NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2026, and our dear friends, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, are here with us.
You know that I am right now in Iran. I've been in Iran almost 40 days to see, to experience what's going on. 12 years since I last came back. And you know, conflict after conflict with the United States.
It all started, Michael, with protests here in Iran. The people were not happy with the way that the economy was working for them. They were facing difficulties because the Iranian currency was collapsing. The U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent came out and said that we have prepared for this moment happening in Iran. When it comes to the United States, it was amazing for me to see how it is possible for the United States to manipulate Iranian currency that much.
MICHAEL HUDSON: U.S. military strategy from the Korean War to the war in Vietnam to the war in Ukraine and over Gaza has been the same. It's the belief that if you can hurt civilians enough, if you can ignore the basic laws of international law of war and focus on attacking civilians, not military sites, that that will lead civilians to abandon their support of the existing regime and say, oh, we've got to elect a pro-American puppet who, because he's pro-American, will stop the United States from bombing us.
This is the exact opposite that has happened in every country throughout history. Countries rally around the leadership of the country under attack. They blame the attackers. They don't blame the existing regime for being attacked, especially if the attacks are completely predatory in character to put in place a system of economic and military dependence on the regime.
From the very beginning, the U.S. strategy has failed. And so what can the U.S. do ? All it can think of doing is bombing even more. But the problem is that bombing doesn't seem likely to have an effect because Iran has already gone through all of the demonstrations that it needs to do from the first Israeli attack in the 12-day war to the present.
And it even showed its ability to send warnings to U.S. troop formations throughout the Middle East: look, get your people out of the way. We're just going to show you that you have no defense against our missiles. Kaboom. During the 12-day war, when responding to Israel's attack, again, they showed that Israel's golden dome doesn't work and that the U.S. defenses don't work and that Iran can penetrate them at will. This includes the potential Iranian attack on aircraft carriers, other shipping, missiles, Israel as well as throughout the Middle East.
The United States cannot win any conflict without such a concentrated missile attack on Iran that this is going to completely disrupt and engulf the entire Middle East in war. And Iran will, number one, sink a ship in the oil gulf, which is going to block the oil transport, vastly increasing oil prices to the U.S. and throughout the world, and essentially wipe out the Israeli economy. Well, the reports are that Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, everybody has been warning the United States, you're going to engulf the whole world in chaos and you're going to lose. Don't do it.
Today, on the New York Stock Exchange, oil prices are going down. And that seems to be the belief of insiders that matters are calming down on this talk scheduled for tomorrow in Oman. I really don't see that. Trump's strategy has always been to make unrealistic, enormous demands on other countries, just like Zelensky is making on Russia. Of course, these demands can't be met. And Trump imagines that these demands are going to somehow expand the mind of the countries that he's attacking. And then he can say, okay, let me back down. Let's compromise.
Of course, the compromise is an unrealistic demand that he's making on Iran. Of course, Iran is not going to agree and has said it's not even going to discuss ending its atomic energy program. It will never discuss even the thought of giving up all of its missiles so that Israel and America can bomb it into submission.
The one thing it can discuss is: well, we're not really prepared to make an atomic bomb yet. We're not going to let your inspectors in because your inspectors are spies for the United States and Israel. The inspectors are telling the Americans exactly where to bomb and what to do. We're going to have honest inspectors. If you want to send, maybe we can arrange for Russian inspectors. This is the only thing that they're willing to talk about.
That's not going to be enough for Trump. He's surrounded by people who are encouraging him to maybe miss a meal, get a little more dizzy, and just say, gee, don't back down, Mr. Trump. You know, you can do it.
So my expectation is that against all reasonability, the United States is going to try to attack Iran in some way and then wing it. And the way it'll attack it is the usual salami type tactics. It will begin by a little bite here, a little bite there, just to probe Iran. The question that I would have, and I bet your military advisors on your show are going to have, is, at what point will Iran say a little attack is still an attack ? If you attack us, we'll look at that as the preliminary big attack on us, and we're going to go kaboom from the start. I think that is probably its best defense.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, actually, they're talking that way right now, Michael: any attack on Iran would be responded to by tremendous overwhelming attack on all these assets of the United States in the region and Israel. That's what I'm hearing from the domestic media here. They're all prepared to do it. I hope that nothing would go in that direction because I don't see anything good coming out of this. Richard, your understanding.
