Trump Gets Frozen Out as New Global Alliances Form

0:00Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump is finally surrendering to world leaders, publicly and brazenly rejecting him. And folks, it is pathetic and it is ugly, but it is expected when it comes to Donald Trump. We were waiting to see what Donald Trump's response would be to the formation of the Mecca Pact, a defense alliance like NATO's Article 5. But in this case, between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, where an attack on one nation would be an attack on all of the nations. and the Mecca Pact was formed because the United States security umbrella in the Middle East was destroyed. So what would Donald Trump's response be to the formation of the Mecca Pact?

0:43Ben Meiselas:Also, the Mecca Pact shows that Saudi Arabia, as it always said before, would not be joining the Abraham Accords, which is the alliance with Israel. Saudi Arabia has made it clear it would not join the Abraham Accords until Netanyahu stopped the genocide in Gaza, stopped the invasion into Lebanon, and unless and until there was a Palestinian state. But by joining the Mecca Pact and bringing in Turkey, what was made clear, because Turkey's obviously in a cold war with Israel right now, that Saudi Arabia will do the opposite of joining the Abraham Accords. It will forge its own alliance of Arab nations, protecting Arab nations in the Middle East.

1:26Ben Meiselas:So what would Donald Trump's response be? Total and utter capitulation. What else would you expect? Donald Trump posts, very happy to see that the Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan alliance was formed. He says that they have recently and finally signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement. It shows how the Middle East is coming together and how countries will finally be able to defend themselves in a more meaningful way. Congratulations to the great leadership of the three nations mentioned. This is a big, bold, and important first step. Wow, Donald J. Trump. Now, just think about it. If you're Saudi Arabia, if you're Turkey, if you're Pakistan, and you know that you've created this alliance because of the U.S.

2:14Ben Meiselas:weakness in the region, because of the U.S. betrayal, and Donald Trump wants to take credit for this as though he just did a deal, it confirms why you did the Mecca Pact, and it also shows why other nations will likely be joining the Mecca Pact as well. Turkey's President Erdogan made it very clear that this alliance is open to other Arab nations and that he expects Egypt will be joining as well. Qatar has praised the Mecca Pact as a way that shows Arab nations are taking control of their own security. And in Israel, they are flipping out about the Mecca Pact. You have everyone from Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, to their agriculture minister, all the way up to Netanyahu saying that this Sunni alliance, this Mecca Pact alliance, poses a threat to Israel, while Donald Trump now is praising the formation of the Mecca Pact so that Trump can take credit as though this was like a deal that he entered into.

3:17Ben Meiselas:Now, Trump, utterly weak and pathetic. What else does he do at the same time? You see, all of this is related. while Donald Trump recognizes the formation of the Mecca Pact, while he sees that the U.S. is getting cut out and he just wants to take credits for deals or whatever, he then runs to Kim Jong-un and he praises Kim Jong-un and he attacks South Korea, who is an ally of the United States, or I suppose I should say was an ally of the United States. Donald Trump then posts the following. Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in the joint military exercise with South Korea.

4:02Ben Meiselas:These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile. So Donald Trump then orders Pete Hegseth to limit the U.S. military exercises and then to not do future military exercises with South Korea. So these developments are very much related because as the U.S. gets cut out in the Middle East, Donald Trump looks to the authoritarian who he looks up to, somebody like Kim Jong-un, even at the expense of an American ally like South Korea. The same way Trump destroyed our alliances in the Middle East, he's destroying our alliances all throughout Asia.

4:51Ben Meiselas:And you have China and Russia and others who are watching and saying, wow, the U.S. is just destroying itself and imploding by the second. You have Russia's defense minister saying the fearless North Korean warriors fighting shoulder to shoulder with us have demonstrated how courageous they are. Tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers fight alongside the Russian troops in their invasion of Ukraine. North Korea has provided weapons to Iran. North Korea has provided weapons to Russia. And you have an alliance between China and North Korea and Iran and Russia. And then you have Donald Trump being a Putin bootlicker, a Xi Jinping bootlicker, a Kim Jong-un bootlicker, while Donald Trump destroys our alliances here at home.

