“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing…It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” –President Donald Trump (March 30, 2025) [1]
“And the assumption on the part of the Trump administration is that Russia will not get involved and that the United States can basically do what it wants without any repercussions. And it also assumes that Iran doesn’t have much capability of punching back. If either of those assumptions are wrong, and then we are into World War III.” – Larry Johnson, from this week’s interview.
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For close to twenty years, this website has predicted that war was headed for Iran. [2]
That large country on the frontier of the Middle East, possessing and proximate to valuable oil deposits but lacking courteous attributes of an obedient, colonized power continued to be a thorn in the side of Uncle Sam for decades. [3]
The great Persian-speaking land mass has joined Russia, China and North Korea on the infamous “axis of autocracies” or “quartet of chaos” of countries coordinating their efforts to undermine Western-dominated global order. [4][5]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “Iran is our greatest threat, both directly and through its proxies.” So an enemy of Israel as undoubtedly an enemy of the United States. [6]
In February, when the stock of enriched uranium of 60 percent fissile purity, close to 90 percent of weapons grade had grown, the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that Iran may be able to develop a nuclear weapon within months. [7]
The famous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was an international agreement geared toward limiting Iran’s nuclear program. President Donald Trump ripped it up thinking it did little to disable the creation of an atomic weapon of mass destruction. And now, the time has come to face his own music. [8]
The battleground is now being set with major deployments of fully armed military naval and aerial vessels. A number of B-2 “Spirit” strategic stealth bombers have been moved to the Diego Garcia Naval Support Facility located in the Indian Ocean. There are eight B-52 regular strategic bombers/Missile carriers in place along with seven C-17 “Globalmaster III” heavy transports, ten KC-135 “Stratotanker” aerial refueling tankers and one P-8 “Poseidon” intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) platform. If the United States is putting on a show, it looks to be a terribly convincing performance! [9]
This episode of the Global Research News Hour takes on the prospect of the mighty hegemonic warrior state making its next historical move in the weeks to come and how we should be positioning ourselves as we face the coming disasters resulting deliberately or by accident in the ultimate game of chicken.
In our first half hour, Ken Stone, Treasurer for the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War and coordinator of the Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network (CWPJN) speaks to our listeners about recent media messaging about Canada’s involvement in NATO and the need for a more independent foreign policy devoted to peace, nuclear disarmament, and cooperation with other countries.
The CWPJN’s media advisory can be found here:
Canada-wide Peace Network Slams “Coalition of the Willing” for Ukraine
A set of questions for candidates in the Canadian election campaign can be found here:
Peace Network Issues Sample Bilingual Questions for Federal Candidates
Then in the second half hour, former CIA officer and intelligence analyst Larry Johnson offers his assessment based on available information that a U.S. war campaign is about to be waged in Iran soon and what the consequences could be for the U.S., Iran, the wider region and the world.
Ken Stone is a long time antiwar, anti-racism, environmental and labour activist, and resident in Hamilton. He is also Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War. He currently coordinates the Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network.
Larry C. Johnson is a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He is the founder and managing partner of BERG Associates, which was established in 1998. Larry provided training to the US Military’s Special Operations community for 24 years. He has been vilified by the right and the left, which means he must be doing something right. His website is sonar21.com. You can also follow him on telegram (t.me/sonar https://t.me/sonar_21, Patreon and Substack https://larrycjohnson.substack.com)
(Global Research News Hour Episode 468)
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
Transcript of Larry Johnson, April 3, 2025
Global Research: Larry, it seems like this episode is somewhat reminiscent of the war in Iraq, like the prospects of waging war on Iran. It was illegal, but the Security Council did not approve it, and there is nothing indicating Iran is threatening America or anything else, just the principle stated reason for launching the war being the prospects of weapons of mass destruction.
What do you believe is the real reason they seem to want to attack Iran?
Larry Johnson: Well, I think there’s two aspects to it. One is the sort of the control that the Zionists, and it’s not just Jewish, it’s Christian Zionists as well, have over the Trump administration. Where they have persuaded themselves that the nation of Israel has been chosen by God and that we must do everything in our power to defend and protect Israel, regardless of whether it serves the interests of the United States or not.
So, that’s number one. Number two, sort of, I think there’s a broader strategic objective, wanting to destroy Iran and the current leadership to take it out of any possibility of being in the Russian sphere of influence. Because Russia and Iran have been working for a bit, and that work is now poised to accelerate on building a north-south transportation corridor.
That corridor would run from the Arabian Sea and then the mouth of the Persian Gulf. There are two separate ports. And then from those ports, we’re using railroad lines that go all the way up into the Caspian Sea.
And then through the Caspian Sea, transporting the goods into Russia. Russia’s looking at it in terms of its ability to move grain, fertilizer in and out of Russia is right now heavily dependent upon passage through the Black Sea, going through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. And then if it goes to Asia, having to go through the Suez Canal.
