Max Blumenthal on the Iran-US memorandum of understanding, Israel's strategic crisis, and shifting US domestic politics
Glenn Diesen interviews Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, on the Iran-US memorandum of understanding, Israel's response, and the realignment underway in American politics.
Summary
Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, characterizes the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran as a significant strategic defeat for the United States — one he argues may be worse than Vietnam in terms of economic damage. He contends that Donald Trump is publicly misrepresenting the terms of the MOU to his base, claiming IAEA inspections that Iran has already rejected, while the actual agreement reflects conditions the US was compelled to accept. He argues that Israel, having long sought this war and finally secured US participation, now finds itself more exposed than at any point since the 1956 Suez crisis, with its unconditional American backing eroding rapidly across both parties. He also raises concerns about what Israel may be capable of as its strategic position deteriorates, pointing to what he describes as suspicious pay-for-play antisemitism incidents in Commonwealth countries being attributed to Iran, and calls for a public campaign focused on Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The MOU as Strategic Defeat and Trump's Domestic Messaging Problem
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Max Blumenthal, the editor-in-chief at The Grayzone, to discuss what is happening to the US-Israeli relationship. Thank you for coming back on.
Max Blumenthal: Great to see you, Glenn.
Glenn Diesen: My first question is very specific — the memorandum of understanding, which I assume the US had to sign quite reluctantly, given that it reads almost as a declaration of surrender. I understand why it had to be signed, but at the same time it's hard to imagine the US being able to accept the terms of this. Trump has his own complicated political system, and even though he recognizes that it's necessary to put an end to this, he doesn't necessarily have the final say or the only say in this matter. I was wondering if you could speak to some of the domestic politics — how people in the United States are reacting to what I would define as a defeat.
Max Blumenthal: Well, this was also a major political defeat for Donald Trump, and he's heading toward catastrophe. That's why Donald Trump is trying to sell a different deal — there actually is no deal, but a different MOU — to his base and to the American public than the one that Iran understands was agreed upon. Donald Trump is declaring that there will be IAEA inspectors heading to Iran to inspect the nuclear sites, and that's something that Iran has rejected so far. Why would they accept that, given the assassinations of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — the Oppenheimer of Iran — down to lesser-known quantum physicists and scientists who were assassinated during the 12-day war and afterwards? How did Israel get these names and put them in its target bank? We know Israel hacked into the private accounts of Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the IAEA, and got these names through previous inspections that Iran had to hand over the names of scientists.
So it doesn't seem like Donald Trump is putting forward the actual MOU to his own base — the one he had to sign because the US was dealt what I think is the worst strategic defeat possibly in its history. It's a military defeat in many ways worse than Vietnam, because the economic damage has not been contained and won't be contained even if the conflict ends right now. The situation going through this summer looks bleak, and I'm being told by people who are investors that oil is a really good bet right now because the prices will not stay down.
So Donald Trump has to do this, and in some ways he has won back some of the support of his base. He's put JD Vance out as the salesman for the MOU. Vance was always sold to the public as one of the restrainers on Iran. He wasn't able to do anything obviously when Benjamin Netanyahu came to town and basically gave Donald Trump his marching orders in February. But now JD Vance is kind of having a little bit of a comeback — earning a little bit of his credibility back. Marco Rubio is nowhere to be seen. Donald Trump is backing up JD Vance publicly.
But Donald Trump is facing a rift within the Republican Party elite. The kind of George W. Bush neocon-oriented Republicans are up in arms about the MOU. The Israel-first Republicans like Ted Cruz and Roger Wicker on the Foreign Relations Committee are obviously up in arms. And you have the Zionist movement that supported Trump now attacking him, including in Miriam Adelson's paper in Israel — Israel Hayom, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda sheet — which is now going after Donald Trump. Donald Trump is suddenly unpopular in Israel. They're just so entitled that they would turn on him in a second.