5:43Ben Meiselas:And while you have the number two at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, begging to be able to visit China and Xi Jinping saying no, because you, Elbridge Colby, had a policy where you wanted to decouple from China and you continue to threaten us. Now you're begging for a visit because we can withhold rare earths? Sorry, we don't want to meet with you. And folks, as Fareed Zakaria explains in his recent Washington Post op-ed, and this is what I've been saying over and over again, the Iran war is a masterclass in squandering a superpower's credibility. Trump treats promises like bluffs. Allies are responding by building alternatives.

6:26Ben Meiselas:And when you look at what Donald Trump just did praising the Mecca pact, I think you're going to see others say, got it, good. We're going to form our own alliances. Donald Trump just wants to take credit for our deals while he's isolated. How utterly pathetic can you be? In this recent piece in the Sunday Guardian, also did I think a good job laying out some of these alliances that have been formed recently. Let me share this with you as well. Then I want to talk about more of the US surrendering and what J.D. Vance said as well recently. Trump has incentivized many other alliances to exist without Washington, the European Union's external trade architecture being the clearest case.

7:08Ben Meiselas:It's no secret that America's alliances are in tatters right now. And it goes on to say that Trump incentivized many other alliances to exist without Washington. One of them that it cites is the EU Mercursor interim agreement entered provisional application in May. You have Brussels closing negotiations with Australia in March and with India and Indonesia prior to that. You have Malaysia and the Philippines queued up behind them. Most significantly, the European Commission is pursuing a framework arrangement with Trans-Pacific Partnership, with which it already holds bilateral agreements covering 10 to 12 members.

7:50Ben Meiselas:Who's in the middle of this all? Prime Minister Carney of Canada linking the transatlantic partnership, which he inked with Canada and the EU with trans-Pacific alliances with his recent trip to ASEAN. You have India-ASEAN trade reaching $128 billion in the last fiscal year as Donald Trump screwed over India, tariffed the hell out of India. Then Trump ran to Pakistan. Then Pakistan just did the deal with, and by the way, Pakistan is more closely aligned with China, but Pakistan was more than happy to have a relationship with the US that it didn't have before, but they were always more closely aligned with China.

8:34Ben Meiselas:How do I know that? I mean, just look at what the prime minister of Pakistan frequently says. this is what Sharif said this past week. I consider it extremely important to mention the everlasting friendship and sincere cooperation of our great friend China and its president Xi Jinping. The friendship between China and Pakistan is higher than the Himalayas. This great friendly country has stood like a rock with Pakistan every hour of our trial. And that's where a lot of defense weapons are going back and forth over there as well. So the Mecca Pact is also an extension of China's projection of strength in the Middle East also.

9:15Ben Meiselas:So with all of that going on, you have J.D. Vance kind of telegraph what's happening. The U.S. dollar is getting weaker and weaker. We've had our worst treasury bond sale in recent history. The way it works is the treasury bond holds these auctions to sell its bonds into the market. And when we've been talking about the treasury yields, and I sound like a broken record and a geek talking about treasury yields, the 10-year, the 20-year, the 30-year yield. The 30-year yield is well over 5 % right now. And what that means is that we, the United States, are now paying significantly higher interest on the debt that we issue such that our debt payments annually, that's like$1.3 trillion in debt that we have to service right now as the treasury yield rates increase as well, which is bad for us.

10:14Ben Meiselas:It's bad for future generations, and it's often a sign of decline, and it's a precursor often to very bad economic indicators. We'll just leave it at that. So with that taking place, J.D. Vance in the past week or so has been talking about the collapse of the dollar, but he frames it, and again, as a good thing, but what he is saying is surrender. The dollar being a powerful tool and the reserve currency of the world was part of the projection of strength. So yes, Donald Trump, who bankrupted all of his casinos and many of his companies over and over again, a loser, a felon, someone who's been found civilly liable as a sexual predator, it's not a shocker that they would bankrupt our country, right?

