272 - Michael Hudson: Iran, Israel, and World War III

38:06And one of my colleagues was Uzi Arad, who became head of Mossad and the head of Netanyahu's chief national security advisor. And one day, I think it must have been 1974, we'd made a number of trips to Asia together, to Japan and Korea, and we had a stopover in San Francisco. and there we met a number of generals and usual military types. One general ran over, threw his armor on his Uzi and said, you're our landed aircraft carrier over there. We depend upon you to control the whole region so that we don't have to. Uzi looked quite uncomfortable for the whole thing, but what could he say? So the United States, from the very beginning, has said, well, we don't want to have to bear the expense of fighting with our own army in foreign countries because our own army loses every fight we're in.

39:18We lost in Vietnam. We lost in Afghanistan. We don't want to get involved in the Near East because it's a hornet's nest. So we have two client armies. First of all, they depended on Israel to control the region, and now with Israel, they allied with Al-Qaeda. So America's essentially fight under Brzezinski in the Carter administration, the Russophobia that led Brzezinski to fight in Afghanistan led to the creation of Al-Qaeda, And America has thrown its whole support for the last few decades behind al-Qaeda to essentially terrorize Iraq and then tear Syria apart from that side. And al-Qaeda, ISIS have worked hand in hand with Israel, never, ever attacking each other.

40:24So both of these countries are using ethnic terrorism to essentially dominate the region on behalf of the United States. So, of course, there's, let's say, a harmony of interest between Israel and the United States. And that harmony of interest goes way beyond merely the fact that Israel, Zionists, contribute a lot to American political candidates. Because, essentially, Congress gives large monetary grants to Israel. Israel takes some of the monetary grants and recycles it into AIPAC and other groups to back the politicians who've given Israel the money that ends up partly recycled into their own pockets.

41:18Well, look at what Rubio said yesterday or two days ago. He said, well, we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran because for the last 15 years or so, Netanyahu said again and again the fiction, the great lie that Iran was creating an atom bomb. Israel wants to conquer the oil-producing areas for itself. And way back in the 70s, I knew a number of Israeli security people, and they were all joking. How did God not lead us to Saudi Arabia? You know, why didn't he put it there? I mean, they want control of the oil, and the United States is quite happy to let Israel take control of this oil as long as it administers it on behalf of the United States along the same lines or similar lines that Saudi Arabia is indeed doing.

42:15So Rubio said, well, we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran, and we think that Iran feels, for some reason, that America is so close to Israel that America will attack us. So we wanted to attack Iran before it had a chance to respond to fighting us. And we attacked Iran because Israel attacked at first. And Israel has created such a big problem for us by inflaming the Near East that we would have been collateral damage. And we want the Iranians to be the collateral damage. I mean, I'm paraphrasing him, but the quote has gone all over the media. So just listen to what the Americans say. I also like this phrase that you used, harmony of interests.

43:09And we know that Israel exerts a lot of political influence in the United States. But I'm wondering if a very simple way of putting it, that you think this would be reasonable, reasonable is in so much as we're construing this war as or the united states interest in this war as a an ideological war about global economic structure is the main harmony of interest that we use israel to advance these goals and israel uses us to help with their national security and other maybe domestic political interests? It's way beyond Israel. You could say the same thing of Ukraine. Ukraine is a terrorist country indulging in ethnic terrorism, saying we are human beings.

44:09Russian speakers are subhumans. They are not human beings. We have to exterminate them. And our fight against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian is a fight to exterminate them, to essentially ban the speech. Essentially, you could say that Ukraine is Europe's and America's Gaza area. Very similar. It's a similar ethnic cleansing. It's a similar philosophy and a similar behavior of foreign policy that goes way beyond Israel. You can look at the other terrorist groups that Americans supported, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, another terrorist group, the whole Taliban movement, the whole religious extremist movement that you have everywhere from the Wahhabi, Sunni, Arab countries to make an ethnic, war against other Islamic groups, anyone who's not a Salafist law, to the Israeli war against the Palestinians, to the Ukrainian war against the Russian speakers.

