Tucker Carlson and Doug Wilson Discuss U.S. Foreign Policy and Israel
Summary
Tucker Carlson interviews Doug Wilson in a conversation that begins with Carlson's summer exchange with Senator Ted Cruz about the role of foreign lobbying in U.S. politics and quickly escalates into a sharp debate over America's relationship with Israel. Carlson argues that the push for regime change war with Iran represented a fundamental failure to prioritise American interests, particularly when domestic crises like crushing national debt and social decay demand attention. Wilson initially defends Israel's strategic importance through the lens of Christian Zionist voting blocs and the threat posed by hostile Muslim nations, but Carlson counters by challenging whether Islam itself is the problem or whether Western immigration policy — often championed by the same groups now demanding anti-Muslim foreign intervention — has deliberately undermined Christian majorities in both America and Europe.
Key Takeaways
Full Transcript
Tucker Carlson: No one was allowed — and I mean you'd lose your job for being like, what is this? The conversation I had with Ted Cruz this summer had never been had with any U.S. senator ever before.
Doug Wilson: The one about Israel.
Tucker Carlson: There are super obvious questions like, what is this? It's a foreign lobby. It's not a foreign lobby. Then what is it? Is it an America lobby? Is it for sending money to America? I don't think it is. The reason that he didn't have an answer is because no one had ever asked the question. These are big questions and they're big questions because we almost had a regime change war with Iran that month.
Now we're basically just overturning the last stone. There are a lot of critters under it. They'll scurry away. But all debate should begin with that question: how does this help America? Because there's no other reason to have a government.
Doug Wilson: That's it. That's all I'm asking. And I don't expect people are going to agree with my solutions. I don't even know what the solutions are in a lot of ways. The strike on Iran could be argued for on America First principles.
Tucker Carlson: I never heard any. I attempted to do that and they immediately called me an anti-Semite and they're still doing it.
Doug Wilson: Wait, wait, wait. How?
Tucker Carlson: I attempted to have a debate like, how is this in our interest? The guy just got inaugurated. I was there on 20 January and days later the head of a foreign country is in his office demanding that all of his attention and billions of our dollars go to his problem. That's when I got involved in this. I just don't want regime — I don't want to argue about Israel. I've always liked Israel, actually know a lot about Israel. Been there several times. I'm not against it. But this is ridiculous. What are you doing? Our country is dying in a lot of ways. We need to deal with our problems. We're so in debt that we'll never get out of it. And you're telling me that Iran is the biggest problem? It's a bigger problem than OnlyFans? Some huge percentage of our women are prostitutes now because of OnlyFans. That's a bigger problem than Iran. Sorry.
That's my view. Maybe you have a counterargument. But I voice this and they're like, "You hate Jews." I'm like, couldn't the counterargument be they're both problems?
Doug Wilson: Yes, but there's only so much time and so much money. So you have to create a hierarchy of concern.
Tucker Carlson: I'm merely putting Iran where it deserves to be, which is very low on the list of concerns if you're running the U.S. government. The number one concern is we're about to have a debt crisis, in which case we become poor and we lose the status of the dollar as the reserve currency and we have to actually pay.
Doug Wilson: And then that's when they take Yellowstone away and our water rights and this becomes an impoverished, fractured —
Tucker Carlson: Who's they?
Doug Wilson: Our debt holders. Japan, China, Europe, the world. At some point there's collateral. You owe money you can't repay. What are we going to do about this? I'm just imagining this. I don't know that anyone would ever call Yellowstone, but I'm just saying when you owe money, you borrow that money against an asset that has independent value. That's why your car, your home loan is collateralised against your home. We don't have any collateral. There's more paper than there are assets.
Without getting into it, this is a true crisis. And Trump had a lot of ideas for how to deal with it. I don't know if all of them were right or not, but his energy was focused on this. And then this foreign leader of a country of nine million people with no resources, no strategic value at all. Israel, apart from our defence guarantee, is meaningless. Israel is important because we say it's important. That's the only reason.
Doug Wilson: What's its strategic importance other than that? Are there trade routes that go through it? Do they have a tonne of oil we need?
Tucker Carlson: I don't understand it.
Doug Wilson: I think it's a very simple thing. That is, going back to our friends, the Christian Zionists, they're a huge voting bloc in American domestic politics. Anybody who wants to be successful in American politics on the right of centre has to demonstrate —
Tucker Carlson: You're absolutely right.
Doug Wilson: — has to demonstrate an affection for Israel.
Tucker Carlson: No doubt. But what I'm saying is at some point — I get that, and that's the core weakness of our system: it's easily subverted by blocs of voters who are highly organised. Jefferson worried about this. It's been a problem for a long time. I'm just saying at this point you have to have room for independent judgements about what is in our country's interest geostrategically. We have so wildly inflated the importance of this tiny country — which I think is a beautiful country and I can't visit but I want to because I love it — that no one — you're like, well, we have to be more closely allied with Israel than any other country. Well, why? And no one can answer you. Well, because they're threatened. Well, so are a lot of countries. So's Rwanda. So is Congo. I've just travelled too much. They're not alone in having neighbours that don't like them.
Why is that my problem when we're about to run into this brick wall of debt obligations?
Doug Wilson: I would say, and this is going to take more time than we have, but the people in this instance — the people who don't like them, the Muslims, surrounding Muslim countries — are also people who don't like us.
Tucker Carlson: Who specifically? Which government are you talking about?
