00:00Here to discuss all of this is former Trump Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland.
00:05Always great to see you, especially great to see you, K.T., on this particular story because it's right in
00:12your wheelhouse.
00:13I want to start with Venezuela. When you step back and you look at this deal and I get, you
00:18know, there are all kinds of other questions about this.
00:21But it does kind of make you wonder if when President Trump's memoirs are written, the whole this whole situation
00:31in Venezuela, where the U.S. winds up gaining access to these reserves, wasn't the precursor to his decision to
00:40then go after Iran?
00:45Oh, I think it was. And I think they probably thought Iran might be easier than it turned out to
00:50be.
00:51But it didn't. It turned out to be harder. But we still won. And that's the difference.
00:55We've won that. We've won that war. Because why? Because the oil that was moving through the Strait of Hormuz,
01:0120 million barrels a day, it's going differently.
01:04It's going through the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, I'm probably 10 million barrels a day now because we've cleared the
01:08southern route.
01:09But a lot of that oil that used to move by tankers is now moving by pipeline. And it's not
01:13going to go back to tankers.
01:14And then some of the shortfall has been made up by American oil and natural gas that's moving out of
01:20the United States.
01:21So at the end of the day, we got rid of the nukes. And if they try to rebuild the
01:26nukes, well, we'll bomb those again.
01:27And as far as the importance of the Strait, it's going to be increasingly irrelevant, especially because of the Venezuela
01:33oil connection.
01:34We are now controlling a quarter of the world's oil. And whoever controls the world's energy, the world's fossil fuels
01:42in the years ahead controls the future.
01:45You know, it's kind of amazing to think about. But for five decades, Iran has used their ability to put
01:51the squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz to get exact political things from other people.
02:00It's almost like they kind of pulled that bluff this time with the wrong dude and it didn't work out
02:06for them.
02:07And they may have broken the one thing, the one lever that they've always had.
02:13You know, that's the point. They thought they were dealing with, you know, a typical American president.
02:17They didn't realize it was Donald Trump and he plays by different games.
02:20And so they thought, OK, we're going to close the Strait of Hormuz, just like we tried to do with
02:25President Reagan, just like we've tried to do many times before.
02:28But because Donald Trump already had the armada prepositioned, he could then put a blockade on Iran.
02:34So for six months, no ships have gone into Iran, no ships have gone out of Iran.
02:38Their economy is spiraling. And yet at the same time, we've got this workaround of how to get oil to
02:44the world.
02:45You're going to see oil prices start to go down, I think, pretty dramatically now that that that shortfall of
02:5020 million barrels a day, that's now getting to the producers.
02:53That's getting to the refineries. And it wasn't three weeks ago. It wasn't two months ago. Now it is.
02:59And so the price of oil should start coming down and hopefully the price of gasoline to follow.
03:03So not only is it significant in terms of American power in Venezuela, the U.S. having control of that.
03:10It also means that our enemies, our biggest rivals, whether it's a country like Cuba or a country like China,
03:18doesn't have access, free access for cut rate oil from Venezuela.
03:26Yeah, China had been all over South America trying to get their hands on Venezuela and other other resources, oil
03:33as well.
03:34And now they're gone. They're out of there. They're not having any access to that.
03:37All China can get is that Iranian oil, which they're probably not getting that much of anyway.
03:41The genius of President Trump is that he realizes as a businessman what's the best country solution you can have
03:50to all of your trade, all of your commerce, all of your manufacturing, all of your production to do it
03:54nearby.
03:55So we don't have to think about trans-Pacific trade or transatlantic trade.
03:59We're now going to have a Western Hemisphere united, at peace, trading with each other and under the United States
04:06leadership.
04:07The cheap goods that we've been importing from China for decades, they're going to now be made in South America.
04:12And because of the energy, particularly as we look to the future and the requirements of the data centers and
04:18artificial intelligence, it needs a lot more energy.
04:21Well, who's going to have all the energy? Us.
04:23Yes. Make the Western Hemisphere great again.
04:26KT McFarland, as always, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
