The Tucker Carlson Show
BREAKING: U.S. Resumes Strikes on Iran. A Clean Exit Is Unlikely. Tucker and John Mearsheimer React.
11 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran?
U.S. Central Command announced just moments ago that the American and Israeli militaries are commencing with strikes on Iran. These strikes are reported to be planned to continue for the next several days. In fact, this may well develop into another phase of a full-scale war, a hot war, kinetic war, people dying, bombs dropping, missiles flying.
And on one level, it's not surprising if you haven't been checking in on the progress of our war with Iran. But if you have been sporadically reading headlines about where we are and where this is likely to go, you may be a little bit confused because we were just told the other day that a deal, the president of the United States holds that a deal with Iran is imminent.
Any moment now, we've been hammering out the details. Our crack diplomatic team has been traveling back and forth to Pakistan and we're very, very close. That turns out It's not true. That is, and we counted, the 38th time the president of the United States has announced since March 23rd an imminent deal with Iran.
And like the other 37 times, this one turns out to be completely untrue for whatever reason. And we are back to bombing Iran. And Iran has pledged to respond not by bombing the United States because they can't, but by hitting our allies in the region, the six Gulf states who are our closest allies in the Middle East.
Almost all of them have sustained tremendous damage, in some cases, very severe damage to military and civilian infrastructure. And they'll continue to do that. So this is escalating. The war is back on, despite repeated promises that it was over, that we'd already won. We could play you a lot of clips. No point really in doing that because it's depressing.
We could play you all 38 announcements of an imminent deal. Again, you get the point, but we can't resist playing just one from about six weeks ago. This is the president of the United States saying that victory is already ours and we're all really only hanging around to increase the magnitude of the victory. Here's President Trump.
We've already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin. But we have. We have destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed all of their... If you look at their anti-aircraft equipment, their radar equipment, their leadership, their leadership is destroyed. We've destroyed everything.
So it's hard to know which of those details is accurate or not, because there has been really since February 28th when this began, a total news blackout on the details of this war.
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Chapter 2: Why is there confusion about the U.S. dealing with Iran?
We don't know how many Americans have been killed. We don't know how many have been injured. We don't know how they were killed and injured. We really don't know anything. anything beyond what we read on the internet or in press releases. And in case after case, that has turned out to be untrue.
So there really has never been a war of this magnitude with this little factual coverage supplying the public with usable information about how it's going. So we don't really know We can take some of that at face value. The United States military is formidable. It's huge. It has a budget of over a trillion dollars a year.
So we can bet that tons of Iranian assets have, in fact, been destroyed over the last several months. But fundamentally, we can conclude that Iran has not lost this war. In fact, by the only measure that really matters, Iran is winning the war. What's that measure? Well, of course, it's the ability to control the Persian Gulf.
the eastern aperture of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, now famous. And as of right now, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. It did not when this war began. Now it does. And so what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that President Trump is not a great diplomat. He's overselling this. Like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet in Atlantic City. Oh, it's going to be the best.
And so it's tempting to kind of lay down All of the blame at Trump's feet. And on one level, it is all his fault. He decided to do this. Whatever pressures he faced, it was his decision. And he has oversold America's position in this. And he is in some very real way not good at this. But that would be to minimize the profound nature of this moment.
What we're really learning is not simply that Trump is a spotty commander in chief and certainly no diplomat and obviously not a dealmaker. If you announce a deal 38 times and it doesn't materialize, you're not a dealmaker. What we're beginning to understand, unfortunately, for the rest of us are not just the limits of Trump, but the limits of American power.
That's what we're actually learning, how limited the United States is in what it can do and how it can project its will abroad. And a lot of Americans, particularly if you grew up, came of age over the last 30 years when the United States had really unrivaled power globally, global hegemony.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the U.S.'s military actions in the Middle East?
It was in charge. It was the lone superpower up until maybe 10 years ago. And in the minds of many in Washington, it remains the lone superpower. You imagine that the U.S. government could just kind of affect outcomes by articulating them, say it out loud, and it becomes true because it has the biggest and famously best military in global history.
