Are you wondering how this whole Iran war debacle is going to end? Sick of the lies and propaganda slop that is being fed to the masses on this issue? Then you won’t want to miss this important edition of The Corbett Report podcast where James peers through the wartime propaganda and reads the geopolitical tea leaves to discern what this war is really about and where it’s really going.

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TRANSCRIPT

CORBETT: So, are you wondering how this whole Iran war debacle is going to end? What is the end game for this war? And what is the exit ramp?

Well, don’t ask me. What do I know? Ask the person who’s making all the decisions: the commander-in-chief of the United States military!

WEIJIA JIANG: What percentage of the war do you think is complete?

 

DONALD TRUMP: I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no airforce.

 

SOURCE: Trump says “the war is very complete.”

REPORTER: What is your day-after plan for Iran?

 

TRUMP: Well, we have a lot. Look, if we left right now, it would take 10 years for them to rebuild. But we’re not ready to leave yet.

 

SOURCE: When asked about plans for after the war in Iran, Trump said “we’re not ready to leave yet”

REPORTER: “We are getting very close,” he says, “to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the terrorist regime of Iran.”

 

SOURCE: Trump: US considering ‘winding down’ military efforts in Iran

TRUMP: And we have, right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks. But we have capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it, whatever. Somebody said today, they said, “oh, well, if the President wants to do it really quickly after that, he’ll get bored.” I don’t get bored.

 

SOURCE: Trump: Iran war projected to last four to five weeks, have the capability to go far longer

REPORTER: Is the president in the process of winding down this war or escalating it?

 

SCOTT BESSENT: Again, they’re not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.

 

SOURCE: U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent on Iran: Sometimes, you have to escalate to deescalate.

TRUMP: And when Steve called up and he said that to me, I said, “Well, here we go. Let’s do it the hard way. But the hard way I think is probably the easy way.

 

SOURCE: Trump Asked ‘What Do You Consider Enough’ In Iran War After Saying ‘We Haven’t Won Enough’ 

CORBETT: Wait, let me get this straight: the US has already won, but not won enough. So, they’ll wind down soon, but they could go four to five weeks, but maybe longer, because you’ve got to escalate to de-escalate by doing things the hard way, which is also the easy way?

Yes, if you want that hodgepodge of nonsense, then you can listen to Donald J. Trump. But, as my very astute listeners know by now, he is not the one calling the shots on any of this.

So, who really is calling the shots and what do they want out of this conflict? Those are the answers that matter and you’re not going to find them in the mainstream press.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves and dig in. That is exactly what we’re going to cover on today’s edition of the Corbett Report.

CORBETT REPORT THEME

CORBETT: Welcome back, friends, welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you as always from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in late March of 2026 with Episode 495 of The Corbett Report podcast: “This is the REAL Endgame in Iran.”

Yes. So for those who are wondering about the endgame in Iran, of course, we have to start with the first order question, which is how and why did this war even start? And although, hopefully, I would imagine most of my audience is beyond this point, perhaps it needs to be stated that the on the record official reasons that have been proffered in the establishment press and by establishment mouthpieces is not the reality.

So, yes, let’s put it on record: no, this is not about spreading freedom and democracy for the poor, oppressed Iranian people by raining love bombs down on their country and completely obliterating their infrastructure. Nor is this about stopping any perceived nuclear threat. And we know this from a number of different sources.

But if you really do need it spelled out for you, boy, have I got a resource for you! It is the latest edition of my editorial that appeared in this weekend’s subscriber newsletter, which, of course, as with all of my subscriber newsletters, is available right now on rorbettreport.com. It is called Why Did USrael Attack Iran? And it purports to answer that very question. So, you can either get it directly from corbettreport.com or, of course, the editorial of my weekly subscriber newsletter is also posted to my Substack. So here it is: Why did USrael Attack Iran?

And I start by talking about the very interesting phenomenon that we all know and that you have seen documented on The Corbett Report for many, many years now, which is that there is always some perceived, ginned-up war threat in order to corral the public into sending their sons and daughters off to die in some foreign land once again. So, I go through some of those examples:

The Spanish-American War had remember the main. World War I had babies on bayonets. World War II had Pearl Harbor. Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin. Gulf War I had babies thrown from incubators. Gulf War II had weapons of mass destruction.

The Spanish-American War had “Remember the Maine!”

 

WWI had babies on bayonets.

 

WWII had Pearl Harbor.

 

Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin.

 

Gulf War I had babies thrown from incubators.

 

Gulf War II had weapons of mass destruction.

 

Libya had a “spontaneous people’s uprising“ against Gaddafi’s viagra-fueled rape squads.

 

Syria had madman Assad gassing his own people.

 

But, of course, every single one of these casus belli was a deception—a false flag or a provoked incident or a completely fictitious non-event designed to whip up the masses’ lust for blood and desire for revenge. But in each and every one of these cases, the puppeteers of the American Empire had to at least try to deceive the public in order to win their support for war in some faraway land.

