Episodes

Gerald Horne joins Paul Jay to break down how the U.S. war on Iran has isolated Washington on the world stage, fractured the political right at home, and handed Tehran leverage it never had before. From anti-Trump summits in Barcelona to Jamie Dimon urging the elites to "finish the job," they examine whether the American establishment has any real exit strategy, or whether it's heading toward another Iraq War.

Next week, Paul Jay talks with historian Gerald Horne about what may be a genuine rupture in U.S. political life. Unlike Iraq in 2003, the elite consensus has fractured. The right is divided, corporate America is nervous, mainstream media is using the words “war crimes,” and polls show most Americans want no part of this war. The Israeli genocide in Gaza already cracked a consensus that held for decades— has the Iran war shattered it? Can the progressive left seize the opening? Leave your ques...

Daniel Ellsberg was the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing U.S. lies about the Vietnam War and helping trigger the crisis that brought down President Richard Nixon. He went on to spend the rest of his life as an antiwar activist, focused above all on the dangers of nuclear weapons. In this conversation, Barry Stevens speaks with his son, Michael Ellsberg, about Truth and Consequence, a collection of Daniel’s writings that blends personal memoir with decades of political and e...

In this conversation with Barry Stevens, Col. Larry Wilkerson argues that the United States has utterly destroyed the international legal order it once led in creating, eroding its legitimacy, and turning it into a global pariah. He says the war with Iran is strategically self-defeating: to win, Iran only has to survive, while the U.S. and Israel require a decisive victory that remains elusive. One consequence could be a global recession. Meanwhile, China benefits from American overreach without...

This interview was originally published on May 19, 2023. We are republishing it as the war in Iran continues to escalate. Historian, Assal Rad, explores identity formation in modern Iran, both under the Pahlavi dynasty as well as after the 1979 Revolution under the Islamic Republic. Her book “State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran” examines top-down and bottom-up manifestations of national identity as narrated by state structures and popular culture, respectively. H...

Miloud Chennoufi, professor of International Relations at the Royal Military College of Canada, tells host Barry Stevens that the rapidly escalating war on Iran is not about democracy or self-defense, but a dangerous and illegal conflict driven by Israel, which has long sought to reshape the Middle East while avoiding a resolution of the Palestinian question. He claims the United States has been drawn into a war it did not need to fight, launched despite ongoing diplomacy and in the absence of a...

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), joins Barry Stevens to discuss the alarming wave of complaints from U.S. military personnel. Over 200 service members from 50 installations have reported that commanders in their chain of command are framing the war in Iran as part of God\'s divine plan to bring about the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming. Weinstein describes how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth holds monthly Christian Nationalist prayer service...

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson — former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the State Department and Joint Chiefs — joins Paul Jay and gives his unfiltered assessment of the U.S. war on Iran. Wilkerson argues the conflict is unconstitutional, unwinnable, and strategically catastrophic. Topics include: Iran\'s military resilience and long-term strategy, Israel\'s nuclear threats, the depletion of U.S. and Israeli air defense munitions, China\'s push to replace the dollar with the renminbi, the collapse...

Trump’s State of the Union and Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference reveal a sweeping — and deeply troubling — vision for American foreign policy. Historian Gerald Horne (University of Houston) and journalist Jonathan Katz (The Gangsters of Capitalism) join Paul Jay to break it down. What emerges is less a foreign policy than a neo-colonial project: regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba; a reordering of Europe under American dominance; and an ideology rooted in Christian ...

The Epstein files are naming names — CEOs, politicians, a current and former president. This is the stratum of people making decisions about nuclear weapons in an uncontrolled arms race with no arms limitation treaties, no diplomatic channels, and AI now integrated into nuclear command systems. Paul Jay talks with Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists about where the U.S. nuclear modernization program actually stands — the Sentinel ICBM, hundreds of billions in cost overruns, the ...

Paul Jay joins Maria Hall, Jim Lafferty, and Michael Smith on the Law and Disorder radio show. They discuss his upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thompson. Jay reveals how post-World War II economic decisions drove nuclear weapons expansion, explaining why the Soviet threat was largely manufactured according to declassified CIA documents. He breaks down why Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system ...

In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the “Doomsday Clock” to draw attention to the existential dangers posed by human technology. The time was set to seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing the destruction of life on Earth. Just two years before, in 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world saw firsthand the potential of nuclear annihilation. As World War II was ending, a different kind of conflict was underway: the Cold War....

Gerald Horne, Johnathan M. Katz join Paul Jay: Trump’s ICE killings in Minneapolis have exposed deep splits inside the Trump camp and among business and political elites, many who now see him as dangerously unstable for capitalism itself. These fractures create a rare opening: massive street protests and sustained organizing can push harder than ever, while progressives use the crisis to run bold anti‑ICE, pro‑worker campaigns and turn elite disunity into real electoral gains.