But I think one of the most cynical, insidious elements in American politics that is now attempting to turn the screws on Trump for signing this — and doing so in Versailles, with all the symbolism of signing basically a declaration of surrender in Versailles — are the Democrats. And the Democrats are doing so because the MOU is actually unpopular among the American public, not because they don't want peace with Iran. It's because they don't want Donald Trump to sign it, because Donald Trump is unpopular. Donald Trump is a widely hated figure, so anything associated with Trump is doomed to fail.
There's a new CNN poll — 64% of Americans don't like the MOU. That's almost the same number of Americans that didn't like the Iran war. So why wouldn't they want there to be peace? Why wouldn't they want there to be an MOU? Because it's Trump doing it.
Everything in the news right now — the top story in the US if you watch cable news — is not the MOU, not the dynamics of the deal or whether Iran will actually give up its nuclear program or submit to inspectors. It's about the reflecting pool on the National Mall. A former Olympian was arrested for dipping his hand into the reflecting pool because Trump has just overseen this absurd Mar-a-Lago-style renovation of the reflecting pool that cost like $30 million. He gave the contract — a no-bid contract — to a crony, and now the pool is filled with algae blooms. It's turned green. The blue sealant has cracked off, National Guard are guarding the reflecting pool, and anyone who approaches can be arrested. Trump is blaming vandals for the failure of this glitzy renovation project. And that's what everyone is focused on right now. It's become a microcosm, a conduit for all of the public's contempt of Donald Trump, and that's flowing into opposition to the MOU simply because Trump is doing it. That's a real problem.
Behind all of this political spectacle are figures like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz — all of these pro-Israel operatives whose careers have been fueled and instrumentalized by the Israel lobby, or who are simply adherents of the Zionist movement. Jared Kushner actually brought Nick Stewart from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — which is the main Israeli cutout that devised this war in Washington — to Switzerland for the negotiations. So these figures are still honeycombed throughout the Trump administration and are poised to prevent a deal. But I think what they're doing right now is just buying time. They see this as a form of strategic sequencing. So there are many factors working against the success of the MOU, even though the American public is solidly against going back to war.
Israel's Strategic Exposure and the Failure of Military Objectives
Glenn Diesen: What is said about Trump speaking of a different MOU — it's quite evident not just in how he's arguing that the IAEA has to come in, but he's arguing the US doesn't have to pay ten cents. The MOU is quite specific. He's threatened Hezbollah to stop what you might call disruptive behavior, but it's the Israelis who are still occupying Lebanon. So all of these points in the MOU — and of course threatening Iran during the negotiation, which is also prohibited — he doesn't appear to want to live up to it. It does seem that he might be buying time just to get some oil through and stabilize markets, but it's hard to see this actually being implemented in full.
How do you see Israel though? It seems to be in a difficult spot. It's been pushing for this war with Iran for decades, it finally got its man in the White House, Trump did it, and then obviously it did not go as planned. Iran has come out on top, despite all the death and destruction. Where does that place Israel at this point? How bad is the panic, and what's plan B?
Max Blumenthal: Israel reportedly proposed to destroy all of Iran's infrastructure in 48 hours to the US, and the US rejected that because it's simply something they can't do. Even the Trump administration, as buffoonish as they are, recognized that this was just another ploy to drag the US back into a war that it can't win — one in which it achieved zero of its stated military objectives from the outset.
It was none other than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, who opposed the war before it even began and began leaking to the Washington Post and the New York Times that the US would experience a munitions shortage — which it did. Dan Caine then testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I think in an exchange with Senator Dick Durbin, that Iran's navy had not been destroyed and that the US could not militarily open the Strait of Hormuz. This was as Donald Trump was — and he's even stating today — that their military was decimated, the navy's destroyed. It could be that that's what Donald Trump is being told in his echo chamber, but I think that's just the case Donald Trump wants to make to his base so he can continue to sell the MOU following this defeat.
The US can't achieve military objectives that it did not achieve before, unless it's willing to commit massive amounts of air power, lose scores of planes, possibly have pilots taken hostage, in order to destroy Iran's missile cities and deterrence. And it wasn't willing to do that. The war was fought through standoff munitions. After losing F-15s and an F-35 being downed, the US was unwilling to send in the air power that would have been necessary.
