2026.09.10—Dialogue Works - TR (v4.1)
Nima Alkhorshid: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, September 10, 2026. Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are here with us. Welcome back, Richard and Michael.
Richard Wolff: Thank you.
Michael Hudson: Good to be here.
Nima Alkhorshid: Let me start with what's going on in West Asia. As I don't know if you know that there is a fight going on in Yemen between Ansar Allah and the [Saudi-backed PLC], the [PLC/ Presidential Leadership Council], supported by Saudi Arabia. And Ansar Allah is just advancing and controlling the whole border with the Red Sea. And let me just bring up the map here just to understand what's going on with the case of Yemen, which would help us here.
As you see in this map, Richard and Michael, here, they're controlling, right now, here [Hays], and Mocha is under the control of the Houthis [Ansar Allah]. They're basically controlling the whole line here, you know, close to the Bab al-Mandab, close to the Red Sea, which is one of the main objectives to control, to have an effective or robust control on Bab al-Mandab. And the other point was this little island here, Perim Island, as they call it; right now it's in the hands of Ansar Allah.
The reason I'm bringing this up here is [because] Saudi Arabia has been trying to do everything to control Yemen because they wanted control of Bab al-Mandab.
Right now, in the fight that is going on, Saudi Arabia is bombing as we talk. They tried to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. But it doesn't seem that [Ansar Allah is] going to back down because on the ground they're advancing, they're capturing, they're controlling Yemen. As an outcome of that, they're going to control Saudi access to the Red Sea as well. This is what's going on in the region.
The problem is here is the difference between what is going on right now and what was [going on] before the war against Iran started. And Donald Trump in those days, or the United States, had the power to control these conflicts because they had the military power, they had the bases, everything. They were prepared to support Saudi Arabia. Today, that's not the case.
Then you see why Saudi Arabia is seeking some sort of partnership or alliance with Turkey and Pakistan. This is part of the issue for Saudi Arabia—not only Saudi Arabia, but all these GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries together.
The main issue today is that all these GCC countries are suffering from the security that they thought they were going to have with the United States, with the U.S. bases on their soil, which is not the case anymore.
Here is today what Donald Trump said about the end of the war between Iran and the United States.
[clip start]
Donald Trump (clip): It's going to end immediately after the election. I think the war will end immediately after the election. Because they can't hold out any longer. They're desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon. And if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble. All they want is a nuclear weapon.
Reporter 1 (clip): Are you still hoping for a nuclear deal ? Secretary Wright said a nuclear deal might not be on the table anymore. Is that true?
Donald Trump (clip): I'm doing much more than a nuclear deal. There's a lot more than nuclear. We're going to have nuclear. That's 99.9. But there's going to be a lot of other things on the table that wouldn't have been on the table three months ago.
Reporter 2 (clip): What about negotiations with Iran ? Do you expect that to be restarted sometime?
Donald Trump (clip): We're not looking for it, to be honest with you, Jeff. Originally, I wanted to make a deal. We're so far down the line. They have very little country left right now. So we're not looking for it. Yes, a negotiation could possibly happen, but it's not something we're looking at. This war will end immediately after our election.
[clip end]
Nima Alkhorshid: He's somehow saying that he would bring Iran to its knees. But the problem here is, Richard, this picture here:
Look at Iran today—99% of the trade is between Iran and China, comparing [it] to the United States. Nothing with the United States. I don't know how they can put pressure on Iranians. There is no sign that anytime soon they would bring Iran to its knees.
And there was an assessment on Bloomberg. It says that the advisors of Donald Trump told him that this war would continue until the last moment of his administration—2029—because there is no capability or there is no way to bring [Iran] militarily to [its] knees.
Here is the question, Michael—where are we headed ? Go ahead.
Michael Hudson: Well, I think that Iran's destruction of the U.S. military bases throughout West Asia has prevented the U.S. military from defending Saudi Arabia and the other pro-U.S. kingdoms, such as the Emirates, in the region.
