Tucker Carlson warns the U.S. is “tethered” to Israel in the Iran war in a monologue on Wednesday, calling for negotiations before U.S. leverage declines. Carlson said the decision “for the United States to be yoked to a foreign nation” to go to war with Iran will go down as “one of the craziest things this country’s ever done.”

TUCKER CARLSON: And the purpose of the American government is to serve the American people, not in some abstract way in their war against radical Islam, but in a concrete way like nicer airports and no crime and decent schools. The things that any citizen should expect from his government. And if you’re totally ignoring all of those on behalf of another country, it’s just not acceptable. And it’s also not sustainable. This country has not, at least since the Second World War, handed any measure of operational control in a wartime theater to a foreign power. And why is that? Not because we don’t have allies or people we like, or people we share common goals with. We’ve got a lot of those, or we had a lot of those. But because no two countries’ interests are identical. Even identical twins, if you spend enough time around them, are different in ways you can perceive. No two anything are exactly the same. And nations, which are complicated, don’t even have that many points of intersection in their interests. There’s a lot that separates the national interests of two separate countries. So if you enter a war co-joined with another country, you’re going to reach a point very soon where your interests diverge from those of your partner. And in a war, the stakes are very, very high. So you would never do that, ever. If you cared about your country, why would you do that? And of all the things that historians will reveal in the aftermath of this war, the one that some of us should be paying the closest attention to is who made that decision? Who decided it was okay for the United States to be yoked to a foreign nation in the middle of a war with a country of 92 million people? That is one of the craziest things this country’s ever done, and the people who decided to do it should be exposed and they should be penalized. Because that single decision will cost, unfortunately, this is likely to be true, more American lives. It may extend this far past a point where the American interest is served. And by the way, we are approaching the point at which we get no more returns from being engaged in this war. If you know that you’re going to negotiate your way out of something in the end, in other words, if you’re not going to destroy each other with nuclear weapons, demand total abject surrender, but if you think there’s even a possibility you’re going to have to negotiate your way out of something, you want to do it at the apogee of your power, at your most powerful point. You don’t want to do it when your power is obviously decreasing, like say when you start to run out of weapons because you sent them all to Ukraine because Ben Shapiro demanded you do that. And why wouldn’t you want to negotiate when your weakness is obvious? Because you’ll get worse terms. The United States has a true national interest in controlling or having a say in the flow of energy out of the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz. If you could narrow down our interest to just one, we have many interests, but just one, it’s that. It’s very important for the United States to have some say in that. And if we negotiate our way out when we’re weaker rather than stronger, we will have less say. And if we negotiate our way out in humiliation, God forbid that doesn’t happen, we will have almost no say at all. And so it is very important to begin those conversations. Now, if you think there’s a possibility, we could negotiate our way out if we don’t have to go to nukes. And let’s hope that we do believe that. So what stands in the way? Well, again, as noted, the Iranians, they’ve got to be reasonable and willing to bend a little bit. And that’s not easy because they’re not that reasonable and they’re inflamed right now. But it’s not just the Iranians, it’s Israel too. And from the very first day, Israeli priorities have taken precedent over American priorities. American national interest has been pushed down and in its place has been elevated Israeli national interest. And what specifically are we talking about here? Think about the target list. So the first big strike of the war killed, eliminated the Ayatollah who was 86 years old and not simply the head of state technically, but the head of a religion, Shia Islam, apparently had prostate cancer and was totally willing to be martyred. So that alone should tell you, wait a second, why would we kill that guy? He may be bad, he may be the most evil person in the world. Mark Levin tells us he’s Hitler, great or bad, we’re against that, we’re against Hitler. But killing him will have what effect? 60 seconds, predict. Oh, maybe it will unite the country on religious grounds and make the opposition to the United States and Israel stronger. Maybe it’s also a kind of point of no return after which you can’t really negotiate your way out. You killed our religious leader. What was the last time America killed a religious leader? It’s not a defense of the Ayatollah, sorry Ben Shapiro, it’s not a defense of Shia Islam, it’s a defense of American national interests. And if you’re having trouble remembering the last time we killed a religious leader, it’s because we haven’t killed any religious leaders, at least not openly, because we don’t want to start religious wars because they’re hard to fight and very hard to resolve. And how was that good for us? How was that good for our access to LNG and oil from the Gulf? Tell me, Ben Shapiro, can you find a Gulf on a map? No. So why did we do that? Now, we don’t know exactly why we did that. Maybe there are American military planners who thought sincerely, hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s kill the Ayatollah. Then all the liberal elements in the country will rise up. They won’t actually discover their latent Shia Islam and rally around an 86-year-old man who was killed along with his family. Maybe there are actually American military planners who thought that, but more likely there were Israeli strategists who realized that once the United States kills the Ayatollah, they kind of can’t get out. We’re all in. And so that’s the point. This can never work in America’s national interest as long as it is tethered to another country’s national interest. And if that doesn’t work, if it doesn’t work in the middle of a war, it probably doesn’t work in peacetime either. It probably doesn’t work to have a permanent Israeli detachment at, say, the Pentagon, where wars are planned, or at CIA, where information is collated and analyzed. It probably doesn’t work to have people in all branches of government who are dual citizens with Israel and other countries. What? Because you’re always going to wind up where we are now, which is tethered to another country, which may be a good country or a bad country. We can debate that. But it’s not America. And the purpose of the American government is to serve the American people, not in some abstract way in their war against radical Islam, but in a concrete way, like nicer airports and no crime and decent schools, the things that any citizen should expect from his government. And if you’re totally ignoring all of those on behalf of another country, it’s just not acceptable. And it’s also not sustainable. And so no matter where this goes, and again, we pray it is resolved peacefully and soon, our country needs to think through how this happened, find out in specific terms, not bury it like 9-11 and every other traumatic event over the last 50 years or 63 years. It’s like, oh, we’re not really sure. We need to be sure. How did this happen? How can we prevent it from happening again? A sober assessment of what went wrong. That’s what all functional institutions do. They used to be called after action reports, and they were mandatory, so it didn’t happen again. That’s what the NTSB does with plane crashes. How’d this happen? We’re not going to guess. We’re not going to blame radical Islam. We’re going to find out whether the pitot tubes worked. We’re going to find out the specifics that led to this tragedy because we don’t want more tragedies. And if we’d done that after the Iraq war, we probably wouldn’t be here because the Iraq war was started, which everyone knows went on for 20 years at great cost, trillions of dollars, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, millions of people, all in, was started under very similar circumstances. Pressure from Israel, bad intelligence, in part, not exclusively, but in part from Israel, a massive lobbying campaign by Israel-aligned pundits and think tank people, politicians. And if it had gone well, okay. But it didn’t. And no one was ever punished for it. And more critically, no one ever explained precisely what happened. And 23 years later, that was 23 years ago this month, we’re still debating why it happened. And there are increasingly few people who are there and remember, I’m one of them. Let’s not let that happen this time. We can’t afford more wars like this, literally can’t afford it. And we shouldn’t have to because the purpose of the US government is to serve Americans, period. And by the way, you can hit the little bell on there and get notifications every time we produce a video. We hope you’ll do that also.

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