Iran has a very wise military doctrine based around survival. I was actually watching Iran's World Cup performance versus Belgium, and there was a clear parallel between Iran's strategy in that match and Iran's military doctrine — just based around survival. That was such a wise doctrine against a US empire that just doesn't have the political will to erode Iran's deterrence. There wasn't the political will at home, there weren't adequate munitions.
And so this leaves Israel alone — more exposed than it has been probably at any point since the Suez crisis in 1956. That means the Zionist movement is also exposed. Everything they say comes crashing against the hard rocks of the reality that the 99% experiences in the United States and around the world — economic calamity brought on by their war. More and more people are waking up to the fact that this was essentially a Zionist war.
Zionists don't understand this though. They don't understand why everyone's mad at them. They actually see this as a form of persecution, as antisemitism, and they're not sharpening or honing their messaging. They're not able to cope with a popular mayor in New York City like Mahmoud Mamdani actually campaigning openly against AIPAC. More and more candidates in the US are campaigning against AIPAC. The level of opposition to Israel in Pew and Gallup polls is surging right now to record levels — I think over 80% of registered Democrats oppose sending aid to Israel at this point. The American public wants to cut Israel off.
Within Israeli intelligence and the Israeli military intelligence apparatus, they are attempting to absorb some of the lessons of this war, but they won't have the firepower to confront Iran alone. The outgoing Mossad director David Barnea has leaked details of what his Iran unit had been doing to generate regime change, and actually predicted that the Mossad would continue to escalate its destabilization activities inside Iran and its subversion to spawn regime change riots — and that they will actually achieve regime change by the end of the year. I think this is another absurd prediction to justify their bureaucratic priorities and get their budget, and also to keep the US mesmerized by the aura of Israeli intelligence. But they don't have a clear strategy.
I think Israel will press ahead with destabilization activities. They may try to launch another war, perhaps after the World Cup, and assume that the US will join them as it did during the 12-day war to rescue them. That would increase the pressure on Donald Trump to do something, and it's unclear if he will rescue them this time as Nixon did in the 1973 war.
But one thing that they have no strategy for, and that they cannot stomach at all, is the loss of support of the American public and growing elements within the US political establishment. It's gotten so desperate that Israel's Channel 14 — the pro-Netanyahu propaganda channel — hosted the Israeli magician, mentalist, and fraudster Uri Geller, who declared that Donald Trump's brain had been hacked by a sophisticated electronic transmission by Iran, and that's why he signed the MOU. That really gives you a window into the thinking in Israel right now. And I don't even know if we can call it thinking.
The Fracturing of the US-Israel Consensus and the Threat to the MOU
Glenn Diesen: I haven't seen that story — quite extraordinary. But within the United States, what is fascinating is that on the Israel issue there always seemed to be a consensus — Republican, Democrat, they would always fight for Israel till the end. But now you have all these pro-Israeli groups up in arms because of the MOU being seen as a massive decoupling, while on the other side you see the Tucker Carlsons of America, those who argue for putting America first instead of Israel. Israel has become a polarized issue. But how does that work into the survival of the MOU? There are many who would like to sabotage it within the US. Israel would like to do the same. And I think the Iranians have caught on — they know what Washington's planning to do, which is just drag them along and slowly water it down and fail to implement. This looks like what's going to happen, but they showed they were willing to walk away as soon as Trump began to threaten them. So they seem to be preparing against this.
Max Blumenthal: I think this is just a historic inflection point more than an actual signal of any concrete deal, and that the process of Israel's dissolution — or at least the dissolution of Israeli exceptionalism in American life — is accelerating rapidly. That's all we can say. But I agree with you: the MOU will eventually be watered down, and the key lever for Israel to unravel the MOU is in Lebanon, which is why they're consistently escalating there.