In the past, the Yemenis never could have mounted the serious attacks on Saudi Arabia that they're making now because the U.S. had all these bases in Jordan, in Kuwait, and in Saudi Arabia itself.But when Iran destroyed the U.S. bases there and left the U.S. unable to rebuild them, and when Iran even drove the U.S. aircraft carriers and the ships out of the whole Persian Gulf-West Asian region, all of a sudden that showed that the United States was more of a paper tiger, as Mao said. But I think 'paper dinosaur' is more [in] the region because the arms that the United States has are those based on the past wars.
The United States is still living in the world that it created in 1945 at the end of World War II, when it had all the military power in the world. It was the [world's biggest] creditor and it was the major industrial exporter. So all the other countries were dependent on the United States. And all of a sudden, what does it have now?
It turns out that these military bases that have been destroyed since February are a vestige of not only America's previous power, but of the whole means of making war that existed before. And all of this is affecting all of North Africa. And that's what we seem to be talking about right now as I read the news.
Look at the whole residue of what was supposed to be the Arab Spring, from Egypt to Tunisia. The United States came in and it had enough money to [bribe] the Egyptian army. And instead of the Arab Spring, you had the protégé of Egypt's dictator, the military leader [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi, become his successor.
There wasn't any Arab Spring. Same thing in Tunisia. And the United States probably can't do that this time any more than it can protect Saudi Arabia from what nobody would have expected. The Yemenis—the Houthis, who are basically the Yemenis—[are] defeating it.
So now, the people may not have much of a voice in all of these North African and Middle Eastern kingdoms, but the economy is the people, and the economy is no longer tied to the United States. As you've been pointing out in your show, China has replaced the United States as the industrial supplier and as the key to the whole thing.
So I guess there's a similarity here, what's happening in West Asia to what's happening in Russia. The whole last week there have been discussions about Jared Kushner and etc., [and] the CIA head [John Ratcliffe], going to Russia and offering a ceasefire.
Well, there already is a ceasefire in Ukraine. Ukraine is in a ceasefire. It doesn't have any arms. It doesn't have any missiles. It's shot them all. And it doesn't have any men to fight.
So Russia has no interest. [It's] saying, "Well, [Ukraine] is now in a ceasefire and we can just walk west as far as we want and take over Odessa. We, you know, we've won. This is going to be settled on the battlefield. Why would we want to be a part of a unilateral ceasefire that's already happening?" And all that Ukraine has is NATO-supplied missiles that it moves into Ukraine to shoot against Russia.
Well, we're in the same kind of nearing a ceasefire in the Persian Gulf. And it seemed to be that we were in a ceasefire like that a few weeks ago, before Trump started the war again.
The United States military is shrinking so much that it's used its missiles. And just in the last attack by Iran on Jordan a few days ago, there were statements that 100 of the U.S. big missiles were expended. So the United States is out of missiles.
And it's very much like Iran is doing a rope-a-dope strategy that Muhammad Ali did. Muhammad, in his big fights, would let his opponent hit him and hit him until his opponent's arms got tired and didn't have any strength left. And then Ali, who'd taken a lot of body blows, would—pow!—knock the other guy out.
Well, you could look at that as a metaphor, I think, for what's happening with Iran. Iran has let the United States use all of the muscle it had—which were its missiles, its arms, and its aircraft carriers. It's used them all up. It has no more muscle. And so Iran has it now.
So I think that when Trump says the war will end after the election, it probably means that the United States will be completely exhausted. And if anything, it'll be a technical knockout, unless Trump uses atomic war. Why would he keep talking about the same myth—"It's all about Iran's atom bomb"?
Iran has no atom bomb. And even if you have an atom bomb, you don't have the delivery mechanisms for an atom bomb. You need a really big plane for that, I'm told, which is why NATO has been sending huge missiles into Russia, blowing up Russia's big bombers that were needed in case Russia ever wanted to atom-bomb Western Europe, which I don't believe it wants to do.
You're having this whole fiction. It's as if Trump is trying to say, "We're threatened by an atom bomb, so we're going to atom-bomb Iran before it atom-bombs us." What the demagogy is in—this false idea that Iran has an atom bomb—[is] just like we're back in the George W. Bush myth about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, the Niger uranium deal that didn't exist, the whole propaganda.
So it looks as if Trump is trying to prepare the ground for saying, "Well, probably after the election, we're going to have the war over."
