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Press TV interviewed me and Clive Menzies on last night’s News Review. Below is a transcript.
Press TV: It’s a pleasure to have you. Thanks for your patience. Joining us from Morocco, Kevin Barrett. I put the first question about the International Energy Agency’s report just earlier today. A set of oil inventories, Dr. Barrett, plunged by 2.2 million barrels a day last month. It said shipping traffic through Hormuz has slowed with just 16 vessels transiting the Strait over the course of Monday and Tuesday, according to Kepler data. He said that that’s down from about 130 to 140 daily transits before the war, meaning before February 27th. Your initial thoughts, please.
Kevin Barrett: Well, this shows that Iran has managed to get control over the Strait, and that wouldn’t have happened if Trump hadn’t allowed Netanyahu to talk him into launching this disastrous war. He did a dastardly sneak attack on Iran under cover of negotiations, murdering the Supreme leader of Iran, members of his family, other leaders, and all sorts of other people, including lots of civilians, notably the 168 people killed at the school in Minab. So this war was launched under false pretenses, under the false notion that it was supposed to be over within a few days with a new pro-Israel leadership that would take orders from Trump and Netanyahu. And this was all a fantasy.
And that has forced Iran to basically go nuclear, not with a literal nuclear weapon, but with the equivalent, by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is what all of us predicted would happen if the Americans were ever stupid enough to actually attack Iran.
And so it’s clear, the handwriting is on the wall. Trump and his team are desperate. Their desperation is coming through in everything they do, whether it’s Trump screaming out obscene tirades on Twitter one day and then retracting them and saying that we’re on the edge of a peace breakthrough. The American leadership is showing that they’re completely discombobulated, confused, afraid, and they have no idea how to get themselves out of this predicament that they’ve gotten themselves into. Whereas Iran, which has been planning for this for decades, knows exactly what it’s doing. It has the Americans over a barrel, as John Mersheimer said in his video today.
The writing’s on the wall. The Americans are just going to have to accept that they lost, and they’re going to have to allow Iran to dictate the terms, and the terms are absolutely clear: Call off the war, give Iran back its money, pay reparations, and the war has to stop across all fronts, including in Lebanon and Gaza.
If Trump were smart, he would accept that. He would declare peace. He would claim credit for forcing the Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians, forcing them to withdraw to their pre-’67 borders. But he’s not smart enough to figure that out, apparently. So he’s going to keep muddling through and making these kinds of confused, irrational, lashing-out gestures for who knows how long, maybe a few more months, in which case he’s in serious trouble in the November elections.
Press TV: Thank you, Dr. Barrett. Mr. Menzies, the U.S. President today, again—I don’t know if you saw his tweet saying the U.S.—and you’ve seen him repeat this a number of times—the U.S.A. controls the Strait of Hormuz. But obviously that has not been corroborated
Clive Menzies: People like Donald Trump are not in charge. They’re in office but they’re not in charge. They’re responding to the incentives and penalties. And the particular circumstances of their own situation. Trump is a notorious loose cannon who fires off in all directions. But essentially, I don’t think he has a lot of room to manoeuvre, other than to keep this stop-go war going, because that’s what the incentives are providing. I mean, your other guest said what would be sensible, but that has very little to do with what’s unfolding. As he said at the outset, if sense made any relevance for this, then the war wouldn’t start in the first place. So we’re in the throes of this structure shaking itself apart, and the actors, be they Israeli, American, Palestinian, Iranian, or whatever, are having to respond to the situation that arises. And those on the side of Israel, US, UK, Europe, are actually in a far greater state of confusion and control than Iran, which is primarily trying to look after its own interests and not seeking to interfere in other places around the world.
So that’s the difference. You have this meddling out of one’s jurisdiction, which is going on, whilst the the moral high ground, if you like, sits with those who are being attacked, not with those doing the attacking.