But what’s the justification for the Iran war? Oh, right: “we’re…uh, we’re…we’re freeing the Iranian people, or something.”

—Oh wait, no. Maybe there’s a more obvious question. And as I go on to talk about in this article, of course the official story is bunk.

So, what is the real story? We can take it from people like UK National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell, who was at the US/Iran talks in Geneva in February, and who reported that he was “surprised by what the Iranians put on the table.”

Or US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated last year. Remember that whole 12-day war thing where the White House literally put out a press release saying they “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? So, no, no threat there.

And of course, we’ve all seen Joe Kent, the former Director of National Counterterrorism Center, resign his post, complaining that there was “no imminent threat” from Iran.

So, what was this really about? Well, we can take it from people like Joe Kent or Jonathan Powell, who have both testified that obviously there were Israeli pressures that were putting being put on the White House in order for this to take place.

But we don’t have to take it from that or even from Stephen McIntyre—who, people will remember, hopefully, if they’ve been following the climate story, as I have as “Climate Audit,” a.k.a. one of the people who completely deconstructed and eviscerated the Michael Mann hockey stick lie. Well, he’s also eviscerating other lies! And he points out that the most definitive White House statement purporting to justify the Israel-US War on Iran was its March 2nd, 2026, statement titled “The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens.” And if you follow that link to that post, you can see all of these examples of Iranian dastardly terrorism against US forces and sources over the course of the past few decades.

But, as it turns out, that entire document was plagiarized almost word-for-word from a June 19th, 2025, post by Tzvi Khan, who works for a—well, was a former AIPAC employee who works for a think tank, the FDD, which was founded “to provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America.” So, there’s a pro-war Zionist-funded think tank that was literally word-for-word behind that post.

Again, you can take it from many different sources, but why don’t we take it from the horse’s mouth himself: Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Yes, the same Marco Rubio who—as, again, Corbett Reporteers will be well positioned to know—was personally vetted by Larry Ellison during his 2015 presidential selection run. Well, that Marco Rubio came out and kind of said the quiet part out loud about who’s really directing America’s foreign policy.

MARCO RUBIO: And so the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher—those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.

 

SOURCE: Marco Rubio speaks on US strikes in Iran

CORBETT: Wait, OK, so let me get this straight.

So, Israel was going to attack Iran and therefore iran would have obviously retaliate against those attacks and that retaliation would undoubtedly hit US forces in the region. So, the US had to preemptively attack Iran to stop them from preemptively responding to the preemptive attack that hadn’t taken place yet.

Anyway, once you follow that unbelievable pretzel knot back to its underlying thesis, you will discover, as many in the mainstream establishment world soon did: “hey, wait, he’s basically saying Israel basically started this war! They were the ones who were going to attack. And so the US had to attack in order to defend the attacks against the defense against the attacks that hadn’t taken place yet!”

And, as you may or may not have seen, and as I document in this editorial, yes, there was quite a lot of diplomatic brouhaha about that and some walking back. And, well, “we don’t mean to say that Israel is the one behind all of it.” Anyway, that is exactly what Marco Rubio was indicating there.

And, of course, that comes as a surprise to precisely no one who has two brain cells to rub together or who has their head screwed on straight. And that is precisely because, again, as I document at length in this editorial, this is not the first time Israel has floated the idea of regime change in Iran or fighting Iran to the last American, which has been a key theme of warmongers like unconvicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu for decades.

DMITRY MEDVEDENKO: In 1992, as a member of parliament, Netanyahu addresses the Knesset. He says “within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.”

 

Three years later, in his book Fighting Terrorism, he repeats the same time frame: three to five years.

 

This is a fragment of a 2009 US State Department cable released by Wikileaks. Netanyahu tells members of Congress that Iran is one or two years away from being capable of developing nuclear weapons.

 

It’s 2012 and Netanyahu is holding up his infamous cartoon bomb at the UN General Assembly.

 

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

 

MEDVEDENKO: And now, 33 years after Netanyahu’s first so-called “imminent warning,” Israel attacks Iran.

 

NETANYAHU: And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year. It could be within a few months, less than a year.”

 

SOURCE: Benjamin Netanyahu’s 33 years of Iran nuclear warnings

CORBETT: Right. So if we listen to Bibi, well, the world has been under threat of nuclear annihilation by the Iranians for decades now. They are always and have always been just weeks or months away from their building their nuclear device that they’re definitely going to rain down on your head! So, you’d better go in and bomb them!

So, yes, it isn’t going out on a huge limb to say that Israel obviously wanted this war, has been lusting after this war for decades, has been working concertedly to make this war happen and to put all of the domino pieces together that would allow this war to take place. You don’t go after Iran first, of course. You have to destabilize the entire region. You have to take out Iraq and splinter that into sectarian violence. You have to destabilize all of Iran’s regional proxies and allies in Syria, in Lebanon, and elsewhere. And then you go for Iran, right? Seven countries in five years? Well, 25 years and counting. But anyway, better late than never, right?

