Nima Alkhorshid: Hi everybody. Today is Wednesday, April 8, 2026, and our dear friend Michael Hudson is here with us. Welcome back, Michael.
Michael Hudson: I'm glad to be back, especially on what a day.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, exactly. And we, Michael, we had the ceasefire yesterday, you know, late last night. And today, what we've learned that these sort of attacks are again and again, Israel has attacked Lebanon and more than a hundred attacks. We had some sort of attacks in Iran, some sort of bombing, Iran bombing, you know, UAE together with Kuwait. And it seems that the ceasefire is somehow shaking. But after all, what we've learned from the secretary of the press secretary White House, Caroline Levitt, she just said that they're going to meet on Saturday, J.D. Vance, together with Steve Wetkoff and Kushner. They're going to meet with Iranian counterparts. They're going to talk about the ceasefire and a two-week ceasefire. So far, the ceasefire is shaking, but the main issue of what is going on and why the United States decided to go after some sort of ceasefire is basically related to the reality of war, reality of the battlefield.
But we know Iran has something important right now in its hands that it did not have before. It's the Strait of Hormuz. They call it a nuclear bomb for Iran. And what is your understanding and what is the importance of this Strait of Hormuz and what is how do you find the current situation with the war?
Michael Hudson: Well, the Strait of Hormuz controls the OPEC oil trade and it's only part of the picture. It's not going to matter so much if the fighting, if Iran, if Donald Trump had succeeded in his threats to blow up every bridge in Iran and every power plant that would take a century to replace. If that had happened, then Iran would have wiped out all of the oil export capacity of all of the Arab OPEC countries, from Saudi Arabia to the Emirates. And that wouldn't have left any oil to export at all. But no, I don't think that even if there are violations of the ceasefire and Israel is going to do everything it can to break the agreement, it's going to continue to attack. And the idea of making a ceasefire with the United States is just as absurd as the thought of Russia making a ceasefire with Ukraine and letting Britain and France and Germany continue to send missiles and Estonia at Russia because you have to have all the parties involved. And Israel has already said, we're not a part of this. We're going to keep shooting.
Well, I think that probably the Iranians are only going to retaliate against Israel for this. They're going to try to do what they can to provide arms to their cohorts in fighting Lebanon, arms to Hezbollah and others. But I don't think there will be any major total attack such as Trump has been threatening for at least a two-week interim. And that two weeks gives the whole rest of the world an opportunity to create an alternative to what, if the fighting resumes, would be a world depression on the scale of the 1930s. And this depression would be a result of stopping 20% of the oil trade and, I think, 30% to 40% of the gas trade and much of the fertilizer trade and ammonia and sulfur that are needed. All of that would require a huge closing down of industries and the whole world would be threatened by chaos.
Well, threatening chaos has been the U.S. strategy all this time. And all of a sudden, the threat of chaos is a tool to force other countries to follow a policy to avoid it is in the hands of Iran. And it's through its control of Hormuz and the means of exporting the OPEC oil and gas that remain in production right now, such as remains. And so the question is: what are other countries going to do to support Iran in bringing pressure on the United States and on Israel to prevent the resumption of hostilities that would result in their chronic depression that would last for three or four years and lead to a whole restructuring of the world's economic and financial system.
So I want to get into what that restructuring would look like, but I'd like to talk about the general strategy because, 50 years ago, what's happening today, there was a general logic for it that was all spelled out. And it was spelled out where I happen to be working, at the Hudson Institute. And that strategy that Iran is following is very much akin to what was discussed as a means of avoiding world chaos in the 1960s. And that was atomic warfare. And the question was, how can the world avoid the chaos of being blown up ? And the answer was the doctrine of mutual destruction, mad, mutual assured destruction, MAD. And the idea was that if only one country had the atom bomb, as the United States had in 1945, then it could threaten other countries with atomic war.
But what are you going to do when Soviet Russia developed the atom bomb and then other countries began developing atom bomb ? The threat of atomic war was the single major concern in foreign policy in the 1960s. And Don Brennan at the Hudson Institute coined the term mutual assured destruction. And Hermann Kahn, in 1962, the same year, wrote a book thinking about the unthinkable, spelling it out. And the idea was that, well, if you have other countries not only have the atom bomb, but they maintain military parity with the ability to improve their weapons technology in keeping with each other, then every major country will be afraid to use the atom bomb because their opponents can fight back and use it against them and they'll both be blown up. So that, as long as there was parity among the atom bomb users, war among them was avoided. And the United States, of course, continued to fight its own wars everywhere from Southeast Asia to Latin America and Africa.