Press TV: All right. And Dr. Barrett, U.S. officials—I’m putting pretty much the same question to you. They’ve warned the continued shutdown of this critical waterway could lead to higher oil and gas prices. Despite Donald Trump’s insistence, the U.S. still has control over it. So my question to you, why the lies? Okay, to keep possibly public panic at bay. But that’s usually when you have a plan. That you’re going to implement to get to your objective. Not usually when you tried everything, it hasn’t gotten you the intended results and you’re just lying for the sake of lying.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s sort of like the classic psychological phenomenon of denial, when there’s some terrible problem and people just avert their eyes from it. It’s a very common situation, whether in ordinary life or even in politics. My life has been heavily affected by the denial of the American people over two overwhelmingly important historical events: the coup d’etat that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and then the September 11, 2001 false flag attack that launched the series of disastrous wars in West Asia. And we’re seeing the final one, the one that the Americans are going to permanently lose, playing out right now.
Americans have been in denial about these coups and the fact that their democracy is illusory. And so the leadership is likewise in denial. They imagine that they’re still in their unipolar moment after they took over the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they have the world’s strongest military, they spend more money on the military than the next eight countries combined. And so why can’t they just easily win any war that they choose to jump into? That’s Trump’s attitude. But his narcissism that leads to this kind of denial and lying is actually not just a personal peccadillo, but also a kind of a symbolization and concretization of the state of the American nation. That is, the whole country and its leadership are in denial. Of the fact that they’re on a historical downward trajectory, and that their democratic experiment has largely failed, and has been harmed by these terrible crimes that I mentioned and others as well, that their intervention all over the world is not benign, as they like to pretend, but it’s murderous. They’ve killed well over 50 million people in these interventions since World War II. And so they really can’t accept the terrible reality, the bad side of reality.
And so they lie about it and they spin it and they look the other way. And so I think that’s partly what’s going on. And then also, of course, Trump’s statements seem to have a strong effect on the markets, which he and his friends can take advantage of to make a lot of money. Trump is propping up the markets by lying and saying that he is in control, “we are in control of Hormuz, and we’re winning the war.” This reassures the markets. Maybe it’s the artificial intelligence systems that invest much of the money in the markets these days that are programmed to run on whatever the leadership is saying, no matter how ridiculous or false it is. He’s been able to both make a lot of money personally.
And then there’s a huge bubble right now, the AI bubble and the derivatives bubble. I think the elites in the West are tiptoeing around that and trying to stave it off, and their denial and their lying is one way of trying to do that.
Press TV: Thank you there. And Mr. Menzies, I got this little extract just before the show off, this website, US government website, congress.gov. It said on June 17, 2026, President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pazishyan signed a Memorandum of Understanding, infamously known as the MOU, the Pakistan Media MOU, I know you’re very well aware, declaring The removal of the U.S. naval blockade and Iranian arrangements for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only, with future administration of the strait to be determined by Iran in consultation with Oman and other Persian Gulf states. Now, the MOU was working and Iran’s sovereignty authority was stipulated in it, Clive. So why did the U.S. president put a signature on it and immediately not only uphold the obligations under it, but move to renege on it.
Clive Menzies: Well, as I said, you know, this is the manifestation of psychopathy in action. Basically, the structure under which we live is psychopathic. And it selects for an incentivized psychopath. Because That’s the way the structure operates. So your other guest is perfectly right. We are in the midst of a collapse. And to some extent, a lot of this drama over oil prices is part of the theatre, trying to draw attention from the structural nature of the collapse. You know it’ll be blamed on the oil shop. That’s not a new story. But actually, the collapse that has been underway, arguably since 2008, although it’s been staved off with bank bailouts and huge socialization of what is essentially private debt, what the banks made. So we’ve taken that on. And now the system is premised on people having enough income to be able to afford to buy the goods they produce. That equation no longer works. So the system has no long-term future, and we’re living through the transition. As I’ve said before, this is a subject that requires a lot more understanding to do with the role that technology is playing in allowing us to circumvent institutions to be able to organise ourselves separately from the structures. They are psychopathic, and they are there to extract, control, divide, and kill, basically.
Press TV: Right. And Dr. Barrett, I got this little extract from this kid out of Georgia Tech, and I put it in my lead earlier. I think you joined us after I read the lead, so I’m going to read this part for you. The experts warn the most severe economic consequences from prolonged closure of the Strait, that is, including higher food prices. So I want to put that same question to you, if you would also weigh in on “why the U.S. refusal to abide by this memorandum.” Does it just go back to simple psychosis and the U.S. president and his cronies getting asset gains through the markets because of it? Or is there some other sinister or even logical explanation to this?
