Nima Alkhorshid: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, July 9th, 2026, and our dear friends, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, are here with us. Welcome back Richard and Michael!
Richard Wolff: Glad to be here.
Nima Alkhorshid: Let me update you on what has happened in the last 24 hours. On Tuesday, we had four or five tankers trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz using the southern part of the strait close to the Omani border. Then they were hit by the Iranians. These tankers belong to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE. They were hit by Iranians. Then, right after the attack, we heard from the U.S. Treasury Secretary that they had lifted the sanctions on the Iranian oil and energy sectors. [Then] they put back the sanctions on Iran. So after six days of relieving or withdrawing or removing the sanctions on Iran, they put them back on Iran again.
Then, at night, Tuesday night, the United States attacked in the southern part of Iran, basically hitting the same sorts of targets they had before. They said they hit something like 80 targets in the southern part of Iran. Then we had Iranian retaliation in Kuwait and Bahrain.
The second thing - what has happened yesterday with Donald Trump in NATO, he was coming out, so angry with the Iranians, "This is the cancer, the MOU is over. I'm going to finish the job!" as he said it yesterday.
And then they attacked Iran last night. It escalated. It was reported by the New York Times. More than 170 missiles they used last night or targets. They hit 170 targets in the southern part of Iran. And then what is so important that they hit some of the bridges. The bridge is so important because that bridge connects Iran to China in the northern part of Iran.
And the other bridge is between Tehran and Mashhad, which connects Tehran to Mashhad. And they have a funeral today in Mashhad. More than 8 million people right now are in Mashhad in the funeral procession. So this is on the part of the United States. Today, last night, Iran started attacking Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. And it continued until this morning here in Brazil. It was at 7:30 a.m., which would be 8:30 your time on the east coast of the United States.
They were attacking, hitting some targets in Jordan. They used 10 ballistic missiles to hit the targets -the U.S. base in Jordan. This is the outcome. Right now, the United States is telling us, Donald Trump says that in the coming days, Axios reported that the United States is planning for four to five weeks or maybe two months of all-out war as they call it. Iran is prepared.
What's going on in Iran ? The border with Iraqi Kurdistan - they sent a lot of troops there from the army, from IRGC to control the border because they're feeling that maybe the United States is trying to do some sort of incursion from that part, from these terrorist groups in Iraqi Kurdistan.
So this is the atmosphere in Iran, why they're having the funeral. I think Iran last night didn't respond the way that they wanted to respond because of the funeral that was happening. It was in Iraq, by the way. And today it is in Iran. And tonight it's going to be over. The funeral is going to be over and they're going to get back to the fight.
This is the situation right now, Richard. As the Israeli government, Israeli media, just 20 minutes, 30 minutes ago reported that Israel is preparing for war and they're prepared to get back to the war. It's a huge sort of gift for Benjamin Netanyahu with the war, getting back to the war. Your understanding, Richard, of what's going on?
Richard Wolff: Okay, I think that what we're seeing is the disintegration of the arrangements, if you like, that were made after World War II, that were sustained after the 1970s, because by then Germany, Japan had recovered, and so they could be sustained a little longer by some expedient measures that were interesting. And if we had time, I would talk about them.
But European and American economics was really in trouble in the 1970s and had to be rescued. They had a generation of rebuilding from World War II. The United States was dominant. The United States financed and provided for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and so on.
But underneath that, which was a kind of superficial prosperity because it was government financed and all of that, there was a terrible problem. And the terrible problem was the loss of the colonial system. World Wars I and II ended the colonial program. And I want people to understand that for centuries, the colonies had been a subsidy to European capitalism.
Try to keep in mind, Belgium is a small country. The Congo in Africa is a huge country. So Belgian capitalism could survive because it had an enormous infusion of wealth and surplus produced in and out of the colonies and by means of the Congo. And that was true for England and France and even for Germany until it lost its colonies as a result.