But this wasn't the world war and it wasn't an atomic war. And the whole idea was the use of the understanding of countries that if they escalated a kind of warfare, that their own existence would be threatened beyond their economies. Well, that's the situation that we're in today. What was threatened in the 1960s was called atomic winter. In other words, if there was an atomic war, the whole world would essentially have a winter, production would end, agriculture would end, trade would end. Well, what is threatened today is a financial winter. And the financial winter would be suffered by oil-importing countries from Europe to Japan and Korea and the Far East and most of the global south and many of the Asian countries. So the question is, how can this financial winter be avoided ? Well, what makes the situation between Iran and the United States different from the military situation between the United States and Russia in the 1960s is that Iran cannot say, well, if we blow up the oil-producing capacity of the Arab OPEC countries, that's going to leave the oil-importing countries in desperate positions. And the United States had already thought out what the result would be. And Donald Trump bragged, saying that, well, sure, Iran may very well do all of this. And Iran has demonstrated its power militarily to at least wipe out its neighboring economies' ability to produce oil.
But Donald Trump said, well, America is an oil surplus country and an oil, a gas-exporting country, thanks to all of the fracking technology that's been developed. And if the blowing up of the OPEC oil trade raised world oil prices, that would be a bonanza for the American oil and gas companies and while the United States began to release its reserves of oil to keep down prices here the oil companies would export their oil and gas at the enormously high world prices to Western Europe and Japan and Asia and essentially give itself power over its closest allies. And so it's up to these allies to decide, well, we cannot afford a fight between the United States and Iran, which would destroy our economy. You may talk later with me about how it would also destroy the U.S. economy financially. But for the time being, the most immediate crisis would be in countries that need their oil to power their factories and heat and light their homes and office buildings and produce fertilizer and power their railroads and transportation and all of that.
Well, making that threat of destroying other countries' access to oil has been the U.S., the center of U.S. foreign policy for the last half-century, as you and I have discussed in earlier broadcasts. And now that threat is in the power of Iran. And the question is: will other countries, will Western Europe and East Asia realize that it's up to them to stop this war ? Because if there is another attack on Iran, and Iran has already demonstrated its ability to wipe out OPEC oil and gas, just as it's already wiped out Qatar's helium export capacity, the result will be the global financial winter. What will they do ? Well, I guess yesterday at the United Nations, the vote sponsored by the Arab Emirates to blame Iran for being attacked by having the power to retaliate for the Israeli and American attack by fighting back, that was an aggression. It's aggression to fight back against being attacked with a threat of being wiped out. If you defend yourself militarily, you're to be blamed.
Well, China, I think, helped bring sanity into the discussion by blocking that action from being passed by the Security Council and voted on in the United States. But it shows how totally almost insane the U.S. opposition to the whole rest of the world is. The United States and Iran jointly are threatening the entire world with utter chaos if there's a war. What are the other countries going to do ? Well, so far, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, and other countries have said, well, why is Iran bombing us ? We didn't bomb it.
Well, Iran's response is, well, you're letting the American bases there. You're letting the American planes fly over your territory. You're not doing anything about it. Well, Europe has also said, well, we're not joining. Why are you making us suffer ? We didn't join the war. Look at Italy and Spain and other countries have blocked the, even France has blocked the United States from using its airfields and military bases there for planes to take off and bomb you. Why are you blaming us?
Well, what's to be blamed is their passivity, their inactivity, and their refusal to do anything at all to stop the American attack on Iran, which is an attack basically on all of the rules of civilization, as we've discussed before. The rules of international law, the rules of war against not bombing civilians, the rules against not bombing basic infrastructure utilities, and in the last few days, the assassination of professors and the destruction and physical destruction of universities to do what Israel said. We must destroy the culture. God has commanded us to treat Iran like Amalek. They are our existential enemy. Where are other countries moving to accuse Donald Trump and Hegseth of being war criminals and bringing charges against them to prevent them and the rest of their staff from traveling?