Our correspondent at The Grayzone, Wyatt Reed, was in the south interviewing people who are attempting to return to the rubble of their homes, and many of them had to turn back because Israel continued to escalate and was enacting new massacres, killing scores of people a day. The action around the Ali al-Taher hill — where it's said that Hezbollah has a base and Israel has been unable to reach it with its tank columns — has been extremely demoralizing for Israel. It prompted the Twitter tirade by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister, calling for making thousands of Lebanese mothers weep for every one Israeli mother who weeps, and declaring that all of Lebanon must burn. This really exposed the hideous face of Israel's governing coalition to everyone. Even the arch-Zionist CNN anchor Jake Tapper felt compelled to condemn this. This is what's being brought out of Israel's demented soul through its failures in Lebanon.
But it has to stay in Lebanon in order to sabotage the MOU. AIPAC, the main arm of the Israel lobby in the US, attempted to portray those four invading Israeli soldiers — who were attempting to attack Hezbollah inside Lebanese territory — as victims of a Kristallnacht-like pogrom, declaring that Hezbollah just killed four Jews because it enjoys killing Jews. They're actually trying to elicit sympathy for invading Israeli soldiers. And every time they do so on X, those posts get ratioed with thousands of comments essentially mocking and taunting them. There is no sympathy for what Israel is doing there.
JD Vance was asked in Switzerland by an Arab reporter about Israel's rampage in Lebanon, actually using the term genocide. In the past you would have seen Joe Biden or Barack Obama or their underlings denounce that reporter for using the term genocide, but JD Vance simply shrugged and said no one is doing more than us to try to tamp down on the violence in Lebanon. And if the MOU is to be enforced, Israel is going to be restricted in Lebanon — and that will be a military failure that could actually be more devastating for Israel than Iran was. Iran was a more catastrophic failure for the United States, but at this point it looks like Lebanon is where they're heading, and Lebanon will be the main lever for unraveling the MOU. To the extent that Hezbollah continues to inflict losses with FPV drones, Kornet missiles, and other anti-tank weapons on the Israelis, the MOU survives.
Just another quick point, because you brought up Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson declared, I think yesterday, in a podcast interview that he was done with the Republican Party. Tucker Carlson comes out of the real center of the Republican Party, the mainstream. He was never considered an extremist or a far-right person or a populist until just a few years ago. His father was a major Republican figure who served as an ambassador in Republican administrations and was close to the Reagan administration. This is Republican Party elite, and he's declaring that he can't be part of the Republican Party anymore because it doesn't serve the United States — it essentially serves Israel.
Tucker Carlson could potentially form a third party that would include figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Thomas Massie — many of the figures who've been pushed out by the Israel lobby, who have a lot of cache within the conservative grassroots and also have a lot of respect on what I would call the populist left, which Representative Ro Khanna of California is attempting to lead right now. He'll probably run in the Democratic primary. So let's say they do that — they're going to kneecap the Republican candidate in 2028, unless that candidate is JD Vance, who Tucker Carlson has been close to. Tucker Carlson's son worked under JD Vance until he was forced out by the Israel lobby. Having that contingent — the Tucker contingent, you could call it — will force JD Vance to take a harder line against Israel.
It's something I wished would take place with the Democrats, but you only have the Green Party, which the Democrats have successfully kept off ballots nationally and in state races — most recently in the California governor's race — to prevent there being any lever of restraint on the Democratic Party's pro-Israel position. It's shaping up to be a fascinating 2028 primary in both parties, because the base has dropped out on pro-Israel support and the only thing left is legalized bribery.
Israel's Desperation, False Flags, and the Nuclear Question
Glenn Diesen: I think the third party would do much good, actually, because when you have this polarized two-party system, it's very hard for one side to drop off to the other. But if there's a third party, it doesn't even have to win — it's enough that it forces the other parties to moderate themselves if they want to hold on to that electoral base.
Just a last quick question: given that so much is at stake for Israel — they might lose their unconditional American backing, the whole policy of peace through strength based on the Clean Break approach, Greater Israel — all of this seems to be at risk at the moment. What do you think Israel could do in desperation? Do you think an actual use of a nuclear weapon to show its determination would be out of the question? I just have a hard time seeing them backing down or adjusting to new realities, which then begs the question: what remains for Israel?