So the wars are a fantastic end. They are the end of the colonial system and they are the mutual destruction of all the colonial empires that capitalism had enabled, with one exception, the United States. By virtue of the two oceans and the fact that air power had not yet developed, we were able to escape most of the damage. The bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, but never again anywhere else. No railways gone, no factories gone.
Not only that, but in the crazy way of American capitalism, the war got us out of the depression. The economy was in better shape in 1945 than it had been in 1929 when it went into its collapse.
That's why it is so strange for people to not understand that Russia has done better in this war than they were doing before, because the war is a stimulus. And that's not a surprise. It can be if you have a certain configuration of your situation. And the Russians are different from the U.S. in 1929, but they also have the ability to stimulate their economy, and that's what they have done. That's why their growth rates are as impressive during these four years of war as they are.
Okay, what sustained European capitalism once the colonies are gone, once they've got the little boost from Reconstruction 1945 to 1975, is interesting. Here's what it is: it's a combination of an explosion of credit to give masses of people credit in a way they had never had before. The modern credit card that sits in everybody's wallet, that's a creation of the 1970s. Before that, we didn't have anything like that.
And the second thing was bringing masses of poor people from the global south as immigrants into capitalist Europe. An infusion of cheap labor. You couldn't go to where the cheap workers were. Colonialism is finished. So you had to bring them in, which they did, until that was no longer possible because of the reaction of the local workers, who took a while but figured out this was not good for them. This was good for the employer, but not good for the employee. Now they can't do that anymore. That's over.
Here in the United States, we take the lead. We deport millions of immigrants. We're not getting that support anymore. And the credit is used up. There's not much more to go there. And here I come now. There is desperation - What else is going to sustain this economic system ? And I think, in the case of Europe, it is a fantasy. Here comes the fantasy.
"We are going to go to war against Russia. We're going to bring the United States, desperate like we are, into this war. We're going to remove Russia from the ranks of the great powers."
That's John Mearsheimer's explanation.
But for me, coming out of the Marxian tradition, I see the goal as to break up Russia into half a dozen small countries and make them the new colonial program for Europe and the United States. What they have done to Eastern Europe since 1990 will now be extended into all of Russia. And it becomes reasonable to provoke Russia over and over again in the direction of a war because they have no other option.
I mean, the European leaders are in an impossible situation. The United States has withdrawn the support, the subsidies, and the military overhang, paying for it all. They don't have cheap energy from Russia anymore, and they have the competition of China for their exports, which is overwhelming them. They have nothing. Everything looks terrible for them. They're already having virtually no growth.
Volkswagen has meetings in the United States to see whether they should move their headquarters. What ? The United States just shut the American market for automobiles. No Chinese cars, not just BYD, but today they shut out Geely, which owns Polestar in Sweden, and those cars can't come to the United States.
You're watching the United States turn in on itself because it can't cope with a world of free trade. It finished. It is desperate. And these are the signs for me of a desperate effort to see if Israel can somehow manage the Middle East so it's an appropriate field for the situation to be recouped by controlling the oil above all else, but also by this attack on Russia in the hopes of taking, and let's remember, Russia doesn't have to go after colonies because the Asian part of Russia is the future for Russia, which Russia has told us. They're pivoting to Asia.
They are the biggest country by geography anyway, and the vast reaches of Asia have never been developed. So they don't have to go anywhere else. They don't have to impinge elsewhere. They don't have the situation. And by virtue of the power of the state, they are much more fluid and flexible as to how they use their surplus and where they invest it. It's not driven by private profit. It's driven by a larger viewpoint, which, in the current situation, is by far the safest prospect. So to be honest, as I mentioned before we went on the air, for me, as I watch daily events, I think there's a greater danger of World War III coming out of Europe's provocations against Russia than there is even around the volatile Middle East, Iran, and Israel.
Nima Alkhorshid: Michael, you sent me an article on Saudi Arabia, which was published recently. It shows how Saudi Arabia played a role in that Operation Freedom that the United States wanted to do. By the way, what they're trying to do right now is something similar to Operation Freedom. You remember that. This is a continuation of the warships in the Strait of Hormuz to help these tankers to pass through. And this is the game right now. What is in that article that is of importance in your opinion?