It's as if the whole rest of the world is paralyzed and unable to really cope. And it's very hard to see whether it realizes this. For the last week, I'm just amazed that the stock markets in the United States, Europe, and even Asia have hardly gone down at all with this threat of world depression. Only, you know, maybe 1% at most, just marginally up and down, hardly anything. And even more surprising has been the fact that today, despite the fact that none of this danger of national war was discounted, the Dow Jones industrial average was soared over a thousand points. Stock markets in Japan and Korea, the most vulnerable to a cutback of oil and gas, recovered by three, four, five percent. I mean, just amazing gains, not from any depression that had gone down, but as if somehow everything is going to be okay. The question I guess all of us have to forecast and ask is: is the world just in a state of denial ? It cannot think about the unthinkable prospect that the war will really result in mutual destruction, assured destruction between Iran and the oil-importing countries to what the United States hoped will be its own benefit to pick up all the marbles. How can they proceed without realizing this?
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, when it comes to this trade-off for most, one of the main questions right now would be what would be the future for GCC countries ? Talking about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and all these countries. But looking at what's going on, can they survive this situation, this situation of hostility against Iran ? Somehow they want to fight Iran. Today we've seen the UAE trying to strike some targets in Iran. This is the future that they're seeking, but can they survive the situation that they're making for themselves?
Michael Hudson: No, I don't think they can survive. These sheikhdoms, these basically little family sheikhdoms, were created right after World War II with Kuwait a bit later, with the intent of dividing and conquering all of the Arab countries. And most of them are their small family dictatorships, with, I think, 88% of the Emirates and of Bahrain consist of immigrant labor that's working there.
Saudi Arabia is really the only Arab country in OPEC, I guess, along with Qatar, which has a fairly large domestic native-born Saudi and Qatari population. The others are, like Jordan, are populated largely by Palestinians and then by increasingly Indian immigrants under almost near-feudal slave terms. The immigrants have their passports taken away. There are no courts for them. They're regularly abused. These are countries that are backward and essentially they are a legacy of the whole epoch of Western colonialism, from the Middle East to Africa to Asia. Not only should they be replaced, but Iran makes the following point: even if you get rid of American military bases, as we've insisted, the problem is that your economies are inextricably in a symbiotic relationship with the United States.
For instance, American artificial intelligence companies, computer companies, Google and Amazon and others have all built huge data processing plants in Bahrain, the Emirates, and other countries in order to have access to energy, especially because it's going to be very, very hard for these companies to get energy in the United States, given the inability of the United States to create electric utilities in enough of a hurry to enable them to proceed with the data processing that they're going to need in order for the magnificent seven stocks, all of the information and technology and internet stocks and computer chip stocks from soaring.
None of this can take place without having some source of energy, probably outside the United States. And, of course, that energy outside the United States is just exactly what's threatened. And that's why Iran has concentrated on bombing the American affiliates in these other Arab OPEC countries, because it says that what is needed in order to protect Iran's own national security is to remove the symbiotic economic relationships between the OPEC countries from Saudi Arabia right down through the smaller emirates and little family dictatorships.
And I don't see how that can be done without some sort of takeover. Iran used to control the Straits and Oman was right across the Strait of Hormuz, where it said the Titus was part of Iran until the 17th century. The British East India Company seized Oman and broke it away because it wanted to control the seaborne trade on the way to India, which was the key to British prosperity there. And Iran wants to reverse this legacy of colonialism. And it wants to prevent financial and economic colonialism that has made the other OPEC states basically Western. And that is why these countries have joined the United States in attacking Iran and trying to push forth the United Nations resolution blaming Iran for the war for defending itself.
So even if the immediate war with the United States is settled, that's going to lead to, I think, what looks like an Iranian conquest of the rest of the countries on the oil gulf. And there will be either some sort of a rapprochement, an agreement. Saudi Arabia has tried to reach a modicum of an agreement with Iran, but its own national savings funds and the funds of its wealthiest families are all invested in the United States, largely in the information technology companies that have been investing in their own OPEC countries for what I've described, the data processing plants, and also just because they thought that by investing in the United States, that was supposed to provide them with military protection.