Mark Carney’s Davos speech was widely praised as a bold stand against the breakdown of the so-called “rules-based order” and the rise of naked great-power politics under Trump. But speeches do not change power relations. In this wide-ranging analysis, Paul Jay argues that Trump did not rupture the global order so much as strip away its cover—exposing a U.S. system in internal crisis, increasingly authoritarian at home and openly coercive abroad. From hemispheric dominance to trade war and milita...

Director Paul Jay discusses his upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, featuring Daniel Ellsberg's final interviews before his death. In conversation with Cole Smith, a former Air Force nuclear missile operator, Jay explains why Ellsberg's journey from Cold War hawk to whistleblower provides the perfect lens for understanding our current nuclear crisis. The discussion covers Cold War lies, the risks of AI-controlled nuclear systems, and concrete steps toward disarmament, including phasi...

Venezuela’s oil industry has long been a site of struggle—between national sovereignty and foreign control, between social development and extraction for profit. In this wide-ranging conversation, Gregory Wilpert situates today’s crisis in that longer history, from the Chávez government’s effort to reclaim PDVSA for Venezuelans to the current U.S. strategy of tying sanctions relief to oil exports. As Washington pushes Caracas to increase production and redirect crude away from China, Wilpert exa...

Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko on what is misunderstood about this war — and why it matters for the peace we need so badly. In Part Two, Sakwa and Ishchenko turn to NATO’s expansion, Russia’s internal politics, and the peace proposals now being pushed. Sakwa dismisses the claim that NATO is merely defensive and rejects the idea that Russia poses a serious military threat to Western Europe. He traces the crisis to post-war settlements that shut Russia out of Europe’s security order — even ...

Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko on why peace was lost—and who helped destroy it. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine did not come from nowhere. In this first of two parts, Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko cut through the common narrative that reduces the war to Putin alone, without excusing the invasion itself. The failure — and in key moments, US sabotage — of an inclusive European security order after the Cold War helped lay the ground for conflict. Inside Ukraine, post Soviet clas...

President Donald Trump entered office backed by fossil-fuel executives, hedge-fund financiers, and the AI-military industrial complex, then used sanctions, military pressure, and trade coercion against Venezuela to dismantle national control over its oil sector—culminating in a $2 billion crude deal that redirects Venezuelan exports from China to the United States and rewards major political donors. Prof. Steve Ellner and Journalist, Ricardo Vaz explain, this outcome is not an aberration, but ra...

Following overnight U.S. airstrikes on Caracas, the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro, and President Donald Trump’s declaration that Washington will take control of Venezuela’s oil and effectively run the country, analysts Steve Ellner and Ricardo Vaz warn that the operation constitutes an unlawful use of force. They cite the combination of military assault, extraterritorial abduction, resource seizure, and alleged extrajudicial killings at sea as violations of international law and Venezuelan...

Paul Jay and host Barry Stevens analyze rising progressive movements, from Mamdani's victory in New York City to Sanders and AOC drawing massive crowds in red states, and why working-class consciousness has always been the real threat to American elites. They discuss why fossil fuel companies have known about the climate crisis for decades but chose denial, why AI could plan a sustainable economy, but is being used for profit and war. They examine the specific dynamics of Christian nationalism, ...

Paul Jay rejects the false choice between "Putin as a new Hitler" and the anti-NATO Left's defense of Russia. Under the UN Charter and Nuremberg principles, Russia's invasion is a war of aggression — there was no imminent threat and no "sphere of influence" justifies it. At the same time, NATO expansion was provocative and deceptive, and the U.S. refusal to take it off the table helped set the stage for war. The discussion highlights: •The Ukrainian people's right to self-determination and to ov...

Paul Jay breaks down what’s really driving Trump’s aggressive moves against Venezuela in 2025. Spoiler: it’s not about drugs or democracy—it’s about pushing China out of Latin America. In this conversation with Barry Stevens, Paul explains how China has become the dominant trading partner across South America without military projection, why the US is reviving the Monroe Doctrine, and how manufactured pretexts (from “Soviet expansionism” to “weapons of mass destruction” to “the war on drugs”) ha...

In Part Two, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson confronts the U.S. attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific—killings now broadcast openly on television—and says they violate not only international law but the military code he lived by as an Army officer. With Pete Hegseth installed as Secretary of War, Wilkerson argues that the United States is sliding into a new era of impunity, where the drug “war” becomes a pretext for murder, the laws that govern armed conflict are discarded, and ...