Michael Hudson: I do want to explain that, but I want to comment that I support the two major points that Richard has made, and they're connected to Operation Freedom. The first major point he made was how World War II ended European colonialism.
The second point he made was how important the war by the EU and the United States directly with Russia is. And I agree with both points that they're critical. But the ending of European colonialism didn't really end with World War II, especially in the OPEC countries and especially in what became the United Arab Emirates, because Britain sort of established the ruling clan and gave its members, as I'm sure you know well enough, control of Bahrain, the Emirates, Abu Dhabi, and the whole group.
And as the United States absorbed the British Empire and ultimately, after supporting the French Empire in Southeast Asia, absorbed it, the United States absorbed the European, French, and British colonialism in West Asia. And that included the overthrow of the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, the installation of the Shah, and all of that.
The real end of European colonialism in the region that we're talking about, the Near East, was the war between Egypt and Israel in 1973. And that's when President Nixon suggested we've got to invade Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia was leading the Arab oil embargo against oil sales to the United States.
It was Britain at that time that actually tried to talk Nixon out of the invasion of West Asia by saying exactly what was going to happen: that it would destabilize the region, it would galvanize the whole region against not only the United States but Europe. This memo was declassified 30 years later, as happened under British law and was all reviewed.
And it's very significant that last Sunday, as you just mentioned, the official Saudi website, gave the whole story of why Trump's Operation Freedom was aborted. And this story had not been told before, and the article provided the whole logic for what happened.
On May 3rd, Trump gave a public speech. He's going to imminently attack Iran. He did not consult with Saudi Arabia or any of the other OPEC countries. He just said they would counterattack. Saudi Arabia saw that if the United States attacked Iran, Iran was going to retaliate and it would retaliate against any Arab OPEC country that had a U.S. military base in it, like Saudi Arabia. They saw exactly what would happen.
So the Crown Prince blocked the United States from using Saudi airspace, and he negotiated with Kuwait that Kuwait forbid the United States to fly over its territory also, or to use the airbase. That grounded 43 American warplanes that were stored and stationed in the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. And within hours of this, Trump announced that he wasn't going to be able to do it.
Well, all of this wasn't mentioned at the time. What Trump said was, "Well, Pakistan has asked us to keep trying to mediate, so I'm suspending everything."
But that was only the cover story. The fact is that [Riyadh] said, you cannot use our bases to attack us. And that is what held back the U.S. attack on Iran until June 11th, which is what ultimately led to the Memorandum of Understanding.
But in this article, it spelled out a number of things. It pointed out that, in Saudi Arabia's view of the whole near eastern geopolitics, all of this goes back to 1973. The article highlighted the fact that the Saudi Crown Prince views Israel as the major danger to Saudi Arabia. And I'm sure that that was partly just political. He didn't want to come out and criticize the United States. The article said that day after day, again and again, President Trump kept calling the Crown Prince, saying, "Won't you let our aircraft land?"
Again and again, Saudi Arabia said no. They had Rubio, they had Vance, everybody calling him. He held his ground and said, "You cannot fly over our territory. We will not support you."
All of this was not revealed until Saudi Arabia revealed it last Sunday, and I think it is a warning to set the stage for all of this. It was published by the Saudi site, which is the House of Saud, and the article sort of gave the whole background.
And after this four-day stoppage, then the United States was quite furious. And Saudi Arabia sought to ameliorate things by arranging the largest arms purchase in American history. One hundred and forty-two billion in U.S. arms Saudi Arabia promised to buy.
Well, the article points out that the Crown Prince knew that the United States doesn't have the productive capacity to produce more Patriot missiles or all of the other arms. It takes years and years to begin providing these, and the actual money won't be paid to the United States until the arms are delivered many years down.
And the article pointed out that Saudi Arabia said, "We're not going to be able to get these arms in time for us to actually use them. So it's not going to help us at all."
But the big conclusion was repeated in the article that the Crown Prince says having a U.S. military base on our property, in our country, is a threat to our security. The promise was that the U.S. military bases were going to be supportive of, protect us against whom ? Well, presumably, Iran.