So again, as I document in this Why Did USrael Attack Iran? article, you can go back and see the development of Israel’s foreign policy and geopolitical position on Iran over the decades, from the time when they were best buddies and allies in the era of the Pahlavi dynasty that lasted from 1925 to 1979, with, for example, Iran being the second state in the Middle East to acknowledge the state of Israel after its foundation in 1948. And you had good relations between them. You even had Mossad literally training the Shah’s SAVAK secret police/torture goon squad back in the 1970s. That is all documented on the record. I go through the links and talk about all of that.

And then, of course, we had the revolution of 1979, which made the Iranians into mortal enemies and a big threat. And then everything changed. And then you had the Iran-Contra deal, through which Israel was actually providing weapons to Iran on behalf of America. And why were they doing that? To establish contacts with the Iranian militaries that they could use to overthrow Khomeini. I mean, it gets crazy. And I go through all of those twists and turns.

But, long story short: yes, Israel has been lusting after Iran for decades now. It is a regional rival that has to at least be taken down a peg or two if greater Israel is to be constructed, as Oded Yinon and other well-known Israeli foreign policy planning documents have put on record for decades.

But I don’t think that that fully explains everything that’s going on here. Yes, of course, Israel is interested in what is happening in Iran right now. But that also begs the question of why they have not accomplished this in the decades and decades that Netanyahu in particular, and of course, the Likudniks and Israel crazies—Zionist crazies in general—have been lusting after for decades.

Why now? Why is it in 2026 that suddenly this thing that’s been talked about and prepared for literal decades is now suddenly coming to a head? Well, as I have stated before, and I will state here again, I do not think that massive world historical events like these take place because a singular group with a singular agenda has suddenly decided to write the script that everyone else will now slavishly follow. I think that these types of massive world historical events take place because there are a number of players at the table with an interest, a vested interest or sometimes a very explicit interest in these events taking place.

So, the real question becomes (and this is where I ended that editorial): what’s the 3D reality? As in 3D chess, not the cartoon meme-fied version of Lord Emperor Trump playing his 17-dimensional chess garbage that is now rightfully seen for the absolute garbage that it always was, although it was vociferously defended by some people in this quasi-supposed alternative media for years there. I think no one can think that this Iran war is part of Trump’s super plan to undermine the deep state and judo flip Netanyahu—

No, no, it is not. Because he is just a puppet that is performing what his puppeteers are telling him to perform. But who are those puppeteers and what are they doing this for? What is the 3D reality to this 2D chess war that we see taking place on the two-dimensional chessboard?

Well, we can get a hint of that from one of the strangest aspects of the war that we’ve seen so far. And I take my cue here from Kit Knightly at Off Guardian, who wrote a very interesting and in-depth piece that people should check out about the bizarre Strait of Hormuz back and forth that has taken place. I’ll just read from this part of my editorial.

As Kit Knightly points out over at Off Guardian, perhaps the most telling part of this stage-managed war narrative is the very strange tug-of-war over the Strait of Hormuz. As Knightly correctly observes, the clearly manipulated stage play of the closing of the Strait—with the Iranians closing the Strait before denying they closed the Strait before the insurance companies actually closed the Strait—and the clearly manipulated stage play of the mining of the Strait—with anonymous “trust me, bro” sources telling Rothschild Reuters that the Strait had been mined before Iran officially denied mining the Strait before Trump demanded Iran remove the mines from the Strait before US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed there was no evidence of mines in the Strait shortly after the US Navy abruptly decommissioned four minesweepers in the region after 40 years of service—has led to the next narrative being propounded by the establishment press: the squabble over the Strait will lead to a never-ending state of perma-war between the West and whoever is in control of Iran.

Now, I highly suggest, if you are interested at all, please go to the editorial and follow every single one of these links. Every single one of these statements is of course hyperlinked back to its source, showing this strange shadow play taking place where suddenly there’s this story: they’re mining the Strait! “No, we’re not mining the Strait.” “I’m gonna blow you up if you don’t de-mine the Strait!” “We never mined the Strait.” “Actually, there’s no evidence they mined the Strait. Oh, by the way, we just decommissioned our minesweepers after 40 years of service.”

Just bizarre, bizarre, bizarre, bizarre.

But it ends up in this narrative and Knightly links rightly, I think, to this Financial Times article: “Why Hormuz will haunt us long after this war ends,” which notes:

It is not in Trump’s power to reopen this vital sea passage by declaring victory and walking away. Instead his war with Iran—and the particular issue of the Strait of Hormuz—will define the rest of his presidency and may haunt his successors.