Well, the West can easily shut those down and in a way, bottle up Russia. So, Russia for a long while has been looking for an alternative route that goes through Iran. And so, this both Iran’s status as a new member of BRICS.
Now, this is part of what I’d call a longer term Russian strategy to completely divorce itself from the Western economy, from any dependency whatsoever on US dollars as a dollar reserve currency.
GR: Is there a possibility that there’s like a blinking contest between the two of them to see, well, are they going to scare Iran, you know, with a bluff, so to speak, and surrender a nuclear program or something else?
LJ: Yeah, the danger we face right now is not just the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, and his national security team with Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Pete Hegseth, John Radcliffe, and I’m sad to say even Tulsi Gabbard have bought into the nonsense, apparently, that Iran has been tremendously weakened by the October 27th air attack, missile attack by Israel.
And they’ve also ignored Iran’s attack on Israel, 1st of October, which was in retaliation for Israel’s murder of both Hamas negotiator in Tehran, as well as assassinations of other top Iranian military officials. So, there has been that tit for tat, but in the October 1st attack, Iran, it was a demonstration attack. In other words, Iran was not trying to destroy Israel.
It was trying, it was sending Israel a message that if you don’t back off and change your conduct, we can do tremendous damage to you. And they revealed, demonstrated that they have hypersonic missiles that are capable of changing course in flight to the target. In other words, in the videos that emerged, you could see an inbound Iranian missile.
It’s coming down at about an angle going, traveling from say, two o’clock to eight o’clock on a clock face. And you see a missile, an air defense missile from Israel coming up. And that missile from Iran suddenly does a nosedive to six o’clock position, goes down, then comes back out at the eight, pointing to eight.
I mean, it clearly evaded that missile. And Iran claimed to have hit a key Israeli military base. The Israelis said, oh, no, they didn’t do any damage.
But the video actually that emerged online showed a number of significant hits on that base. So then on October 27th, Israel claimed, oh my God, we hit every base in Iran. We really, we wiped out their air defense.
And yet the, again, the information that was available online with video taken from the ground showed that Iran intercepted the vast majority of the missiles that Israel fired. So right now you’ve got the West pushing a lie. And believing a lie that Iran is naked in terms of its defense capability and that we can easily go in and just bomb them like Trump said, oh, they’ll never seen anything like it.
Well, there’s one other change in this equation. And that is Iran’s military relationship with Russia. So we know that for the last seven years, Iran has been conducting annual joint naval military exercises with Russia and with China together.
So it’s been a triad of joint exercises. And that started in 2019. So my point in this is that the nature of the agreement between Iran and Russia is such that any attack, unprovoked attack by the United States and or Israel will bring the Russians in on the side of Iran.
GR: I know that, there was a conversation with Scott Ritter, and he was talking about, you know, taking Iran out of the picture that the whole Middle East would be destabilized. And maybe Trump and Netanyahu want Israel to be the lone power in the region or something like that.
And Ritter thinks that it would be bad for America. But what do you think of this point? I mean, how would the Middle East be, exactly would the Middle East be destabilized in the wake of an absent Iran?
LJ: Well, number one, it proceeds, let’s say the Western attack, the Western plan to take out the Iranian regime is based on the premise that we can install a new government in Iran that will be more amenable to cooperating with the United States and will actually be more hostile to Russia and to China. That’s what we’re banking on.
GR: Yeah.
LJ: Now, where are we going to find those magical people? It is, we’ve got now a history of over the last 70 years of repeated military interventions, where we’ve replaced the existing governments with the anticipation that the succeeding government will, you know, bring magical solutions. Well, you know, we saw how that worked out, even in Panama, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Syria now.
And so, this is one more example of Western hubris, in my view. This, I think that really, US desires to replace, destabilize the government of Iran, I think will backfire. I think we’ll see the government of Iran actually strengthened if the United States decides to go forward with this attack.
And it’s going to up to this point that they’ve sort of aligned themselves with the West, thinking that the West is more powerful and stronger than it really is. That’ll be the revelation. If the United States launches these air assaults and fails, that in fact, Iran is able to defeat it, shoot down a number of US aircraft and prevent any of the inbound missiles from hitting their target.
The rest of those governments are going to step back and go, whoa, wait a second. You know, it’s like you’re betting on a cage fighter. You think this guy’s the best fighter in the world.
Then he goes into the ring and gets beaten. All of a sudden, you’re not as confident about, hey, I’m going to bet all my money on this guy.
GR: Larry, given the way the US is building forces in the Gulf, I mean, the Diego Garcia, the bombers in the Diego Garcia, for example, being deployed. What kind of a time period are we looking for before an attack takes place?
LJ: Probably four weeks.
GR: Four weeks, eh?
