Nima Alkhorshid: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, October 15, 2026, and our dear friends Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff are here with us. Welcome back, Richard and Michael.
Richard Wolff: Glad to be here.
Nima Alkhorshid: Let me start with what happened yesterday.
In the last four or five days, we've heard multiple ships and vessels have been hit in the Strait of Hormuz, at least six of them the day before yesterday. Yesterday we had four of them. Then later on, we had two of them, two ships. A container ship was targeted and was sinking, one in the Strait of Hormuz by one of those mines in the southern part of the strait, close to the Omani border, and the other one in the Gulf of Oman.
We have the footage of that container ship in the Strait of Hormuz. What you see on the surface of here, these are iPhones and perfumes, you know, all floating there.
And the other one was today: the oil tanker is on fire in the Gulf of Oman. This is today, the footage that came out today.
Moments ago, we learned from CNN that the United States is thinking of the use of MOAB. MOAB is the "Mother of All Bombs." This is the biggest conventional bomb the United States has, the most destructive conventional bomb that the United States has. Once, they used it in Afghanistan in 2017. So this is not going to be the first time.
Today I talked with one of our military analysts. He mentioned that it's not going to be easy for the United States to use these sort of bombs because the delivery would be important. If you put it on a huge airplane with the air defense system that Iran has, they can hit the target easily.
It's not going to be an easy operation for the United States to do that. But they're considering [it]. CNN reported that the Trump administration is considering that. We've heard about the use of nuclear weapons and all of this sort of tactics on the part of the Trump administration.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that Benjamin Netanyahu, together with Donald Trump, they're trying to come out with a new strategy, a new plan to attack Iran before the midterm elections, before the elections in Israel. This is what we've heard so far.
The other important point is the diesel deal between Donald Trump and Russia, which it seems that first we've heard that it's all prepared and the ceasefire Donald Trump announced, an energy ceasefire, everything is resolved, the two sides are coming together. Then you see the attacks from Russia on Ukraine, from Ukraine on Russia, and nothing of the ceasefire is happening as we talk.
Michael, go ahead. What is your understanding of the situation that Donald Trump is dealing with ? I assume that the main difficulty for Donald Trump is the midterm elections and the case of the diesel and what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz.
Michael Hudson: These are two different questions. The last time I remember reading about the "Mother of All Bombs," it's when NATO was, I think, two or three years ago, issuing urgent warnings to Russia that if you use a gravity bomb—which, essentially, it's an electromagnetic bomb. It destroys all of the electromagnetics in the city and also most of the living people. It destroys everything on the surface.
It's not the kind of bomb that would be used against subterranean nuclear facilities or arms facilities, which is what Trump keeps talking about as his public relations link.
So here you have something that NATO has said, you know, "Never use it. It's the equivalent of atomic war. We would react violently against Russia if it tries to use it against Ukraine," that's when they thought it would. And now you have Trump talking openly about using it.
You would only use this over a large civilian center to hurt people and any of the electronic facilities that are there. Of course, this would enable Russia now to use it against European sites that are controlling the electronics that are steering the Ukrainian bombs attacking Russian refineries and, now, Russian information technology.
So you see all of this, and your point that you just made out about the technology of these bombs. Because they're very heavy, they need a really big airplane to carry them, to drop them right over the site. And big airplanes fly very slowly. And if you fly very slowly, you're very prone to anti-aircraft attacks, such as the Houthis (Ansarallah) that just destroyed a Saudi fighter plane the other day. So I don't see how this bomb really would be used.
But then you pointed out that Netanyahu has been urging Trump, saying, "Don't wait until after the election to attack Iran. You've got to do it in the next two weeks, namely before Israel's own election."
Because I think what Netanyahu figures, well, if the U.S.—probably with Israeli support—attack Iran, Iran will then send all the bombs that it's been warning against against Israel too, as America's main military base and staging area against Iran, including staging it in North Africa now, where Israel is setting up military sites of its own to attack Iran.
Well, if this is the case, Netanyahu will be able to cancel elections there. And who knows what Trump is going to do here?
The second part, your second question is about the effect on the trade, Trump's trade. Should I let Richard comment on what I've just said and then we talk about the trade?