Well, the question is whether the war will be over because now the election's over and Trump doesn't have to posture anymore and he can just withdraw and declare victory, or whether he's going to escalate into an awful atom bomb. That's my view of the big picture.
Nima Alkhorshid: Go ahead, Richard.
Richard Wolff: Well, I'd like to reorganize what Michael said a little bit as follows.
It seems to me that recent weeks have indicated that Mr. Trump and his advisors pretty well understand they cannot bomb Iran into subordination. They've really tried that. They tried that a year ago. They tried it after February of this year. And they've tried it on and off ever since. That doesn't work.
All right, so then what are their options ? They're very well aware that they could go away, declare victory, and, by controlling the mass media, at least make it a fuzzy issue around the world who won and who lost.
But their decision to do that has been destroyed by their own behavior: by allowing the Iranians to have the time to use their missiles, to do everything Michael said about their military bases. You can't now walk away without it looking as though either the United States lost or the United States was held to some kind of a draw.
Well, that's a loss, a draw. If you're the biggest, richest country in the world with the biggest military by far, and you have a war against a poor country of 92 million, and you can't do better than this, you are exposed. And it would only be worse if he [Trump] shut it down now.
Therefore, his conclusion and that of his advisors is to maintain the unstable status quo. Let it be. Every now and then bomb something so you can look on the evening news as though you are, and I quote Mr. Trump, "You know, there's very little of Iran left."
He can say that forever. And by the fact that the war is still going on, he can position himself. And he's got to get through these elections or else he's in very serious political trouble.
I mean, the man yesterday proposed to bribe every adult American voter with $5,000 to vote for what he wants. I mean, you could not be more grotesquely exposed as desperate than that. That's like having a sign over your head: "Hello, I'm desperate. Look what I'm doing."
No one has ever done that before. It's probably illegal. I noticed that Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio seemed to be withdrawing that proposal last night when they could feel the reaction of what it means. Okay, so this is a non-solution.
In that light, then what Nima wants us to talk about—what he opens the program with—is the right thing. Because if the United States' position is to hold everything kind of as it is, just to keep this half-war going for the next two months, then the disruption of that plan is what the Houthis are forcing. They are forcing right there another angle in which this war is expanding.
If I understand correctly, Pakistan has already indicated it is not intervening here. It signed a deal [the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement] with the Saudis just a few weeks ago, as we know. We talked about it on this program. But they've said they're not [intervening]. I don't know if Turkey has made a statement, but if Pakistan doesn't [intervene], then the chances are Turkey isn't going to do it either. They're going to let this be something. And what is Saudi Arabia going to do ? This attacks its oil business in a potentially very powerful way.
They're going to have to come to terms. And my guess is they're going to come to terms with Iran. And if that happens, you know, it changes, again, everything and every calculation in that part of the world.
Also, if I understand correctly, the price of oil crossed $105 a barrel this morning. The price of gas likewise followed up. I don't know yet what the reaction is. I noticed that the price of oil in terms of oil stocks in the stock exchange this morning has not gone up. I don't understand what that's about.
So for me, what we are watching is the effort of the United States to maintain the current level of absurd war-slash-not-war for an indefinite period, hoping that they have more freedom after the election than they do now. But if you ask yourself the question, what do they have the [freedom] to do ? It's equally likely that they will walk away from all of this once the electoral cost of it is behind them.
Michael Hudson: Well, Richard, that's the whole point. What will they do with freedom?
All that America has is bombs, and bombs never win a war. Not even the U.S. bombing and British bombing of Dresden and Hamburg won the war. All that did was turn the population to rally around the existing government. And self-preservation is what populations do when they're bombed.
So the United States is muscle-bound. It doesn't have an army.
But who does have an army right now ? Well, from what I read in the news this morning, the Yemeni army drove the Saudi army out, captured a lot of Saudis, and offered them amnesty if they laid down their arms.
The armies that I think the Saudis have and most countries in the Middle East have—apart from the Yemenis—are not fighting armies. They're armies for being there and symbolic armies, but not [for] fighting.
So, again, there's nothing that's really happening. So, I think that you're having Saudi Arabia face the closure of the export route through the Red Sea that seemed to be reported as if Saudi Arabia was exporting 70% of its pre-war oil exports up until the last few days.
