BREAKING: We Spent A Trillion Dollars On Our Military, And Still Lost To A Country We Call Backward” Carlson

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According to a video posted on Sky News, on Thursday June 25, 2026, Tucker Carlson questioned how the United States, despite spending enormous sums on its military, ended up losing ground to Iran, a country Carlson said American leaders have long dismissed as a backward theocracy.

Carlson argued that the outcome reflects a flawed belief within American leadership that military power alone determines global influence.

He said the United States spends roughly one and a half trillion dollars a year on its military, yet still found itself outmaneuvered by Iran, which he described as the world’s thirty-fourth largest economy.

He suggested that decades of unchecked global dominance had made American leadership complacent, allowing decision-makers to convince themselves of ideas that turned out not to be true, particularly regarding the source and nature of real geopolitical power.

In his words, Tucker Carlson said, “It’s also just the fruit of like being in charge for 80 years. It makes you weak and decadent and dumb. And you start to convince yourselves of things that are not true.

“And one of the things we’ve convinced ourselves of is that power flows only from the barrel of a gun. And that military power is the only power.

“And so we fund our military to the tune of one and a half trillion dollars a year and declare ourselves in charge. And we just lose to a country we’ve described for generations as like a backward theocracy.

“How’d that happen? And the answer is because military power’s not the only form of power. Geographic power is actually more important,” he said.

Carlson tied this argument back to his broader concerns about the war, suggesting that American leaders failed to recognize before the conflict began that the country’s traditional levers of strength would not produce the outcome they expected.