This contemporary application episode examines how American regime change evolved from covert CIA operations denied for decades to open presidential assertions of authority over foreign governments. Tracing the trajectory from Korea through Syria, we analyze how President Trump’s statement that he “must be involved” in selecting Iran’s next leader represents the culmination of seven decades of executive aggrandizement and congressional abdication. We examine the Venezuela model, the Board of Peace governance structure for Gaza, explicit regime change rhetoric regarding Cuba, and the systematic failures of oversight—including the Pentagon’s eighth consecutive failed audit and Congress’s rejection of war powers resolutions by party-line votes.

This episode begins Part IV of our series—The CIA and Covert Empire—by examining the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. We trace the British oil interests that motivated the coup, the Dulles brothers’ WWII background that shaped its methods, the operation itself, and the blowback that produced the 1979 hostage crisis and four decades of U.S.-Iranian hostility. We also examine the cases of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames to illustrate the dangers of intelligence agencies operating without oversight.

As American military operations in Iran continue, this contemporary application episode examines how the national security state—built for the Cold War, expanded for the War on Terror—has delivered the very outcome the Old Right warned against and Donald Trump himself promised to prevent. We trace the War on Terror framework that enables executive war-making without congressional authorization, the transformation of campaign promises into regime change, and the global application of targeted killing methodology from Mexico to Venezuela to Iran. The episode connects the institutions built in 1947, first deployed in Iran in 1953, to the war now underway—a seventy-three-year arc of consequence.

This episode examines the institutional transformation that followed World War II—the construction of permanent agencies, alliances, and war footing that replaced the founders’ constitutional design. We trace the Truman Doctrine’s unlimited commitment, the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and NSC, NATO’s entangling alliance, the Korean War’s constitutional precedent, NSC-68’s blueprint for permanent militarization, and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex he himself had built.

This contemporary application episode examines how the rhetorical techniques used to silence the Old Right in 1940-1941 continue to be deployed against critics of intervention today. We analyze the function of labels like “isolationist,” “Russian asset,” “antisemite,” and “conspiracy theorist” as tools of exclusion rather than argument. We document how the Old Right’s predictions about war’s consequences for the American republic have been vindicated by eighty years of evidence: the permanent expansion of military spending, the creation of constituencies dependent on defense contracts, and the erosion of congressional war powers. We profile modern inheritors of the non-interventionist tradition, from Ron Paul to Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna. And we discuss what listeners can do to recover constitutional limits on war-making in an era of potential conflict with Iran.

This episode recovers the lost tradition of principled American non-interventionism that flourished between the world wars. We examine the intellectual foundations developed by thinkers like Albert Jay Nock and Garet Garrett, the political leadership of Senator Robert Taft, and the mass movement of the America First Committee. We trace how this tradition was suppressed after Pearl Harbor and systematically discredited by historians who wrote interventionism into consensus—and we evaluate which of the Old Right’s predictions about war’s consequences for the American republic came true.

This contemporary application episode traces the direct line from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to present-day Gaza and the West Bank. We examine Balfour’s explicit calculation—his refusal to consult “the wishes of the present inhabitants”—and trace how that imperial logic persists in the current “ceasefire,” the Board of Peace reconstruction framework, and the accelerating annexation of the West Bank. We present data on ceasefire violations and casualties, analyze the Kushner reconstruction vision, and examine Netanyahu’s Washington visit in the context of US-Iran negotiations. Throughout, we acknowledge the propaganda on all sides and offer tools for critical thinking.

This episode traces the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East through three documents: the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration. We examine the key figures who shaped these events—Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, Winston Churchill and the Gallipoli disaster, T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, the Hussein and Saud families—and explore how promises made and broken a century ago created conflicts America has inherited and cannot resolve.

Article 5 examined how World War I transformed America - how financial entanglement, propaganda, and the suppression of dissent created what Randolph Bourne called “the health of the State.” Episode 5b applies that framework to the present: the permanent bombing campaign in Somalia that receives no media coverage; the $771 billion flowing to five defense contractors; the think tanks and media that manufacture consent; the Epstein files as a case study in narrative control; the deportation of students for peaceful protest; and the tripwires in Iran, Ukraine, and beyond that could produce the next catastrophe.

America’s entry into World War I was not a response to German aggression against the United States but a choice—influenced by British propaganda, financial entanglement, Wilsonian ideology, and the interests of those who would profit from war. This episode traces how neutrality eroded through $2.3 billion in Wall Street loans, how the Lusitania and Zimmermann Telegram provided pretexts for intervention, and how the dissenters who opposed war were silenced and destroyed. We examine Randolph Bourne’s insight that “war is the health of the state” and trace its manifestation in conscription, propaganda, censorship, and economic control. Finally, we confront the peace that failed—the Treaty of Versailles that planted the seeds of an even greater war—and ask whether American intervention served any purpose beyond the transformation of the republic into a warfare