And if that is really the case, then that's been shut off now. And if the Saudis cannot maintain or restore what was their Red Sea trade—which is 5% of the Persian Gulf trade with the rest of the world—compared to the 20% through the [Strait] of Hormuz, then there's not really much to do.
So Saudi Arabia is accusing Iran of backing the Houthis, as if somehow there's always a central devil behind everything, like [how] the United States and NATO blame Russia for everything that goes wrong, like the German airport duds of so-called bombs and drones that were found at the [Leipzig/Halle] Airport there.
Well, there's no causality there. The Yemenis obviously have agency of their own, just like Hezbollah did, just like Hamas did. And none of these groups are simply proxies for anyone in the center.
What they have is a common understanding of what the war is all about. And the big picture is: the war is about ending the whole legacy of European colonialism, not only in that region, but we're seeing that all the way down through Africa.
The world that the European colonial countries created in Africa, the Middle Eastern monarchies and clan rule, really, that the British and French created after World War I, and against the British. It was the British, really, and Americans that installed the Saudi clan that ruled Saudi Arabia, and installed all of the interrelated clans of the Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and the other countries there. All of this is being wound down, just as you're having the fight in Africa, [in] Mali and other countries, against the residue of French and British colonialism there, with the United States throwing all its support behind the ISIS terrorists.
We're dealing with three terrorist powers throughout the world. We're dealing with Ukrainian religious and ethnic supremacist terrorists in Ukraine. We're dealing with the Israeli terrorists' religious war against the Palestinians there. And we're dealing with the United States that—just as Richard said—the United States is the agent of chaos. But what chaos are you going to create?
The Sunni terrorists—the Wahhabi jihadists—are essentially America's Foreign Legion, and they're being mobilized all throughout Africa. And it's a fight of Islam against the former European colonies that were not Islamic because Europe wasn't Islamic.
And we're seeing really a fight of terrorism against attempts by other countries to be independent. And of course, their independence will still be under the control of monarchies and clans. And there's still going to be the domestic political class war there. But at least I think that's the framework for all of this.
Richard Wolff: I think so also. And I want, again, only to stress: no one should be much moved by notions that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are all kinds of puppets run by the Ayatollah in Iran.
Just remember, during the Cold War, everything was explained by the machinations of the evil communists in Russia. They were held, even against all the obvious evidence of disagreements and battles and fights in the Comintern, in which different communists in different parts of the world had radically different notions of which way to go. I mean, that was always true, for example, in the relationship between Russia and China.
The imagination of a singular mentality—that's pure propaganda. And it's embarrassing when people who are otherwise reasonably thinking human beings descend into that. It tells you more about what's happening to the people who talk like that than it tells you anything about what they're talking about. They're reflecting their own.
These days, if you talk to American diplomatic officials, they refer to the Iranians the way they used to refer to Stalin or Mao. "The terrible Ayatollah"—and they can't give you [his] name because they don't know [it]. "But they're a terrible evil, and they are"—what did the president say—"the center of global terrorism."
As if global terrorism had a center. You know, even Michael just now had to give us three or four people qualifying for 'Terrorist of the Month.' It is a complicated situation, not improved in any way by making simple-minded analysis.
There will be books written on who the Houthis are and how they evolved over the last century into the community that now can field an army, can confront the Saudis, can defeat the Saudis. Everybody's going to scratch their head because a year or two ago, no one ever heard of that group. Now they are Yemenis and they have a country and they have an army and they have missiles.
Wow, you don't do that overnight. That's not a quickie program of Iran's over the last few years. That's childish, that way of thinking. It's really very childish.
And that's what's going on because you have this absurd war that the United States runs with its control of the mass media. And so we are all left to have to push back against what is a mountain of nonsense impeding the effort to understand what's going on.
Michael Hudson: Well, there's nothing that I can add to that. The whole question is: what's going to come out of all this?
This is, like I said, really a fight against the world that European colonialism created and that the United States has taken over from the residue of European colonialism after World War II and is fighting really for Western control and for control of the raw materials in Africa [to start].
As far as the United States is concerned, let all the Ukrainians die in the army. Because what America and what Donald Trump want to make with Putin is: "Well, let's divide up who's going to exploit the raw materials. We don't need people for that."