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, let Richard comment on that. Then we can. Go ahead, Richard.
Richard Wolff: Well, I must admit, in a way, that I'm confused. I try to pay as much attention as I can, but I don't understand, and maybe either of you can help me and our audience.
I do not understand the following: the mines that are knocking out the ships that Nima showed us at the beginning of the show, the fact that Iran, if I understand correctly, has sent some drones and/or rockets into Israel, possibly southern Lebanon, and so on. And yet, neither Israel nor the United States has retaliated. I understand they are saying things, but they aren't doing anything. And I find that extraordinary. And it is not solved to say that they are considering things.
They have had plans on the books—they're supposed to have plans for every contingency. They're supposed to know exactly under what circumstances they would drop a bomb, what kind of bomb, in what way, with what airplane. They know better than we do what the air defense capacity of Iran is.
So, what is there to be considered ? I don't think there is any consideration.
They have faced a situation now, building for some time, where they have no option. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor says, and he's very good on this material, there's no military solution for the United States. They don't have anything here.
John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago says pretty much the same thing. When you survey what they can do and you survey what the Iranians can do in return, there's no military option.
So, they've made the decision to wait. They think their best shot is to wait. So, that's what they're doing. They're waiting. The rest is all verbiage and public relations, theatrics of this and that, and bluster, and all of that. But the reality is, they are waiting to see...what ? Well, there I need your help.
I don't know what they're waiting for. And as John Mearsheimer—I want to give him credit because I learned from him—what he says every time this question comes up, "Before or after the midterms?" he basically says it's got nothing to do with it.
If they could do it, they would do it now. If they can't do it now, waiting till after the midterms makes no sense. It's not going to be better for them then, likely going to be worse at home. If they suspend the elections, you're going to get trouble in the streets. If he [Trump] claims victory when he's been defeated, you're going to get trouble in the streets. And neither of those is good for conducting military operations abroad.
So he's stuck. He can't, there is no option.
We are confused, or at least I am confused because, if I may be allowed to quote myself back to myself to help me remember what I thought I understood before, we are living through the decline of the empire. And one of the points in a declining empire is when it finally confronts one of those people it used to put down with its dominant military power, and it can't do it anymore. And it doesn't know what to do.
Michael Hudson: What you and the U.S. call "waiting" is really a sense of denial in the market saying everything is going to be [fine]. They're waiting because Trump is saying, "Everything is going to be all right. It's going to go back to normal."
And he's focused again on his obsession of what are U.S. diesel prices going to be. Well, I think just yesterday, the International Energy [Agency] came out and said, "Probably within about two weeks, we're going to see the end of the ability of releasing [national] petroleum reserves to keep down prices, and prices are going to go up."
Well, so far, Trump has been able to keep saying, "We've made an agreement with Russia, we've made an agreement with Iran. Everything's okay, things will be going back to normal."
But as Nima's clips showed at the beginning of the show, they're not going to be normal.
And the question is: who are you going to believe ? The news or what Trump is saying?
The important thing is that Trump has been able to strong-arm America's allies—and this is what Nima's second question was—to supply diesel to the United States. And Trump has threatened the European Union, saying, "You know, the United States is a major exporter of the diesel and oil that you need. And I'm under pressure to prevent American oil companies [from exporting] this oil to you so that they can keep it in the American market and hold down the oil prices that our consumer is going to pay.
"But I'm willing to promise not to cut you off and to let oil companies make their enormous profits selling to you at world distress oil prices while their cost of production in America remains unchanged. So I will let them make their huge oil profits as long as you help me keep down oil prices for the next two weeks." By no coincidence, the same period the International Energy [Agency] has said.
And the deal that Europe has made is an amazing giveaway. They are releasing their oil and diesel reserves to the United States market. It's not more than a few drops in the bucket, but it's symbolically enough for Trump to convince "the market," which obviously is being manipulated by Treasury short sellers or whoever is manipulating the market to keep the oil prices nominally down. All of this means that the oil that Europe is selling to the United States, the diesel fuel, is at today's low, artificially manipulated prices.
Well, what's going to happen after the elections ? Prices are going to go up, and at the end of, I think, the four-month period that Trump has negotiated his deal, diesel prices are probably going to be double.