RICHARD WOLFF: If it's correct that there's now another move to demand that Iran stop selling oil to China, then you put that together with the embargo declared yesterday against allowing any Venezuelan oil to go to China. Both Iran and Venezuela have supplied [most of its] oil to China for quite a while. (Though China would not have much trouble replacing oil if it faced an intervention in this way. Russia has virtually unlimited, and then there are other parts of the world that will continue to sell to China.)
But I want to underscore a point that we have been making on your show for a while. This is behavior that is desperate. It is desperate. It is behavior that, I think Michael said, violates international law. Venezuela was not a threat to the United States by any reasonable calculus, nor is Iran.
International law specifically says you cannot intervene in the life of another country because you don't like its economic system or its political system or how it treats its own people. Any more than another country could say that the repression of black and brown people in the United States is offensive. Yes, it is. But they don't attack the United States - partly, of course, because they don't have the power. But it's also the law.
I mean, that's why the law was set up. That's the same reason the League of Nations was set up, and the United Nations was set up. All of the documents founding these organizations, which the United States signed, prohibit what is being done now.
This is not to be attributed to Mr. Trump's bizarre personality. This is something that is being supported by the employer class of the United States. They are not revolting against him. The working class is moving against Mr. Trump. Absolutely. The general population, absolutely.
We actually have general strikes. We had one in Minneapolis over the last couple of weeks. It spread to large parts of Minnesota. Over the last few days, unions around the country have announced May 1st of this year will be a general strike. Yes, the first ones will be spotty, they will be uneven. They always are. It's an enormous step that there's even a conversation in this country about a general strike.
But these are all symptoms of desperation. And the real risk is that Mr. Trump and his advisors, living in the bubble that they have created, are going to make one mistake along the way, and then we will all suffer. That has happened before. Marx once wrote: these things end up either in the end of one system and the transition to another, or Marx's phrase, the common ruin of the contending parties. Here we go.
If we're to move forward, forward is not the United States, it's China. It's this mixed system of the government and the private. Not that that's the end of history. It isn't. History will continue. What is going on in China will give way to new and different things in China, of course. But the United States is the desperate one. China is not intervening in global trade. China has countries around the world with which its leadership disagrees on very fundamental things. But they are not behaving in the way that the United States is. The United States is aggressive. The United States violates the law left and right.
I want to remind everyone, because I don't think it ever has gotten the attention it should have. For the last five months, Mr. Trump and his advisors, with virtually no opposition in the United States, have been killing fishermen in boats in the Caribbean Sea and on the Pacific side of Latin America.
These are people who were treated in a different way before. The United States Navy would have reason to suspect a boat. It would demand to be able to inspect the boat. U.S. naval personnel would go on the boat. If it was carrying contraband, illegal stuff, the people would be arrested, taken back to their country, the contraband confiscated.
Suddenly, all of that is short-circuited. We don't board the ship. We don't inspect it. We don't ask any questions. We provide these people with no lawyer. There is no trial. There is no judge. Mr. Trump executes them one after the other. I believe it's over 100. Latest count. 100 people, dead people. There are even lawsuits by the family surviving these dead fishermen suing the United States for killing the husband or the father.
That this happens is extraordinary. That it is happening over five months is more extraordinary. And there's no real opposition. I don't know what to say. What's going on ? And I want to make sure people understand, including the leadership in Iran, you're dealing with people who are prepared to do this, who have been doing it, and who have no doubt been interpreting the absence of serious opposition as a license to do more of this.
Having said that, there's nothing more I can say. It sits there as a screaming statement about something.
Then, when you add the killing of Renee Good and Mr. Pretti in Minneapolis, and you read the explosion of the Epstein files indicating what kind of human beings have been collected in the White House to run society... Well, yeah, you can tell yourself all kinds of stories, but I think the only one that holds any water is the story that we're coming to the end of a system because this is extraordinary behavior that can't go forward.