 

That is because the strait’s closure creates both an immediate crisis and a long-term strategic quandary. The current problem is that the longer it is closed, the greater the threat of a global recession. The future dilemma is that Iran now knows that control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it a stranglehold over the world economy. Even if it relaxes its grip in the short term, it can tighten it again in future.

Oh, no!

So, there, coming again straight from the horse’s mouth of The Financial Times—Gideon Rachman, that’s a name that people should be familiar with. But anyway, coming straight from the horse’s mouth, it doesn’t matter what Trump does or doesn’t do at this point. He can walk away completely. He can obliterate Iran’s navy as he already says he’s done, but he’s going to do it even harder now. There’s more back and forth that’s developing as I am recording this episode with an ultimatum. You have 48 hours to clear the Strait of Hormuz or we’re going to obliterate your power plants, says Trump, etc., etc. People have seen this taking place.

But as the establishment mouthpieces and gatekeepers are saying right there in the open, it doesn’t matter what happens at this point and how this is resolved or not resolved. The point is the threat is now established and it is there. It is always there and will be the thing that can be ginned up at a moment’s notice by anonymous sources telling Reuters, “oh, yeah, they totally mined the strait.” And, again, where the hell did that report come from? Who were these anonymous sources? Reuters really, truly just says anonymous sources in a position to know. That could be literally anyone from anywhere, right? But they don’t have to tell us because they’re protecting their sources.

OK, great. So we have this completely, totally fabricated information from nowhere by no one that just appears in the press and then dominates the headlines that then completely reconfigures the entire calculus about the war and what’s happening and what the strategic choke point is and brings the world to the state of warfare. Because, of course, what happens with the Strait of Hormuz is and has been the choke point that makes this not just some regional squabble for dominance between Israel and Iran, but a global threat.

And that is the thing that can be, again, drawn out of the hat at any time by anonymous sources speaking off the record to whatever established mouthpieces want to publish it whenever they want to publish it. This is the real ultimatum that is taking place right now. It is not an ultimatum from Trump to Iran: “you’d better clear the strait!” It’s an ultimatum from the deep state, the people who are really handling this, to Trump and whoever else succeeds him in the Oval Office, that you are going to be holden to whatever narrative we create about the Strait of Hormuz at any time we create it.

So, I think there’s a deeper level of what’s going on here that is not being managed by Trump. It is not even being managed by Netanyahu. There are forces above these players.

And that brings with it some of the strange parts of this story that, again, some of them obvious, some of them much less obvious as to who is really benefiting from what is happening with the Iran war.

Of course, the base level of this analysis would be the obvious one. The “follow the money,” who benefits? Well, obviously, as always, when it comes to warfare, the military industrial complex benefits. They cash in, they laugh all the way to the banks that they own. And here we go.

So, for example, we saw this float through the news wires a few days ago from antiwar.com: “Department of War Seeks $200 Billion More to Fund Iran War.” Because, yes, on top of expanding and ballooning the US military budget to its largest ever in history, the Trump administration—the Peace Prize administration, right?—is now asking for even more money for this war that they’ve already won. But not won enough. And $200 billion. “But don’t worry, guys, they have to seek $200 billion. They’re asking, please, Congress, will you approve this?”

Oh, wait, they don’t have to ask anything! “US Fast-Tracks Billions In ‘Emergency’ Arms Sales To Gulf, Bypassing Congress.” Yeah, of course, they can fast track the money that they need when they need it, because, of course, this is an emergency wartime situation, which, as always lets the floodgates open and ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

And if you want a really detailed deep dive report on this, I will point people to this recent report from the Democracy Defender: “Iran War: We Follow The Money (To Mar-A-Lago).” And this is a step-by-step deconstruction of the entire Trump administration and everyone who’s literally invested in this war, who also happens to be in positions of power in the administration.

So, again, person by person, Steven Feinberg, the co-founder of the Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm with approximately $70 billion in assets, who serves as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. (I thought it was the Secretary of War?)

Howard Lutnick, of course, Commerce Secretary, who has made appearances here on The Corbett Report in recent weeks.

Scott Bessent and his conflicts of interests in various investments that he’s totally going to divest from in 90 days or something like that! …Oh, wait, he failed to do that.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and then going through the Board of Profits, the Shadow Contractors, the Golden Grift, etc. It’s, again, a very, very detailed report. So please do explore that if you’re interested in how exactly the military-industrial complex is benefiting from what’s going on.

But it’s not just the US military-industrial complex that is benefiting from this, although they demonstrably are. And obviously there are people who are making bank on this bloodshed and carnage. Weirdly enough, it’s also people who have been in the US State Department’s crosshairs who are also benefiting from what’s going on, sometimes quite literally and quite financially. For example, this recent report from the Daily Caller, “Russian Oil Poised To Flood World Markets As Trump Admin Lifts Sanctions.”