But despite having that military, despite aircraft carriers that cost $120 billion start to finish to put in the water, the United States military has not been able to open that straight to shipping to the rest of the world to global commodities in months. And there is no promise that we'll be able to. So we have first and foremost learned the limits of American military power.
There are some things we just can't do, and you would have thought we'd be able to do them. Iran, fewer than 100 million people, primitive, backward theocracy that everyone makes fun of, globally reviled as a medieval state. The U.S. military could not force Iran to do one thing, open up a narrow waterway. So our military power has limits that a lot of us didn't appreciate until February 28th.
Our economic power has limits that a lot of people didn't fully understand. It's a little confusing after hearing for decades that the United States has one of the world's largest oil reserves and by far the most sophisticated oil extraction technology. Every oil producing country in the world uses American technology to get the oil out of the ground and the gas.
It's a little confusing to learn, but it's true, it turns out, that despite having energy independence, the United States is not at all energy independent. And gas is now more expensive in your town because of this war. Does that make sense? Well, yeah, if you understand the true nature of the U.S. economy, which is globalized.
The United States economy, like every other economy on the globe, is linked to the rest of the world and dependent on the rest of the world. And so while conceptually the U.S. may have enough oil and gas to meet its own needs, in real life, the price of Brent crude set on the global market determines the price of gasoline in your town.
Which is another way of saying Iran has massive power over the United States economy. Who knew that? We spent decades hearing about how Iran was a military threat somehow. This sanctioned backward country was going to nuke us for reasons that were never exactly clear because they hate our freedoms.
But we thought of Iran, most of us who listen to the media, thought of Iran purely in military terms. Iran is crazy. Iran is heavily armed. Iran is a theocratic Shia country. death cult, and they want to kill us, and we should worry about Iran's military power. Well, here, according to the president, we've eliminated a lot of Iran's military power.
It's Air Force and Navy who knew they had those, but they're gone in any case, according to him. And Iran is still exercising power over the United States, not just because it's slamming our enemies with drones and missiles, but because it is affecting the price of energy in our country thousands of miles away.
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Chapter 4: How does the war in Iran affect the perception of American power?
It is genocide by any definition. is the biggest thing that is happening at this point in history. It is the biggest thing. It is the thing about which the most will be written going forward. How did the rest of the world watch this and do nothing? How did the United States back this? How did the United States become the only country on the planet, other than Israel, to approve of this genocide?
These are questions normal people will ask fairly soon. They're asking them now. And Iran, for all of its many faults as an American, it's painful to admit this, has tried to do something about it.
So long term, that doesn't hurt Iran, whatever their motive for doing that. That does not hurt Iran. That enhances Iran as a state.
So the whole thing, like so much of life, has turned out to be exactly the opposite of what you thought. You initiate a regime change war against Iran. You kill its elderly cleric head of state. You blow up a girl's school. You sink its ships. You decapitate its air force, whatever that was. You unleash the full fury of the largest military in human history on this country.
And in the end, almost inevitably, that country becomes stronger and the countries that attack it become weaker. Again, only in real life do ironies like this exist, but they are everywhere. In fact, that is the story of life. The opposite happens.
Who could have called this? Who could have seen this coming?
Well, certainly, almost no one in Washington saw this coming because they've been talking about this war with Iran and the need to decapitate Iran and do something about Iran. America's biggest problem is Iran and their proxies and the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas.
And they've been yammering on about this at the Brookings Institution and CNN and the Atlantic Council and every place where midwits with overpriced degrees gather to talk about the world that they don't understand, whose languages they don't speak. But whenever they gather in Washington to talk about the world, Iran is at the top of the list of problems we must solve.
And in almost none of these gatherings has anyone piped up to say, well, wait a second, if we do that, the opposite will happen. Iran will become more powerful and will become less powerful. Almost nobody said that in Washington. Literally almost nobody. And if there is somebody, who is that person? There wasn't one. But there was at least one person outside of Washington who said this.
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Chapter 5: What historical context is provided about Germany's role in World Wars?
