hedgemonic superpower.
You are now the dart beneath our feet.
And that he flipped the 1956 war into Britain and France's waterlue.
As the Norwegians are approaching, the Egyptian people in Versail realize if they don't let the British and French out, it could turn into a shooting war.
So, they flood the streets and try to trap the British and the French in the city. And the British and French are falling over each other, trying to dig their way out of the city as fast as they can. And they finally get out before the Norwegians show up. And that's how Noster won the 1956 war, out shooting single shot. That's also how Eisenhower won the 1956 war.
Isn't that cool? Eisenhower had three objectives. One, destroy the British and French empires and then replace the United States with them.
Two, stop the Arabs from unifying in any way, shape, or form. Third, fight communism.
Now, you're like, "Wait a minute.
Shouldn't communism be number one?" Not Visenhower. I'll prove it to you. So, inspired by the events in Egypt, but it took takes a very bad turn. Farooq and his family were allowed to leave Egypt with everything they could carry. So they just grabbed all their gold and jewelry and and left. So it's a peaceful toppling of the monarchy. In 1958 in Iraq, they don't do a peaceful toppling of the monarchy. Uh they capture King Fisel II and they execute him and parts of his government. It's a it's a catastrophe. He's actually drugged through the streets at one point. It's a really brutal overthrow.
It's at a time when things have moved too quickly. So in 1958, in 1955, Shukri al- Kawati, the guy that was overthrown in 1949, the first president of Syria, gets back into power. He approaches Nasser in 1958. They've been talking, but he approaches him in 58 and he tells Nasser, "Syria's finished." And also goes like building a monument, building a freeway, like what are you finished with? He goes, "No, Syria is finished.
We're about to collapse. We're done. The government's finished." I got in after five years of chaos, six years of chaos.
I, you know, one coupet after the other.
I've I'm I've spent the last three years trying to stabilize Syria. I uh we did the defibrill, CPR, mouthto mouth. It's done. And Ner goes, "I I don't understand. What does this mean?" And he goes, "The Communists are going to take over. Syria will be taken over by the Communist Party. There's nothing we can do to stop it."
Well, there's one thing we can do to stop it. And Noster goes, "Tell me."
Because there was one thing Noster was well, there was two things Noster was clear about. He hated fundamentalists and he hated communists.
those were his two two groups that he just despised hated.
So he doesn't want Syria to go communist.
So he goes, "Tell me what is it?" And Alati goes, "You have to annex us." And also goes, "What?"
He goes, "You wanted to make United Arab States." And Naser goes, "No, no, so the plan is United Arab States. We make a Confederacy." You You just told me annex. You didn't tell me Confederacy.
That's United Arab Republic.
That's something that we should do in a hundred years from now when we're ready for it. We're not ready now. I I barely took over Egypt. Like we don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the we we're building a brand new state from scratch kind of. I mean, Egypt didn't delete the old state, the old monarchy.
It kept almost all those institutions intact. It just changed the leadership around. But when you think about what they're trying to do, they're trying to do something new. So this he's like, "I can't do this." And Alati goes, "Okay, we're going to go communist. I'll go into exile. I'm not I'm finished. It's that or get executed by the communists."
So, but yeah, I get it. You're not ready. And Nasser goes, "All right, annexation it is. I don't want Syria to go communist. We'll annex it." And so Nasser becomes in 1958 the president of Syria in addition to being the president of Egypt and he does an awful job. He treats the Syrians as secondclass citizens in their own country. It's a disaster. He becomes paranoid. He's convinced that there are elements within Syria that are planning to do a coup d'eta and break Syria out of the area republic. And because he's so convinced of this, he starts mistreating Syrian leadership and push that he pushes them to do a conspiracy to launch a Gah to pull Syria out of the Republic. Like don't don't fulfill your own bad prophecies.
And within three years, the U is finished. Syria does a military coup and pulls Syria out of the UA. That's it.
Only lasted three years. So when he said, "I'm not ready," he wasn't wrong.
But Syria didn't go communist. So I guess that part of it worked.
So in 58 when Egypt and Syria are emerging, Iraq is having a revolution.
So is Lebanon because Lebanon is now split. It's split between the pronoser faction that wants Lebanon to join the U and the guys who don't. They want to keep Lebanon as a separate place.