45:37They're all very, very similar and they have the same approach. And that's what makes American foreign policy terrorist. It's not protecting the world against terrorism. It is the terrorist policy threatening the whole rest of the secular world saying, wait a minute, everybody's a human being. It's a crime against humanity to do what Ukraine is doing against Russia. It breaks all the rules of war that are laid down by the UN Charter, just as they've accused Israel of doing it. And you could say they could bring the same charges against the Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi group for financing al-Qaeda. So all of these terrorist groups that are, it's America's alternatives to socialism.

46:34It's America's alternative to other countries acting democratically in their own interest to support their own national growth instead of that of the United States. This is what other countries are finally coming out to realize. And it's in such a contrast to the narrative that we're the good guys. We're protecting you from terrorism when we're the terrorists. I'm surprised to hear you so strongly condemning Ukraine just because most commentators, especially those on the left that I hear are much quicker to talk about Russia as the absolute unmitigated evil in this conflict so I'm just wondering if you could explain a bit more about how you view that conflict more broadly especially because as we continue to talk I imagine it'll be one of the conflicts that is most vital to contemporary U.S.

47:36foreign policy? Well, I think the Soviet Union fell apart in the late 1980s because there was a universal perception that Stalinism didn't work, that it just didn't work. And they were invited, the, they thought, well, what's the opposite of Stalinism? They fell for the fake Russia narrative that, well, Stalinism is communist, Russia is communist, Russia is socialist. Well, it's not at all. It was Stalinist. It was a bureaucratic collectivism. It was managerialism, you could call it. But one thing you could hardly say is it was socialism, unless you want to identify Psy-socialism is everything that's bureaucratically inept and bad.

48:31So they invited the Americans and the IMF and the World Bank to try to redesign Russian society. And the hope was that the Americans and Europeans would help make Russia recover and create an industrialization along the lines that Europe and the United States did. But that's not what the United States did at all. They created a disaster of economic crisis, essentially broke down the government, let a kleptocracy register the factories, the oil reserves, the nickel companies, the electric utilities in their own name. And you had the population fall by so many, far over 10 million people, that when President Putin came to office in 2000, he said almost as many Russians lost their lives as a result of depending on the United States for that it was going to help Russia develop industrially instead of dismantle it.

49:48Russia lost in World War II. So Russia had no—gradually, Putin realized, well, Europe is not trying to help us at all. It wanted just to disengage. And the United States kept pushing NATO forward. I've been reading the speeches of Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin for years, and I've followed Russian history very closely from the time that I was a child because of my family. And the last thing Russia wanted was to recreate the Soviet Empire because actually Russia had made sacrifices, bizarre as it seems, and as oppressive and as inept as Russian administration of Central Europe was, from East Germany to Hungary and Poland, Russia had sacrificed much of its own wealth to help support the communist countries to the west.

51:07Although obviously the support was not appreciated because it was so inept and inherently bureaucratic and corrupt. So, it was the United States deciding, well, now where the communism has fallen, now let's extend NATO eastward. And they turned NATO, instead of a defensive organization, into an offensive organization with the idea of recreating Yeltsin-type kleptocracy in Russia and ideally breaking Russia into five different regions. And that became especially the case after the effect of the U.S.-NATO expansion was to drive Russia together with China, and that made the United States redouble its efforts against Russia so that it thought that, well, if we can drain Russian economic energy by fighting in Ukraine, Russia will teeter and go broke and this will lead the population of Russia to want to overthrow the Putin regime and overthrow the existing regime and bring back a U.S.-oriented Russia.

52:36That was the dream and it was a silly dream but that's what they believed and they said also by draining Russia's military power it won't be able to really support China, which is our real enemy because China's providing not simply a rival, but an alternative form of economic organization, industrial socialism, that is the real threat. Because if America were to follow the same logic that has made China so successful and industrial, then there goes the fire sectors control, there goes the financial control, there goes the real estate rentier capitalism, rentier finance capitalism control. So I think Russia was under attack.

