TRANSCRIPT: Alexander Mercouris on US Military Moving into Strike Position from Israel and the Geopolitical Stakes Danny Haiphong Oct 30

Danny Haiphong: Welcome back to the show, everyone. As you can see, I am joined by co-host of The Duran and geopolitical analyst Alexander Mercouris to go over the latest developments.

So, Alexander, I wanted to begin with a very busy 24 to 48 hours in West Asia. In the last 24 hours, there’s been at least 10 US military transport aircraft landing in southern Israel, according to Israeli media. Air bases in Israel, as well as in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have reportedly received more air defenses and other munitions for the coming war.

I wanted to play what Senator Chris Murphy said—that an insane US war plan is underway and that the Senate has been briefed on it. Here is what he said:

“In one of these briefings, we did get the chance to have a fairly detailed conversation about what the war plan would be if we restarted military operations. You’ve heard a preview that it would be a short-duration plan. I will just say this: their plan is insane. It won’t work, it will lead to devastating escalation, and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law. There’s been open reporting as to what we may be planning and the civilian infrastructure that we may be targeting. The plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war.”

President Trump was briefed reportedly yesterday on all of these options. Here’s what Fox News had to say about that:

“President Trump reportedly receiving a briefing from the top US commander in the Middle East regarding potential military options for Iran. Jackie Heinrich is at the White House right now with the latest. Jackie?”

“Yeah, no kidding, Brian. Top US commander in the Middle East reportedly meeting with the President just yesterday at the White House alongside War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. It comes after the Vice President held a similar meeting on Wednesday following warnings to regional allies that the US could continue strikes right after the midterms.”

So Alexander, it seems like we’re on the knife’s edge of another restart to the kinetic action of this war. What do you make of these developments, and how does this all tie together into the broader geopolitical picture?

Alexander Mercouris: I think it’s all very, very ominous. I think that the decision to attack Iran has been made, and I expect it to happen at some point over the next few days or week—maybe certainly after the midterms. All of the indications suggest that the aircraft, the fighters, and the military personnel are being put into place.

There has been a small amount of diplomacy, but I think the signals from it are being read wrongly by many people. There was a visit to Tehran by the “Mecca Three”—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan—but I don’t think this was really effective diplomacy. I think it was rather a plea to the Iranians to make some concessions to avert this attack which is coming and which would be a disaster.

I mean, Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, has also recently been to Iran, and I think that’s also basically to gauge the temperature and to see whether there was anything that could be done to move things forward. The Russians have had some discussions with the Americans about this, but all the indications tell me that the Americans are now moving towards a war.

The one thing that might have stopped it was an election outcome in Israel which meant that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s position was no longer secure and that he would no longer be prime minister over the course of the next few weeks. The election result in Israel, on the contrary, has secured Netanyahu’s position for the short term, and he will now be looking to shore it up. The way he will want to shore it up is by escalating the war against Iran. So he’s going to be advocating for this war, his voice is decisive, and I think the war is going to come.

Danny Haiphong: Well, to that point about Israel, Alexander, was this the worst possible outcome for the restart of heavy military action against Iran? I mean, the war has been going on, but the US and Israel have refrained from bigger strikes for a variety of reasons. Now, without majorities for any side in the Israeli Knesset, and as you said, Netanyahu will be prime minister for quite a while, it’s not imminent that any internal decision will be made. There’s a whole process that’s going to take weeks to months to resolve. That gives Netanyahu time to do something about this. Your reaction to this?

Alexander Mercouris: Well, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Netanyahu remains prime minister, and he has all the levers that he needs at his control. The way the election played out is that Netanyahu—or his coalition—won a majority of votes from Jewish voters in the Israeli elections. A majority of Israeli Jews, as I understand it, voted for Netanyahu, which puts the opposition coalition in a very difficult position. In order to oust Netanyahu, they need to forge a coalition with the Arab parties.

How is Netanyahu going to make that much more difficult—and perhaps outright impossible? He’s going to engineer a crisis in the Middle East—in other words, a war. That’s in his interest now. He’s going to say to the other side: “We are now in this conflict with Iran. How can you form a coalition against me with the Arab parties who are sympathetic to our enemies? You’re taking an anti-patriotic position, and everybody ought to be uniting behind me, the Prime Minister and leader of Israel, in this crisis.”

So I think this election outcome has actually made a war even more likely than it was previously. If you wanted an outcome that incentivized Netanyahu to desire a war, this is it.

Danny Haiphong: What do you make of the calculations around diplomacy especially? We’ve heard all kinds of reports about mediators in Qatar, and you even had JD Vance supposedly reaching out to Mohsen Rezaee, the Supreme National Security Council leader. Yet at the same time, you have all of the indications that the top head of CENTCOM is literally briefing on options, and it seems like the plan is right after midterms there’s going to be a strike. This feels like a loop—what was happening before February 28th, but under different circumstances. Your thoughts on what this diplomacy means?