Max Blumenthal: That's the question on everyone's mind right now, because anyone who's paying close attention and still has their critical faculties understands that Israel is an anachronistic state. It's a high-tech, nuclearized colonial state that exists out of place in history and outside the reality of normal international relations, and wants to unravel international law as a matter of its own survival. It has no borders — it refuses to set borders — and is perpetually occupying millions of people who actually comprise a majority between the river and the sea. This lunatic rogue state, in order to maintain its ethnosupremacist character, is prone to some dastardly acts and is capable of anything. I don't think we've seen the worst of what Israel is capable of.
It's boasted of its ability to infiltrate common household communications equipment like pagers or cell phones and turn them into explosives. So what will it do when its back is against the wall? Will it engage in assassinations of leadership who are not members of non-state resistance groups like Hezbollah or Hamas? Has it already done so? Will it begin to get violent against members of the media? I don't want to speculate. I just know that's where so many people's minds are going right now as Israel grows increasingly desperate.
We see, for example, a former IDF Persian-language spokesman declare that America needs a new Pearl Harbor to understand what the stakes are. We should worry about what they're capable of.
What they're doing right now is attempting to elicit sympathy through the conjuring of bogus antisemitism hoaxes — to the point where prominent Canadian Zionists have been hoping for the past 24 hours or so that the Montreal shooter, who appears to be someone who resented that women weren't available to men like him, was actually an antisemite who was out there shooting Jews. They're doing everything they can, against all evidence, to convince the public that this shooter wanted to kill Jews — just as AIPAC was attempting to portray IDF invading soldiers in Lebanon as Kristallnacht victims who were killed just because they're Jewish.
And then you have this whole global phenomenon, from Australia to the UK — mainly in the Commonwealth states, Australia, the UK, and now Canada — where there are these gun-for-hire antisemitism attacks in which mostly youth from poor backgrounds, lumpenproletariat types, are being paid in crypto through anonymous online foreign actors to carry out low-level property damage attacks outside Jewish communal sites, as well as the US consulate in Toronto. Strange Telegram channels are claiming credit for these attacks under the name of something called Ashab al-Yameen al-Islamiyya, or "the right hand of Islam," claiming they're part of the Iran-sponsored resistance. And it all looks very shady to me.
When we consider that in 2016, a wave of thousands of antisemitic robocalls to Australian Jewish centers actually originated from Israel — and an Israeli teen was arrested after Australian intelligence fingered the culprit — and yet Iran is blamed for all of it. Iran's ambassador had been removed from Australia after being blamed for these strange pay-for-play antisemitism attacks. Iran was blamed by Keir Starmer for a stabbing in London by a mentally ill man who had previously stabbed a Muslim flatmate before stabbing two Jews. Iran's being blamed, but Iran doesn't gain anything from this. There's only one state which gains from these strange pay-for-play antisemitism attacks, and it's the one with a long history of false flag attacks — for example, bombing synagogues in Iraq to compel the Iraqi Jewish community to move to Israel in the early 1950s, crimes that were documented and confirmed by the Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, or the Lavon Affair in Egypt, which collapsed Egypt's Jewish community and set the stage for the 1956 war. It's Israel.
We really have to be asking what they're capable of with their backs increasingly against the wall, and we have to be documenting it and pushing our leadership to do something to restrain this state. One idea I put forward in an interview earlier this week — or last week, I'm losing track — is a United Against a Nuclear Israel campaign. Throughout the United States there was a United Against a Nuclear Iran campaign run by Israeli cutouts like Jason Brodsky, with big billboards in Times Square, but Iran didn't even have an active nuclear program. Israel has a secret nuclear program. Its Samson Option — in which it could direct that nuclear program as blackmail against the West — has been well documented, and it's time to educate the public about the threat Israel poses. It's an apocalyptic threat. And we also need to explain how necessary it is to dismantle its apartheid system, which really is at the core of the global economic crisis that's afflicting almost everyone on the planet right now.
Glenn Diesen: Well, Max, thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule.
Max Blumenthal: Yeah, we've got a new piece up about these gun-for-hire attacks at The Grayzone — thegrayzone.com is where you'll find it.
Glenn Diesen: I'll leave a link to that as well. Thank you.
Max Blumenthal: Thanks a lot.