53:29And the result is that just reading the speeches of the Russians, You can find, if anything, a disgust that Putin feels with the behavior of Germany, France, and Britain. And all that Russia wants to do is say, well, you know, we're turning our eyes eastward. We don't, you know, America, you can have Europe. We don't need it. I think yesterday, Putin said, now Europe doesn't have to impose sanctions on Russia's gas and oil. We're stopping our gas exports to Europe now that Iran has essentially destroyed much of the Middle Eastern gas export capacity. we're now shifting our gas exports to our more friendly allies in the East.

54:30So, you know, this is the basic geopolitics. And there's just a Russophobia in Europe, in the American press. And you're right, much of the left is a Democratic Party. They're not really the left at all. It's Russophobic. Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us.

55:15Rinse. It's time to be great. Thank you. Again, to use your phrase, on a very large scale, you view World War III as being about ideology and global economic structure. But then you also said more locally within Iran, this war is about oil first and foremost. Is that correct? Yes, yes, because oil is such a key to the American balance of payments. And I mean, for one thing, economists don't really, when they talk about trade theory, it's all general. It's exports or something they'll call widgets, but they don't look at the actual statistics for oil. That was my job on Wall Street at Chase Manhattan in the 1960s to study oil and the balance of payments.

56:05and then the same for Arthur Anderson and for the United Nations. So I work very closely. I think the balance of payments is something that isn't taught in universities and certainly not as specifics like the form of the oil industry. You almost have to work in the field. And I was walked through it by the treasurer at Standard Oil of New Jersey that was one of the backers of the statistical studies that I was doing for Chase. I was the only guy working on it. What I was going to ask, though, is, granted, we're not actually at war in Ukraine and Russia. What is this war about for us, for Trump?

56:58The attempt to hurt Russia. The only tool that America has left to it is the ability to hurt other countries, to create chaos. And so the Americans say, we have something to offer you and the other countries that no other country has to offer. And you're really going to want to take our offer. What we can offer you is to refrain from deranging your economy and causing chaos by suddenly closing the American market to you, which you've come to depend upon, imposing sanctions on you, or overthrowing you with regime change. So if you back us, we will agree not to hurt you. We'll stop hurting you if you give in to joining our sanctions policy so that we can break up Russia, break up Iran, and then finally confront China and try to break it up.

57:55I mean, that's the big picture. So at the outside of our conversation today, you mentioned in discussing America's foreign policy and how we got here, you wanted to begin by laying out sort of where we are today and then turning to how we got here. And I'm wondering what the other critical elements or events of foreign policy today. So we've got the war with Iran. We have our relationship with Israel. We have the Russia-Ukraine war. Or I also imagine maybe we should talk a bit more about our relationship with China. But I also wanted to ask what other events or situations we should be discussing before we turn to how we got here.

58:40It's whatever you really find important. I mean, there's so many dimensions of this. It's like an onion. I think the original hatred of Russia was a hatred of socialism. and the fact that Russia really did not provide anywhere near a real socialism that you had. At least Yugoslavia under Tito was much more successful in that. And the Chinese, when they decided to develop their socialism or industrial capitalism with Chinese cap characteristics, the last thing they ever wanted was to talk to Marxists from the West. They made that very clear to me way back in the 1970s. And the irony is that it was Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago going to Shanghai and essentially talking about you need free markets.

59:50Government planning cannot possibly be innovative. You need to let a hundred flowers bloom. And it was this sort of adopting this flexibility of a mixed economy of a strong social socialist or social democratic infrastructure and that would give free reign to private initiative and enterprise. And that's that was the perfect mix. China achieved the very mix that Europe and America were going through in the late 19th century. So this is basically it. The United States, when they deindustrialized and offshored the industry to China under the Clinton administration, they thought, okay, now we'll just have Chinese cheap labor.