Well, this whole idea that it's Saudi Arabia against the United States and Israel at that time, remember, Iran under the Shah was also unfriendly with Saudi Arabia because the Shah of Iran refused to join the Arab oil embargo against the United States that led to the rising oil prices.
There were crises in the United States. There were long oil lines, just like today. And so the Saudis are going back to saying this is still the structure that has shaped all of our relations today. And we are wary of the U.S. attacks because we don't want to fight to the last Saudi, like the Ukrainians are fighting to the last Ukrainian. There, we're not going to be that.
So what's going to happen now ? I noticed that, in the Iranian attack, counter-attacks that you mentioned, you know, they focused on the countries that are most loyal to the United States and have the U.S. military bases, Jordan, the Emirates, and the Emirates that are still a vestige of British colonialism and all of that.
Since Richard said that one of the functions of war is political and to clear away the vestiges of colonialism, this is a war that is going to clear away some of the last vestiges of European colonialism and U.S. financial colonialism in West Asia.
So that's really what we're seeing unfolding. And you can see what the United States wants. Why is it fighting Iran ? It wants to monopolize the world oil trade so that if it can do that, it can prevent countries from buying from other countries like Iran, Venezuela, or Russia not under U.S. control. And the United States can increase natural resource rents from oil. That's how the United States is based.
"How are we going to get by in a world where we've deindustrialized and have fallen into dependency?"
The United States wants to monopolize seaborne trade. So it wants to control the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump has said when we defeat Iran, number one, we are going to control the Strait of Hormuz. And also, we will charge what happens after a war - reparations. And we are going to do to Iran what we did in Venezuela. We are going to seize their oil and pay reparations to us for all of the cost of the arms that we've used in defending ourselves against Iran's counter-attack on us to protect itself. We're going to reimburse our military for the presumably trillions of dollars of military cost and our allies that have been attacked by Iran, especially Israel.
So, this is an existential war, not only for Iran, but for the United States to say, any country that opposes us, we will invade. We will, as the winner - we have the right of winners to impose reparations, which will be all of the foreign exchange and all of the economic surplus that these countries create, just as we did in Venezuela.
Well, you can see how all of this is related to the Russian war, too. The Saudis said, well, America's out of weapons. We can afford to promise Trump, well, we'll make amends to you for not letting you fight Operation Freedom by buying your arms because we know you don't have any to sell us.
Well, the same thing for Europe. America has no arms to sell Europe. And Europe has said, well, we're going to rearm now and go to war in 2030. Well, you can just imagine what this is going to be. The cost of this war is going to reverse the principle that Richard was outlining of military Keynesianism.
If Europe rearms and uses its economic surplus and its budget resources for military arms, it will not have the revenue to finance social spending. It will roll back the social democracy and all of the spending and the subsidies to its labor force for having to pay higher energy prices for heat and to light their homes. And it will cut back domestic industrial investment of a non-military character and essentially make the European economy as obsolete as the American economy has been.
So this is really the last gasp for the United States, and its only solution is to try to say, we'll make it the last gasp for the Iranians, too. That's what's at stake in both West Asia and in the fighting in Europe.
Richard Wolff: If I could, let me supplement the last point that Michael made because I think it's so important. And I'm going to use a simple analogy. If you follow the whole Israeli strategy, it is pretty clear and pretty widely viewed that we have an example of a small tail wagging a large dog. Israel is a small country, basically the 7 million Jewish people who run that country, not the other roughly the same number of Palestinians who are subordinated in every way that we know.
So the only way Israel can survive, the only way the tail can survive is if it gets mammoth support from the dog. And therefore, we get this result that, between the foreign policy and the AIPAC lobby here in the United States, this tail wags the dog.
Now, the Europeans watching this have understood, and they are doing exactly the same thing. They are a much larger tail, so they have a much larger role to play. They're not small, their population is bigger than that of the United States, but they're not the economic powerhouse of the United States.