Alexander Mercouris: Yes, this is exactly what it is, in my opinion. What is happening is this: Trump has made a decision to go to war. There are some people close to him who are worried and nervous about this. Vance has never been keen on this war from the start. The Saudis, undoubtedly, are having cold feet about this, because this time last year they were gung-ho for a war. They thought Iran was weak, they were pressing Trump to attack Iran, and they told him they believed the Americans would quickly prevail. Now everybody is very nervous, looking at this situation and saying: “Well, if this war resumes, it could potentially be a disaster for the region and for us.”

But in Trump and Netanyahu, they face an immovable axis on this. I don’t think Trump is in any mood or position to back off, and Netanyahu is incentivized to push forward. So what they’re all trying to do—Vance by calling the Iranians, the Saudis by going to Tehran—is try to get the Iranians to make some concessions to persuade Trump to call this off.

I don’t think the Iranians are going to do that. The message the Iranians have taken from the last year is, firstly, that any concessions they make to the Americans and Israelis will simply lead to more demands, until Iran’s entire negotiating position collapses. That tells the Iranians to stand firm. The other thing that tells the Iranians to stand firm is they’ve seen over this last year—or believe they’ve seen—that they can actually withstand any pressure the United States brings upon them.

So this diplomacy has not really led anywhere and cannot lead anywhere. If the war begins, if missile strikes happen, and the situation escalates, then we might start to see real diplomacy kick in as external parties—the Chinese, the Russians, maybe the Saudis—try to step in with proposals to avert the most extreme crisis. But at the moment, that isn’t the situation.

Danny Haiphong: It seems like the Trump administration—or big parts of it—believe that a renewal of strikes will force a move. Chris Murphy said infrastructure is going to be targeted. I know Israel has been pushing CENTCOM to approve strikes on Iranian energy and nuclear sites. The narrative in the mainstream media is that this will bring Iran back to the table, but Iran and the Trump administration had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Ghalibaf just said yesterday that the terms Iran is putting on the table are pretty clear and haven’t changed. What is this narrative of pushing Iran into negotiations supposed to mean?

Alexander Mercouris: You’re absolutely right. We had an MOU; it was clearly set out, Trump signed it, and the Americans appeared to agree to it. It was a deal, but a deal which the Americans ultimately walked away from. They did what they often do: they cherry-picked parts of the deal. They maneuvered to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened and oil moving from the Persian Gulf, but they took absolutely no steps to lift or relax sanctions as they were supposed to do, or to fulfill the many other conditions in the MOU. There was never any good faith behind it, so it unraveled very quickly.

Now, the US believes that Iran has been greatly weakened over the last 10 months by the war and that the Iranian economy is on the brink of collapse. So they say to themselves: “Let’s hit what we haven’t hit before—Iran’s civilian infrastructure: bridges, railways, port facilities, energy production, power stations, gas fields—and let’s do that overwhelmingly and quickly. That will be enough by itself to bring Iran to the negotiating table.”

It’s wrong at multiple levels. Firstly, it’s not going to work. What we have seen in the Ukraine war is how resilient energy systems, bridges, and water supplies actually are, and how quickly a country under pressure—especially a country like Iran—can repair and restore these facilities. This is never enough to actually break a country. What it is much more likely to do is cause the Iranians to feel that if they are being attacked in this way, they have no choice but to respond by launching their own attacks against America’s allies in the Middle East, targeting energy and oil facilities across the Persian Gulf. If the Iranians go further and attack desalination plants across the Middle East, depriving tens of millions of people of access to fresh water, we are in a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions.

Danny Haiphong: Our mutual friend Brian Berletic often cites a Brookings Institution paper called Which Path to Persia?, which includes a whole chapter dedicated to “Leave It to Bibi Netanyahu.” It seems like all of the preparations for this next attack are centered on Israel, which was not necessarily the case in the first attack. In the initial reports in February 2028, it was reported Israel conducted strikes, but eventually, it came out that the US Air Force was right there with the Israelis in a joint attack. This one feels a lot more like there is going to be an attack based out of Israel. What are the implications of that? Up until this point, since April, Israel has not been involved kinetically in this conflict. What are the implications if they do rejoin, given all of the factors you outlined?

Alexander Mercouris: First of all, we’ve seen that the Iranians have the capability to hit Israel, and they can hit Israel hard—probably a lot harder than they have up to now. Israel is small and does not have the same degree of resilience as Iran simply because of its geographic size, so it doesn’t have the enormous depth of resources that the Iranians can bring to a battle.