Well, what Iran has shown is that all of this is a fiction. The whole idea that Israel protected itself with the Iron Dome is lost. The idea that the United States is protecting the Arab OPEC countries from attack or takeover or any threat to their way of doing things has been blown up. The United States is not the protector. It's the United States and its attempt to control the world's oil trade.
Now that it's seized the oil of Venezuela, now that it's been able to isolate Russia's oil trade to gain control of the ability by itself to create chaos in other countries that would be subject to U.S. sanctions against oil if the United States so desired. Well, you've seen how the basic dynamic is. What the United States has done by its attack on Iran has led Iran to respond. And essentially, it is now in the very position that the United States had hoped to be in. The United States policy has been so self-defeating that it's brought about the exact opposite of its intended effect. That's the effect of underestimating the fact that if you try to take over other countries, they'll fight back. And other countries are not stupid, and they don't have a corrupt private sector military-industrial complex that makes weapons that don't work. Their government is actually, like that of Russia and that of China, has created weapons that do work. And that's left the United States at least a decade behind in missile technology, air technology, and the other military technology that it takes.
The United States was completely unprepared to really wage a war in Iran, but the neocons around Trump, who have financed his political campaign and supported his appointment of a political cabinet that essentially are personally loyal to Trump without questioning him, have cut themselves off from any kind of realistic feedback to make a realistic estimation of what will the effects of this war will be. They've left out of account all of the trade dynamics, the financial dynamics, the military dynamics at work. There's been a tunnel vision in U.S. policy. And you can now look at the genius of the Iranian strategists to look at the big picture and see what they have to do to defend themselves.
Nima Alkhorshid: And there's no way that they can attack the United States in the way that they've been able to attack Israel or the Arab OPEC countries, but they can stop the oil trade and again by controlling the Strait of Hormuz largely or by simply wiping out bombing the oil and gas production of the OPEC countries. They can do that to hold over the heads of the rest of the world to show that you had better bring pressure on the United States and isolate it from attacking us because if we're going to be destroyed, our only defense is to destroy the OPEC economies and that will destroy your economies as well. So an attack on us will be an attack on your economies, causing a depression and economic collapse, a financial collapse, unemployment, and all of the things that happen in a great depression or financial winter.
Michael, I think the situation right now with the Strait of Hormuz is that Iran, for such a long time, in the aftermath of the revolution, they were under the sanctions of the United States. Basically, the whole West was imposing sanctions on Iran and to this day they are under those sanctions but with that regime of sanctions they couldn't sell their oil. They couldn't trade through the Strait of Hormuz because after all, the strait was open for them, but the sanctions didn't let them use their economy to flourish their economy. This is the new strategy on the part of Iran. If you hit us with the sanctions, we're gonna hit you with the Strait of Hormuz. And how is that going to help Iran in a long run?
Michael Hudson: Well, here's how this was spelled out, I think, in Iran's response to Trump's actions yesterday. Iran listed the terms that it wanted. And one of the terms that it had insisted upon is reparations for the attack that has destroyed so much of its industry, so much of its oil production, and its refinery capacity. And I don't have to go down the whole list. It's schools. And the fact is, how are you ever going to go through the court process of getting reparations ? It'll take a whole Nuremberg commission that'll take years to enforce it. So Iran has only one way of gaining restitution to rebuild its economy, and that's to impose a transit fee on traffic through the Hormuz Strait, just as the Panama Canal charges a transit fee and the Suez Canal charges. Well, the U.S. has said, well, the Panama Canal costs money to dig. You know, that's man-made.
So was the Suez Canal. That's all man-made. But it was man-made over a century ago. And it makes no difference whether it's man-made or not. And that we're not now repaying the investors in the Panama Canal Company or the Suez Canal Company. That's the legacy of colonialism. It was the United States that seized Panama and broke it away from Colombia. So Iran can say, well, as you say in America, possession is nine tenths of the law, the canal is ours, take it or leave it. And Iran is in a position to enforce its control over the canal. And there's nothing that the United States can do so that when Trump says Iran must open the canal and the straits, Iran can say, well, we've been doing that along. Of course, they've been open. Ships have been going back and forth. They pay the tolls. If you pay the toll, we'll let you through.