So for them to survive now is a greater dependence on the United States than perhaps ever, just when the United States, for its own problems and solving its own difficulties, is withdrawing from the support of Europe, putting the Europeans in an unspeakably difficult position. They've lost the cheap labor, the immigrants, they can't bring any more in. The pressure inside European countries is to push them out.
They have no longer cheap energy from Russia because of the war in Ukraine, and they have growing competition from China for their exports. And the United States is withdrawing!
This is an existential moment of crisis for Europe. So they become another tail trying to wag the American dog. Why ? Because any attempt by them to solve their problem without the support of the United States is either doomed or has a much lower likelihood of success than they could have or could imagine having if the United States supports them.
Since I would argue, as I said a few moments ago, that the attack on Russia is a fantastic notion that "Here's a way out for us. We will have a new period of colonialization as we colonize what once was Russia after defeating them, carve them up into four countries -five or whatever, and divide up among the Italians and the British and the French and, of course, the Americans and the Japanese, just so they go along with it. This gives us another period. It gives us another survival for a few years: the way bringing in immigrants did, the way they deal with the United States protecting them did."
The way they were able to continue, and Michael was right about that, economic colonialism, even after political independence, had taken the formal colony away from them. Look at what France has done with all of its former colonies in Africa. Economically speaking, they are only now crawling out from under. And that's partly because of China as an option, which they didn't have before.
So you put all that together, and the United States is the dog being wagged by the tail of Israel in the Middle East and the tail of Europe in its effort to take over Russia as a way to keep itself going.
But I don't think it will work. When you look at the Germans, they are committed to spending $800 billion in a vast program of rearmament. All right, that's a period of, I think, eight years, $800 billion over eight years. The United States is on schedule next year to spend in one year $1.5 trillion versus the German $800 billion over a bunch of years. That's not a way to catch up. That's a way to be permanently behind.
They're not going to keep up with the Chinese. They're not going to keep up with the Americans. And they're certainly not going to overtake either of them economically. In other words, the Europeans are scheduled for a mammoth decline no matter what they do, so long as they keep the capitalist system. If they changed, if they had a real socialism in which every enterprise was now organized by all the workers in it, and you could have a whole different notion of what economic development is, not governed by maximizing private profit, then you might have a chance.
But you have to think like that, which none of them do. Otherwise they are in a death spiral. And the only real risk, and there I would claim that I'm only saying what is being said without Marxism by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, which is they are beginning to realize that the tail that is wagging the dog. In their case, they focus on Israel, but eventually they'll understand Europe is the same.
They're now worried that if that continues, the tail will collapse and take the dog down with it. And they don't want that. They really are, as they point out, America first. They want America to save itself by cutting the tail off. And that, of course, is the greatest threat that those two tails could imagine.
And so they work ceaselessly. That is their number one priority. Not the war in Iran, not the war against Russia, but trying to hold on to the United States, to somehow bring the United States back into a supportive relationship to them. The desperation of the Ukrainians in targeting gas stations and oil refineries in Europe is to create the illusion that Ukraine might win. It's craziness.
Nima Alkhorshid: You mean in Russia?
Richard Wolff: I'm sorry, yes. Russia. But it's a way to support in America a public opinion, notice how the American media hype every time a rocket hits an oil refinery, every time there's a line of motorists at a gas station somewhere in Russia, "Oh, look!" All the people who study this seriously will tell you, "Does it damage Russia?" Yes. "Does it fundamentally change the equation?" No. So what is it being done for?
It only produces retaliation from Russia anyway. Well, what are you doing ? Answer: "We are doing the number one thing, which is to persuade the American government by going directly to the people to see if we can get the United States back."
And over the last week, there have been lovely rumors. Mr. Trump gave Ukraine the authority to produce Patriot missiles and gave them the right to do that. Hadn't done that before, you know, and on and on. And then, as you pointed out, Nima, Mr. Netanyahu is no doubt happy that the war has resumed, since, clearly, they were terrified by the memorandum of understanding. These are tails wagging a dog, and the question then becomes how successful they might be in doing that.