That means that Europe has a 100% loss, and it is going to have to replace the diesel in its own national petroleum reserves at double the price that it sold this diesel to the United States.
Well, you can imagine what this is going to do to the EU budgets that are already being squeezed and are subject to the crazy EU limit that, well, you can't run a budget deficit of over now 5% of the GDP. And this is at a time when NATO has already told them: "You have to spend 5% of your GDP on preparing for the war with Russia."
That's going to take a lot of money, even though President Putin has said, "Well, if there is a war with Russia, it's only going to take about three hours."
I don't know why they have to spend so much money on what's going to be a three-hour war. But obviously, Europe will be wiped out very quickly in any case.
But that's the absurdity that we're finding in all of this. What we see is that Europe is going to be the big loser in all this.
And just imagine what's going to happen if somehow oil would flow again from the Persian Gulf. It's not going to be Saudi oil. [There's] not going to be much oil from the other emirates. Any oil that ends up being exported will probably be from Iran.
And the deal that America has made with Russia of, all right, Russia is going to be very helpful in selling us diesel and selling us oil. And there's a question: you know, is Trump Putin's puppet, as Hillary Clinton kept saying, and as the Democrats are saying today ? Well, not really. What does Russia get out of this?
What Trump gets out of this is, "You see, Russia's helping us keep down the price of diesel oil. Iran is pretty soon going to end up having to make a deal with this."
Well, the oil that Russia is sending to the United States, now that Ukraine, meaning America has given Ukraine the bombs and steered them to blow up the Russian oil refineries, this is going to be largely Iranian oil. And from what I understand, Iran will be selling oil to Russia at below market prices. Russia will be marking up the price of this oil and sending this Iranian oil to the United States. That's the "Russian" oil that is being sent here. And it's all being sent for this charade that we've been discussing that Trump is trying to arrange for the fuel markets.
Who are you going to believe ? Well, just for your audience, it's not America.
The Democrats are strongly opposing this deal. The Democratic Party, led by Senator Chuck Schumer, the head of the Democratic Party in the Senate, [has] said, "We've absolutely got to go to war with Russia. We've absolutely got to support Ukraine. We've got to support Ukraine and fight Iran."
The Democrats, as we're coming up to the election in about two weeks, are opposing any attempt by Trump to say, "You know, we're trying to not have a war on two fronts with Russia and Iran." The Democrats are saying, "Yes, we want a war with everyone."
That's what the Democratic Party has been all about all along.
So it's interesting that the Democrats are once again showing themselves to be the pro-war party, while the Republican candidates sort of feel obliged to support Trump's policy of saying, "Well, let's have enough peace with Russia so that we can get Russian oil and diesel to keep down America's fuel prices."
Schumer came out and said, "It's worthwhile having Americans pay more money for their oil and diesel in order to stop Russia."
And almost word for word, he's saying what Friedrich Merz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France and the British are saying: "It's worthwhile having our budgets here for war with Russia and not importing Russian oil, not having Iranian oil, squeezing labor in order to fight war with Russia. What do you want, voters ? Do you want higher living standards or war with Russia ? Of course, you're good citizens. You want war with Russia and you're willing to make the sacrifice."
Well, that's basically the tension that's coming out. And imagine what Iran will be responding to all this if and when the oil trade is resumed under the Iranian decision of, "Whose boats are we going to let use the Strait of Hormuz and our own exports ? Who are we going to give preference to?"
Well, now you're going to have the whole world needing this Iranian-Russian oil. And you can imagine that given a choice of who will Iran and Russia sell it to, Europe is going to be at the bottom of the whole list. They're going to sell it to their Asian allies in the Global South countries, allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, not at all [to] either the United States or Europe.
So the cost to Europe and also Japan and Korea of allying themselves with the United States, both in the war against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran, this is going to leave them holding the short end of the stick when it comes to access to whatever oil market does emerge at the higher prices later this year.
Richard Wolff: Let me offer a little addendum to what Michael has said. It seems to me that Mr. Schumer, and I'm not surprised given the quality of leadership he has always provided, is busy trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Democratic Party.
A huge part of the disaffection of American voters is now attached to the war in Iran. I want to remind everyone, it was a loser in public opinion from day one, from the 28th of February. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan, which at least had popular support at the beginning of the war. Didn't last all that long, but they had it at the beginning.