And it it's getting heat hot in Lebanon.
Like in 1958, it's moving towards the possibility of there being a civil war.
People are starting to get really nervous about the level of anger and violence being demonstrated.
United States is looking at this situation going, we're losing control. Because in 58 they don't know that Noster is going to mess up the U. They don't realize that he's going to make this big mistake with Syria. What if he pulls this thing off and Iraq does its revolution and joins Egypt and and Lebanon joins Egypt? Once once the Levant is and Iraq are unified with Egypt, like what's to stop them from going further?
This could turn into a snowball, especially if if they prove some successes.
So the United States is trying to figure out how it can undermine that situation from unfolding.
And it's a disaster for another reason.
When they overthrew Mosedc in 53, they went to Iran and they said, "We want you to create an anti-ar anti-Arab unification block." And Iran went, "Okay, cool. But we're not Arab. That would look bad." And he and Isa's like, "You're not Arab? What is it?
Uh, I didn't know.
So then he goes, "What do we should we do?" And and Iran said, "Let's talk to King Fisil, the king of Iraq." And so they create the Baghdad Pact. And it be and it becomes Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. And they're they're going to push back against panarabism. That becomes the anti-panarab block.
And since it's in Iraq and Iraq's an Arab state, they thought, "Okay, this will work. We can we can at least pretend that there's some anti- panarabism in the Arab world."
So the the the US decides that's what we have to do in Iraq now that they're having this revolution. They're going to overthrow Fisel and basically pull Iraq out of the Baghdad pact, which will be awkward because they'll keep the name, but they won't have the city. So how do we do this?
And the answer they came up with was find the elements in Iraq that don't want to join the UR.
And they found two, Abdul Kharim Kasum and the Communist Party of Iraq.
The United States began sending money to the Communist Party. By the way, the Soviet Union was sending money to the Communist Party. So the Soviet Union, United States were funding the Communist Party because the the socialists, most of the socialists were Ba'ists were pro taking Iraq into Arab Republic.
When the dust settles on the revolution, the violence of the revolution, Dawsome ends up as the prime minister and within a very short period of time, he ends up the real power and he doesn't want to join the United Arab Republic. So he he does everything he can to push back against it. The problem is he's surrounded by socialists who want this. He's surrounded by socialists who are pushing Iraq in that direction, including most of his government. So he starts trying to find elements within Iraq that he can ally with. And then he realizes, oh my god, the CIA has been funding the communists. He legalizes the Communist Party and he starts actively working with the Communist Party to because they become the counterweight. The communists were against unifying with the A because the Soviets told them not to. The Soviets wanted Iraq to go into the Soviet sphere of influence in the same way Hungary wasn't and East Germany were in the Soviet sphere of influence. And if you Iraq joined the U, they would now be in this government with Nasser, a fierce anti-communist.
So they end up pushing really hard and they support Gossam. They they're like, "This is our guy." He finds other elements within Iraq. I'm going to I'm oversimplifying.
It's not just the communists. There's also Iraqi nationalists who didn't want to do this. And he he works with anybody and everybody he can. And for the next five years, he keeps Iraq out of the the United Arab Republic. But in 1958, he declares very loudly, "Kuwait belongs to Iraq. I'm taking it." And Eisenhower doesn't waste a beat. He goes, "And if you do, I will drop a nuclear bomb on Baghdad." And Gossam goes, "It's okay.
Uh, we respect the sovereignty of Kuwait and we're happy to leave it alone. Thank you." And so in 1958, we threatened to nuke Baghdad.
Like there was so quick you would think there were steps first like don't do that there'll be a military response on our part oh what will that look like maybe we'll include there you know like you wanted to escalate not go straight for the nukes but that was actually a US tactic at at the end of World War II the Soviets had invaded Iran and the British had invaded Iran they they did fulfill their dream from 41 to 45 the British did with splitting Iran with this with the Russians When the when the British pulled out and the Soviets were pulling out, the Soviets stayed in Iranian Azarbajan and they were like, "We're just going to reunify it with the Azarbajan, a Soviet Socialist Republic." That's a republic in the Soviet Union. And the United States was like, "We will nuke you." And the Russians went, okay, look, it's staying in Iran. This is okay. We don't we we just wanted to take these people who were split and put them into a Nope.