LJ: Four to six weeks. Now, the last 24 or 36 hours, there has been one development. You know, initially, Iran completely rejected the US, you know, Trump’s letter saying, hey, let’s negotiate, because Trump’s letter wasn’t just, hey, let’s talk.
It was, yeah, we’ll talk, but you’ve got a, you’ve got a number one promise that you’re not going to provide any more support to Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Yemenis, and that you’re going to, you know, it was loving a bunch of requirements that Iran just said, no, we’re not going to, you know, we’re not going to disarm ourselves. You know, we’ll sit down and talk to you, you know, as a, as a peer country talks to a peer country, there’s got to be some respect here. So now it looks like Iran is open to talking via a mediator, having a third party, perhaps the folks out of Oman, or the folks out of Dubai, or Qatar.
You know, those are, those are three, three places within the Persian Gulf that they could be amenable. So if they start talking, then that will get a process underway. And frankly, this is one of those elements of that agreement that Iran and Russia signed, where Russia would work with and on behalf of Iran through diplomatic channels as well to defuse threats in the region.
So I think Trump’s got a lot really at risk if he opts for the military strategy vis-a-vis Iran. You know, it sounds, makes good soundbites for television, be terrible from a policy standpoint. And I think it will expose, if you will, the weakness of the U.S. military, not its competence.
GR: Well, why don’t you build on that? I mean, what kind of damage does the United States risk? How exactly is Iran expected to retaliate? You know, you did bombing U.S. bases in the region and bombing Israel itself?
LJ: Yeah, yeah, no, the, depending upon the types of targets that the U.S. hits in Iran, assuming that the attack comes off, Iran’s in a position to hit, you know, we’ve got an estimated 50,000 American troops scattered in bases from Al Udeid, which is in Qatar. You’ve got a naval base, naval facility in Bahrain. You’ve got other bases there in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
So, Iran could hit those. There’s also bases in Syria and Iraq, Western Iraq anyway. Then on top of that, if there are any attacks on the oil infrastructure of Iran, then that would, they would shut down the Gulf.
And so you would, you would be deprived of all the oil out of the Persian Gulf, including Iranian oil, which had sent a massive shock-wave through the international oil market. It’d be good news for Russia because, you know, there’d be greater demand for the product, even though it’s being sanctioned. So this is, this, this would be terribly, terribly dangerous, just from an economic standpoint.
If the U.S. is assuming that it can keep complete control of the process and limit the damage, I maintain that as a wrongheaded, dangerous assumption, that it’s more likely to go just in the opposite direction, where we lose control and we suffer the damage.
GR: You don’t anticipate any U.S. troops actually being displayed, dispatched on the ground, do you?
LJ: No, that’d be suicidal.
GR: Yeah.
LJ: Look at the size, look at the trouble we had quelling unrest in Iraq after our, you know, mission accomplished day. Okay. We were there for another 15 years and never really got it settled down.
Iran is four times the size of Iraq in terms of land mass. It also has a larger population. So, and, and the nature of the terrain, a lot of mountainous areas in the northern part of Iran, it makes it very difficult to, you know, troops on the ground to control.
So now we, you know, if we were going to, quote, invade Iran to somehow secure it, we’d need probably a two to three million man army. Our current army is 450,000, 470,000. We’re not even anywhere in the ballpark.
And that’s, that’s our total global commitment, force commitment.
GR: And for Iran, I mean, what kind of damage would the weapons be able to do on Iran?
LJ: Well, they’ve moved a lot of it underground. So, you know, I don’t think there’s a lot of, Iran has not put its most sensitive, important assets above ground.
So it would be, the United States would have to figure out how to try to hit them. Now they’re talking about bunker buster bombs, but even as we’ve seen in Yemen, they’ve been of a, they’ve been of limited effect, which then raises the specter. And I think Scott Ritter talked about this, of the United States using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.
I know that’s within our toolbox of capabilities, but doing that, I think, would bring Russia and China into the battle. And this is how, just as in World War I, the assassination of the Archduke of Austria by a Serbian nationalist, all of a sudden got the Russia, the French and the Brits on one side lined up against the Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italians and the Turks on the other side. And it just went off, you know, and we started killing each other.
We could face that kind of scenario here where all of a sudden any attack on Iran is going to be responded to with support direct from Russia. And Russia’s not waiting until an attack occurs. There’s already intelligence sharing.
There’s already the provision of military equipment that is critical for defeating inbound missiles, things including like electronic warfare capabilities, as well as air defense systems, such as the S-400, S-500 potentially. So this is a dangerous game that Trump is playing, and he’s not going to be able to bully the Iranians into doing what Trump is claiming. But more important than that, Trump is, he’s lying about the status of Iran’s nuclear program.