If Israel starts to get into trouble, it will call on America for help. The moment America steps in—which it will, because this administration politically and ideologically has no choice—we are right back to where we were: a war between the United States and Iran, a war in which both the United States and Israel have struggled to prevail.

Then we’re back to the old question: what do you do if this war drags on, if the Iranians won’t break, and if oil prices rise? Given that the pattern of this conflict up to now is brief periods of negotiation and pause followed by escalation, I worry we’re going to see another attempt to achieve a pause without anything ultimately being resolved, with each side then preparing for the next escalation. As to where those escalations can take us, we’ve heard the rhetoric from the President of the United States about “an entire civilization ends today,” and his speech to the General Assembly talking about annihilating Iran. I think many people think those were hints about using nuclear weapons, and frankly, so do I.

Danny Haiphong: You mentioned earlier the “Mecca Three” countries. Why was it that they ended up going to Iran? We know Saudi Arabia is in big trouble. The United Kingdom and France have doubled down on support for Saudi Arabia at this time, but Saudi Arabia had a big incentive to broker talks with Iran. All three of them came, but not much was conclusive out of it. What’s your take on their diplomatic role—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey?

Alexander Mercouris: Saudi Arabia is in a very difficult position. It is another high-spend, high-cost economy that depends heavily on maintaining the supply of oil. Crown Prince MBS had a very ambitious program to develop Saudi Arabia beyond oil—a program that is now in massive jeopardy. What the Saudis also discovered is that the American guarantee of protection they’ve lived under since World War II doesn’t mean as much as they believed it did.

They find themselves in a long, drawn-out conflict with Iran, involved in another long conflict with the Houthis in Yemen, facing pressure in the north from Iraqi militias, and dealing with a restive Shia population in parts of Saudi Arabia. We don’t know exactly how stable Saudi Arabia really is or what tensions exist within the royal family and wider society. They want to end this quickly.

They made this alliance with Pakistan and Turkey to try to get another guarantee, since the American guarantee wasn’t working. But they discovered that neither Pakistan nor Turkey is keen to go to war on Saudi Arabia’s behalf against the Houthis and Iran, as that would be deeply unpopular domestically and create a tremendous crisis for those countries.

So everybody got together with the Saudis and said, “Look, this is an impossible situation; we’ve got to see what we can do.” They all went to Tehran and likely told the Iranians, “Look, we’re faced with war again. Can you give us something we can take to Trump to tell him not to proceed because you’re backing off?” But the Iranians refused to back off because, from an Iranian point of view, there is no sense in doing so.

It really shows the relationship these countries still have with the United States. They aren’t going to the United States saying, “You should back off; this is going to hurt us and the region.” Instead, they go to Iran telling them, “How about you capitulate and give concessions to the United States?”—even though Iran is the country that has been targeted. It’s very revealing.

Danny Haiphong: You’re absolutely right, and speaking of relationships, what about Europe’s relationship to all of this, including the UK? The rest of the EU has been silent for the most part, with tepid opposition in some cases, but very much supportive. It’s interesting how much the UK in particular has been saying they’re going to support Saudi Arabia against Yemen. This war in the region doesn’t have Europe’s interests at heart, yet there is not much opposition.

Alexander Mercouris: What you’re seeing is the bankruptcy of European diplomacy—the fact that, to all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist. Back in 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration sought to invade Iraq, European countries like Germany and France vigorously opposed it, calling it a hugely mistaken policy. It made an impact on international relations.

This time, the Europeans have remained silently complicit with this whole crisis. They didn’t speak out in 2025 after it became clear the Trump administration was looking to resume attacks on Iran. They didn’t tell the Americans that another attack would be a catastrophic mistake. On the contrary, they’ve remained silent.

That complicity is now going a step further. My personal view is that these deployments of fighter jets by Britain and France to Saudi Arabia, along with declarations of support, are not really about the battle with the Houthis—they’re about the conflict with Iran. You’re going to see British fighter jets participate in the war against Iran. I don’t see how that can be prevented, and I have no doubt that was the intention all along.

Danny Haiphong: Deepening on Europe—not just in the Middle East, but with Ukraine and domestic unrest—the United States appears to have delegated a lot of responsibilities to Europe. There’s deep collaboration, but a lot of it seems to be against Europe’s interests, and we’re seeing unrest across the continent. How does that relate to these wars in general?

Alexander Mercouris: It’s collaboration underpinned by dependence. The Europeans have maneuvered themselves into a situation where they are committed to a long, drawn-out conflict with Russia, the great power on the European continent. No European state individually can take on Russia, and it is debatable whether they could do it together. They need the United States.

Because they are in conflict with Russia, they can’t stand up to the United States and say, “Please don’t attack Iran.” They worry that if they do, the Americans will get angry, as they did in 2003, and ask why they should help Europe in Ukraine. As a result, the Europeans are willing to assist the Americans in anything they do in the Middle East. They were very unnerved when Trump started to blame them for the fact that the US was fighting Iran on its own, which is why British and French military assets are being deployed to the Middle East—so they can claim they are involved and prevent the US from abandoning them in Ukraine.