We don't need to. we just don't nuke us.
So this this is a frequent US tactic just for the record.
But the US then takes it one step further and invades Lebanon in 1958.
Eisenhower actually sends in the United States Marine Corps. By the way, one of the units was flying a Confederate flag.
So there is a picture of this Marine unit walking in Beirut in front of like a bakery with this Confederate flag flapping and you're like, I thought they lost the Civil War.
Uh it turns out they have a Marine unit.
So weird. So they go in and the the the goal is it's a peacekeeping mission to prevent a civil war from taking place.
And of course it wasn't. What it was was a show of force to help Iraq not join the United Arab Republic, but also to to signal to Egypt and Syria that if the United Arab Republic had ambition of expanding past Egypt and Syria, there could be a military intervention. And of course, that ends the debate in Lebanon, right? Because now that there's Marines on the ground, like even if you wanted to join the UA, it's clear that's not an option anymore because might makes right.
So that's that's how that dream ended.
That's important for multiple reasons.
One of them is it was really the the first time in the 20th century that the United States spent that kind of focus on the Middle East. Because you have to remember the United States was super hyperfocused on Latin America and East Asia.
That was right. The Monroe Doctrine for Latin America and the Open Door Doctrine for East Asia. That was where we wanted to go. China was a huge market. The British had made so much money selling them opium. We wanted a piece of the pie. We didn't have opium to sell them.
We thought we would sell them, you know, like napkins or something. Uh cars maybe. I don't know. So we we wanted that was our focus with the exception of course when Thomas Jefferson went after the Barry pirates right that this is our really our second major adventure in the Middle East other than World War II because right we invaded Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to drive the Germans out.
For the record, we didn't know if Morocco was going to fight us because officially Morocco was under Vishy French rule and Vishy France was a German ally officially. So, as we're landing, we see these Moroccan soldiers and they're in uh dress uniforms, not combat uniforms, and they're playing music. And so, the American soldiers come ashore and they're like, "You're not going to fight us." And Morocco goes, "Are you kidding? We're the first country on Earth to recognize you." And I in 1777, we're besties. We go way back.
And even even when you did the Bobby pirates thing, we were the first guys to capture your guys, but the first guys to release them. And so that's what happened. But then the United States had to fight in Algeria and Tunisia, but it's it's okay. Not Morocco. Oh, by the way, we ruined our relationship at least briefly with Morocco.
Um we asked if we could have an air base in Morocco. And after we nuke Japan, the king of Morocco told the United States, "We don't want any nukes ever to transit through Morocco. We think that the nuclear bomb is a sin. It's it's against our our beliefs. We want nothing to do with it." And we were like, "Yeah, of course. We'll respect that." Anyway, we had a broken two broken arrow incidences from Morocco. uh a nuclear bomber caught on fire on the runway with a nuclear bomb on board and Morocco went and we're like, "Yeah, you sorry. We did bring a nuke. We won't happen again."
And then uh a few years later, an an a bomber with a nuke on board leaving Morocco lost its payload. And you're like, "What kind of payload?" The nuke.
and it went into the Mediterranean. By the way, we sent divers down to find it.
We never found it. [laughter] It's gone. Uh and Morocco went, "Did you just lose another nuke?" And they were like, "We're the United States.
You can't take our word for it. When was the last time we respected a treaty?"
Uh there was one and it's the Canadian goose hunting treaty.
Uh did I talk about do you guys know the story? Okay, I'll just I have to tell you the story because I opened this can of canned goose. Um Canadian geese were becoming extinct in Canada. So they they fly from Canada to Mexico. So why weren't they named Mexican geese? That feels like that was racist. And then they they fly back from Mexico to Canada, right? Because they like to they like to summer in Canada and winter in Mexico.
The problem is they got to fly over the United States.
Yeah. That country, the country where there's like seven guns for every person. And so like the the poor geese are flying through this barrage of lead.
Like in Colorado, there's a law that says you cannot shoot geese from an airplane.
This is how bad it had gotten.
Apparently, people are like, I'm what's the rifle for? I'm going to shoot geese from the the the window doesn't open. I never saw a law saying I can't shoot geese. Like, what was that? How did this even happen?