Well, that's how the Europeans and the Americans feel about Africa and about the Middle East: "What we want is the oil. What we want are the minerals in Africa. Let's get them all fighting against each other. Let's divide and conquer. Let's involve them in a religious war, in a political war, in a war against clans, in a Sunni-Shia war, an Islamic-Christian war. And if there are no more people, then there really won't be any overhead that has to be supported while we really just exploit the natural resources that we're after."
There is no concept in the West of benefiting from mutual economic growth of regions that are politically different and are not part of the Western gang with its hierarchies from the United States to Western Europe.
That's really it. Are we going to have a world just with the Western population and the rest of the world empty of population, just except for the people doing the mining and the transportation and the servicing of the minerals trade, as the whole idea of the 19th century was ? Or are we going to have a world of human beings and economies with mutual growth and mutual benefit?
Well, that's what this sort of emerging unity of China, Russia, and Iran is threatening to cause. It's threatening to restore the whole idea of civilization. And that's the threat to the United States and European destruction, to the chaos and the mutual destruction that the U.S. and NATO of Europe [are] doing.
So that's the big fight. And the political fight, I guess, of Iran—and the rest of West Asia—is to say: "This is a fight for civilization. It's not a fight of us and the Houthis against Saudi Arabia. We want Saudi Arabia and our neighboring countries to all join us together because it has to be a common fight. It's as if we're the American colonies saying, 'We have to join together or hang together, or we'll all hang separately.'" It's that kind of situation, spread to this region.
Richard Wolff: I think the notion of colonialism deserves much more thought and elaboration than anyone is giving it these days. And so let me offer a little chapter of that.
When World Wars I and II culminated four centuries—the 17th, 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th century—that was the culmination: four centuries in which the world developed the center, called Europe, and the periphery—everybody else.That whole way of organizing the world was a European project. And it came out of a new economic system that displaced feudalism at that time in Europe, which we now know is capitalism. No more master and slave as slavery, no more lord and serf as feudalism. A new system built upon employer and employee with all the novelty—a market in labor power.
The slave market had been a market in people. Capitalism said, "No, no, no, that's illegitimate. Can't have that. But we can have a market in the brains and muscles of people during the day."
And that's what will be the great market—between the employers who have the ability to buy the labor power of human beings, and the mass of human beings who have no other way to survive unless they sell their capacity to work. If they have profit, if they don't need that—if they have wealth—they become the employer.
So the system reorganizes around that. And that system has built into it, as Marx and so many others have shown us, the need to expand and grow.
The successful business is the one that makes a profit and plows it back in to grow. It's understood that growth is how you survive. If you don't grow, you will be out-competed by somebody who does grow. So you better grow.
All right, if everybody's survival, everybody's competitive well-being depends on growth, it's only a matter of time before wherever capitalism emerges from feudalism—say in England, say in what we now call Belgium or the Netherlands—it will quickly grow. It will quickly need more food sources, more workers, more raw materials, minerals, oil, and all of that. It will grow.
All right, so for the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, they could grow from their bases in Europe, eventually adding Japan, eventually adding a former colony, the U.S., until they had taken over the whole world, pretty much. That famous conference in Berlin in 1884, where they took the map of Africa and literally marked it up—Germany gets this, Spain gets that, France this, England the other, and so forth.
All right, here's my point. When that all culminates in the greatest savage warfare the world had ever seen, World Wars I and II—because they were the culmination of the imperial colonial project, the worst mass slaughter in the world. [Those two world wars far exceeded] anything attributed to Stalin or Mao in the turbulences of their revolutions. What emerged from that is even more important to understand.
Because air power and air war were not developed, the United States escaped this cataclysm. Protected by the Pacific and the Atlantic, they got away. They were the exception. They weren't wrecked by World Wars I and II.
That's why that statistic is so important: 25 million Russians killed in World War II, 400,000 Americans. There's no comparison between those two. None at all. It is as big a difference as you could imagine. And we're talking about events that aren't that long ago.
When the dust clears and all the European countries are wiped out and Japan with it, the United States is left.
The United States inherits the whole colonial world. All the colonial masters can no longer run them. They can't squeeze the resources out of them. They can't dictate what happens there. They don't control anything. In come the American businesses, the American political operators, and inherit in the literal sense.