Doug Wilson: There's the government of Dearborn, Michigan.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of the Muslims in Dearborn are Christian. A lot of the Arabs in Michigan are Christian, just in point of fact. And I'm fine with them because they're fellow Christians, even though they look different. I haven't been to Dearborn in a long time. I can't speak to Dearborn. I'm against — I'm a Christian, but I rate that against the actual threats.
Doug Wilson: Think of it this way. I've seen England for years. I've seen England as 20 years behind the continent and America is 30 years behind England. Currently, every major city in England is governed, has a Muslim mayor. Their immigration policy has been disastrous like ours, only ours — our southern border — has been largely Pentecostals and Trinitarian Catholics that have come across the border. Islamists in Germany and Islamists in the U.K. are an entirely different —
Tucker Carlson: I have family in Europe. I'm there constantly. I was there 10 days ago. So I agree with you completely.
Doug Wilson: And so someone could argue, as I would, that the Muslims who are threatening Israel are Muslims who are threatening us.
Tucker Carlson: Islam is a greater threat than the Jews.
Doug Wilson: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Is the problem with the Muslims of Europe that they're too Muslim or that they're criminals?
Doug Wilson: That's the same thing.
Tucker Carlson: It's not, though, actually. It's not. And —
Doug Wilson: Muslim —
Tucker Carlson: Let me ask you this. I'm totally not for Islam. I'm a Christian. Why are there twice as many Christians living in Qatar as there are in Israel? Do you think —
Doug Wilson: Twice as many Christians in Qatar?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. The Islamist slave state that we hear so much about. But there are twice as many Christians living there as in Israel. And they can leave if they want. They came freely. But there are twice as many in Qatar. Why do you think that?
Doug Wilson: Build churches.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Actually, the state gave them the land for their churches. But why is that if what you're saying is true? Because it's not true, actually. Islam is false. I don't believe in it. I don't want my kids to be Muslim. I'm not Muslim. But the reality that you experience when you get outside the American media biosphere is so different from what you're describing.
Second question I want to ask is, how did we get all these Muslims here after 9/11? They all came after 9/11. Who encouraged that? Exactly. Who encouraged that? And it's a lot of the same people who are now encouraging us to hate Muslims. Actually, the ADL was totally for it. Totally for it.
Doug Wilson: They want to make —
Tucker Carlson: Completely for that. You could not —
Doug Wilson: For 25 years.
Tucker Carlson: They encouraged that. What is that? I don't know what that is. But I know that the same people who are like, "Islam is the problem" are the same people who brought us all these Muslims here. I feel like I'm being played a little bit. That's all I'm saying.
Doug Wilson: I agree with that. The left wants discord. The left wants to foment. They don't like white Christians. So they wanted to dilute the population in the United States and they did it systematically through migration and they did the same thing in Western Europe. And I think we should stop all immigration, period.
And I would also say that at this point you can't — we have this non-Christian society. We're not going to have an overwhelming Christian society in my lifetime, sadly. But what do you do with that? And the first thing you do is recognise that attacking people on the basis of their DNA is going to turn us into Rwanda. And the same people crying anti-Semitism constantly, telling me I can't have free speech rights because there's anti-Semitism, are the same people telling us that we have to hate Muslims because they're Muslim. Well, how is hating Muslims better than hating Jews?
Tucker Carlson: It's not. Exactly. If you hate Muslims because they're Muslim, that's the same as hating Jews because they're Jewish.
Doug Wilson: Correct. I'm out. But if you are opposed to Muslims who have read the Quran, which I've done a couple of times — I read through the Quran — the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis, are not twisting the Quran.
Tucker Carlson: I'm sure. I wouldn't know.
Doug Wilson: They are being consistent with it. And I see them as a far greater threat to the West than the state of Israel is. And so protecting Israel from Muslims, you could argue, is a roundabout way of protecting — it's a process.
Tucker Carlson: How's that work for us? We went to war in Iraq in March of 2003 at the behest of Israel. Flat out. Netanyahu said it: "Glad you're doing it." There's no debate about that. And then in the years since, we've gotten millions of Muslims in the United States. Millions since the Iraq war. So how's that programme worked out for us? We didn't have any Muslims in the United States when I was growing up.
Doug Wilson: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: And as our support for Israel has become more and more fanatical — which it is, it's fanatical, can't even discuss it, anti-Semite — we've gotten more Muslims. So I don't think this works the way that we think it does.
Doug Wilson: I think that the whole system at the top is demented.
Tucker Carlson: You think?
Doug Wilson: But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. We've got the problem that we have in Dearborn is a problem that London has and a bunch of other U.K. cities have because we have lost our centre. As the poet says, the centre gives way. Everything is sunk. The best lack conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity. That's where we are.
Tucker Carlson: I would argue that because we are involved militarily and on many other levels in the Middle East at the behest of Israel — we're there because of Israel, we have an air base in Qatar because of Israel, we have all these troops there because of Israel — we have a lot of Muslims.
Doug Wilson: We might have an air base in Idaho if the Qatari deal goes.
Tucker Carlson: Why is that? Because Israel bombed Doha because they were doing a peace negotiation. We were doing a peace negotiation with Hamas. Why is that our job? Why is any of this our job? We've invaded the world and then we've imported the world. That's what happened to Britain. That's why they got immigration in the 60s. Because their empire was coming down and they're like, "You're from Barbados. You're from Nigeria. Those were British colonies. You move here." We're doing the same thing. How about we just — we don't have actual interests in the Middle East other than oil. Let's just pull back because this is destroying our country.