We can't. Otherwise, we are simply heading to World War III. We will have learned nothing from the two horrible wars of the 20th century, and we're going to have one more. I want to remind people, the two wars of the 20th century were the end of the British Empire. Two-thirds finished in the First World War, and the remaining third wiped out by the second. And it gave a boost to socialism, which is still more than the West can handle.
It would be very naive not to think of what this means in terms of the future. The people of China and India together have 10 times the population of the United States. At a certain point, given the balance of nuclear weapons, this fact alone makes it absurd. It is a mouse brandishing its little sword against an elephant. And the elephant will win this game. And that ought to teach people a lesson. And when it doesn't, I think we all have to draw the conclusion.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you've made two points about the system that's coming to an end. The first point you made was that interference with foreign countries is against all international law, going from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the United Nations.
The second point that you rightly emphasize is that the attack on the fishermen and boats in Venezuelan waters - some from Trinidad, not even Venezuelan - is also a violation of the international law of war. In addition to attacking these boats without probable cause and with their being basically civilians and not military, there's a law against camouflaging warplanes as civilian craft. And that's being done.
These are criminal acts of war. Yet no country has dared to risk U.S. retaliation by challenging this in the International Criminal Court, unlike the case with Israel's attack on Gaza.
Trump's demands on Iran are a violation of the UN Charter. And perhaps the countries that are most affected by, immediately affected by any war in the Near East are going to be Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the other Near Eastern neighbors that have American military bases there. So perhaps instead of telling Trump simply "look, we're going to warn you, don't go to war against someone bigger than you", they should say this:
We will join a case with Iran before the International Criminal Court to accuse you, Trump, of being a war criminal, so that you cannot go to any of these countries without being arrested. And we will add Bessent, and we will add your cabinet, who are the responsible members for this. This will be a very public accusation that far from deserving a Nobel Peace Prize, you're a war criminal by what you're doing. And we're going to apply the laws of war against you because it's illegal.
Otherwise, if they don't do that, then what Richard just said, a system is coming to an end. And it's a system of international law that was the whole spirit of Western civilization, trying to prevent war. And if there has to be a war, prevent attacks on civilians, which is just happening. I'm sure there can be, especially from the Iranian leaders themselves, a statement that this is not only a principle of Islamic law, but it's written into all of the United Nations bodies of law and the International Criminal Court.
The question is, the United States, in addition to violating the Constitution as it's doing in Minneapolis as Richard has described, is violating the whole principle that was supposed to underlie Western civilization. This can be escalated into a civilizational legal fight, which for Trump is a public relations fight, and that's the fight in which he lives.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me expand in two other ways on this. One about Mr. Trump and the domestic reflection of all of this, and the other one about Europe, because we've also had conversations about the peculiar position of Europe and its relevance here.
But first, domestically. Over the last week, Mr. Trump made a comment that suggested that we're not going to have a midterm election in November, or that we don't need such elections, or that the Republicans or the federal government will take over some or all of the elections. Again, this is an extraordinary departure. The Constitution gives the states control of the election process. He would have to take it away from the states and make it a federal responsibility and give it to one of the two major parties, which would violate everything.
The press asked follow-up questions, and his spokesperson, a woman named Levitt, explained that the press had misunderstood Mr. Trump was joking. Now, no one believes that, but she tried. He then followed up by explaining in the next press conference that he was not joking. In other words, he contradicted his own spokesperson on that point. He wasn't joking.
The disregard for international law, the aggressive action towards other countries that pose no credible threat against the United States, et cetera, et cetera. If we let it go, it will mean that the United States can say whatever it wants about any country in the world, that it is engaged in drug trafficking. Most countries in some way are. It's an international business. So then the world will be under the gun of a perpetual threat from the United States militarily, the way it already is in terms of tariffs.
This is not a tolerable arrangement for the whole rest of the world. It requires the rest of the world to live in a state approaching the anxiety that Iran has now had to live with for God knows how long.