Kevin Barrett: Well, I think that there are all sorts of different interests that are able to profit by the current state of things as the world as a whole is heading for disaster. And among those, one that we haven’t mentioned very much so far is the genocidal Zionist entity which created this war in the first place. The state of Israel actually was behind the murder of John F. Kennedy and the false flag attack of 9/11, which was used to hijack the American military to go after those seven countries in five years that General Clark talked about that were all problems for Israel, but not problems for the United States.
And so this is the seventh war. They’re going after that seventh country, and it took them 25 years, not five years. And the Israelis would be perfectly happy to see all kinds of mayhem come out of this. They wouldn’t mind seeing Iran much more devastated and the other side of the Persian Gulf devastated as well, because that would weaken other parties in the region and pave the way for their greater Israel project, which is committing genocide and stealing all the land and property between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers and becoming the de facto global capital. That’s their long-term plan.
And they would love to see the world crushed into a horrible depression. They wouldn’t care if there’s a world war or even a nuclear exchange as long as it doesn’t hit them. And so they’re the ones who are pushing this towards the precipice.
They started it by lying to Trump and telling him that “all you have to do is kill the Iranian leadership and we’ll have our guys in power in a couple of days.” And obviously that didn’t work out, because they were lying. I don’t think even the Israelis weren’t stupid enough to think that was going to happen.
They just knew that once they got the Americans into this, then the Americans would never get out and they could keep pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to make it as destructive as possible. So Israel is an example of one very powerful party that is profiting from this endless cycle of destruction that’s heading us over the cliff.
And then, of course, as we mentioned, Trump and his friends are making money gambling on the markets. The military industrial complex is happy as Trump is throwing the biggest budgets at them in all of history. And so there are various corrupt interest groups that are doing well, even as the general interest is being completely crucified.
And so that’s that’s kind of how it works in these Western liberal secular so-called democracies that are really battles between corrupt psychopathic gangster special interest groups. And I think that has a lot to do with why we’re going in the wrong direction.
We need to change the system in Western countries from these corrupt gangster oligarchies to something a lot more like what you have in Iran, what China has. In both cases, you have a kind of an elite, whether it’s the Confucian elite in China selected by rigorous examinations or the religious elite in Iran selected through a similarly rigorous scholarly process in the seminaries. And when you have that kind of elite steering the ship of state, you’re going to have a much better system, a much less corrupt system than you have when you allow gangster oligarchies to rule the show as they do in the West. So I think that’s partly why things are working out the way they are.
Press TV: Right, and we only have about two minutes left, Mr. Menzies. If I get this last question out to Iran and Oman, are the final stages of etching out a management regime to monitor shipping through the Strait of Hormuz? But the U.S. says it will never accept Iran managing the Strait into the future. Iran says, “hey, I never wanted to, but all that changed on February 28th. That ship has sailed now. There’s going to be a new regime, and we’re never going to go to pre-war status.” Do you see any prospects of optimism on the horizon?
Clive Menzies: I see a lot of reasons to know that the world is transitioning to something much better. Being able to predict anything within this rather chaotic situation is fraught with difficulty. But I think I would like to refer to Israel’s role in this. Because Israel, as we know, was created as a private fiefdom for the families that control money. So it is a tool. It is not the prime mover in this. Similarly, Ukraine has been selected. More recently, Argentina. So there are centers of power that have been, if you like, colonized or taken over by money, which are fomenting all this. They’re funding both sides. I don’t think there’s any salvation in any form of elite hierarchy in terms of rule. The Chinese are similarly compromised, but not to the extent of the West. And Iran is reacting to, in many respects, the structure of money. So nobody is free from the grip of money power and the games that they’re playing. And Israel is probably on the course to self-destruction, but that is irrelevant to those that have a much higher goal, which is essentially control of the world and population reduction.
Press TV: Gentlemen, pleasure to have you both on. Very interesting stuff there for the both of you. Thank you sincerely. Kevin Barrett there, joining us from Saidia Morocco, and also Clyde Menzies joining us out of London. If yours, this brings us to the conclusion of another segment of your Spotlight program. Thank you for tuning in, and goodbye for now.