In fact, they’ve even lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which has been stranded at sea, to boost the overall supply because, well, what can we do? You see the oil price going up! So we have to unsanction Iranian oil. So, the very people who we are bombing, we’re going to unsanction their oil so that we can bring down global oil prices.

And there’s even more interesting parts of this. I want you to put a pin in this particular article because I think it tells us actually where this is really going and what the end game may really be about. But anyway, this little story floated through the newswires last week and probably most people didn’t see it at all: “Iran mulls allowing tankers through Strait of Hormuz if trade conducted in yuan: Report.” That, my friends, is a significant part of the narrative.

But the real question. OK, so yes, there are definitely financial interests on all sides that are taking place right now and that there are people who are literally invested in this war. But as always, it’s important to stress it is not the average person who is going to benefit from this in any way, financially or otherwise. It’s not that because the US is making bank, US military contractors and well-connected insider administration cronies, they’re making lots of money. Therefore: yay!

No, because, of course, the average person is just going to see higher gas prices and higher prices of everything as the world economy comes to a grinding halt. And that’s true not just in America. It’s true in every country. Of course, Iran as well. It’s not like the unsanctioned oil, “Oh, yay. Now the Iranian people are going to benefit from the oil that their country owns!”…Oh, wait, they don’t own it. No, the government claims control over it and they will reap any possible benefits from whatever funds might come through that unsanctioned oil.

Meanwhile, in reality, this latest article, “Iran Issues 10 Million Rial Banknote Amid Soaring Inflation.” Yes, they have just released their largest ever, their highest denominated ever banknote to the 10 million rial note because inflation is going through the roof over there. Of course, as it would, as their currency collapses, as their access to world markets already highly sanctioned and highly controlled begins to completely collapse. The average Iranian is sitting there in an Internet blackout with inflation going through the roof watching. Oh, well, good. Yeah. Now I have a 10 million rial note. Yay. Hopefully it will buy me a block of butter at the end of the day.

So, this is the state of of things for the average person.

And wait, it gets worse!

And I think this points us to where things may be really going here. Does anyone remember the dark days of the lockdown during the scandemic? Because it turns out warfare is a good way of reconditioning the populace to, of course, comply with whatever wartime rationing and demands that the state may make.

For example, we get this from The Telegraph: “People urged to work from home in global oil crisis.” Yes, work from home mandates and rationing of various sorts, because, of course, “there is a global oil crisis going on, guys. You see what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts. But don’t worry, it’s for the good of the Iranian people or it’s to keep us safe from their nukes. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly why this is happening. But anyway, we’re all going to make the sacrifices!”

If I didn’t know better, and I do, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say, hmm, I think there’s something more going on here. There’s some sort of, I don’t know, Great Reset agenda, a Build Back Better agenda, a New World Order—a newer, friendlier world order!—that is being erected from the ashes of this smoking crater hole left by the Iran war.

But again, don’t take it from James Corbett. What does he know? No!

No, let’s take it from one of the new rising stars of the alternative media.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you were the commander-in-chief of the United States, what would you do at this point, as of today?

 

JIANG XUEQIN: The commander-in-chief meaning Donald Trump?

 

CARLSON: Yeah. You get to make the decision. What does America do next? If it’s acting in its own interest, if it’s trying to preserve its power and wealth at this point, what does it do?

 

XUEQIN: Well, first of all, I would acknowledge that all these events are interconnected, right? So the trade war with China, this war in Ukraine, this war in the Middle East, it’s all interconnected because American empire is too overstretched and it has its fingers on everything and so it allows its enemies to provoke it into these never-ending wars.

 

So, what I would do is basically sit down everyone, OK, including Russia, China, Iran and say: “it’s time for a new world order where we are partners in this relationship, right?” Before, America was a hegemon. Before, the US dollar was a world reserve currency. But now what we want to do is open a dialogue where everyone is respected, where America is no longer the bully but a winning partner in creating a new economic order that benefits everyone and not just and not just a few.

 

CARLSON: I think that’s the the wisest possible advice and probably the only path that preserves civilization.

 

SOURCE: Political Prophet Predicts the Next Phase in Iran, Trump’s War Plan, & Israel’s Plot to Sabotage It

CORBETT: Are you buying this? I mean, really? Are you buying this? And who’s selling it? Well, for those not in the know, that was “Professor” Jiang Xueqin, who has rocketed through the ranks of absolutely nowhere to become one of the most revered “Nostradamuses” of the so-called mainstream alternative media and is now being hosted by the likes of Tucker Carlson himself. Interesting.

And interesting for a number of reasons, not only because this proposed solution is evidently a shinier, happier, multilateral new world order with China and Russia. (Where have I heard this before? Where have I heard this narrative being propounded before?) But also because: who is this Professor Jiang, anyway, and how did he suddenly become so popular and amazing and millions of people watching him on YouTube?

Despite the fact that I have yet to hear him say literally anything, make any analysis, that is not available in a thousand other places and with better documented sources. I just…I don’t—it’s almost like something’s going on here!