And now Europe. The Europeans are also confronting, if I can borrow a term from the religious folks, the end times. What do I mean ? Europe is fading into insignificance. It is now the afterthought to a world economy in which the United States on the one hand, China and the BRICS on the other hand, are the great power economic centers of the world economy. And they look like they're going to be that for the next little while at least.
There is nothing that Europe can say or do unless it achieves two things, which it has to achieve. Now that the United States is not only not protecting them, but assaulting them, demanding tribute from them - what von der Leyen promised, 700 billion in energy purchases, another 700 billion in quote-unquote investments, that's tribute, not different from anything we have seen historically when a dominant power demands tribute from subordinate powers...
Okay, the only way they can escape the inevitable subordination that they've just agreed to, and they know this, is if they do two things. Number one, develop their own military defensive capability, which will cost them a fortune for the next 10 years. And the second thing, just as important and just as expensive, is they have to invest in catching up to the modern technology that has advanced in the United States and advanced in China and not in Europe. I mean, everything having to do with high-tech computers, artificial intelligence, all of that, where Europe is a spectator, looking rather like Asia, Africa, and Latin America, minus, of course, China in Asia.
Alright, these are two enormous expenditures over the next 10 years, create a military and do this kind of investing to catch up technologically, to do what China has done. The only way they can pay for that, the only way, if they can overcome their political stasis, if they can overcome the fact that all these little countries have a hard time agreeing with each other on anything.
Look, for example, at how they can't agree on using the seized Russian assets as collateral for the loan to Ukraine. They can't get it done. Now at least half a dozen countries, even more, are opposed to it, more joining them.
Let's assume they can get all that done. Let's get to the economics. In order to find the money to build up their military on the one hand and to catch up technologically on the other, they are going to have to savagely cut their social welfare program. They are going to have to find the money that way. And we know that's what they're going to try to do because that's who they are. They are not going to go to the ruling class and savagely tax them, right ? That's not who they are. They've never done that. They're not going to do it now, especially not these center-right governments, which are the majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority.
Now that explains to us what we haven't quite explained up until now. How in the world will these people be able to avoid their perpetual subordination to the United States, to become for the United States what Latin America already is, to descend to that level ? They have to move that money away from social welfare. And with their well-developed labor unions and their well-developed anti-capitalist political parties, how are they in the world going to get that done ? Answer. The only hope they have is the demonization of Russia.
Now we understand. If you can convince the mass or at least a significant proportion of your people that there is an imminent danger that the Russians are going to occupy Copenhagen any day now, maybe then. Maybe then you can get the consensus to destroy the social welfare system, all in the name of defending against Russia. The absurd hysteria.
And for those of you that are not familiar, the foreign minister of the EU, Kallas: watch her, listen to her, because out of her mouth comes the hysteria. I'm sure she doesn't understand why she's hysterical or how she's hysterical, but you will get from her, and she was chosen, and she's allowed to continue because this fomenting of hysteria is their only hope. And it's a long shot. I don't think it will work at all, but it shows you that they have a kind of desperation of their situation that matches, although for different reasons and in a different way, the desperation of the United States.
If you put the two together, it's the desperation of the West. It's the decline of the West. And that's the real historic moment we are living through.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this desperation will be a catalyst. You've just seen Germany come out with its annual report on the future. It's announced that the German economy industry has not grown since 2020 with the COVID epidemic. The European economy does not have the resources to grow much, not only to continue providing the social services of social democracy that was supposed to be the characteristic of Western Europe, but the military.
This is forcing them to try to decide: can we really afford to commit economic suicide and support the militarization, which in the first draft of the militarization means Europe is going to spend all of its economic surplus, its export and trade surplus on buying American arms that are necessary to protect it from this fictitious Russian threat that you've talked about.
And the fact is, even its military is unable to grow because the military, like industry, requires technology. And the fact is that now we're seeing in the United States a whole economic fight and a collapse of the technology stocks in today, yesterday, the last few stock markets, because they realize that technology is electricity and electricity is energy.
Trump has put a complete block on installing energy in the form of wind energy and solar energy. He made a speech saying that China exports all of these gigantic windmill blades, but it doesn't have any windmills at all. Actually, China has more windmills and wind energy than all the other countries put together. It's been putting them in the Gobi Desert, it's been putting them elsewhere. This wind energy is supplying a vast support for its information technology and automatic intelligence industries.