It's a lot of suction. [laughter] It's hard to aim with all this wind.
We should stop that. It's bad practice.
So there we signed a treaty with Canada that there would be a limited amount of geese that would be hunted across the United States. So each state would be issued a limited number of Canadian geese hunting licenses. So Arkansas sued because they said, "Dude, do you understand how much of our caloric intake relies on those geese? like we don't produce enough food to feed the population of Arkansas, right? Arkansas is one of the poorer states. So, we shoot deer out of hunting season and we shoot geese. That's what we do. And they sued and it went all the way to United States Supreme Court. And the United States Supreme Court ruled that a treaty was the equivalent of a constitutional amendment for purposes of law. And the state of Arkansas had no basis to to push back against the treaty. So, that that one treaty is sacred there. And and the Canadians have geese again.
I'm I love Canada, so I'm happy for them.
It's great. All right. So, Canada is like the part of the United States, but it reads it like they're literate because they have the same number of guns. I know you're thinking, "Yeah, but I bet they don't." No, they have the same number of guns. So, owning guns doesn't necessarily mean you're going to shoot the place up because that's what Canada proved. Although I guess Australia and New Zealand proved the other is true. So, I don't know. And the United States, maybe Canada is just weird. It's like the exception to every rule.
All right. So, I know I'm running out of time. Uh, but I I want I want to get somewhere before I let you go because that way we don't have to do a part three. Um, because I'm I really probably have to do a part three. I can't do a part three in the immediate future though, so I'll just leave it hanging.
So, um, [clears throat] if you're wondering about what happens to Gossom in 1963, the CIA with help from the Ba Ba'ist kill him.
Uh, the Ba'ists do a coup, they capture him, they try him, and they shoot him to death. Uh the Ba'ists then go through the country killing about 5,000 people like going doortodoor shooting communists and cleaning house so to speak. Iraq plunges into chaos one coup d'eta after the other over the course of the next 13 years I think it is. They end up with like 14 presidents 14 rulers. It's a catastrophe. I'm seeing a pattern.
It ends when Iraq finally gets Saddam Hussein into a position of power in the government.
He's not technically the president, but it doesn't matter. He pu he maneuvers himself into power. Was it 76? He's still not president, but he's strong enough that he stabilizes the Iraqi state. The Syrian chaos because after Syria breaks away from Egypt over the course of the next nine years, it had something like nine governments. In 1970, uh, Havaz al-Assad stabilizes the Syrian state. Now, notice Haval Assad and Saddam Hussein were tyrants. I mean, there's no other way to put it. They they ruled with an iron fist, and they that's what it took to stabilize both states. In 1973, on September 11, the United States overthrew the government of Salvador Yende in Chile and murdered him.
The guy who took over in the aftermath was Pinochett. Pinochett was a ruthless, vicious tyrant. There's a there's a pattern. Whenever you do this, whenever you do these kind of violent governmental changes, you will not end up with a good result on the other side.
In other words, revolutions don't work, but neither do coupetas.
If you want to change a state, if you want to change the government, it really has to be from within. It has to be organic. It has to be something that the people do. And it shouldn't be violent because look what happened with Iraq.
They do the violent thing with Fisil and it doesn't work.
Um, how to spay and neuter Egypt. That became the United States's priority after the Eisenhower administration ended.
[laughter] The realization was that Egypt is going to be the regional superpower. Right? The only thing that even competed with it, the only things that competed with were Iran and Turkey.
So if Egypt is going to continue on this path of secular panel of socialism, how can you stop it if you're United States? And they made a realization.
Israel was the key.
And that's why the 1967 war unfolds the way it does. The goal was to using Blitzkrieg tactics, using the tactics that the Germans used in World War II to take out the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian militaries in the most humiliating route imaginable. Um, there's lots of speculation about the US's involvement. I've never seen any evidence to prove the US involvement, but that doesn't include uh that the United States launched aircraft from aircraft carriers to take out the Egyptian air force on the ground. Uh Egypt had 200 plus airplanes. Not a single one of them got into the air when Israel attacked. They were all taken out on the ground. What in the buildup to that moment, Egypt got itself entangled in Yemen.
There's a lesson there. Ye, for those of you who don't know, Yemen is the Arabic word for Vietnam.