And yeah, when you start to dig into it, “Canadian journalist deported from China” from The Globe and Mail back in 2002, noting how Jiang Xueqin, who is a Canadian freelance journalist who was born in China, was working for our good friends at PBS back in that time, making a documentary about labor unrest in China, which caused him to be deported from the country, and thus…a crusader for human rights or something? I don’t know. Anyway, he’s a freelance journalist working with the US PBS to undermine China and gets deported.

Then the next year he gets back into China and decides to give up journalism to…focus on education? Well, anyway, that’s what we can get from his own op-eds that he wrote for CNN back in 2017. “China’s media enables tyranny and corruption” (unlike the US, I guess, and PBS). “China let me back into the country a year later in 2003, and today I’ve switched from being a rebellious journalist into a public educator tasked with helping China adopt Western creativity.”

And now he’s literally a high school teacher in China. Mr. Jiang, not Professor Jiang, because that’s just a title he’s just given himself. He is not a professor. He is a Mr. Jiang who is teaching high school in China. He has a BA in literature. I am literally more academically qualified than “Professor” Jiang, if we wanted to go degree for degree, which I don’t. But anyway, make of all that what you will.

But along comes these “truth tellers” in the mainstream alternative media to tell you that the real answer here is for America to just give in to the multilateral world order that, huh, you know, now that I think about it, is the exact same thing that the US deep state and the globalists of all stripes have been advocating for openly for years now.

BIDEN: As one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946. And since then, we established a liberal world order, and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now is a time when things are shifting. There’s going to be a new world order out there. and we’ve got to lead it. We’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.

 

DAVIS: The idea is that the international rules-based order has a moral imperative, which stands in opposition to something that you’ve discussed before, the joint statement between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who suggested a different model based on what they were calling a multipolar rules-based system, but they very much focused on it being an international law-based system, focused more around the G20 than the international rules-based order, which is the one that we’re encouraged to support, which is based around the G7 and what we might call a unipolar world order. And it was actually Patrick Stewart who was writing in the Washington Quarterly for the Council on Foreign, well, not for the Council on Foreign Relations in this instance, but he’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who described the—What the international rules-based order is currently, the Western model.

 

CORBETT: I should interject that you mean Stuart Patrick, not Patrick Stewart. Not Captain Picard.

 

DAVIS: Yeah, no, not Captain Picard, no.

 

But he described it as follows: “What sets the post-1945 Western order apart is that it was shaped overwhelmingly by a single power, the United States, operating in the broader context of strategic bipolarity. It constructed, managed and defended the regimes of the capitalist world economy.”

 

So, this idea—you know, which is framed in fluffy rhetoric of democracy and all that kind of thing. And it is fluffy rhetoric. I think that’s the point to make because there is, if we look at what’s happening now, there is no commitment to democratic principles. None at all.

 

So, the idea is that the US, as a unipolar power, which certainly they were after the end and the sort of dissolution of the Soviet Union, they became that in reality. They became a unit. We had a unipolar world. There was only one superpower.

 

That situation is rapidly changing. And that situation is changing very quickly, given what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. But nonetheless, that was the idea of the international rules-based order as presented by the West, which stands opposed to the new model, which is being advocated by China and Russia at the moment.

 

SOURCE: Interview 1714 – Iain Davis on the New World Order and How to Oppose It

CORBETT: In case you missed it at the time, that was a clip from my 2022 interview with researcher Iain Davis, frequent Corbett Report guest, friend of the show. You will recognize from his many previous appearances on the Corbett Report. That one specifically was entitled Iain Davis on the New World Order and How to Oppose It, in which we were talking about what was very au courant in diplomatic circles at that time, which are various statements by Biden and other deep state stooges about the need for the creation of a new multipolar world order and how this “international rules-based order” has been advocated on both sides of the phoney, ginned-up West vs. BRICS conflict for years and years now. And there’s plenty of evidence in that conversation, in the article that Iain Davis penned that we were talking about in the various sources he was citing, Stuart Patrick and others (not Patrick Stewart), etc.

So, there’s a lot of information there for people who are just getting caught up on reality. So, there you go: “Professor Davis.” Or maybe Professor Corbett, because, you know, REPORTAGE: Essays on the New World Order. “How did Nostradamus Corbett possibly predict that this is where things were heading?”

Anyway, yes, let’s “Yes, And…” this information that’s coming now from the mainstream alternative media, that, “yes, the end game for an Iran war conflict is the creation of a new international rules-based order. Yes, that’s true!” I don’t think that’s a good thing because of everything that it entails.

And we start to see that when we start to see the oil prices skyrocketing, [which] is going to create these rationing measures, etc. And one does not have to have a great deal of imagination to understand how these financial pressures are going to be used as leverage to advance every single one of the agenda items that we know is on board for digital ID and biometrics and all of the other apparatus of the biosecurity state that is now being transitioned into the war security state. You know that narrative is coming.