Likewise, China's taken the lead in solar energy. And again, it can put this in the Gobi Desert and other rural areas. It can put them on urban areas.
Trump has said we cannot have any energy that is not oil-based, because as we've discussed before here, oil is how the United States has been able to control the world's energy trade for the last 100 years in alliance with Britain.
So you're having the United States without energy, and Europe has made the fateful decision that it is worth destroying our economy to exult in our hatred of Russia, a racist hatred, a hatred against the Slavic population, a desire that we must break Russia up into five territories so that it cannot defend Europe against the yellow peril i.e. China which the U.S. strategists have also outlined plans to break up. This is widely discussed, I can assure you, in China and Russia. And it's all publicly available in the United States.
How can the United States grow and achieve the one thing that it hopes to consolidate its economic power: monopolizing information technology, computer chips, with 40% of the Taiwanese computer chip company moving to the United States and building the factory right now in Arizona ? How can it do this if there's no energy?
Electricity prices in the United States have already gone up 12% in the last year, as they have in Europe. If you have this enormous growth in electricity going to finance automatic intelligence (I like to say automatic instead of artificial because it's really just mechanized) how on earth are people going to continue to afford to light and heat their homes with gas and electric power ? You cannot have both.
Also, in the United States, it takes about 10 years to go through all of the approvals and basics for creating an electric utility. The electricity isn't there. And without electricity, how can they really have an industrial power to support a military power unless they cut back almost all civilian industrial consumption ? The same thing happens to Europe. They're forced into a choice.
What have you seen in the last few weeks ? You've seen first of all America's closest ally, Canada, send its Prime Minister Carney to China to negotiate trade with it and open trade with it, including auto trade, to import Chinese electric vehicles. There goes Elon Musk's hope for billions of dollars from his electric plan. Now you've even had America's second puppet, Starmer of Britain. Before he's forced to resign, he went to China to negotiate something similar.
How long will it be before continental Europe makes the same decision that we cannot afford to pay the tribute that the United States demands and finance not only our military buildup, but continue to agree to the American sanctions against trade and investment with Russia and China ? No more energy. We will not import energy from Russia, and we will not permit any Chinese company to own majority ownership of any firm in Europe because we're in a race war with them. And you've seen what's happened with Nexperium already in Holland creating a crisis in auto-battery manufacturers.
The only thing that Europe has done so far is: well, we can do just what Trump wants to do in the United States by controlling the elections. We can fake the elections in Romania. We can ban the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. We can ban the nationalistic parties. We can ban anyone who does not want to be part of this Cold War and is not willing to sacrifice their living standards, to sacrifice their industry in order for us to continue to act as puppets of NATO and the American military.
How long can this possibly last without somehow the people breaking through and say, we actually want elections ? We want an open discussion. We don't want the same constraints on free speech that America has been imposing. This is getting to, again, as the Americans like to say, a civilizational conflict.
It's a conflict of economic systems. It's not simply a conflict between America and China alongside Russia. It's a conflict of what shape the world society and international law is going to be. And that's why I think the one way in which other countries can stop it is not simply in the material sense of developing its own industrial independence, but through international law.
Now, obviously, the United States will try to veto any such thing within the United Nations and say we will block any UN law that seeks to support the UN Charter. Well, at that point, the UN is defunct, and it's already announced that by August, it's going to run out of money and cannot afford to support its New York headquarters anymore. I guess Trump is going to make the UN into a huge new Trump Plaza 2 and will do it.
But where is the United Nations going to move to ? I think that should be brought into public discussion. What's an appropriate country for the United Nations ? Will it be Singapore or Malaysia or somebody ? Can't be one of the leading powers. It has to be some neutral country. I think you have to escalate the context for what this fight is all about. And I guess that's what we've been talking about on your show for the last year, Nima.