Well, the difference is so far they've only been letting friendly countries through. They didn't want to lend their countries that are attacking them or their enemies through the strait. But now they've agreed for two weeks to let all of the boats through and let the trade resume, so that the world can say, all right, look at the panic that you were in, even if the stock market didn't show it. Look at the panic you were in when we closed the strait.
Now look at how good it can be if the trade resumes. We're going to let the Saudi ships, the Emirate ships, we're going to let everybody through. They'll pay the amount of money that $2 million fee was only charged against the supertanker. Lower fees will be charged against smaller tankers. There will be a graduated fee, like there is for the Panama Canal and other canals. This is all going to be done rationally, and countries and ships that are going to sail up and back out of the straits are going to have to file papers. You know, who owns them, where's the oil coming from, where is it going, and here's the money that we're going to pay. And I gather Chinese yuan, because Iran can't use dollars, because the United States has said, we will grab every dollar you have. If you use dollars, we will simply steal it from you.
So the United States has prevented Iran and Russia and other countries from using dollars. So, of course, they're using the best currency that they can find, and that's the Chinese currency in the form of, I gather, Chinese bonds, which have outperformed the U.S. stock market and the U.S. bond market considerably so far this year. So all of that can be arranged, and Iran will be, by doing that, Iran will be showing the rest of the world which future do you want ? Do you want a depression or do you want to return to normalcy ? This normalcy is no longer ever again to be under U.S. control. The United States must move all of its military bases out of the Middle East or West Asia, as people are now quite correctly saying. I mean, in the middle of what ? Of course, it's West Asia. It's not really part of in the middle of Europe anymore. The European element is now being removed.
Well, the question is, again, what's going to happen to Israel, which is America's largest military base there. And as I've heard, American generals often say, back in the 1960s again, they looked at Israel as America's landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. What's going to happen to Israel?
Well, my guess is that Israel is going to continue to try to make mischief by not only refusing to stop its genocide in Lebanon, but also refusing to stop attacking Iran. Iran will respond by wiping out what's left of Israel. And my expectation is there's going to be an enormous emigration out of Israel. It will have lost its industrial capacity, its ports and import and export trade out of Haifa has largely been bombed. I think that the destruction of Israel will be largely completed. And I think the Israelis seem to want to move to Lebanon. There's talk of their moving to Ukraine of all places or going back to their home countries from which they emigrated.
But, obviously, that's going to be the wildcard to be decided. And again, the fact that the United States policy is all up for payments, a pay-to-play, we don't know what the United States is going to do on that. That's the wildcard. Only foreign countries can control the United States. It cannot be controlled from within, given the political system that the United States has and the Supreme Court's [Citizens United] ruling that you're allowed to privatize the election campaigns of politicians, senators, congressmen, and everyone. There are no laws against bribery. Bribery is essentially you've privatized the political process and it's one of bribery to make a long story short.
Nima Alkhorshid: Michael, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has brought something big to the surface, which was the difference between Europeans and Americans when it comes to the Middle East. Because the United States was used by Israel as a proxy in this war. I don't know if you meant if you accept that, if you agree with me or not, but this war is the American-Israeli war on Iran. But Europe has decided not to participate actively in this war. They tried to defend Israel, to use their air defense systems and everything to defend Israel. But when it came to the Strait of Hormuz, they have decided not to go offensively with the attacks.
Then, you know, today, Michael, Israel is violating the ceasefire by attacking Lebanon. They attacked a hundred targets in Lebanon and were destroyed. Many people were killed in these attacks. And just moments ago, we've learned that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez mentioned that, just today, Netanyahu launched his harshest attack against Lebanon since the offensive began. His contempt for life and international law is intolerable. It's time to speak clearly. Lebanon must be included in the ceasefire. This is Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, talking this way.
The international community must condemn this new violation of international law. The European Union must suspend its association agreements with Israel. And there must be no impunity for these criminal acts. You know, this is just something so direct, so obvious, the way that he's talking about Israel. He's just going against Israel. He knows who's the enemy, in my opinion. And that's why he's talking this way. Who's the enemy of peace ? Not who's the enemy of Spain. Who's the enemy of peace ? Which would be Israel in the Middle East. Your understanding of Europe and European policy. Can we put all of them together ? Or do you consider some sort of difference between European countries and among European countries ? Your take on that.