But people have to understand: the United States is then gifted the empires created by a dozen other countries. Of course the United States becomes the hegemon of the last 75 years. It is the global colonial power. It actually does get an idea which, not surprisingly, goes to its head: "We are in charge of the whole world."
Even the British Empire didn't imagine that. They thought it was clever to say that the sun never sets on some piece of property somewhere that the British own. But that they really owned the whole planet ? No, they didn't mean that. They knew they didn't.
The Americans thought they did. More important, they thought that this was—because they're a religious people—the gift of God to them to be the dominant. You don't need racism, although that can obviously play its role if the people who have a swollen head like this, who happen to be able to receive the inheritance of all the other colonial empires.
Europe has never recovered. Europe is returning to what it was before capitalism set it out on its colonial road.
Go to Belgium. It's a poor little corner of northwest Europe. Only if it has the Congo does it become rich. My dorm mate from Harvard, Adam Hochschild, wrote a book a few years ago, King Leopold's Ghosts. Became a bestseller. If you're ever interested, study it. Barbara Kingsolver wrote that famous book, The Poisonwood Bible. There is the reality of what the colonial situation was.
Belgium just can't do it anymore. France can't. Germany can't. Spain can't. None of them can. And they have been in a long decline. And look where Europe is now, desperately trying to figure out if there's anything left.
Last week, Volkswagen announced that it's laying off 50,000. 50,000 [layoffs], of actually the most important corporation in Germany. German deindustrialization is in its final desperate hours.
Europe is finished, and it's finished for one reason: its colonialism is over.
And the Americans are now in the position of having gone in a relatively short historical moment from the euphoria of the second half of the 20th century: "We've inherited the whole world."
Of course, Americans were never ready for it. They didn't know how to do it very well. The whole thing has been very crudely done, and not just by Trump, by the others, too. Partly because it's an impossible task to be the hegemon of the whole planet.
But part of what we're watching is we are still left with leaders who can't let go, just like Europe is left with leaders who kind of imagine they are still the heads of important countries. It's sort of hysterically funny to watch them. They can't deliver.
The election last week in Sachsen Anhalt [Saxony-Anhalt] in Germany was a delivery of a verdict by those people: "We don't want anything to do with the folks that have been leading Germany for the last 75 years. We want an alternative for Germany."
Yes, they include lots of people, leftover half-Nazis, no doubt. But to dismiss them on that ground ? Terrible mistake, terrible mistake.
They include millions of people, millions who have no interest in capitalism whatsoever. This part of the vote in Germany was usually the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. So it was East Germany that just voted the other day.
Those people want a secure job, a secure income, a social safety net. They want everything that social democracy represents. That's what they want. And they're now going to demand that of their right-wing leaders, who are either going to have to give it to them or they're going to be blown away just as much as the current blowing away of the old CDU [Christian Democratic Union] and the old SPD [Social Democratic Party], the two parties, which—like the Republicans and Democrats—are the traditional leaders at a time when the tradition is dead.
The horror of the Strait of Hormuz is that this little corner of the world of which the United States was the dominant hegemon isn't. This little country is taking it, is saying: "We will decide who goes through there and what they have to pay, and they have to pay us. We're going to take a little piece away from your empire."
And they're apoplectic in Washington at the prospect of such a thing, not understanding—that's my point—that this is part of a historical process. If it hadn't been Iran, it would have been someplace else in Latin America or Africa or elsewhere in Asia. That really doesn't matter.
What we are living through is the disintegration of the greatest empire the world ever saw because it was the inheritance of a dozen empires, the likes of which the world has never seen. And of course, it is deeply important that the counterforce is led by an entity that is not only anti-colonial and always was, but is also anti-capitalist, granted with all the ambiguities of what they mean by that. But that tells you that something fundamental is being told.
This is a historical overturning. The future is what the Chinese represent, and the rest of the world is figuring that out. And that is the fearful, scary part that lies behind everything else now.
But it's the colonial experience dying as we live through it that people need to keep in mind to make sense of it.
Michael Hudson: Okay, Richard, then let's look at the antithesis at work. What is the United States going to do ? What is its plan for what it wants to do with this empire?