RICHARD WOLFF: You know, I read an account a few days ago that over the last year, or maybe even for a longer period, but at least the last year, discussions were held between high officials of the United States and the leadership of the Mercedes-Benz Corporation in Germany. And the topic of discussion was moving the Mercedes-Benz Corporation headquarters and leadership from Germany to the United States. Okay, I understand, at least for the moment, that's not going to happen.
But the important thing is that it did already happen: that the German car maker could seriously contemplate it. You know, it's been around Germany for, I don't know, at least a century because it existed in some corporate form even before the automobile. I think they made coaches or other kinds of ways of carrying freight or carrying people.
Look at what that means. That means other major German corporations were having such conversations, but were able to keep them secret. And that means that the government of Germany had to promise them something so they wouldn't go. And I spent the last 10 minutes in my speech a few moments ago trying to get across what must have been. I wasn't there, obviously, but what must have been promised ? A military buildup and a vast investment in support of modern technology so that they would get the support.
As Michael has said on many occasions, a modern military requires a fairly sophisticated technological, but also manufacturing base. The United States is discovering that its military capabilities are hamstrung because it let its manufacturing base be exported. It has the technology, but not the manufacturing. In the Ukraine war, at a certain point, Ukraine ran out of artillery shells. The Europeans had none left, and the Americans had used up so many that they had to keep the rest here for domestic purposes. Whoa, you ran out ? Yeah, and it takes a year to develop the capability of producing them at the kind of rate one now needs.
I want to remind people: Russia has a GDP in the neighborhood of two or three trillion dollars. That's our adversary in the Ukraine. On the other side is the United States with a GDP in the neighborhood of $28, $29 trillion, allied with Britain, France, and Germany, which add another $10 trillion. A $37 trillion economy on one side, and Russia, $2 trillion on the other. This is a fight between David and Goliath, and it doesn't change that much, even with the ally Russia has in China.
Look at what it means. It kept most of it. It kept particularly that part of it that fuels their military. And they have their alliance with China. But the lesson there is obvious, and the Europeans know it. You're going to have to spend a fortune not to become Panama or Colombia or Paraguay. You're going to have to spend a fortune on the military, a fortune on technology, and I haven't even gone into rebuilding your manufacturing sector because it's been pretty much hollowed out in Europe the way it has here.
And that's the end of everything else that they're going to do. And that's probably what they are promising their companies so that they don't leave and relocate to Ohio.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You mentioned artillery shells and bullets. The price of copper, which is what they're made out of, has been soaring as much as the price of gold and silver has.
During the Vietnam War, I was watching the copper market very closely. Every soldier in Vietnam used one ton of copper per year for the bullets. The American policy was to saturate the entire air with bullets and artillery shells, and that's how we're going to win. Well, of course, that was against the rules of law of war. You're not allowed to attack civilians, but that's the American philosophy.
Now the Americans and Europeans, as you pointed out, are out of shells. That means they're out of copper. And if you use copper for armaments and military, how are you going to use it for the wiring that you're going to need for all of this electricity that you're going to need to participate in the new information technology and artificial intelligence that has all been planned as the leading edge of the new technology?
As I said earlier, if you look at the stock market crash in the Golden Seven technology stocks, people are realizing when they do the calculations what is necessary for this technology actually to take off. More electricity than the world is capable of producing at the present time. Something has to give. Well, something also has to give in the form of war.
As Richard and I have said on a number of shows, the thought of foreign countries being able to send their industry to the United States is a fiction because of Trump's tariff policies. Trump has led the destruction of the U.S. economy. If you look at what has happened to industrial production and employment since he took over, it has been straight down, in a not quite vertical but a straight downward flow, because the tariffs have put out of business. A lot of the small industrial companies and now increasingly the large industrial users of copper, energy, steel, anything that's imported and subject to the 50% tariffs on steel and other items, aluminum, have all cut back.
So that however bad the situation in Europe appears, it's not as bad as what Trump is doing to the United States with his tariff policy and his pro-oil policy, his anti-solar energy and anti-wind energy policies and the associated destruction that he's causing on the U.S. economy.
This is what's so ironic. As I've said before, Richard and I have the approach: aren't countries going to act in their economic self-interest ultimately ? Isn't material prosperity the driving fact ? Well, the Roman Empire collapsed and it didn't put it first. And the British let their empire go, and the Americans are doing the same thing. It doesn't make sense if you look at it in terms of national self-interest.