Michael Hudson: Well, in effect, what Richard has described, how the Europeans are turning Clausewitz upside down. Clausewiitz said that war is a continuation of economic policy. And therefore, he said, "When you go to war, you have to say, what is the objective of all this?"
Well, what we're seeing in Europe in its armament against Russia and to support Ukraine, the policy is simply to go to war. What could possibly be the end result that Europe wants from all this ? Well, the only result that I can see is Europe hopes to do what a victor does if you it wants to do to Russia what it did in Africa, carve it up into colonies and impose reparations to essentially take over all of Russia's raw material resources and use the revenue from these resources to pay itself reparations to support its own budget and its own economy, just as the United States is trying to do by exploiting other countries in a financial way.
But Europe isn't able to and doesn't have the financial basis. Europe destroyed the Euro as a foreign currency holding when it confiscated Russia's $300 billion in the Russian deposits in Euroclear in Belgium.
And Europe has now passed a law -the EU has passed laws that China cannot own more than 50% of any enterprise it buys there. So it's essentially blocked China from providing the investment and technology that Europe needs. Everything that Europe is doing is economically self-destructive, but it supports the war industry.
And part of the agreement that Trump and NATO made in Turkey in the last few days was the United States is going to have Raytheon and other U.S. arms makers set up their own affiliates in Europe to make arms, including Patriot missiles. Well, this promise of the United States of providing Patriot missiles to [Ukraine] gets back to the point that the Saudis have made: "It takes three or four years to produce a missile."
There's a long production schedule of this with many, many different suppliers. And there is not going to be any support of Patriot missiles until the NATO-U.S. war against Russia enters a whole new phase that makes the whole issue of patriots obsolete, basically. So it just doesn't matter.
The other point is, you know, why does Europe now have to look to Russia as its economic salvation through neocolonialism ? Well, as Richard just pointed out, it lost its African colonies. But something very interesting is happening there. The United States is trying to take them over, and it's trying to take them over with the Wahhabi terrorists in Mali. And I could go down a whole list of African countries that you have.
The Sunni Wahhabi terrorists are trying to take over, and the United States is bombing Northeast Africa, again - Somalia, again and again and again, trying to use that to control the seaborne trade. Once the seaborne trade gets out of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the United States is still trying to control the law of the sea, thereby essentially breaking all of the laws of the sea.
So the interesting thing is here we have the Saudis worried about Iran attacking it if it joins and permits the U.S. to use its airspace and airports to attack Iran. But what's the agreement that it's making in Africa ? You see, the Saudis are opposed to the Emirates in fighting in Sudan. The Emirates are also playing a pro-U.S., vicious, destructive, destabilizing role there.
So you're having the war in West Asia spread out and extend into Africa. Well, what's going to happen with the rest of the world there now that we're going to see the Strait of Hormuz closed again, as Iran has just done?
I think all of the military advisors that you've had on your show, Nima, have said there is no way that the United States can prevent Iran from taking over the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is saying, "Oh, that's against the law of the sea. Let them go through Iran's territory."
But Iran's response is, "There is no law of the sea anymore. There's no international law anymore. There's no law of war!"
How can there be a law of the sea when you're bombing Iranian fishing boats, saying, well, maybe they're going to attack an oil tanker, just like the United States destroyed the law of the sea by bombing the Venezuelan fishermen that were on the sea outside of Venezuela.
The United States violated the law of the sea by having NATO attack Russian oil transportation through the Baltic Sea. And there was another NATO attack on a Russian tanker yesterday. So the United States is saying, "We're not only going to have a war among the oil producers of West Asia, if we can't control OPEC, we'll destroy it."
That's our policy. Any country that has a resource that we want and it won't give to us, if we can't seize it, we will destroy it and no one will get it so that we can control all of the resources in the category that we've described as national interest, namely anything that other countries need that we can monopolize and hold off as a tool of economic coercion against them.
So that kind of a system is what's in store. Well, now that Iran is closing Hormuz, you're going to see energy prices going up and you're going to see what we've been talking about for the last half year - a very serious world depression!