The war in Iran stands out because it didn't have support at all, ever. So, for Mr. Schumer, two weeks before an election, the polls suggest he will win to strongly support a war. Well, it's beyond stupid.
But it is interesting because it is like Macron and Merz. And here's what's interesting: they all demonize Russia. They don't have much of a politics other than that.
And what do they demonize Russia for ? They demonize them because they attribute to Russia a colonial project in which Russia is going to colonize the rest of Western Europe.
What is the reality ? The reality is that those countries that might be colonized by Russia are the colonial powers of the last three centuries, far exceeding anything Russia [did]. Russia participated also, but it's mostly them, not Russia. Number one.
Number two, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been the West, the United States and Western Europe using NATO, that has marched steadily to the east and taken over economically and politically Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, and so on.
It's the West that has expanded to the east, not the other way around. This is nuts what they are doing, except if you understand that the crisis of Europe, and Michael is more right than he says, Europe is the one self-destructing in front of us.
Europe has to have some explanation for its people, for the disaster that's happening to them. And the Europeans thought they could count on their American ally.
But because the empire all of them once had is going into the toilet, the Americans want to dropkick the Europeans and get them out of the way and convert them into tributary powers. Their job is to invest in and trade under the roof of, in a mercantilist way, with the United States. Shut up and deliver us your wealth. Well, that's nothing other than the recipe of colonialism.
The United States is colonizing Europe. And it is turning around to its partners, Mexico and Canada, and colonizing them, converting them into tributary states. It's holding on to the only thing it knows, which is colonial relationships around the world.
And we shouldn't be surprised, because, as we've talked about it, at the end of World War II, all the old empires destroyed each other in World Wars I and II. And the United States then inherited them all, which is why we've been the dominant country in the last 75 years, because we are the uni-empire. We are the consolidation of all of the others.
And now it's our turn, and there's no one to save us, to go down. Iran is the agent of it. That's what we're watching.
And the political leaders in Europe going down with their ship are finding that the only thing they can think of to keep themselves in power, since these are people who have been identified all their lives from the time they were teenagers as being pro-American. That's how you make your way up the career ladder in the foreign service in Europe.
Mr. Merz, the head of Germany, he was the German agent of either BlackRock or Blackstone.
Nima Alkhorshid: BlackRock.
Richard Wolff: BlackRock. Okay. It's like a joke. And the French leadership is exactly the same, and the British leadership is exactly the same.
You can see why they would pretend, because it's clever politics: "We are besieged by a great enemy, Russia, and we are going to protect our people." They have nothing else.
They can't rely on the United States because to their own people, they've been revealed as patsies, as Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, comes to the United States and says to the Americans, "Yes, we will invest $700 billion in America."
Let me do that again: "We are going to raise $700 billion of the European economy, and instead of investing it there, we're going to invest it in your country."
That's tribute. That's not trade. That's tribute. And the Europeans are in the position of giving away their little bit of future that they have to the United States. How can they make that acceptable to their people?
The answer is they can't. And now let me bring that in. As they go about doing what the United States wants, which is number one, tribute, and number two, pick up the expense of NATO, which we don't have much use for anymore anyway. The only way they can do these things, the only way, is by savaging the social welfare system in their countries, changing their budgets so that they are building weapons instead of taking care of children or schools or health care or anything else. You see it everywhere in Europe.
But now the warning comes. What country in Europe is the first one to go into the streets ? The French. It's been that way for hundreds of years. And where are the French today ? Whoa, they're in the streets.
First, the school teachers union went out. Then the high school students in support of those teachers went out. Then the university students in France, I'm watching this carefully, go out in support of the high school students. And now it has spread to Belgium already in a big way, and Italy, beginning even in Germany.
What we are seeing are the opening guns of the mass from below [pushing back].
Michael, as a specialist in monetary issues, will enjoy the fact that the leader of the largest block of votes in the French National Assembly, the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, four days ago proposed that instead of cutting the social welfare, that the French government cancel 18% of the national debt, announced that they will not pay interest and they will not repay principal on 18% of government bonds issued by the French government.
The point is not the details of the particular idea, but the point is it's a shot across the bow. It's the canary in the mine. That's how serious [it is].
Every lender to every Western government now has to scratch their head and go, oh my God, have we come to that moment when the mass of people rise up and say to the government, "You are not going to sacrifice our schools, our health, our well-being to continue to redistribute wealth from the mass of people to the creditors of the government."
Because in case you're not familiar with it, creditors of the government are the rich people. And who pays the debts of the government ? Everybody.
So it's a redistribution, and the mass of people won't allow it. And at that point, the politicians pick up the telephone and call the great creditors and say, "We hate to tell you this. We really feel bad, but we're not repaying you anything. Have a nice day."
Michael Hudson: Richard, what you said is so clear about Europe's behavior that, you know, I wondered at first, are we really saying anything that's not obvious on this show ? But then the fact is, it's obvious it's not obvious in the mainstream press.
And the fantasy that somehow Russia is a threat to Europe—as you say, it's been Europe moving towards Russia. It's actually [been] for two centuries. Not only Napoleon and France, but England's hatred of Russia, stemming from the point, the early 19th century, when both Britain and France wanted to help carve up the Ottoman Empire, largely to use it as a back door to end up attacking Russia.
Well, Britain never mounted a Napoleonic-type invasion of Russia, but they did everything they could to push Germany to attack Russia. It pioneered the use of proxy armies for there.
Well, I want to point to what has Russia been doing with all of this.
Well, back when Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia, you could see that like almost all the Russian leadership, Russia thought, "We want to get rid of our bureaucratic central planning. We want to be just as successful as Western Europe is as a model."
Well, neither the Western Europeans nor the Americans wanted to spread free markets to Russia Western-style. They wanted to spread it to Russia colonial-style by having their client kleptocrat dictatorship rule there.
And you could see all the talks by President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in recent years have just felt, "Oh my god, how could we have ever wanted to have a rapprochement in Europe ? They hate us. They've hated us for two centuries. There's no way in which we can have peace. We're turning east."
Putin said, "Why should we go to all the expense of going to war with a country that hates us, where we can't have our army invade because they'd be shot down by European partisan reaction ? No."
And wars aren't fought by armies anymore. They're fought by missiles.
So Russia has simply said, "All right, Russia just wants to turn its back on Europe. And we're quite happy, you know, not to sell our gas and oil and raw materials to you anymore. We have the whole global majority to send to." Russia has no need for Europe.
Europe has a dream of conquering Russia and taking over its raw materials, just as it had hoped to do during the 1990s with the kleptocrats as its clients to take it over and then sell their rights to cash out by selling it to the Western and largely American investors.
So there's no discussion of this context of, why on earth would Russia have any interest at all in Europe ? It's all a manufactured fantasy.
And all we can do is point [it] out. What we're doing is seemingly just saying what should be obvious to anybody who reads the actual public statements and the logic, or just look at what all of the voters are telling pollsters about how they want to get rid of the pro-war leadership.
Well, you've described, Richard, very clearly how the present leaders have all been nurtured throughout their careers by being pro-American, and America is concentrated in placing these leaders in charge of the so-called socialist and Labor parties there.
And the Americans have succeeded in meddling and undermining [them with] their groups like the National Endowment for Oligarchy/Democracy, so much that the only response to, "Let's put Europe first and our industry first and our labor productivity and living standards first," that only the right-wing parties are doing this.
The United States didn't try to infiltrate the right-wing parties of Europe as they did the Labor and the social democratic parties because they thought, "Well, they'll always automatically go along with us." So the least infiltrated parties have been the right.
So Europe is really in a situation much like the United States. There doesn't seem to be any proposals for an alternative to the neoliberal finance capitalism based on war financing, a permanent war with Russia, Iran, and anyone else that has resources that the United States and its European satellites cannot control on the theory of, "If we can't control oil and the financial system, we'll just destroy any country posing an alternative to the Western style."
That's what makes the whole current fight civilizational, because it means: how will other countries [respond] ? Who's going to lead this alternative to this U.S. and European control?
Well, it's obviously going to be the countries that are most threatened by it: China, Russia, and Iran.
And the question is that the European and American populations are also threatened by this, as you've just pointed out. And how are they going to somehow politically organize and institutionalize the fact that they also are against this whole idea of trying to use war and economic sanctions and isolating trade and investment penalties as a means of getting from tribute from foreign countries [what] their own deindustrialized economies and financialized economies are no longer producing at home?
Nima Alkhorshid: Richard, you mentioned the French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He said about NATO, his comment on NATO is an important comment on NATO. He said, "We will not prepare our children and grandchildren to die for some reckless operation invented by NATO."
And the other point he mentioned, which is important, is, he says, "Becoming a co-belligerent in Ukraine or becoming a co-belligerent in Saudi Arabia is an immense danger that we do not want."
This is the left-wing candidate in France. You see, basically, left-wing, right-wing, they're anti-war. At least, they think that this sort of understanding on their part is going to resonate with the people in Europe. Go ahead, Richard.
Richard Wolff: There is no question that this resonates with the Europeans. And again, I urge people to pay attention to the mass actions in the streets of France, not just in Paris, in 40 to 50 of the major cities. And that means the country as a whole.
Mr. Macron is finished politically. He already was, but now he has nailed the nail in his own coffin.
I want to introduce, though I know it's a little bit risky, but I want to do it anyway.
What I see in this hysterical scapegoating of Russia now spreading to the United States, which under Trump had hesitated a little bit, but now the Democrats [are] proving once again that which party you're in is really a matter of personal ambition and not political principle. There is something I see in the hysterical demonization of Mr. Putin. He's another Stalin. And unlike Stalin, who was constantly on the defense against Europe, we're going to construct a Stalin who's on the offense against Europe.
You know what that looks and smells and tastes like to me ? Anti-Semitism. You know what this is ? This is what you used to see across Europe in the 19th and 20th century. When these colonial countries imagined themselves to be at risk of being colonized by an evil foreign force, Jews. They were everywhere. They had all the money. They were Rothschild. They were this. The fantasy of this migratory small minority is in fact, and we have to do—the Russians made pogroms. The Polish people did things to this day they can't admit to themselves what they did. They scapegoated a group and eventually killed millions of them, because that's where that ends.
That's what the Europeans are doing. They learned nothing from their overcoming of anti-Semitism. They just replaced one, the Semite, with another one, the Slav, the Russian. And the Russian is now machinating and going to take over, what ? Belgium ? Belgium doesn't have anything, nor does Denmark.
Nobody wants them as a colony, except in their own minds. That's why, as they project a genuine colonial mentality, [like] Kaja Kallas, "We're going to defeat the Russians and carve Russia up into lots of little countries, which could then become colonies of Western Europe."
And you know how that works ? It's like Eastern Europe, which has been converted into colonies of the West.
And here we are in the United States with a crazy president whose fantasy is also colonial: "I'm going to take Greenland. I'm going to retake the Panama Canal. I'm going to make Canada the 51st state." Those are the fantasy ravings, but of a colonial mentality.
There is buried here an awareness that the wealth of the West was based on ripping off the rest of the world. They can't imagine economic development without it. That's why they have these fantasies. They want to be wealthy again, of course. And for them, that means being colonial again. Even if the colonial thing is an ice cap in Greenland, it's the idea.
Even though Kaja Kallas knows somewhere it's crazy. You're going to carve up Russia ? But you never know. You never know. You did once carve up Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Maybe you can do it again.
They don't understand for good reason that the era of colonialism has now bred its Hegelian antithesis. Namely, we live in an era of anti-colonialism, which now has a champion to provide it with the weaponry. And that's China, the par excellence that went from poverty of a colonial sort to superpower status and can now offer help to the whole rest of the anti-colonial Global South.
And in desperation, because there's no way out, you end up scapegoating, in this case, Mr. Putin. Before it was the Jews. Here in America, it's the poorest of the poor, the mass of immigrants from Central and South America who want to come here in order that they can produce surplus value for American employers. And we are so crazy and so desperate, we demonize them.
Notice the language: "They are an invasion." That's the language of Germany vis-à-vis Eastern European Jews when they migrated from Russia to Germany. An invasion of these strange people in their odd outfits and their odd religion.
The only really interesting question : are we—and by we, I mean the human race—are we going to allow ourselves to dribble into a third world war around this craziness ? Have we not learned the lessons of anti-Semitism and world war and the end of colonialism to carve out a different [path]?