Trump doesn't put America first. He puts his campaign contributors first. And the people who pay the industries or sectors that pay the most for the campaign contributions or by Trump's crypto energy fund are the people who are the most corrupt, inefficient, and who need special government favoritism against the naturally more productive and better situated winners.
Trump has pledged to let the overthrowers of the U.S. economy have precedence and outline his tariff policies and the other policies. And this is economic suicide for the United States. And Europe doesn't have to go through this. And obviously, the other countries, increasingly countries who are joining BRICS, don't.
I think, as I started off with Mark Carney's visit to China and Starmer's visit to China, it cannot be long before the rest of the western European countries are doing the same. And one would hope that that may lead to a dissolving of this anti-Russian feeling.
You could say, NATO has destroyed itself by absorbing the Baltic countries and the Central European countries that were indeed occupied by the Soviet Union. And it's not only Estonia, it's Latvia, where I spent quite a bit of time, Lithuania. There's a real hatred and resentment for the occupation there, just as there has been in East Germany. It was a trauma for them. Europe further west was not traumatized by that, but U.S. pressure has forced NATO to put the most traumatized anti-Russian countries in control of EU policy. And that's suicidal too.
What's at issue if withdrawing from the American Cold War is withdrawing from NATO and NATO's control over the EU. And that requires a transition, dissolving the EU itself as a transition to somehow putting it together as some country or continent that will act in its own self-interest. So far, there's only discussion. There's nothing more.
This is something that's going to take decades, to overcome the legacy of letting the United States design the post-World War II economic order and make it into a Cold War opposing every principle of international law and the laws of war that it ostensibly stood for.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add two little statistics that I think shed light on yet another dimension. What Trump is doing is strange. I think it's the desperate behavior of a declining empire. We've made that argument. But I also think it doesn't work, which is going to be a real crisis for them. And here are two statistics.
I asked myself, because I had to give another interview, how many of those manufacturing jobs that were going to be, quote-unquote, re-shored, that is, brought back to the United States ? Remember, a major argument for tariffs was that because you put a tax on an import, you therefore create the incentive for the factory that makes that import to come inside the United States, because then it can produce and sell without the tariff.
Here is the statistic over the last 10 months or 11 months that Mr. Trump has been a president. Manufacturing jobs in the United States have declined by 70,000. That's the number given out by the United States government. So it is a complete failure. Not only did we not see the promised explosion of jobs coming home, we actually saw a continuation of a long historical decline of American manufacturing.
Second statistic: the tariffs put on China - which are still there, they're not as high as they once were, but they're still there - did have the effect of reducing the flow of Chinese exports into the United States during 2025. However, Chinese exports to the rest of the world hit a new record, over a trillion dollars for the first time. Because it turns out the Chinese, by selling particularly to the BRICS, but to others too, was easily able in the first year to overcome the loss of whatever export business they had in the United States, hampered by the tariffs, and more than make it up by selling to the rest of the world.
Alright, those are two key statistics to measure the quote-unquote success of the economic policy of tariffs, which was the number one activity of the last year. They failed. They failed to hurt China and they failed to reshore manufacturing in the United States. Coldstone, clear failure. And it ought to be on the forefront of conversation about the validity of a policy that has that to confront.
But instead, we have basically silence. And it's most important that the employer class of the United States, which put Mr. Trump into office, has basically let us know they are so grateful for the tax cuts he gave them. Remember, his priority act in his first presidency was the tax cut of 2017, and his priority in office this last year was the so-called big beautiful tax bill of March and April of the past year. So he took care of his number one priority, the employer class. Everything else is a disaster. And that's who he serves.
That's what this is about. He's taken care of them, and that's why they don't oppose him. They may go on about civil liberties and civil rights, but he has not yet caused enough civil conflict for them to say, hey, he's getting there. Minneapolis is a big step. But he's not there yet. And we, and Europe and the rest of the world have to face that.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard, Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
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Editing: Ton Yeh
Review: ced
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