But let’s look at a very specific example, something we can put our finger on, of who is behind what is happening and why they are so interested in it and specifically what will eventuate from this. Let’s put our necks out there and make some specific predictions about what is coming as a result of this, because there is enough information now that we can start to get a sense of that.

We’ve already looked at some of the people who are financially benefiting from this. Surprise, surprise, guess what? The Iran war is also a bankster war, like every war is, because their financial and monetary incentives are there. But, very specifically, when we’re following the money on the Iran war trail, let’s not just end at the usual military industrial complex grifters making bank from their blood money. No, no, no. It doesn’t end there. In fact, what we are looking at is following the money all the way into a new monetary order, because that is on the table.

And let’s look at in more detail at that article that I read the headline of earlier: “Iran mulls allowing tankers through Strait of Hormuz if trade conducted in yuan.” What on earth is this about?

Iran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz on the condition that the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan. A senior Iranian official told CNN that Tehran is working on a new plan to manage tanker traffic through the strategic waterway on Iran’s southern coast.

Now, of course, this article is a week old. Things have moved on since then. We now have this new ultimatum that’s happening as I’m recording this podcast, etc. So, the ongoing brouhaha in the Strait is not settled yet.

But, as we see, it is the open festering wound that can be the bandaid can be ripped off at any time, no matter how they cover it over. And the floating of the idea that only yuan-denominated oil will pass through is extremely important because, as people know, maybe you’ve heard about it before, the petroyuan is a thing or a thing that China has been trying to bring into reality for years and has had some limited success on that. If you do not know about that, just type “petroyuan” into The Corbett Report search engine and you will find articles that I’ve had on that very subject over the years talking about that.

But if you don’t know what the petroyuan is, well, how about we start at basics, the petrodollar. Again, this is something that I’ve talked about before. But the long story short is that in the 1970s, as Nixon was closing the gold window and people around the world were discovering that the US dollar was no longer backed up by gold—”Well, what’s it backed up by?”—of course, Kissinger, acting as a proxy for Rockefeller behind the scenes, was scrambling to put together a diplomatic coup. A monetary/military coup of sorts in the Middle East. Specifically, the construction of the petrodollar.

And for people who don’t know, this is an informal agreement. It was not a formal agreement. It did not suddenly end “because it expired,” as was fake news/false news reported a couple of years ago, something that I covered in the Fake News Awards recently.

No, it wasn’t a formal agreement. It was an informal agreement, primarily with Saudi Arabia, but also with other Gulf states to price oil in dollars. To sell oil in dollars. And for those dollars that were collected to then be recycled back through the US banking system by investing in treasuries or in the US markets through US. Banks. That was the deal. And that was what’s what made the US dollar still the world reserve currency, still the thing that everybody had to have. Because if the lifeblood of the world economy is literally priced in dollars, it means you need dollars in order to buy that lifeblood.

And that’s exactly the game that has been played for decades and decades now. But you know what? That’s starting to change. And that changeover has been excellently summarized and encapsulated in this very important article from the Golden Geopolitics Substack. I will, of course, include this in the show notes, along with everything else that I talk about today. So please go and read through it in its entirety. It’s called “The Bretton Whoops,” How 50 Years of Dollar Supremacy Are Dying with a Bang, Not a Whimper.

And as I say, you should read through this whole article. It’s got a lot of good detail in here talking about the situation we’re in and how we’ve arrived at it, at least over the last several years. Talking about Venezuela’s attempts to get their gold out of the vaults in London, et cetera, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, et cetera.

But here’s where we get to the money part, where he describes the petrodollar:

The petrodollar was a simple deal. The Gulf states price their oil in dollars, recycle the surplus into US Treasuries, and in exchange get American military protection. Clean, elegant, and – for fifty years – it actually worked. The US got permanent demand for its currency and its debt. The Gulf got security guarantees backed by the most powerful military on earth.

 

Five decades of procurement scandals and DEI hires later, someone called the bluff.

 

US bases across the Gulf – Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE – were always sold as the physical expression of the guarantee. The muscle that backed the paper. They were protection. Except now those bases are targets. The countries hosting them are getting hit precisely because they host them. What once was “US military presence as shield” has collapsed and became “US military presence as a bullseye”.

 

Medvedev put it with the particular relish of someone who has been waiting years to say it.

And here he quotes the Medvedev tweet:

The Gulf Arab countries let American bases onto their territory. Naively, they expected protection from them. Like hell! The US just uses them, while protecting only one country. Think long and hard about whether you really need US bases—they’re not protection, they’re a threat!