That was one reason. But the other reason that we both stayed was the German problem. You want to remember that World War I and World War II were both all about Germany. Very important to understand that. We forgot that in the Cold War because the Soviets defeated Germany. Nevertheless, what happens after 1945 is that Germany is cut in half. The Soviets take one side and we take the other side.
And most people don't talk about this in polite company, but we solved the German problem. We cut the country into two parts.
Chapter 6: How did the Cold War affect perceptions of the Soviet Union and Germany?
They occupied the Soviets' one half. We occupied the other half. And although the Cold War was somewhat dangerous, it was altogether... Pretty peaceful as these things go. I mean, we did have the Cuban Missile Crisis and a handful of crises over Berlin, so I don't want to overstate the case. But we never came close to having a serious war in the heart of Europe, and we solved the German problem.
But that's why the Soviets stayed. But what eventually happens is two things. And this leads to the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. Number one, the Soviet economy begins to run aground. It really starts in the mid-1960s and it accelerates in the early 1980s. And of course, Gorbachev comes along and the rest is history. But it's...
It's fundamental flaws in the Soviet economy that eventually brings the Soviet Union down. But the second thing that happens, getting back to what we were talking about before, is that the Soviets understand that occupying Eastern Europe and Central Europe is incredibly expensive. Yes. Right. And the people don't want us there. Right. And it's time to go home.
And once you go home, a good idea would be to stay out.
Yes. So it wasn't a net benefit. It's not like they stripped it of its resources and got rich doing it.
Well, they did strip a lot of resources out of Germany early in the Cold War.
But afterwards, no, it was not. Industrial resources.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from the collapse of great empires?
But I mean, they weren't there for the coal.
No, no, no. It was not economically a net benefit. That's what I'm saying, right? It's not a win. Yeah, yeah. By the way, if you just think about the collapse of the great empires, you know, we read about the great empires like the British Empire, the Belgian Empire, the French Empire, the Dutch Empire, and so forth and so on. They've all gone away, okay?
And the question you want to ask yourself is why did they all go away? Yes. There are two reasons that are directly related to what we're talking about. Number one is nationalism. These people in places like India and the Congo, you name it. Yes. And this was true of the United States back in the day. Of course. telling them how their politics should be run.
They wanted to be independent nation states.
Chapter 8: How is the current geopolitical landscape influenced by nationalism and economic factors?
What I'm telling you is that nationalism, this incredibly powerful force, was the number one reason for bringing down these empires. The second reason was that the economic benefits, once the Industrial Revolution comes, melt away, right? Before the Industrial Revolution, we're in a world where commerce is of great importance.
You can exploit these colonies and they make a lot of sense economically. But by the 20th century, by the time the Industrial Revolution is in full swing, these empires are basically an albatross around your neck. India is an albatross around Britain's neck, in my opinion. And you'll notice, just going to who the powerful countries are in the 20th century—
Germany, the United States, and Russia slash the Soviet Union. The only one that has an empire is Germany, and it's a tiny empire that it acquires in Africa in the late 1800s.
Yeah, tiny, tiny, Namibia.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're not a major imperial power. So the three behemoths on the planet, Soviet Union, United States, and Germany, do not have empires. Britain, France, Belgium, They have empires. And what good are those empires? The economic benefits are small.
It's really the aesthetic benefits that they were after. They fall in love. They're sentimental about their empires. Absolutely. But they're not justified by the math.
Yeah, they're not justified by the math. And then go back to the nationalism part of the story, right? You know, when you occupy these places, you run into resistance. Yeah. Vietnam, French experience in Vietnam, American experience in Vietnam. Algeria. Afghanistan, Algeria. Right. That's exactly what you run into. You know, I've... In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan...
Everybody said, this is the end of the world. The Soviets are on the march. We're in deep trouble, and we have to do something to counter the Soviets. I said at the time, this is dead wrong. This is wonderful news for us.
If you're arms racing with the Soviets, if you're engaged in a security competition with the Soviets, what you want them to do is jump into a place like Afghanistan, just like they should have been happy that we went into Vietnam. Right? You're jumping into a quagmire. You said that out loud in 79? I said it out loud, but there was no internet at the time. There was no Tucker Carlson.
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