Even the defense of, the Director of National Intelligence now, Tulsi Gabbard, her office released a report a week ago Monday that was a detailed assessment of the threat assessment in the region, says specifically that Iran is not building or trying to procure a nuclear weapon. On top of that, that agreement that Iran signed with Russia on January 17th explicitly commits Iran to work with Russia on non-proliferation. Well, if they were building a nuclear weapon, a nuclear warhead, that would be proliferation.
That would be a violation of that agreement that they have in place with Russia. I don’t think Iran’s crazy. They’re not going to, they’re not going to take a reckless action and risk alienating Russia, because Russia provides a big security umbrella for them.
GR: Well, Russia signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty with the Islamic Republic of Iran just in January 17th of this year.
LJ: Right.
GR: So if the U.S. attacks Iran, then that suggests in your mind, I guess in writing, that they are bound to enter into the fray, right? I mean, are we talking about World War III here?
LJ: Yes.
Yeah, we are. That’s how this could erupt into World War III. Again, it’s guided by false assumptions.
And the assumption on the part of the Trump administration is that Russia will not get involved and that the United States can basically do what it wants without any repercussions. And it also assumes that Iran doesn’t have much capability of punching back. If either of those assumptions are wrong, and then we are into World War III.
GR: Would it mean like launching nukes right away or Russia, how would they intersect in the dispute, so to speak?
LJ: Well, I think the first, it depends, if the United States used a nuke, then all of a sudden, you know, I think, you know, Russia would see, would probably have to act preemptively against the United States. You know, the United States has already been carrying out military attacks inside Russia. They admitted that in this article that appeared on Monday of this week by Adam Intus at the New York Times.
So this, you know, if this moves to war, the first thing that’s going to happen, the Russians will take out US satellites. And Elon Musk could probably say goodbye to the Starlink system. So it’s going to be, the West is going to experience a bit of a blackout.
And then, you know, Russia is in a position to do a lot more damage to us than we are to them, despite our claims otherwise.
GR: When will we have reached the point of no return where they’re going to go for it or say, well, there’s still a chance that they could back down? Or have we passed that point?
LJ: I don’t know if you’re familiar with firearms, but there’s the expression of a hair trigger.
And the hair trigger means that when you just apply the least little bit of pressure, sometimes even touching the trigger, not pushing on it, just literally touch it, it can actually release the hammer and the firing pin will strike the cartridge. The gun will go off. I think that we’re in that kind of situation right now.
This deployment of the B-2s and the B-52s to Diego Garcia, I think is in part initially a bargaining ploy by Trump to, you know, a way to threaten without directly saying so, hoping that that will intimidate the Iranians, but it’s not. But then Trump’s gonna also, his team will find out that some of the maintenance issues that the B-2 bombers face are so significant that they may have trouble getting them up into the air after two or three missions. So, you know, the United States on paper, boy, we look like we’re really strong and really powerful.
But then as we’ve seen with this confrontation with Yemen, are the Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier and the carrier strike group, which means that carriers accompanied by at least two destroyers and a cruiser, they find that they’ve got limited power, that no matter how many bombs they drop on the Yemenis, the Yemenis are still capable of firing missiles back. So, you know, any hope that this is a quick solution goes away. And then we find ourselves in the position of launching, you know, missiles that cost a million, two million dollars at drones that are preparing to attack our ship that cost only five to $10,000.
Well, we’ll go bankrupt before the Yemenis do.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.
The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca
Notes:
- Doina Chiacu and David Ljunggren (March 30, 2025), ‘Trump threatens bombing if Iran does not make nuclear deal’, Reuters; https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-there-will-be-bombing-if-iran-does-not-make-nuclear-deal-2025-03-30/
- https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reasons-why-iran-is-the-next-target/199
- Jon Gambrell / AP (March 31, 2025), ‘What to Know About U.S.-Iran Tensions as Tehran Rejects Direct Talks’, Time; https://time.com/7273029/us-iran-tensions-explainer-trump-khamanei/
- Yaroslav Trofimov (August 24, 2024), ‘The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies’, Wall Street Journal; https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/autocracies-china-russia-us-election-5dc42efb
- Sarah Paine (November 24, 2024), ‘Sarah Paine outlines how America should deal with the “quartet of chaos”’, Economist; https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/20/sarah-paine-outlines-how-america-should-deal-with-the-quartet-of-chaos
- https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501079075
- Francois Murphy (April 18, 2024), ‘How close is Iran to having nuclear weapons?’, Reuters; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/explainer-how-close-is-iran-having-nuclear-weapons-2024-04-18/
- Sean Morrison (May 10, 2018), ‘What is the Iran nuclear deal and why has Donald Trump pulled out of it? JCPoA explained’, The Standard; https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/iran-nuclear-deal-latest-what-is-the-jcpoa-and-why-has-donald-trump-pulled-out-of-the-agreement-a3833841.html
- https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-attack-iran-imminent/5883245
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