Michael Hudson: Here's the issue. How is international law going to be enforced ? Remember Stalin's statement at the end of World War War II, I think at Yalta, when the Pope had criticized Soviet policy. And Stalin said, well, how many troops does the Vatican have or the Pope have ? Well, you can say that Trump has said, in effect, how many troops does the United Nations have ? Trump has said, we are immune from international law. We make our own law. That's why we in the United States have insisted on veto power over the laws and rules of any organization we join, from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And the United States, supporting and providing arms to Israel and the financial support to Israel, permits it to join the United States in being immune from international law. You treat Israel as a proxy for the United States, and in many ways it is.
But I think, as I mentioned before, on an occasion when I was going, I was traveling to Korea and Japan in around 1974, 191975 with Uzi Arad, who became the head of Mossad and Netanyahu's main economic advisor. We were at an airport and a general came up to him, patted Uzi on the back, and said, you're our land and aircraft carrier there. Uzi's shoulders hunched, and you could see how embarrassed he was. The Israelis have their own agency in this, and their own agency is so extreme and has become so biblically based that it's brought support from the sort of the American Christian Zionists saying, Yes, the Bible says that if we have a war, if Trump will only fight Iran, use atomic war, let Israel atomic war, Jesus will come and save us all and send all the Jews to hell and the Christians to heaven.
But what the hell ? Israel knows that that's just craziness. But the fact is that Israel feels free to act on its own whenever it wishes because the United States has given it the leeway to do whatever it wants. We saw that in the attack, Israel's attack on the USS Liberty, shooting the ship, killing the American naval officers and troops without any American response. So Israel does have its own ability to act by itself, even at the cost of breaking this up. And without the United States really fighting back, because it's put all of its hope in using the Israeli army as its client army, along with the Wahhabi ISIS al-Qaeda head choppers in Syria. So what can you do?
It's appalling how Britain and Germany have made it a crime to oppose the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and Switzerland has moved against the soldier Baud, who was a great military commentator. You've seen Europe knuckle under totally to the United States in supporting, not only supporting Israel, but in growing race hatred against the Arabs. And as far as Europe's concerned, all Islamics are Arabs, including Iran. And this is a defect that can only be cured by an election, but there's no European election for Britain, France, or Germany for the next few years. And it looks like they're really unable to do anything as long as they remain client countries of the United States, as if they were colonies of the United States.
So it's really up to countries outside of Western Europe to bring the enforcement procedures against the United States. Well, obviously, they cannot bring enforcement procedures by military forms because the United States was back in the mutual assured destruction of atomic war if they do that. The only way that other countries can counter this alliance of Western Europe and the United States against Iran and against any other country but the United States controlling oil and essentially the just across the board support for the United States is to create their own alternative set of institutions. And that includes the United Nations, and it includes the international monetary system as such.
A Russian diplomat earlier this week gave a wonderful speech saying, well, the United Nations has a new Secretary General to be appointed. And this is an opportunity to change the whole United Nations to remove the Western influence. And the diplomat said he's appalled at some of the U.S. toadies and cronies saying, well, we want a Secretary General who will continue the wonderful reforms of Gutierrez. And the Russians said, we don't need Gutierrez. We need a return to the original principles of the United Nations.
That can only be created either by reforming the United Nations to get rid of the Security Council that enables the United States to have gained control of the United Nations and the Atomic Energy Authority under it and all of the United Nations institutions under U.S. control. We have to remove the U.S. control. And the implication is you may need the bulk of United Nations countries to withdraw from the United Nations and create their own institutions. I think I mentioned last week's show that Gutierres says that the United Nations is broke by this July or August and will have to abandon its New York headquarters.
Well, if the United Nations is broke, again, the Russian diplomat who spoke said, well, Guterres has not pressed the United States to continue the United under Gutierrez's leadership. The United States has been able to run up year after year of not paying support to the United Nations and its agencies. That's what's driven it broke. And so other countries can say, well, since we're financing it all anyway, let's create an institution that we're financing. And this time, we're going to make changes. We're going to make it really doing what the United Nations claimed to be setting out to do in its original charter, assuring the rule of international law and international rules of war, autonomy, and self-reliance and sovereignty for all countries is equal. But this time, they're going to presumably give it some authorization for military power.