11:04Ben Meiselas:I mean, they're bankrupting our military with our interceptors depleted. The attackums have been depleted. The Navy destroyer anti-ballistics have been basically depleted. You have our bases had to be evacuated. The morale on our ships at all time lows, because they're not even getting food to the supercarriers like the Abraham Lincoln and the George H.W. Bush because our military bases in the region have been hit hard. And so you have our strategic petroleum reserves essentially at tank bottom. And so with all of this going on, the losers are in charge and they're doing loser things. So here you have J.D.

11:47Ben Meiselas:Vance saying it will be a good thing for the dollar to collapse because why would we want to have a strong dollar and to have more purchasing power? He's like, it just makes us greedy, independent. What are you even saying? What are these people even saying? So here's what J.D. Vance said. You can hear it for yourself. Let's play this clip. Yeah, that's exactly right. And by the way, this is maybe super heterodox. I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is a good argument that reserve currency status is akin to coal in Appalachia.

12:23It's a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That's been the story of the American economy for the last 15 or so years, even before that, is we can just borrow basically in an unlimited way because we have the reserve currency.

12:39Ben Meiselas:Yeah, so that's what J.D. Vance is saying. And with all of this taking place, I should also mention that the U.S. took its last supercarrier, its only supercarrier in the Pacific, and now is moving it to the Middle East because of the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln being way too long and how they're treating our troops there. So now we don't have any supercarriers in the Pacific anymore. With all of this going on, though, we've heard from Iran's general and Iran's parliament leader, so both the military and civilian leadership, although Iran's parliament leader, M.B. Galibov, used to be in the military.

13:15Ben Meiselas:So here's what Iran's Army Chief General Hatami just said about the U.S. surrender. Play this clip. The criminal U.S. president says, I want to declare the Strait of Hormuz part of a zone of crime. First of all, you're full of crap. Of course, once they realized what a huge mistake they'd made, they said, we're just joking. Even joking about it is way out of line. And here's what Iran's parliament leader MB Galibov just had to say about the U.S. surrender. Here, let's play this clip. I want to say that today we are in a cowardly war led by the U.S. and the Zionist regime. Our nation bravely, manfully and sincerely stood and fought.

14:21And as a public servant, as a brother who is familiar with the details of the world, I say with all my heart, we have truly won this war, both militarily and politically. I pointed this out in that interview at the beginning of the Ramadan war, right in the middle of it. By this war, I don't mean that we destroyed the U.S. military or the Zionist regime's military. No. What I mean is that the U.S. and Israel attacked us with clear and specific goals with nine specific officially declared, written, and repeatedly stated goals. But they failed to achieve even one of these nine goals on any level.

15:29This was the greatest absolute defeat for the U.S. and the Zionist regime. On the other hand, in terms of securing this victory, politically and diplomatically, the agreement is a badge of honor and victory in the diplomatic arena.

16:00Ben Meiselas:And so I just want you to think about it, that Donald Trump is so thirsty for a deal. He's so utterly weak and pathetic that the Mecca Pact, which was clearly formed as a direct response to the U.S. weakness and collapse of the U.S. security umbrella in the region. Trump's like, great work, guys. I'm a part of that, right? And you know that at countries where they have strategies and they deliberate and they think through things, they're looking at this and they're like, yeah, this is the exact erratic behavior of why we formed this to begin with. Anyway, I wanted to share that we need to get into the weeds like this.

16:39Ben Meiselas:We need to focus on international like this. I talk a lot about that in WTF America. So pre-order WTF America now if you haven't. It's the book I wrote with my brothers. that comes out in October. Let me know if you pre-ordered it in the comments. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Thanks for watching, everybody.

17:18Thank you.