So you are starting to see what is happening here, what is truly unfolding in this situation. Yes, war and all of the things that come along with it. But very specifically, the people who are being retaliated against by Iran right now are the people who are hosting the US military bases, which threatens to undermine the entire basis of the petrodollar system. The entire guarantee was a security guarantee, which has now just become a security liability. “So, why are we pricing our oil in dollars, again? Hmm, I wonder if there’s another way to do it. Oh, if we price it in yuan, maybe we can sail straight through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Interesting. What an interesting trap that has been set and sprung.

And later on in this Substack, he goes on to write:

About $9.2 trillion in US Treasuries rolled over in fiscal 2025 – roughly a third of all outstanding federal debt – and the 2026 refinancing wave is already building. Annual interest payments on the federal debt have crossed $1 trillion for the first time. The Treasury is buying back its own debt in tranches to keep the market from seizing up. But the 10-year yield keeps moving higher regardless.

 

The petrodollar recycling loop was one of the structural forces keeping Treasury auctions clearing. When Gulf sovereigns stop buying – or start selling – somebody else has to absorb that supply. At higher rates. Which makes the interest burden worse. Which makes the deficit worse. Which requires more issuance. The spiral is not complicated.

 

And underneath all of this sits a deeper shift that doesn’t get enough attention. The world is migrating from a currency-based monetary order to a collateral-based one. For decades, Treasuries were the global safe asset – the thing you held when you didn’t know what else to hold. That status is eroding. What’s replacing it, are commodities. Physical stuff™. Things you can actually use. Which is – not coincidentally – exactly what the GCC is sitting on, and exactly what the US has just demonstrated it cannot protect.

And he goes on to make the point, for example, of course, this is what we’ve seen as investors are selling off stocks as private credit fears mount. We’re also seeing, of course, gold skyrocketing as one of the safe haven assets—or that has shown that it is, again, the thing that people will eventually turn to when they realize that the paper promises of US Treasuries are not worth the paper they’re printed on. And then finally, he wraps up by saying:

The entire purpose of US power projection in the Middle East – the bases, the carrier groups, the security guarantees – was always to protect the dollar system. To keep the oil flowing in dollars, the recycling loop turning. Not out of the goodness of its heart. It allowed the US to run deficits indefinitely, export inflation to the rest of the world, and borrow at rates no other debtor could ever dream of.

 

Whether Washington chose this war or simply couldn’t say no when Israel saw its chance and leapt – that’s still an open question. What isn’t open is the result. The Gulf states are under attack because they host US bases.

So, again, please go read through this entire article. It is important, but it shows something very important that is developing here. This is the intertwined concept that in times of great warfare, geopolitical instability, world warfare, we see monetary paradigm shifts. From the gold standard that was being propped up by the British banking system in the early 1900s, shifting over after World War I through the period of great instability of the Depression and everything that came along with that, to the founding of the new monetary economic order in Bretton Woods towards the tail end of World War II that has propped up the system as we know it and has made the US unipower (at this point) empire into the greatest world empire that has ever existed on the face of the planet. That has been done specifically on the back of a number of monetary inventions, including most recently the petrodollar system, which we are seeing starting to crumble before our very eyes.

This is significant. And this is how the people who are really controlling this, pulling the strings—not just of Trump, but of Netanyahu as well, and all of the players at the table, Iran and Russia and China, all of them are pulled on the monetary level. And if you can affect a changeover in the monetary paradigm itself, there is your new world order. It falls out as a result of a new monetary order that is coming into view and a monetary order that may be commodity based for some time as needed, at least to secure the reserves as the handover and changeover occurs.

Will it be a petroyuan world reserve? Well, that’s certainly much up in the air, but you can better believe, bet your bottom dollar, that it is going to be some form of digital currency tied to digital ID and everything else that we know is part of this agenda. And whether that’s through some stablecoin issuance, which is going to be the new replacement for the petrodollar, or something else entirely, remains to be seen. But this is what the bottom line is. This is what the end game is. It is about a changeover in world monetary paradigm that is going to have an effect on the entire global geopolitical calculus.

We are watching it happen in real time and data is coming in every single minute of every day. It’s more than any one person, even myself, can handle. So, I need your help in keeping track of this data and finding out all of the little pieces of the cookie crumb trail that is leading us into this New World Order that some people seem to be so excited about.

On that note, I’m going to call on Corbett Report members, as always, your support is needed, not only monetarily, but also informationally. I need you to help in this open source information endeavor. So, if you have information, good articles like this “Bretton Whoops” article or other information along these lines to share, please share them in the comment section of this post at corbettreport.com/iranendgame. Your support is incredibly important to this open source educational endeavor. And I’m going to keep doing it, Professor Corbett or not, I’m going to keep doing it. So, I hope you will be here with me as I continue exploring this incredibly important world historical event.

That’s going to do it for today’s exploration. I am James Corbett of corbettreport.com, once again inviting you to take a look at the entire hyperlink transcript, all of the sources, and follow the open source investigation in the comments thread at corbettreport.com/iranendgame. But that’s going to do it for today. James Corbett, corbettreport.com.