And the Persian word for Vietnam is called Afghanistan.
Just just so we're clear. And so Egypt found itself in its own Vietnamike situation. What happened was North Yemen, South Yemen went communist. It broke away from the British Empire and went communist and became the only Arab state to actually go communist. North Yemen was a monarchy that had a socialist revolution and the socialist revolutionaries were found themselves stuck fighting Israel, the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia which were trying to restore the monarchy. And so uh they called on Egypt to intervene and the Egypt Naser was like yeah and they created the United Arab states finally and Yemen became the only member of the United Arab states with Egypt and you know it was supposed to be a confederacy and the Egyptian military couldn't didn't know who was an enemy and who was a friend and they were running around trying to put out fires and trying to figure out who was where and what and so the Egyptian military was in the Yemen fighting this long prolonged chaotic war that was leading to nowhere with no concept of how victory looked. I mean Yemen history, the Yemenes are tough people. I mean I I going to war with the Yemenes is like a nonsensical proposition.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. Like these are three places you don't invade. Like you can conquer Russia. I know everybody thinks you can't. It's not true. Germans defeated Russia in World War I. Russia surrendered to Germany in World War I.
The Mongols conquered Russia.
The Vikings tore Russia to shreds.
But you can't conquer Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Like, those are just not something you can do. Anyway, while the Egyptian military was in in Yemen, that's when Israel attacked. So, it didn't have most of its military available to fight. Its air force was caught completely offguard. And Nasser actually walked out in the Medanta and he said, "I let you down to the Egyptian people. I don't deserve to be your president." And they raised him up on their shoulders and they carried him around the square and chanted his name despite the shame of this six-day catastrophe. The rest of his presidency, he's kind of a lame duck president. It was very effective tool. Egypt pulls out of Yemen. But he does do one thing that's really interesting. He decides to train his air force. He decides never again on the air force. Here's how he trained the Air Force. He ordered his pilots to fly into Israeli airspace. The Israelis would go to intercept.
And he told, "I will kill you if you surrender. If you land your plane in Israel and you and the Israelis send you back, I will shoot you by firing squad."
So you fight and you come back. That's how he trained the air force.
Isn't that amazing? In 1973, Naser dies in 70. In 1973, Saddat launches the 1973 war. And in many ways, that moment shaped the Middle East, not really because of the war as much as you would think, but because of what Saudi Arabia and what OPEC does, which is stop selling oil to United States.
It causes a massive spike in the price of oil.
It's a completely irrational thing because if Saudi Arabia doesn't sell oil to the United States, United States can just buy it from Venezuela. And the oil that was bought from Venezuela, the guy that was going to buy that Venezuelan oil can just go buy the Saudi oil. It's not like the supply of oil shrank.
It was just a psychological thing that caused the price of oil to spike because it's capitalism and capitalism is this completely irrational doggy dog mania thing, right? The stock market.
It's not an indicator of the health of the government. It's an indicator of how insane the investors are. It's usually a Ponzi scheme. Sometimes it's based on reality. Most of the times it's just a psychological we're doing cocaine and loving it here.
more money [clears throat] and then as soon as everybody realizes it's a bubble because maybe they got sober for a while, it implodes and it crashes out.
And then the it's the middle class investors who are idiots who are c caught holding the bag cuz the rich guys knew to bail before and they ran away and then they buy the stocks when it's cheap again and they do it again and then the middle class is buying later because they don't have the insider information. So they buy high while the rich buy low and it's just a massive middle class transfer thing.
[clears throat] You know it's true. Anyway, the price of oil goes through the roof. All of a sudden all the oil producing countries on the planet have all this cash in US dollars. They don't know what to do with it.
and everybody. Venezuela, Norway, Scotland, Indonesia, not just the Arab states, not just Iran, it's everybody.
And so they're thinking, well, I've got it in US dollars anyway. What place on the planet has the kind of resources that I can bank this money? And they realize it's the US financial districts in New York City. And so they start dumping those dollars, those petro dollars into US banks for savings that'll get interest on them until they figure out what to do with this money.
Well, the US banks realize, oh my god, we can make crazy money loaning off of this money.
And then 1981 rolls along. Reagan is president of the United States. Reagan believes a few weird things.