1:00:46labor. We'll have American companies come in, and they can hire labor and factories over there to produce the goods that we're not making anymore. We'll import them in much lower cost than if we had to pay the high costs of American labor. And that was what American actually welcomed. they called it the post-industrial society. So they didn't call it deindustrialization. There was already in the 1970s, 1980s, a whole discussion, Daniel Bell and others, talking about the post-industrial economy, post-industrial society. There won't be a working class anymore, no more blue-collar labor. Everybody will be a member of the professional managerial class, basically.

1:01:38and that was sort of the imagery. Well, America's been trying to maneuver to say well, if another country, if China industrializes let it industrialize and we're all for it, but we have to be able to get the profits. It has to let American banks create the credit the loans to potential monopolies like We American banks would have loved to finance Jack Ma's monopoly and other billionaires and ended up with all of the stock market and financial gains that they did. But that's not what China did. China wanted to keep its technology and its innovations itself and to create an institutional environment that prevented billionaires from becoming, let's say, what Americans would call filthy rich.

1:02:45I can't help but think that it's important to ask, so long as we're talking about the balance of global economic power, where you see AI fitting into the conflict to come and our foreign policy, especially with a place like China. I really, it's not my specialty, and I really can't tell. The AI that the Americans are doing is very different from what the Chinese are doing. They focused on robotics, obviously, to a much greater extent, robotizing factories. The key to artificial intelligence to be developed Well, its precondition is electricity, because there are just obviously enormous requirements for electricity to run all of these computers.

1:03:45And secondly, the design of computer chips that America so far has a monopoly and was hoping on, you have NVIDIA showing the enormous ability to make hundreds of billions of dollars by innovating on computer chips. And the United States has tried to prevent the Dutch company that's developed the ultraviolet etching machinery that costs, I think,$20 million or so for each machine that's sold. The United States has tried to keep that out of Chinese hands. And the United States in the last year has suppressed Europe not to permit any Chinese company from owning more than 50 % of the company in China because China's are the enemy.

1:04:44This is an explicitly racist policy. The first effect of this was it said, well, to the Dutch government, you've got to close down Nesprits. I'm sorry, I'm not pronouncing it right. Nesprits. that is essentially battery-making machinery because they're keeping control in Chinese hands. And if a company is owned by Chinese, China is the existential enemy and is a threat to you instead of looking at China as here's our growth area that we can partnership with China and we can both benefit. The United States has tried to block it, and the result is that battery makers throughout Europe right now are having real problems getting all of these very simple battery projects that the NXperia company was producing.

1:05:53So you're having a similar fight here over TikTok, where America said, We cannot have a Chinese media platform that is so successful in making so much money. It must be controlled by Americans so that we can use TikTok to censor the discussions. There were discussions on TikTok about American foreign policy. There were even criticisms that you shouldn't have genocide against the Palestinians. And so the new buyers at TikTok have said we're going to block certain words. Like if they see the word Israel in anything, they block it. You're using AI as thought control and essentially to impose fascism, cultural fascism on the country to prevent any kind of political discussion or economic discussion and analysis that is not America's mainstream discussion.

1:07:01You had the same thing with Paramount's degree to take over Time Warner. We have to control all of the media, and we're going to use automatic intelligence to control the media, to scan the Internet, and to see who's saying what, and to block things. You're having, there was talk way back in the 1970s about, well, the American and the Soviet economies converge. They're all going in the same way. Well, it turns out they are converging, but people thought that the convergence would be the Soviet Union breaking up and becoming more democratic. And it turns out that the American culture is becoming much more Soviet when it comes to the mass media, the centralized control of the mass media in the United States and the Internet and TikTok and the entertainment and the news that you see on CBS.

1:08:14these days. You have all of this, a heavy degree of censorship. So AI in the United States is used very, very heavily on censorship. I suspect something similar occurs in every other country with AI. And it's not necessarily very democratic. And it looks like the effect of AI is going to be to polarize economies and to create quite a bit of unemployment of that whatever kinds of labor can be replaced by AI, such as warehousing. I think Amazon is trying to use AI to replace labor in its warehouses. And you've seen factories in China where entire automobiles are made. The whole assembly line is done by robotics.

1:09:09That's AI. So it's transforming things. But to really develop it into something so-called super computing requires energy. And the fact that the United States is so committed to letting the oil industry dominate its policies across the board is that Donald Trump has said, well, we don't want any alternative to oil in the United States or by the green policies of Europe, talking about climate control and getting rid of carbon fuels. So Trump, one of the first things he did was to close down the wind energy, windmills investments that were taking place in the United States and to prevent solar energy from being developed here very largely because China has taken the lead in making windmill blades and solar energy panels.

1:10:16panels. So China has used much of the Gobi Desert area as essentially a huge solar energy accumulation system on solar energy to power its AI, whereas the United States has a problem. How are they going to get the existing electricity that's needed to operate AI without causing such an overload, a demand for electricity that you're bidding up the electric prices and it's going to cost American workers and American businesses much more money to turn on the lights and operate their machinery and to run the homes. So Trump has said, well, AI companies are going to have to produce their own electricity.

1:11:08And so far, this has turned out to be something very difficult to do in practice because of all of the administrative hurdles that are required to either to create a new electric utility extension or to create even independent sources of self-AI companies producing their own energy. So America has a huge bottleneck blocking this. And as an economist, I can study the bottlenecks and I can look at the wealth and income distribution patterns and stock market patterns without knowing that much about actually how the computer systems themselves work and whether it's all self-referential. And AI computers tend to make up fictions of their own and can make really, really big mistakes so that, you know, they end up looking about as sophisticated as Donald Trump.

1:12:12When I asked you how you thought AI would figure into the economics of the future and how it figures into foreign policy, I had not expected that your answer would be so closely related to energy. But it makes total sense given that a lot of the news that I hear today about AI is, oh, they're building these huge warehouses in some rural area that's causing tremendous power demands and power surges or prices and power surges in nearby areas. So it makes sense that energy is going to be so vital. And I wonder then, though, how this also fits into the shifting energy landscape in that energy today is being increasingly or it increasingly comes from renewable sources.

1:13:10So how this fits into the global landscape and dependence on oil and how power is balanced because of the same. The United States is a single major backer of exacerbating global warming. Trump is absolutely set against withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate, is fighting any non-carbon energy. He acts as a total lobbyist for the oil industry, and this policy is one of the most dangerous American foreign policies. I didn't get into the fact that supporting oil and controlling the oil trade means, well, what's the point of controlling oil trade if there's an alternative to oil to produce electricity and power?

1:14:02Well, solar energy and windmill energy and renewable energy is a threat to American control of that. So the byproduct of this American attempt to use oil is a choke point for the world. World's energy is creating a choke point in the form of all of this extreme weather that is sweeping across the entire world right now, causing such destruction. Tax Act knows filing taxes can be confusing. So we have live experts on hand who can help answer any questions you may have. Questions like, can I claim my SUV is my home office if I answer work emails in my car? If I adopted 12 dogs this year, can I list them as dependents?

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1:15:18I guess I'd like to transition now from talking about the present to how we got here. Ah, something I know much more about. Well, then maybe I should let you take it from here then. What do you think are the crucial things that we should be looking at first when we ask this question, how we got here with our foreign policy? Well, how we got here from where? The last time you asked me a question like that, I began by talking about the Bronze Age for 45 minutes. Well, I feel like two good periods to begin with, granted that a lot of what we've been discussing has revolved around World War III, is maybe it would be good to start around World War I or World War II, whichever you think makes more sense.

1:16:04Well, the aftermath of World War I was largely financial, and that was the fact of the inter-Ally debts. The Americans insisted that Europe pay for the arms that it had bought from the United States before the U.S. entry into the war. My book, Super Imperialism, starts by explaining this whole period and the only way that Britain, France, and other allies could pay their debts that the United States insisted upon that was unique. In the past, after the Napoleonic Wars and other wars, allies usually forgave the war debts of each other's countries because they were all together. But the United States said, we're different.

1:16:53We're not going to forget. You know, alone is alone. And so the allies turned to Germany to impose reparations that created absolute economic crisis. There was this, you could say that the legacy of World War I was to say that once there's no debt cancellation, that debts, once they're undertaken, the countries have an obligation to pay their foreign debts even before using their income and their fiscal resources to pay. for their own purposes. And the fiction that governed economic thought at the end of World War I, the financial sector got together with such a thought control, such an intolerant autocracy that said any country can repay its debts if you only cut back your payments to labor enough.

1:18:00If you can only impoverish your labor and industry Buy enough, you can pay your debts. This is the theory that David Ricardo developed of bullionism, saying we in Britain can, of course, create paper credit, but other countries cannot create paper credit. And the way to pay your foreign debt is to oppose austerity. So Britain, opposed on austerity, ended up with a general strike. I think 1926. France imposed austerity, had hyperinflation. Germany imposed austerity. And by essentially throwing its Deutsche Marks onto the foreign exchange markets that plunged the Marx exchange rate in order to buy the dollars, to pay the Allies, to pay the United States.

1:18:57So you had this financial dominance of the world economy was one consequence of World War I, and that led to the economic collapse of the stock market in 1929 and then the depression that led to World War II. So you could say World War II and fascism was the product of the instability caused by the demands by the financial sector to get paid, and specifically by the United States financial sector. So the legacy of World War II was that the United States had ended up with three-quarters of the world's gold stock, and that enabled it to use gold and bullion as a choke point in the economy. And it said, well, we're creating the IMF and the World Bank, and we're willing to lend you money in order so that you can recover it.

1:20:03But you're not allowed to create your own money. You're not allowed to do what Britain did with the Bank of England and create its paper currency. You're not allowed to do what America does. You have to base all of your currency on hard money, on gold or on the U.S. dollar. that was as good as gold. So the result of World War II was to once again create a world economy centered on the financial power of the United States, which initially thought that, well, we can avoid what we did in World War I. We're not going to insist on moving directly into a depression. We're going to say that, well, you can depend upon the dollar and do your trade in dollars in a way that will enable you to develop at the same time.

1:21:01But in order to join this American-centered world order, you have to agree on free trade. Well, the first geopolitical aim of American foreign policy during the closing days of World War II, 1944, was to break up the British Empire. America wanted to absorb it into the American economic dollar area. We won't call it an empire. I have a whole chapter, two chapters on this in my book, Superimperialism. And so the United States said, well, they were for one of the principles of the international order that we're sponsoring is free trade. Countries can spend their savings on whoever they want. Well, that meant the end of Britain's sterling area.

1:21:59During World War II, India and other British colonies had accumulated very large foreign reserves as a result of their supply of raw materials. So did Argentina and other Global South countries had that. Many of these were sterling area countries, and the Americans made an agreement as a condition for the British loan of 1944 that Britain would not tie these foreign savings by its colonies to being spent in Britain. they ended up being spent on the United States because the United States had the industrial power that Britain didn't have. And other countries were not allowed to devalue their currency in order to gain an industrial advantage, and Britain had to promise not to devalue its sterling to a degree that would be competitive with American industrial exports.

1:23:02So you could say that the post-World War II order started with America destroying the British economic empire and also that of France and other countries. And it was founded on pro-creditor rules that ended up by the fact is that the international debts grew exponentially at compound interest. And by the 1980s, you had the whole breakdown of the Latin American debt bomb, the whole Latin American default. The whole 1980s were a period of default among countries. And all the countries wanted to get free from the IMF at that time. They realized that if a country was having to borrow from the IMF and it said you have to impoverish your labor force, this is class war.

1:24:08This is America's foreign policy is a class war against labor above all. And in order to pay your foreign debts, you have to agree to reduce your wages of labor as if that will make you more competitive. Well, of course, it didn't make them more competitive. The less you pay labor, the less productive it is. If you impose austerity, you don't have the money to mechanize production, to increase industrialization. The America started World War II, the post-war period, with the ability to crush other countries' ability to develop. So you had a dual economy developing during the whole post-1945 period.

1:24:57You had more industrial economies in the West, Europe, the United States, and its allies. And you had the global South countries, the raw materials exporters that dissipated the foreign exchange savings that they'd accumulated during World War II by essentially being forced to follow free trade and were blocked from imposing protective tariffs, such as the United States and all the European countries had done to build up their industry. They had to agree not to use government subsidy of industry, like the United States was doing. And they had to agree not to produce their own food. That was the central role of the World Bank, that the World Bank was willing to lend money for park development, road development, electrification, and other public infrastructure.

1:25:57But countries could not develop family farming. They could not undertake land reform to develop their own food production. The tropical countries were obliged to focus on plantation crops from large plantations, largely foreign-owned, such as most notoriously the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. And the American government said, we will assassinate any foreign leaders or governments that want to take control of their own land to feed themselves. Feeding yourself is viewed not only as a threat to American security, meaning our dominance, but as an act of war. and it waged a war against Guatemala, Nicaragua, almost the whole of Latin America in order to keep it food-dependent on the United States.

1:26:57So the United States added foreign food dependency to the foreign oil dependency that it had, and it fought against any socialist regimes in these countries, culminating in the fight in Chile, the destabilization of Latin American countries. So you had an increasingly belligerent American foreign policy that was designed to prevent any kind of socialist opposition, and, in fact, any kind of attempt by countries to use government to develop their economies along the same industrial, strong government lines that the United States, Britain, and Germany had used to develop their own industry in the 19th century.

1:27:55That was, you could say, the shaping force of the world after 1945. You mentioned that America's post-World War II era was founded on the destruction of the British Empire and the French Empire and these European empires. And I'm wondering if we could just briefly, I know it's a distraction, I guess, from our main topic, which is U.S. foreign policy and place in the world order. But what has Europe's trajectory been since this period? And where is it going today? How relevant is it? It's become in... You have a diverse... The question is, what is Europe? So that's a trick question. On the one hand, you have what the European voters want.

1:28:44They didn't want continued war with Russia. They wanted to heat their homes with inexpensive Russian gas, and they wanted to keep being employed by the industrial companies and the chemical companies and the fertilizer companies importing Russian oil and gas. And so they're against the Cold War conflict, the new Cold War conflict, with post-Soviet Russia. But the leaders of these countries, Merz in Germany, Starmer in Britain, and Macron in France, Look at the first wave of demonstrations by the farmers in France with their tractors against Macron. I think last summer and before, Macron is incredibly unpopular in France.

1:29:41Then you have Starmer in Britain, and you wonder how he ever could have got there. You have the Labor—Stammer has destroyed Labor Party as being the apotheosis, the ultimate trajectory of where Tony Blair had been taking it. And so Labour just came in third after the Conservative Party. And even the Greens won the last by-election last week in Britain. So the Starmer has essentially ended the Labour Party's role in Britain, and yet he's the prime minister. And then you have Merz in Germany, the hyper-Russophobe. And you have the heads of the European Union, Vondelian and Kayakalas, both of whom are extreme Cold War Russophobes.

1:30:50and their policies are to intensify the Cold War against Russia to the point of scaling back social spending programs, scaling back the subsidies that European governments have given to homeowners so that, well, we know that it's more expensive now that you're buying U.S. liquefied natural gas at four times the price that Russian gas would have cost. So we're going to give you a subsidy so you can afford to heat your homes without suffering a decline in your living standards. Well, the Russophobe leaders have said, well, we're going to end that. We've really got to devote our GDP, much more the GDP that in the past was based on social spending and helping your standard of living and keeping your employment going now we're abandoning all this we're sacrificing ourself to in the same way that our Ukrainian democratic friends have done by accelerating our cold war against Russia because if we don't fight them you know who knows they're going to be walking right through us on their way to Britain.