What will the rest of the world do ? What will the oil-importing countries do in response ? They're going to be collateral damage, just as Saudi Arabia wanted to save itself from being collateral damage in the U.S. attack on Iran. The issue is what kind of world oil trade are we going to have ? Will it be the United States in control of the world's oil trade to monopolize it and use it as a force of diplomatic coercion ? Or will countries support Iran's interest in free trade in oil, the ability of Iran and Russia and other oil producers to sell their oil to whatever country they want without having U.S. permission, free of American trade and financial sanctions that are trying to prevent countries from buying oil from designated enemies, from earlier Venezuela and now Russia and Iran?
That's why you're having the Ukrainians follow the American guidance to bomb Russian oil refineries. The United States is saying if we can't control Russian oil, we don't want Russia to be the beneficiary of this closing of the Strait of Hormuz, raising oil prices. So if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, we're going to have a hot war against Russia to destroy its oil refineries and its oil production power.
"And you think stopping OPEC heralds a World Depression ? Wait till we stop Russian oil production too and capture Venezuela and control it. The whole world will be starved for energy that will bring its industry to a halt and create a world depression. That's our threat to you, the world. Wouldn't you rather just surrender and say, okay, stop bombing us, stop hurting our economy, we'll let you take over?"
That's the U.S. dream, that other countries are all going to surrender. Well, Iran so far is the country that has said, "We will not surrender. It's up to you other countries to do something. We can't fight America to restructure the world economy all by ourselves."
It's just brought in by the fact that the United States has blown up the bridge that you mentioned, Nima. This bridge is key to its overland trade with China. You'd think this is going to tell China: You have a stake in all of this. Same thing with Iran's northern trade with Russia. That's why Russia is so concerned about West Asia - that is the road up to its own southern flank.
So all of the connections between the OPEC, West Asian countries, Russia, and China are all part of a much larger international strategy at work. And other countries have not thought this through to the point that the United States has thought through a whole doctrine of how we can control all the countries in the world by controlling oil, energy trade, artificial intelligence, and military technology, the whole works of everything that other countries need, that we can shut off and starve them into submission.
Richard Wolff: If I could, Nima, I'd like to bring good old Karl Marx into this conversation. And one of the interesting things and ideas that Karl Marx developed was the notion that an economic system like capitalism will flourish and grow to the degree that it develops what he called the forces of production, technology, productivity, and all of that.
We are now watching in these wars; all the details that we've gone over are relevant - but here's another angle of vision. The United States is systematically not only not advancing technology, but holding it back. The decision, for example, to block BYD from having the ability to sell what are everywhere admitted to being the highest quality, cheapest electric vehicles was added to yesterday when the United States government prohibited the Swedish people who produce a car in Sweden, but the company is owned or majority owned by the Geely Corporation, which is Chinese. On the basis of that, they were now blocked.
They are selling in the United States now. They must stop this year. Okay ? You are then depriving the American economic system of the most efficient electric cars and trucks. You are not advancing technology. You are not making possible all of the breakthroughs that might be achieved, large and small, in agriculture and industry by having the highest quality, cheapest electric vehicles that are inputs to a thousand different inventions, large and small. All of that is closed off.
By the way, the United States blocks solar panels from China on that basis and various pharmaceutical basics, so on and so on, more and more with the passage of time. The old arguments about free trade that Marx explained have to do with this need to be always welcoming to the technological advance. Capitalism is now destroying technological progress, holding it back.
That's not a sign of strength. It's not an advertisement for its future. That is an admission that its best years are behind it. It now has to protect what it has. We will continue to pollute the air, destroy the earth, keep having an automobile industry based on fossil fuels when the whole rest of the world is running the other way from all of that. That will isolate the United States. All of these things are going on.
And here's one more: Japanese newspapers over the last two or three days have been full of headlines about China, having informed Japan that it will no longer ship rare earths to Japan. Now, the headline all says this is a kind of retaliation for the Japanese, excuse me, the Japanese leader making noise about Taiwan. And I'm sure that's part of the story. But what are we seeing ? We're seeing the same thing as Iran wanting to control the Strait of Hormuz. It's the Third World. It's the old colonialized countries, including China.