The oil war that we're seeing centered in Iran right now explains everything. And in the last week, especially, the news for oil [was] made largely in Venezuela when the United States made a 100-year deal to secure the largest swath of Venezuelan oil. And here is the detail of the deal that's [been] announced:
The U.S. military is a proxy. The U.S. government is going to have 35% of ownership of the company [North America Blue Energy Partners/NABEP], the corporate organization of this Venezuelan oil. This 35% carve-out for the United States gets to pay for Venezuelan oil only for the direct cost of production, of producing this oil, namely the capital investment and the minimal amount of labor of the oil rig makers necessary to deliver this oil. This was the classical economic definition of value: the cost of production plus the cost of labor.
Venezuela is not going to be able to get any of the natural resource rent of its natural patrimony, the equivalent of land rent, but in this case, it's for oil and its natural resources. The Global South will not be able to keep any of its own economic rent from these oil resources. Only the foreign and a little bit of domestic labor for the cost of production of emptying out the oil wells and leaving an empty space in their place is going to get it.
Well, this is not industrial capitalism, which is all based on, "How do you create a profit by investing in plant and equipment to hire labor to produce more goods?" There's a minimum of hiring labor here.
What the United States wants from the oil-producing countries is not profit. It's economic rent.
That the rentiers, largely the financial companies that own the rent-extracting companies—the symbiosis between, certainly, American, British, and Dutch banking, between the banking system and the oil industry—is financialization.
You mentioned Europe is going back to what existed before industrial capitalism. Well, this is exactly what the plan of the United States [is]: absorbing what you said of the European Empire and simply returning to an economy based on rent extraction—not profit, not capital investment.
The idea is you can afford to let the Western ['Golden Billion'] under U.S. leadership live without industry of its own, without raw materials of its own, all as a rentier aristocracy, of maybe its own shrinking population, of living off the exploitation of land rent, natural resource rent, and the monopoly rent that was created by the whole international order that the world has had since World War I and especially since World War II.
Richard Wolff: You know, and I don't mean to beat this horse to death here, but this is ancient colonialism.
You violently remove the president of the country because he's in your way. You kidnap him and stick him in a jail somewhere in New York. And then you terrorize the remaining leadership—the government of Venezuela, that woman who's the titular head and the people around her—and you threaten God knows what, and you impose a 99-year lease.
That's what the British did with Hong Kong, remember ? That's why we had to wait until 1999 to get Hong Kong free from the British and [so they could] return to what they had been.
Yep, 99 years. We'll hire a few Venezuelans, no doubt with supervisors who are Americans, who will supervise an extraction program.
Well, you know, this has existed all through human history. This used to be called tribute. It's one part of the world that is providing tribute to another. It's a good word because it tells you what Michael just did: [the Venezuelans], they're not going to get anything out of it. They're just doing the drawers of water, the hewers of wood; they do the work to bring it up.
But all of the financing, all of the benefits of a world dependent on oil and gas ? Those will be reaped by the American military who get 35% and pay only the value of the object. And all the other intermediaries who sell the oil, who market the oil, who promote it—who I'm sure down the road somewhere will distill it into yet other products that can have an even higher markup, etc., etc.
You're trying to. what ? You're trying to re-establish the only thing you know is somehow at the base of your wealth, which is colonialism.
That's why the Europeans fantasize they're going to win in Ukraine. They're going to defeat Russia, and then take that huge country, Russia, carve it up the way they did Africa in 1884, and deliver chunks. There'll be that part which goes to Sweden and that part to England.
And what will it rescue Europe from ? The horrible decline that otherwise threatens it at every turn.
Michael Hudson: Well, the question then, Richard and Nima, is why don't Saudi Arabia and the Emirates realize that this is a plan for them ? That everything America has done to Venezuela is what the United States wants to do to West Asian oil. This is the plan. Why don't these countries see what Iran sees and what America is doing every day ? Where are they?
Richard Wolff: I think they're worried that there's a place waiting for them right next door to Mr. Maduro in New York if they even think like that.
Nima Alkhorshid: Good point. Thank you. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Richard Wolff: Thank you.
Nima Alkhorshid: See you soon.
Transcription and Diarization: scripthub.dev
Editing: Madison
Review: Ced
Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash