NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, December 11th, 2025, and our dear friends, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, are here with us. Welcome back, Richard and Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back.
RICHARD WOLFF: Good to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Please subscribe and hit the like button and follow Richard and Michael. You see their names on the picture, you see democracyatwork.info. You can go to the website or to the YouTube channel. Michael Hudson is at michael-hudson.com. You can go there and find the transcripts of these interviews that we're doing here on this podcast and a lot of other articles that Michael usually publishes on his website.
Let me start, Michael, with you and with the new national security strategy of the United States. The new doctrine indicates or targets China as the main enemy of the United States.
Here is the question. If the United States' security depends on controlling other nations' environments, can the U.S. ever feel secure in a world where rising powers insist on sovereignty, Michael?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that's exactly the problem, Nima. For the United States, security means the ability to control the whole rest of the world, the environment, other countries. And to the extent that they have sovereignty of their own to act independently, the United States foreign policy feels insecure.
The problem is that when it solves this insecurity by surrounding Asia and the whole rest of the world with 800 military bases throughout the world, well, this threatens other countries' security. So there's a basic asymmetry built into the whole concept of U.S. security to begin with..
That's the point that Vladimir Putin has spent almost a year now trying to explain to Donald Trump's team. He says security should be for all countries mutually, and that NATO's expansion into Ukraine or any of the other regions surrounding Russia are a threat to its security. And the idea is, you can't make America's insecurity mean the actual military insecurity of other countries.
The single factor causing all of this economic and military insecurity is China. Ever since the Bandung Conference of non-aligned countries in 1955, they sought to break free from the legacy of colonialism and financial imperialism and their trade deficits and control of their development policy by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which were serving U.S. interests. Well, the same situation existed in the 1970s with an attempt to create a new international economic order. The problem is that these countries could complain, but they didn't really have an alternative to their dependency on U.S. trade, U.S. investment, and the whole financial system of the world that was controlled by the United States in its own self-interest, the Treasury Bill standard, the way in which foreign central banks held their reserves.
The last few decades have seen China make for the first time such great progress toward its own self-sufficiency through its policy of industrial socialism with Chinese characteristics and its increasing trade and investment linkages with the rest of Asia - headed by trade with Russia and Central Asia as part of the Belt and Road Initiative - that for the first time, the rest of the world has an ability to be mutually interdependent among themselves and not really dependent on the U.S. market to the extent that they're able to break away, to de-dollarize their economies, to shift their reliance on China and Russia for manufactures, raw materials, to replace the United States.
That's why, as you pointed out before, the United States calls China and Russia competitors, not enemies, but they're really not competing because it's not part of the same economic system. While China has been following really the same logic i.e. reinventing the wheel that Great Britain, Germany, and the United States followed in the 19th century, having a mixed economy with government providing subsidized basic infrastructure for transportation and communication and health care and education, the United States itself has deindustrialized and relied on foreign countries with cheap labor in order to bring down the price of American labor.
And the financialization that's taken place is basically at odds with industrial capitalism. Finance capitalism, U.S. style, has used corporate profits not to invest in more, building more factories and employing more labor, research and development to grow, but for stock buybacks and dividend payouts to increase the price of their stock to make money financially, money from money, not industrially.
You really have, as we've talked about before, these two different systems of how the world's developing. Industrial socialism (which is very similar to industrial capitalism in the late 19th century), and finance capitalism in the United States that's been undercutting the U.S. economy. So the national security strategy is, how is America going to resist its decline and increasing loss of economic power, military power, monetary power to China?
Well, countries in the world are beginning to de-dollarize, and that means to trade with each other's currencies instead of with the U.S. dollar. And China has created an alternative electronic payment system so that no longer are countries forced to go through the European SWIFT system of bank clearing that the United States has weaponized by partially cutting Russia and obviously threatening to cut China itself off of the SWIFT system so that it can somehow interfere with and block their own ability to finance their own foreign trade and foreign investment. China's already said, well, you know, we don't have to depend on the United States. It doesn't have to be this way.
That threat by China saying it doesn't have to be this way, is what the United States looks at is the great threat to its national security. And even more threatening is the fact that the other countries, by de-dollarizing, are withdrawing from what I've called the treasury bond standard of international finance that occurred when the United States went off gold in 1971.
Before that, General de Gaulle, the Germans, other countries were receiving all of these dollars that the U.S. was flooding the world with as a result of its military spending in Southeast Asia and the whole rest of the world. These dollars ended up in the central banks of largely Europe and they were cashing them in for gold and the U.S. gold supply was going down and down and that was the basic measure of power.
As I described in Superimperialism, once other countries were pressured not to invest in gold, they had only one alternative. That was U.S. Treasury securities. Thus they financed not only America's budget deficit that was largely military in character, but America's balance of payments deficit that was entirely equal to all of the U.S. military spending abroad. So other countries' savings and monetary arrangements took the form of financing the U.S. military surrounding them with the world. That was the basically self-destructive character of this.
It peaked in 1974 with the OPEC countries creating the Euro dollar. They saved all of their oil surpluses in the form of investments in U.S. securities, recycling the money. And that's because of this. The U.S. military spending abroad did not reduce the dollar's exchange rate and the associated rise in interest prices.
All of that is now coming to an end because other countries have a choice. China has been willing to hold its dollar holdings just about constant over the last 10 years. All of its growth in economic reserves has taken the form either of accumulation of gold, which has helped raise the price, or each the currencies of its trading partners. And this has left the dollar to have a declining role in the international reserves, not only of China, but other countries.
The leading country holding dollars is still Japan, which is willing to keep it, basically subsidizing the United States. But there's one source that's even larger than Japan, and that's the cryptocurrency coin, the stable coin.
In yesterday's Financial Times, Martin Wolf had a whole article on this saying that stable coins are expected to increase from a few hundred billion today to $2 trillion over the next few years. That means that countries are not going to hold Treasury bills, but they'll hold cryptocurrency, which is going to be invested in U.S. Treasury securities. And of course, this vastly increases the risk of other countries holding their money in cryptocurrencies, which go up and down radically.
But cryptocurrencies are not regulated. And they're a vehicle, basically, for criminals and kleptocrats and heads of state, such as Zelensky and his gang, to keep their money invisible, ostensibly, to the regulatory authorities and the criminal authorities of the countries.
So all of this development of self-sufficiency abroad has gone hand in hand with the lack of America's own industrial sovereignty. The growth of foreign sovereignty and independence means they're not dependent on the United States. And it was the ability to exploit other countries by their trade dependency, their financial dependency. The dollar standard was giving them the free ride.
The only group that they can really exploit today to a similar extent is, of course, NATO. The European Union is the only country that has just become a surrender monkey to all of the demands that Donald Trump has made because Europe has made an agreement to depend totally on the U.S. market for its exports and to give up hope of trading with the Russian market, the Chinese market, and the Eurasian market generally. The United States wants to at least lock in Europe. And the question is whether it can lock in other countries.
I have other comments to say on this later about how the U.S. strategy is based on oil, agriculture, and other things. But that's the big picture of what is national strategy for the U.S. and for other countries, and what's the asymmetry there.
RICHARD WOLFF: As I mentioned to you before we went on the air, the document released by the United States government last Thursday on the 4th of December on national security is an extraordinary document of historic importance.
And I would begin by telling anyone who has the time, go get it. I'm sure it's available in a dozen different places on the internet. Read it. It isn't that long, 20 pages or so. But it does put into one general document a good part of the kinds of new directions that we have been talking about on this program for at least the last year or two.
I'm not going to repeat the things that Michael said. I want to go to a different direction.
I have learned a lot, I continue to learn a lot, from a professor of political science from the University of Chicago named John Mearsheimer. He has been doing a lot of work on global big power conflict. He was early on to identify the impossibility for Ukraine to win that war, et cetera, et cetera. And he analyzes everything from the standpoint of great power activity, one against the other.
He usually explains it by saying it is in the nature of big powers to feel insecure about their situation and then everything they do, including war with one another, are products of attempting to cope with that insecurity.
I've always wondered: why would you start your argument there ? Why wouldn't you ask the question, why are people fearful about their security ? Conventional human nature ? Are we supposed to think like that, the way people have been thinking that way for centuries ? And I believe the answer is no, and I think it's relevant right now.
Here's the model to keep in mind. It's the conventional model of capitalist competition.
You have three companies making the same thing. Let's say it's shoes or software programs. It doesn't matter. Each company is aware that there are other companies. And each company is aware that the customer can go to another company if they don't like your company. So they try to improve their product by giving it new capabilities, by painting it a different color, by advertising it in a new and better way.
But everything they do to enhance their own security thereby threatens the security of the competitors. Because if you succeed by improving the quality of your goods, you shift your buyer from that other commodity by the other company to yours. That's what you hope for. That's what success represents. So the success of each is the endangerment of the success of every other. That's the nature of capitalist competition.
When you teach it to students in economics departments, you do a very odd thing. You tell them how competition gets you good results, such as improvement, new technology, and so forth. And that's true. Competition provokes improvements of all kinds. But as anyone with even 10 seconds of Hegel in their brain would know, now you have to ask the question, what are the negative consequences of competition, which turn out to be every bit as horrible and destructive as you could imagine?
Competition is why one company looks for a shortcut, uses cheaper materials, uses inferior products, falsely advertises, and a hundred other things that come out of competition. The notion that competition is some universal good thing is stupid. It is a sign of inability to think in a sophisticated way. It's when ideological need completely trumps intellectual honesty.
As I said, I have enormous respect for Mr Mearsheimer. He has taught me enormously and is a very valuable thinker. But it's out of capitalist competition that big powers are insecure and then take steps on their own security that threaten everybody else. Perfect analogy with capitalist competition. Which raises the question, if we're going to be honest, whether we are ever going to solve the problem of great power hostility if we don't get rid of the capitalism out of which all of this grows and upon which it is modeled.
If we go from the collection of competitors now to whatever rearrangement of competitors we will have 20 years from now, just like today's are different from what they were 20 years ago, the document on December the 4th explains to us just how far Europe has fallen. The Europeans now are going to have to ask themselves the following question, which they never dared do, and which the current crop of leaders are probably incapable of formulating even as an idea. Here's the question. The mistake we may have made in Europe - and by we I mean Macron, Von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, Meloni also, throw her in for good measure (she's a little different, but not enough), they are now in a new competition they haven't understood -
Between Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other, which of them is going to cut a deal with Russia and China first and screw the other one by doing so?
That's not just a hand that the US can play. That is a hand that the Europeans can also play. They are coming late to that game. They have stumbled over their own inability to see what the December 4th paper now shows them. But there will be the forces in Europe that will figure this out.
First among them will be the large capitalist corporations who are going to look at this new situation and say to themselves, we now have to make a strategic choice. And we're sure as hell not going to move any more production out of Europe to the United States unless and until that choice is clear. And that means the United States will not reshore significantly anything. And that's not good news for Mr. Trump. So that's the first thing.
Second, I do believe that we're watching the shift by the fact that in that document of December 4th, neither Russia nor China are referred to as an enemy. The focus on China is the focus on a competition. I hope I'm wrong in this, but I believe the United States in that document has accepted that it can no longer dominate the world. It just can't. It can't confront Russia and win. It can't confront China and win. If it wants to win, it has to limit its confrontations to little boats in the Caribbean or countries like Venezuela. And even that may be beyond its capability.
We need a moment of reflection. If what I have just said is more or less on target, as I think it is, then we really are witnessing the end of the whole Cold War exceptional situation of the United States. It should have been understood from the beginning. It could not last.
We have had 70 years of literally one line every year going in one direction, showing us that the rest of the world is catching up and will surpass what we have done in this country for all the obvious reasons. And I think it's understood almost everywhere in the world, so that the real attitude toward the United States, which cannot be spoken because the United States is still strong enough, but the real attitude is this is a dying empire. This is a dying system.
It may not just be the U.S. that can't control the world. It may not even be U.S. capitalism. It may be capitalism per se, that the ironic dream of socialists for two centuries is finally arriving in a way that is becoming tangible. You can't keep doing it this way.
You tried multinationalism after World War I because you recognized that capitalist competition among empires gave you the worst war in human history, World War I. You realized that the League of Nations set up afterwards to try to go in a different direction was destroyed by the attempt to undo the reorganization of capitalism achieved out of World War I. Mussolini was going to re-raise the Italian Empire and Germany, the Deutsche Reich, and all the rest of it. And then we tried the United Nations and the Cold War made a mockery out of that. But those efforts are the efforts of a collective way of dealing with your problems.
We're going to discover - and it may come out of economics, but of course that's a prejudice of mine and of Michael's given the work we do - as people understand that individual enterprises competing with one another is not some gift of God to the human race any more than slavery was or feudalism was. It's a temporary phase we learned to do better than. And that's where we are now.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let me ask you a question before going to your comments. You know, when they try to treat China as the main enemy in this document, NSS National Security Strategy, in my opinion, is somehow accelerating the very multipolar world that the United States is trying to prevent. And the other outcome of that would be de-dollarization. If de-dollarization succeeds, can the United States national security built on treasury finance military spending survive without its global free lunch?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that's really what the national security plan is all about. The question is, they acknowledge their de-dollarization. They acknowledge that the U.S. can't control the whole world, and there's really going to be a sphere of influence group. Russia, China, Japan are not going to be in there. What the U.S. can secure is a captive Europe, although it points out, as Richard said, that Europe is pretty much falling apart, and Latin America.
The U.S. wants to lock in Latin America and at least its supply of raw materials and oil. And even with the division of the world into these different blocs, the U.S. still has a way of starting a new strategy for the Cold War. You can look at the National Security Report as one for Cold War II. The U.S. strategy essentially has been, since 1945 and really ever since World War I, to control the world's energy supply, oil and gas. Britain and the United States, along with Holland together, have tried to do this because if you can control the world's oil and gas, that enables you to turn off their electricity, turn off their heating, stop supplying their factories with what they need to power them and add to GDP.
The United States is still trying to isolate Russia and China, [stop others] from depending on Russian oil. This is what the war in Venezuela is all about. The U.S. assertion of the new Monroe doctrine here is part of this new strategy, reviving it.
Last week you saw the policy of blowing up tankers that are carrying Russian oil and gas. There was another attempt on a Russian oil tanker yesterday. Also yesterday, U.S. armed forces seized a tanker leaving Venezuela with Venezuelan oil. They haven't yet announced where this oil was going, but Trump says he doesn't call Venezuela an oil-producing country. He calls it a narco-terrorist country.
That's like calling somebody in high school a poo-poo pants. For the United States anyone we don't like is now a narco-terrorist. Everybody's a narcoterrorist, except the United States, which is the center of the CIA-sponsored narco-terrorism trade, and U.S. supporters like the former Honduran president, whom Donald Trump just freed from being imprisoned for being one of the largest narco-terrorists in Latin America.
So the United States grabbed Venezuelan oil. Last night, at least on Channel 7 news broadcast at 6:30, he was asked, what are you going to do with the oil ? And Trump said, well, I guess we're going to keep it. So not only are they grabbing the oil that Venezuela tries to sell to other countries to get the money to survive in the face of the sanctions that the United States is imposing on it, but Trump says we're days away from a land invasion of Venezuela. We're going to grab the oil. We're going to give it back to the U.S. oil companies as our basis.
That is going to help buttress the dollar, the balance of payments, and our ability to continue to spend money all over the rest of the world. Even though the national security strategy talks about spheres of influence, it doesn't say that the United States now can reduce its military bases abroad. It calls for all other countries, especially the QUAD, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, all to buy more U.S. arms and to create a threat, constant threat against China and turn basically Taiwan and Japan into the new Ukraine. Are they willing to die to the last Japanese ? Is Taiwan willing to die to the last Taiwanese ? I don't think so. Philippines, perhaps, if the dictator is given enough money by the U.S.
This attempt to control oil seems to be independent of this division of the world into spheres of influence. And I didn't mention dependence on U.S. agriculture like soybeans, but you've seen exactly that next to oil, getting other countries dependent on your food imports while using the World Bank and the IMF to block other countries from investing in their own land reform or regulating their economies to grow food crops for themselves instead of export crops. This is the second position that has led to one war after another against Latin America, starting with Guatemala back in 1953, 1954, when there was an attempt at land reform there. There was the whole U.S. attempt to fight against the Catholic Church's liberation theology that was all about land reform, feeding themselves.
The national security strategy is not going to come right out and say, America has one thing to offer other countries, if not industry and money: the ability to not to hurt them, to agree that we're not going to kill you, we're not going to bomb you, we're not going to do to you what we did to Chile with Pinochet and what we plan to do and are threatening to do with Maduro in Venezuela i.e. grab its gold like the Bank of England did and give it to the opponents of the Venezuelan government, or simply invade you and take over in our attempt to refight the Vietnam War, this time in Latin America, and maybe we'll have better success in the forests and jungles of Venezuela than we did in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
That's basically it. Well, what can China and Russia do to oppose this ? For one thing, they've already tried to help Venezuela protect itself by providing it with arms. We don't know what power it's given Venezuela either to shoot down American aircraft and missiles or even to bomb the U.S. carriers and the U.S. ships that are mounting the invasion of Venezuela.
Iran also is part of this triumvirate. China, Russia, and Iran. You'll notice that Iran was not recognized as having its own sphere of influence over the Near East. That's because it's such a nightmare for the United States that Iran, rather than Israel and U.S. puppets, Saudi Arabia will control the Near East, that it couldn't even mention it.
But Iran has a very great response to all of this. If America's going to prevent Russian oil exports by blowing up its tanker ships, if it's going to block Venezuela's exports by blowing up its ships and invading the country and seizing its oil fields, then Iran can simply sink a ship in the Persian Gulf. That will block OPEC's ability to export its oil by sea. And of course, that is going to send oil prices soaring.
Iran's logic can be: if we can't trade, if the United States blocks us from trade with the sanctions it's done, if it blocks us from selling our oil, then no other countries in the Middle East can sell their oil either. We'll blow up a ship, and we're not going to permit any Near Eastern oil trade unless you give us our sovereign right to export oil to whoever we want and to take payment in whatever currency we want.
This is the Iranian situation, the Near Eastern situation, even the situation in Israel to act as America's proxy to conquer Iraqi oil, Syrian oil, and to threaten the other Arab oil producing countries with simple military takeover if they don't continue the oil to use their oil earnings to invest and finance the United States economy. This is all part of the whole national security strategy.
I think that we're probably doing a better job of spelling out the strategy on your show than the document, the December 4th document does itself, although of course it's important just for the nakedness in which it tries to express U.S. ambitions for Cold War II without really describing what we were watching its strategy unfolding as.
RICHARD WOLFF: What I thought emblematic was von der Leyen's deal with Trump. It's two or three months old now, but it was that final step in which Mr. Trump lowered the tariffs on European countries in general to around 15, 16 percent.
In exchange for that service - an example of Michael's notion: we will reduce the damage we're doing to you - von der Leyen agreed to two things. Number one, there would be a purchase in the neighborhood of $700 billion worth of liquefied natural gas as the energy source for Europe at a price which I believe is roughly three times what the equivalent energy cost would be if they bought Russian oil and gas through a pipeline or by sea. The second thing von der Leyen agreed to do was to establish a fund again of around $700, $750 billion over the next five to ten years of European money that would be invested in the United States.
Now, there's a word in the English language for what von der Leyen agreed to. The word is called tribute. This is the tribute that a subordinate member of an empire pays to whoever is running the empire. It's like what Rome got from the people around it or the Ottoman Empire at the time of its dominance and so on.
Before the document of December 4th, all of this was rationalized by the politicians in Europe as a necessary part of winning the war in Ukraine and sustaining the NATO alliance. Well, the war in Ukraine is over in terms of the question of who's winning, and the NATO alliance is on its final voyage by virtue of the December 4th document.
That will actually, and that's my point, free these lousy European leaderships to take a different direction because the direction they were going in would mean that the left-wing opposition, strong in places like Spain and France, and the right-wing opposition, strong in places like Germany and Poland, would now have less of an opportunity to overthrow these leaders because they would no longer be in the position of being able to make fun of them for having paid the tribute. Every European country would know that its economic development is severely hobbled by what von der Leyen agreed to do. That should never have happened, and now they too have a choice. They too.
You know, there's a rumor, I do not know if it's true, but there was a rumor two years ago that Macron asked BRICS if the French could join BRICS, and he was turned down.
I think we're going to see the resuscitation of these ideas now in a way that we would not have without that document and what it puts in plain English right out there for everybody to see.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, if countries stop holding US Treasuries, it seems to me the United States not only loses the global dominance, but also the financial engine that funds its own military. I don't know if that is considered, this mindset was considered in the document.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You'd think that's logical enough, but Donald Trump says there's a silver lining. He said, if the dollar goes down... which he does want the dollar to go down. That's one of the reasons he wants the Federal Reserve to lower the interest rates so that Americans will sell their treasury securities and buy foreign government bonds that yield more. Donald Trump says, well, if the dollar goes down, that'll make our exports and industry more competitive.
The problem is there isn't any more industry to be competitive with. He's living in a fantasy. And much of the Trump strategy and the national security strategy is all about this. It's all fantasy.
Today's Wall Street Journal says that the U.S. has come out with a new strategy to try to get Europe to indeed grab the 200 billion to 240 billion dollars that Russia has on deposit in Belgium with the Euro Clear. And the Wall Street Journal says, well, there is a whole plan for this. The U.S. a few months ago hired BlackRock, the investment company, intending to give BlackRock a contract to survey all the ways in which U.S. companies and their European satellites can make money by investing in Ukraine for rare earths and things like that.
The head of Germany, the most vicious anti-Russian European leader, is Merz, who had been working for BlackRock. So he has a personal advantage in being able to leave the government and go back to work for BlackRock. He's helping to invest and make enormous profits and capital gains from this U.S. and European investment in Ukraine, of which probably 30 to 40% will be pure overcharged profits, as usually is the case with real estate development and essentially all of the payoffs and little white envelopes filled with money, as they say, that go to all these.
That really is the plan. And I think the plan is that all this money is going to be seized and used as a fund to invest in Ukraine.
One of the crazy things that the Wall Street Journal said is they're going to have the Zaporizhzhia, if that's how you pronounce it, the nuclear power plant. The nuclear power plant is going to be used to fuel a whole information processing center because information, automatic intelligence requires enormous amounts of electricity. This electricity is not available in the United States. It obviously isn't available in Europe because you need gas or solar energy, atomic energy or solar energy for that.
I did not add before that one of the ways of blocking foreign energy self-sufficiency instead of relying on U.S. oil is solar and wind energy. U.S. electricity production has been absolutely flat for the last decade. The Wall Street Journal has a great chart on that. China's electricity production has gone way up. And one of the main sources of this is its solar panels that are creating energy and its wind energy. The United Nations in the climate conferences have tried to push de-dollarization. The United States has blocked the United Nations and other countries from decarbonizing their economies and moving to solar and wind energy because China is the producer of solar panels at the most competitive prices and the most efficient panels, and also the main producer of the metal blades for the windmills that produce the wind energy. I should have added that.
That's the hope, that Ukraine can somehow use the nuclear power of Zaporizhzhia. There's no way that this can happen because the power plant is part of Luhansk, Donetsk, that is already part of Russia. It's not part of Ukraine. And Russia is not going to provide the power to Ukraine. In fact Yves Smith has a very good article in today's Naked Capitalism about what the problem is. How is Ukraine - by Ukraine, I mean what's left of the shell that will be called Ukraine after the Russian speakers join Russia - going to get energy?
In retaliation for Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries and energy sources, Russia has bombed Ukrainian energy sources. That's one of the big ways in which it's trying to speed up the end of the war in Ukraine: it offered a mutual refusal to bomb each other's energy. And the Americans told the Ukrainians, say, no, no, we want to hurt Russia's energy. Even if it's only a pinprick, it's worth having you all freeze in the dark for your whole country that Russia's bombing just to give a pinprick to Russia. That's the standard.
The question is: how is Ukraine going to get energy, now that it's Western Ukraine, no longer having the generators and the transformers for energy ? It has the production facilities, but without the transformers, how do you transform either nuclear power or oil or gas power into electricity ? Well, you need transformers and electrical equipment that was all following the Soviet standards for many decades and still follows the Soviet standards, just like Russia energy and electrical companies follow the Soviet standards. Western companies are not going to say, okay, we're going to, of course, rebuild your equipment in the West. That'll give us an export, but the market for post-Soviet electrical equipment is not large enough to justify investment in all of this.
So only Russia can produce the equipment to turn the lights and the factories and the electricity and the heating and the furnaces back on in Western Ukraine. And it's not going to do this for free because it's expecting Western Ukraine to pay reparations for the attack on Russian speakers that it's mounted.
This whole fantasy that Europe has signed on to, led by Von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, is still going strong despite the national security report saying that Europe no longer has viability because its leaders have been utterly rejected by all the opinion polls. I think 12% popularity for Macron, 20% maybe for Mertz. And Starmer is completely out of British politics. The European political system is falling apart. That's, I think, why Richard said that the military and Cold War system and NATO is falling apart as a result of all of this.
RICHARD WOLFF: I also think that there's symbolism and there's reality. I understand that the symbolism is what's driving this business of seizing the Russian assets. It allows Merz and Macron and Starmer to keep funding that war, which is what they believe keeps them in office. It is they who are holding back the horrible Russian bear from invading all of Europe.
They could not admit that moving the NATO boundary right up against Russia was a provocative act against Russia. That word can't be spoken because that's Putin's propaganda. Therefore, you have to come up with something else. What you came up with is, Putin is an imperial crazy person who wants to take over all of Europe. And, when you're dealing in that kind of gross symbolism, you get the remarks of Kaja Kallas of a couple of weeks ago when she gives a speech explaining how Russia has invaded Europe 19 times and Europe has never invaded Russia. That's an ability that goes far beyond the limited capabilities of our president in the sheer ignorance of modern history. You know, there's no Napoleon, there's no World War I, there's no Hitler. In her universe, it's all Mr. Putin. I mean, it tells you how crazy they are.
Here's the importance: $200 billion is just not enough for any of this. It is good symbolism. It allows those European leaders not to have to face their parliaments and ask for money to save their political careers because they've run out of that option. That's not there for them. So they need an alternative basket. They're doing something, which, in fact, I believe the United States opposes. Whatever it says in that article... I could be wrong, but my understanding was that the United States supported the Belgian position that this is way more dangerous for the long-term viability of Europe as a place to keep your money, of the dollar as a place to keep your money, for the whole world's rich people and governments, [just] to salvage the career of a politician who knows, as everybody does, that the war they're supporting is going to be lost. I mean, maybe if that flies, it'll tell you that Europe is an even more desperate position than I think it's in.
I think this is lots of headlines, lots of dancing around, lots of glimmers of hope. But, you know, the IMF doesn't like it. The World Bank didn't like it. The Belgian government didn't like it. The clearance agency there in Belgium that handles it didn't like it. The United States is very noticeably not pushing it officially. So my guess is this is part of the desperation of a dying empire engaged in a losing war. You get these suggestions.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's this desperation that led to what the Wall Street Journal was reporting: there are groups in the United States, certainly within the State Department, that are pressing for exactly this. So obviously, the U.S. speaks with a forked tongue.
You accused the Estonian lady Kallas of being ignorant. Well, when I grew up in the 1950s, there was a radio show that I used to listen to. It was called, It Pays to Be Ignorant. It was half a comedy question show. And it does pay to be ignorant. I'm sure it's paid Kallas very well.
There's some question about whether there's been quite a bit of embezzlement under her regime. And the question is: what's going to be stronger ? Will the narrative be stronger or will reality be stronger ? Well, we've seen the narrative of industrial capitalism and libertarianism and free markets and cryptocurrency being stronger than the reality of all of these for the last many decades. Just because something's not realistic doesn't mean that it won't dominate public opinion. Obviously, this has not worked for Starmer, Merz, and Macron, but the United States always has hope springing eternal that ignorance and narrative can win out over reality and material self-interest.
RICHARD WOLFF: I would like to make one point. If the United States, as the December 4th paper suggests, is reviving or (maybe a better word) reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine, and so retreating from an effort to control the whole world to an effort to control Latin America, if that is real in the sense of a strategic shift, and if Venezuela is a sign of what that means in terms of what the United States is willing to do, then I think you're going to also see, in addition to everything else we've talked about, a fantastic struggle emerging now and in the years ahead between the United States on the one hand and major forces in Latin America on the other.
You cannot do this again. You've done it from 1830 when the Monroe Doctrine begins to the present. Okay. But you cannot keep doing what might have worked at a time past century now.
As an example, once upon a time, settler colonialism was doable. The British could settle people in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Africa, in the United States, in Canada, and so on. And you could kill large numbers of people to clear the land so that you could settle your people. But you can't do that now. Or to say the same thing, to try to do it now is to be in the situation of Israel and Palestine. And look what that produced. And you might be able to pull that off in a country that has 8 million Israelis and 8 million Palestinians, roughly. You cannot do that with the United States and Brazil or Chile or Mexico. This would be a recipe for unspeakable violence, bitterness, and organization.
The Organization of American States is a fractured institution. Its silence about what's going on in Venezuela or relative silence is very loud in its implications. But I don't think that's a viable institution. I think there will be efforts by Latin Americans to fight back. They are better organized to do that now than they ever have been. And they will have friends in Russia and China and all the rest of it. This is not going to be a secure arrangement for the United States because the rest of the world will not observe it.
The Monroe Doctrine, just to remind people, was a deal. And it was a deal made between the United States and Britain because the British had tried to prevent the independence of the United States, a runaway colony. But to everyone's surprise, it had been defeated in the War of Independence in 1776, and it was defeated again in the War of 1812. After being defeated twice, it understood what it couldn't do. So it made a deal. You get Latin America, we get everything else, which is how the rest of that century worked out.
But you can't do that now. Anti-colonialism is now the dominant ideological construct in the world, embraced by the vast majority of its people. Only a country that imagines the alternative to what I've just described being even worse would undertake the strategic initiative articulated in the December 4 paper.
Transcription and Diarization: scripthub.dev
Editing: ton yeh
Review: ced
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