The only difference there was their colonialism was informal, not the formal kind. But colonialism with the cities, Hong Kong and all the others, what are we seeing ? We're seeing the Third World, the old global south, saying, "We want our peace of the world economy. We don't want a world economy in which the world is controlled for the enrichment of Europe and North America and Japan. And we are going one step at a time to do it."
So the Japanese have to learn that the Chinese are shutting it down. And no one is going to stop it because the Chinese don't permit it. The Americans know that. They've caved into China now on half a dozen of these things in order to hold on to the others, which, for the long run, they can't do.
Iran is different. It's not as big. It's not as powerful. It doesn't have nuclear weapons yet. But it is the same thing. "We, the Iranians, we want to get a piece of the global trade that you colonialists organized, insure, finance, and protect with your navies, so we can't get anything out of it. We watch our resources and oil, leave to go to you ! And we get enough to keep a few families with their mansions in the south of France, but we don't get anything from it."
That's why they overthrew Mossadegh. He had the idea of using the oil of Iran for Iranians. What a strange idea ! That's what this is about. And that's what the global south will see. That's what this struggle is about.
And if Israel prevails, they will make sure that the colonial model, which is their own country, operates in all of that part of Asia. That's why they're there. And if they can't do that, they know better than anyone, they will be a tail that the dog cuts off. Because the only use for that tail is to be an agent of the management of the world to make the resources flow to the center. And that's over now.
And it'll go faster, slower, zig and zag. But that's it. The richest country on earth is fighting one of the poorer ones in order to determine whether this will be another step in the emergence of the global south or whether that can be postponed for a few more years. That's the issue.
Michael Hudson: Well, the question is, what are other countries going to do about this ? You mentioned that capitalism as practiced in the United States and Europe is a failure. But capitalism has succeeded in Russia by following exactly what Marx and everybody else of his generation believed. Capitalism succeeded by evolving into socialism and by evolving into a mixed economy, with government playing a key role in infrastructure and providing basic needs.
What you've seen in the United States and Europe and what you are seeing today going on is a destruction of the whole spirit of industrial capitalism that evolved in the late 19th century. It all began with the Chicago boys, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan saying, "Get rid of all government, privatize, turn all of the public infrastructure into monopolies, and financialize the economy."
And when financialization ended up deindustrializing American and European industrial economies, that paved the role for China, which reinvented the wheel by following exactly the policy that Marx expected industrial capitalism to evolve into: socialism, a mixed economy, not leaving finance and monopolies and rent-seeking, making money in your sleep without working for it, getting rid of all that and focusing on increasing tangible capital investment to raise productivity and living standards.
That's the model China has. And that's really what is threatening the United States so much and saying we'd better go to war now. China is the enemy because it's the enemy, not as an industrial rival, because we're not rivals, and because we're not industrial. It's the enemy by saying there is an alternative.
The United States fight in Iran and the fight with NATO against Russia and the fights in Africa and Venezuela is saying there is no alternative to our post-industrial capitalism, purely predatory. You could call it neo-feudalism, a return to a rentier economy that industrial capitalism was supposed to free countries from. That's the long picture of the fight that is now.
And the only way that other countries, the global south and the global majority, can cope with what's happening is to spell out exactly what needs to be done by taking this long structural view of what kind of an economy do we want and what kind of a world trade and investment and monetary and financial system do we want. Will the economy be run for the financial system and the military system to essentially enforce this dollarization ? Or are we going to create an alternative ? That's really the key that I think we've been speaking about for the last year or so.
Nima Alkhorshid: Great. Thank you. I think we wrapped it up beautifully. Richard, and thank you for coming in, and the crucial points were mentioned today. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure. As always.
Richard Wolff: Look forward to next week.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, see you soon. Bye-bye.
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Editing: Matt Connors
Review: ced
Photo by Tolga Ahmetler on Unsplash