One, he believed that the the New Testament that Revelations says that the earth will be cleansed in fire. And he believed he was the president who was supposed to trigger a nuclear war with the Soviet Union to cleanse the earth in fire so that Jesus could come back. And James A. Baker III talked him out of this. And that's why you should say a prayer to James A.
Baker III every time you pray because he saved our lives.
I'm serious. You really should just at least once in a while just and and God remember James A. Baker III cuz we love him. Love him. Another thing that Reagan believed was that Americans had turned against war in a way that didn't make sense. That war was good. That Vietnam had soured Americans on war. So he it was his job to bring Americans back into war love and he could do it. And the third thing he believed was that the United States had been corrupted by socialism and that socialism was this atheist plan to destroy America from within.
And what he believed he needed to do was get rid of public schools and food programs and welfare programs and social security. all these horrible things that he believed were socialist by their very nature. So the way he thought he could do that was by ramping up military spending by and cutting taxes to the rich. It would starve the federal government of money and then the American people would see a debt spiraling out of control and the American people would go, "Oh no, we don't want that kind of fiscal irresponsibility." And they would agree to cutting the social programs. They would agree to cutting school funding and school lunch programs and food programs and social security because they wouldn't want to see the United States debt bubble get out of control. What Reagan didn't bank on was the banks now had an infinite supply of cash to loan off of because the banks can't loan off of nothing. They have to have something in savings. There were all these petro dollars.
That $39 trillion US debt is literally funded by all the oil rich countries on the planet. If the oil rich countries on the planet withdrew their money from the banks, the United States couldn't float that debt anymore. The vast majority of that debt is US bankowned. The Chinese are number two now. They don't even have a trillion dollars of the 39 trillion. I know everybody thinks it's foreign. It's not. The Japanese are the largest. They have just over a trillion.
When you put everybody together, it was four and it's like five trillion. The other 34 trillion are US banks floating off of petro dollars.
All because of the 1973 war. The 1973 war. I didn't even tell you anything about it. Egypt beat Israel for two days. The United States took all its tanks, flew them to Israel. They they painted Stars of David on them, put Israeli crews. The Israelis did a counterattack and beat the crap out of Egypt.
Saddat got up in front of Egypt and said, "We proved we can beat Israel.
Nobody can beat the United States." That was that was that wasn't that what was important. What was important? Well, they got the Suez Canal opened up and Egypt got the Sinai back by making a deal with the Israelis because it United States made it clear you make a deal with the Israelis or you don't get the Suez Canal and Sinai back.
But the real thing was the petro dollar thing.
And then of course the Iranian revolution in 1979 did another oil spike.
It's supply and demand. It's capitalism.
But Iran isn't selling the United States.
Who cares? United States can just buy from Norway. Like do you see what I'm saying? Like it's it's just pure psychological overreaction, which is exactly what we do as a species. We are an emotional species. We are almost never rational. We are so emotional. In fact, we could just get rid of the word rationality and we'd be fine. Rationality describes almost none of human behavior. What we do is we rationalize. We make the decision to do something. And then afterwards, we're like, "How am I going to explain this to my wife?
Okay, I bought a red Ferrari.
It's so irrational.
It was on sale. H it's one of a kind. it gets great gas mileage like whatever you just you made the decision and then you rationalized it afterwards because that's what's expected of us that we are rational. The reality is is we're not and that includes our leadership.
So obviously I didn't get to the end of this but I just wanted to leave it with what Reagan does because this is if there was a part three which there won't be. Um maybe there can be. I don't know. Uh if what Reagan does is he goes, "Oh, I figured out how to make Americans like war again. I'm going to fight somebody really small.
Libya."
And so in 1981, Reagan starts to hyperfocus on Libya almost like he's Thomas Jefferson going back in time and fighting the tripletian barbar pirates all over again. And then Israel attacks Lebanon, invades Lebanon for a second time, right? They invaded in 78, then they reinvade in ' 82. And they actually start to enter Beirut. And the whole world's like, whoa, that's crazy. And Reagan goes, I got it. I'm going to do an Eisenhower. I'm going to invade Lebanon. He got away with it. And this will make Americans love war again. And so he tells Israel, "We'll do your dirty work in Lebanon, in Beirut. pull out of Beirut so you don't get the bad PR and we'll make it an international peace program and we'll bring in the British, the French and the Italians. And the Israelis like really cool. So they pull out the British, the French, the Italians, the Americans go in. The Italians send medical staff and they're like treating wounded Palestinians and wounded Lebanese. And Reagan's like, "What are you doing?" And the Italians are like, "We're you said it was a peacekeeping force. We're we're here to help the wounded. And Reagan goes, "No, no, no. I need you to send in a military force." And the Italians go, "No, no.