What can be done is that the countries of Eurasia and the global south can impose their own sanctions on U.S. creditors and U.S. investors in their countries, saying we are now isolating you until you join our organization under our rules. As long as you're threatening us with the power to control the international economy through weaponizing world trade in oil, weaponizing agricultural trade, weaponizing tariff policy, and replacing the rule of law with your rules-based law, then we're going to do what communities throughout archaic times did. A lawbreaker was exiled from the community. There were cities of refuge. All of that's in the Bible, but it was practiced in other countries. A lawbreaker had to be exiled from the community. They were usually allowed back when a new king or ruler took power. There was a general forgiveness, and if they agreed to behave once again, well, something like exiling the United States and Western Europe until it agreed to a policy that did not threaten the rest of the world with either atomic warfare, military attack, or the economic equivalent of nuclear winter in the form of financial winter. That is the only way in which other countries can protect themselves.
And so far, as I mentioned, they've been thinking about the unthinkable. Well, the show of Richard Wolff and me with you have been discussing this for over a year now. And the rest of the world has not absorbed these ideas into the mainstream discussion or even the academic discussion, to put it mildly.
Nima Alkhorshid: Michael, before wrapping up, you know, one of the main problems right now with the ceasefire, as it was just moments ago, was mentioned by the head of the Iranian parliament. They're saying that without considering the case of Lebanon or the case of Gaza, there is no, you know, there is no solution for the war that is happening, that was happening between Iran and the United States. So you have to find some sort of understanding of the whole region. It's not just about Iran and the United States, it's about the whole region altogether.
Is Donald Trump capable of making that sort of agreement, or we're heading towards something like what we've had in the Minsk 2 agreement. You remember the Minsk 2, you know, the guarantors, Germany and France, and Russia was one of the signatories of that agreement that they had between the Eastern Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. Are we going to have the same sort of fake agreement?
Michael Hudson: Well, the big question is: what is the United States going to do ? I think Iran has calculated that it seems unlikely that Donald Trump would renew his threat to blow up every bridge in Iran and every electric utility in Iran and blow it up to the Dark Ages just because Israel says that we want to kill all of the Shiites in Lebanon.
Iran figures, well, we can do what we want as long as we're pointing out to the fact that it's Israel that's violating this condition of the truce. And if the United States cannot enforce it, who else in the region could enforce it ? Well, who is the only country with an army sufficient to enforce it would be a country like Turkey ? Well, what's Turkey's role in this ? What's India's role in this ? They're powerful countries in the region, but they've been trying to play both sides at once. Turkey's trying to be part of NATO and it's part of trying to be part of BRICS. Same thing with India, where Modi has just returned from Israel by just doing everything but convert to Judaism in his praise for it.
So I don't think they can really be trusted as an honest broker. And China and Russia are too far away. Russia would certainly be a logical choice, but then that would leave it open to America saying, well, if you just double-cross Iran, we'll let you do whatever you want with Ukraine. To which Russia should say, well, we'll do whatever we want with Ukraine in any case. Then the U.S. can say, well, you can do whatever you want with Europe. And then Russia can say, well, we can do whatever we want with Europe in other cases.
What would Putin do ? We don't know. But how would you find a guarantor that is immune from U.S. diplomatic threats, including, remember when the United Nations reporter found Netanyahu guilty of genocide, all of her bank accounts were closed. She was blocked from traveling anywhere. And when Iran tried to negotiate with the United States, twice its negotiators had been killed.
So how are you going to find an arbitrator or negotiator ? The international court judges have all found themselves; their bank accounts have been closed. They're been under personal attack. How are you going to protect from this ? It has to be a larger alliance than just two countries. It has to be a group alliance by countries that have the capacity to economically and financially isolate the U.S. economy, the U.S. dollar, U.S. foreign investors in raw materials, U.S. bankers and bondholders. All of these would have to be fall subject to the sanctions that are against the United States. That is the scale on which any regulation would have to occur.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah. Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you, pleasure, as always. It's the most, this is, I think, the last two days are the most a turning point in the direction in which the world is moving.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, exactly.
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Editing: ced
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