It is an appalling policy of war rather than peace, and it is economically ruinous for Europe. Even if the European public doesn’t understand all the details, they are instinctively deeply unhappy and protesting every day. The protests over economic and social crises are ultimately a product of these wars.

If you want proof of how unpopular these policies are, look at Britain. The British government published a budget demanding more sacrifices from the public. What they aren’t loudly talking about, and what the media avoids discussing, is that this budget commits a further £10 billion of support for Ukraine. They don’t want to widely discuss it, and the media helps them hide it.

Danny Haiphong: Last question before we wrap up on Ukraine: what is the role of Russia and China right now? Sergey Lavrov was in Iran recently, and China has been relatively quiet other than reinforcing the MOU. There have been rumors of Russian cargo and transport planes in Iran. What is the state of the relationship between these three countries regarding the war?

Alexander Mercouris: The Russians and the Chinese have a straightforward position: Iran was attacked, and it was an act of aggression while negotiations were underway. Where there is a difference between Russia/China and Iran is that Russia and China want freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf. They do not want to see the Strait of Hormuz closed or controlled by Iran, because both understand that if sea blockades become standard practice, the West could try to impose one against them in the future.

At the same time, they don’t want to see Iran collapse or its government fall. They are giving significant economic support. For example, Iran is now the biggest buyer of Russian grain. Since Iran likely lacks foreign currency, that food and natural gas supplied by Russia is likely being funded through loan arrangements. I suspect China is providing similar assistance.

The Russians and Chinese are also providing intelligence assistance, while telling Iran: “We’re giving you this help, but keep your doors open to the Saudis and Persian Gulf states so we can help you reach a long-term deal when this storm passes.”

On China, when I was in Japan recently attending a conference with Chinese representatives, they all noted that the public mood in China is hardening in favor of Iran and against the United States—something the Chinese government has to take into account.

Danny Haiphong: What is the latest on the battlefield in Ukraine, and how does it factor into Russia’s calculations regarding political changes in the US and the internal decline of the Ukrainian regime?

Alexander Mercouris: We are approaching the moment when the battle for Donbas ends. Donbas is an industrial, heavily fortified region in eastern Ukraine. The Russians have taken control of 90% of the Donetsk region and all of Luhansk. There is about 5% of Donbas still in contention. Once the Russians have it, they will have broken through Ukraine’s major fortress belt. From then on, it’s open country all the way to the Dnieper River.

This will be a major moment in the war. If the Russians capture Donbas, they’ve achieved their original political objective and broken through Ukraine’s primary shield, allowing them to move toward the Dnieper or Kiev more easily.

Danny Haiphong: Does the West have any real military control over these wars right now, or is it driven by independent interests?

Alexander Mercouris: The West does not have military control over these wars, just as it didn’t in Vietnam or Afghanistan. The military initiative is held by the West’s adversaries—the Russians, the Houthis, and the Iranians.

However, the West could adopt different diplomatic strategies to address security concerns and work toward lasting peace. The problem is we don’t do diplomacy well anymore. So when the President of Finland and Prime Minister of Norway recently phoned the President of Russia to have a civil conversation, the reaction across Europe was uproar and fury, even though that is the only logical way to resolve the crisis.

There is a very powerful war lobby in the West driven by financial and economic interests—arms companies, contractors, lobbyists, ideologues, and media outlets. Prolonged wars secure their power within Western societies. Generals become more important, intelligence agencies expand their reach, and connected economic groups direct overall policy.

Danny Haiphong: Alexander, any final thoughts on where things are heading before we close?

Alexander Mercouris: There is one thing completely overlooked from Putin’s conversation with the leaders of Finland and Norway. The Russian readout stated that for there to be peace, Russian security interests must be accepted without conditions.

That is extremely stark language, close to the Soviet demands during WWII for unconditional surrender. I have never seen Putin talk in that way. It gives a clear sense that as the Battle of Donbas ends and Ukraine’s economy is shattered, the Russians are close to saying there will be no negotiated settlement—only dictated terms.

Danny Haiphong: We had one question from the audience: “Why do we never talk about Crimea’s attempt at rejoining Russia 20 years prior to 2014?”

Alexander Mercouris: The Russians talk about it a lot, but in the West, nobody wants to because it would be an admission that Crimea didn’t want to be part of Ukraine.

Danny Haiphong: Everyone, hit the like button, check the video description for links to The Duran and Alexander’s channel, and thank you all for watching. Alexander, thank you so much for joining.

Alexander Mercouris: Delighted to have joined, and looking forward to doing so again.