When Michael reminds us that Mr. Putin told us, "We're not of Europe anymore. We are now part of the East," he was saying, "I have no colonial plan for Europe. That's not my future. I'm not building connectors to Europe. I'm building connectors to China. Pipelines, rail lines, supply lines, you name it."
He's shown what he's about. The investments have all been made in that direction. The connections to Europe keep being cut off. It is bizarre that in the midst of a make-believe struggle against anti-Semitism, you're actually reinventing it, just shifting it from Jews to Russians. Bizarre.
Michael Hudson: Well, Richard, you've described the dynamics of European and American affluence. And what is affluence ? It's literally "a flowing in," obviously, a flowing in from without. And that was the objective of European colonialism and later the financial colonialism that the United States gradually took over in absorbing the old European and French and other empires financially into its own system.
The response, as you pointed out, leading China and Russia and Iran and other countries, is they are breaking away from the residue of the effect of this colonialism and trying to make the rest of the world outside of industrial Europe and America suppliers of raw materials and debtor countries. They're trying to do exactly what the United States and Europe did: develop their own self-sufficiency and industry. When they do that, the Americans are saying, "This is socialism. This is autocracy. You're using governments to support industry. We would never do that."
Well, of course, that was the whole plan of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States. Of course, the industrialists wanted government subsidy. They wanted government protectionism. They wanted government tax breaks and to oppose rentier interests.
Well, what you had is the dual economy for the last 200 years that have made other countries the source of Western affluence. And now they're trying to make themselves not affluent, but self-reliant and self-expanding.
And that means that Europe and America will lose this whole 200 years of a dual economic relationship, an asymmetry where Europe and America take from Russia, the Global South, the whole rest of the world. All that is coming to an end.
And I guess the one thing we can thank Trump for, and Macron and Merz, is that he's driving them, leaving them no alternative but to develop their own alternative and reinvent the wheel and make themselves productive in the way that Europe and the United States did in their own industrial takeoff.
Richard Wolff: And if I can, just a last point about the war in Iran.
The way I see it, the United States, the uni-empire, the unipolar empire, inherits all the other empires after they destroy themselves in war. And what an ending for colonialism that was, those two wars. But put it aside.
The United States, in its denial, because it cannot face what its real problem is, becomes crazy when a small country, Iran, wants to have a say over an obscure passage of water where certain ships go. That mustn't be allowed. That cannot happen.
Why not ? What ? What's the point?
It's the megalomania of a colonial power. And if you're the colonialist of the whole world, then every piece of water is your responsibility.
Mr. Trump says, "I'm going to rename it the Strait of America or the Strait of Trump," the way he renames other [bodies of water]. He wants to reestablish an empire. It can't be the Gulf of Mexico.
You know, you learn from psychology that when a person says something crazy, it's only the beginning of the analysis to say, oh, that's crazy. What you have to do is find out what is the real issue which is being displaced into the crazy expression. Calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is nutty. Of course it is. Everybody laughs.
But behind it is that colonial impulse. And that gives you the clue to everything else that's happening here.
It's the end of the colonial world. We live in the era of anti-colonialism. It's championed by the Global South for obvious reasons. They got ripped off.
We celebrate with Marx the creation of a world economy and we credit capitalism for having done that. And it did. Capitalism brought the world together. But it made the worst mess of it imaginable because it put all the wealth in Western Europe, North America, and Japan, and made the mass of the people bearers of water and hewers of wood to bring the wealth back.
Belgium is a little poor northwestern country, no offense intended. The Congo is the richest part of Africa. Belgium takes the Congo, the wealth goes to Brussels. Belgium becomes wealthy, and the Congo, well, it's the Congo.
That's over. And the West hasn't understood it and is busy demonizing immigrants or Russians or Lord knows who else in the desperate effort not to see what's happening.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Best way to wrap it up. Thank you so much, and see you soon. See you next week.
Richard Wolff: All right, till next week.
Nima Alkhorshid: Bye-bye.
Transcription & diarization: ScriptHub
Editing: Madison · Review: Matt Connors
Photo by Thiago Yonamine on Unsplash