We're sending in peacekeepers. We're just sending in doctors and nurses.
That's what we're doing." And Reagan throws a temper tantrum. And the Italians went cow. And they pulled out because they didn't want to be part of Reagan's plan.
And then the guys who weren't yet called Hezbollah, but will become Hezbollah, drive two trucks full of explosives. One into the Marine barracks and one into the French barracks and kill it was over 300 Marines, I think, and 150 French. And Reagan goes, "Gada, Grenada is being com taken over by communists." And he takes Marines that were on their way to Lebanon and he reroutes them to Grenada.
Grenada is an island. And I think it had 70,000 people living there. And what happened was Grenada had contracted with a Cuban and East German company to build an airport. Those were the communists.
They were building an airport because Grenada thought our only future is tourism. Let's build an airport to bring tourists in. And we go in and we shoot the place up. And then people go on the streets chanting USA, you and that's where I'm going to stop the conversation.
On that fantastic note, also it's uh one more thing I realized. You can tell a lot about the United States by the helmets. So when we were really hyperfocused on Latin America and Asia, we didn't have helmets in the beginning.
When we finally did adopt helmets, we wore the British Pith helmets. The the one that you associate with the British army in the colonial in World War I and World War II with you know what I'm talking about, right? like it's it's round and it's got the ridge around.
It's kind of flat. And then in World War II, we wore the pot helm, the thing that looked like a pot. And then during the Reagan administration, we switched to the Fritz helm. Fritz as in a German first name. Why? Because it looks so much like the German helmet.
like eerily like the German helmet. It's almost like somebody was like, "What's the best helmet design ever made?" And so, have you seen these Nazi helmets?
Really? And they they are they they do look nice. I will I just I just want to throw it out there. They are very nice helmets.
I mean, if I was going to design a helmet, it would be that helmet. Just I want to say that. But I also want to point out those are the those are the moments when US foreign policy changes dramatically. We change our helmets and in this last stage we switch to the German helmet and it's like oh too eerie. Don't can we go back to the pot helm? Obviously, you don't want to do the British one because that that causes trauma for, you know, like India and Egypt and South Africa and Nigeria and Kenya and Tanzania and Malawi and you see where this is going. All right. Uh, okay. On that note, I'm going to stop. I promise. So, you've been a great audience. Thanks so much for coming.
[applause] Thank you so much Dr. Roy for an excellent session. Thank you everyone for staying here tonight. Inshallah our next session will be on May 14th. It's going to be about the the Roman Empire.
>> Roman Republic.
>> Roman Republic. Sorry.
>> Roman Republic.
>> And I will neither confirm nor deny that I'm coming in costume.
Related Videos
They Said Flight Was Impossible—Then Two Bicycle Mechanics Changed Everything#wrightbrothers
umars997
526 views•2026-05-30
#SeamansAct1915 #MaritimeHistory #LifeAtSea #BoatShitCrazyX #SaferWorkEnvironment
BoatShitCrazyX
859 views•2026-06-01
Black Women Were Banned From White Suffrage Groups
Peoplediduknow
782 views•2026-05-31
A Volcano Created Frankenstein — And Killed Summer for a Year
TheDarkSideOfSmth
389 views•2026-05-29
Born into slavery in Beaufort
RoadsanRoots
613 views•2026-05-31
50.32 Judah And Israel Split / Jeroboam's False Religion - 2 Chronicles ch. 10-11
smyrnachristianchurchkokomo
107 views•2026-05-29
Iran's Secret Society Wrote the Constitution — Then Got Hanged for It
TheShadowLecture
502 views•2026-05-29
How the Qing Dynasty's Imperial Harem System Actually Worked
HiddenTime360
580 views•2026-05-28