1:32:11So what is Europe? Is Europe what the people want, or is it what the governments of these countries, especially the European Union, are so anti-labor, so anti-industry, so willing to sacrifice German industry and European industry in general in order just to indulge in their hatred of Russia that they're willing to impose chronic depression on European industry that, of course, now is greatly exacerbated by what's happening in the Middle East.

1:32:58there's a question of whether the European Union can remain. The European Union has just said, we're abolishing the principles of the Constitution. Forget what we wrote. If the Americans can ignore their Constitution, we can do the same thing. We're a democracy. Whatever the leaders tell us to do, we will do, and forget the Constitution, forget the written law. were essentially going to prevent the main constitutional feature of the EU was that it has to be unanimous and any country has the right to veto war spending and war power. Well, you have Hungary and Czechoslovakia. I'm sorry, the Czech Republic, slip of the tongue from my childhood usage, saying, well, wait a minute, we cannot afford to go to war with Russia, and we need Russian oil.

1:34:03The Ukrainians have just blown up the Russian pipeline that was feeding oil to Hungary, threatening to cause a whole crisis there. And the Europeans essentially have just abandoned NATO. They said NATO, the rules of NATO no longer apply. The whole enabling fiction of NATO was if one country was attacked by outside, we'll all support it. They now say, we will not support you if you're attacked by a country that we like, like Ukraine, and we don't like you. So, of course, any European country can be attacked at will by Ukraine or U.S., whoever wants, as long as they're not a right-wing, financialized, neoliberal country.

1:35:05Well, this is not what the EU was supposed to be. It wasn't supposed to be a neoliberal, polarizing country as an adjunct of NATO. And now that you have the EU foreign policy leadership and the fight, you could call it a legal civil war of NATO against Hungary and the Czech Republic and other countries' members that want to say, We don't want to sacrifice our economic growth just to fight Russia when Russia hasn't attacked us, and it's all a myth. You're making up all these stories. This is all a fiction. The emperor has no clothes. You know, the reality is we were doing just fine, getting inexpensive Russian oil and gas and finding Russia a profitable market for the industrial exports that we were making.

1:36:10There was a circular flow. It was very good. And now you stopped it just because you personally and ethnically hate Russians. And you've recovered the old Nazi fight that the Russians and the Slavs are genetically inferior to the rest of the human race. We don't believe in that genetic inferiority. This is abhorrent. The reality is that the World Bank and every other observer says Ukraine was the most corrupt country in the Northern Hemisphere. That is, and America says Ukraine is the democracy that we're fighting for, just as Israel is the democracy that we're fighting for. And the third great democracy we're fighting for now is al-Qaeda in Syria.

1:37:01Well, look at the three democracies that America is holding up to protect the world and its allies against autocracy are involved in racist ethnic cleansing. What does that tell you about how the world is splitting up? So at any rate, that was a long answer to Europe. Europe, the European leaders have decided that the wrong country won World War II, and that they're going to refight World War II, and this time the Germans are going to win. I'm paraphrasing. I think that's the inner meaning of Chancellor Merz's speak. Germany is going to win the war against Russia this time. And this is crazy. But that's our ally.

1:37:58Germany is our landed aircraft carrier, you could say, or atom bomb carrier now, along with France in the war against Russia. Again, I'm taken by your description or discussion of racism and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, because I mean, I've done a number of dedicated episodes about Israel and Palestine. And for those, I read many books. I'm at least aware of base. I have a basic awareness of the issues. I'm not a scholar in these subjects, but I haven't done that with Russia and Ukraine. And I remember at the outset of the war hearing that this was one of Putin's motivations was that there was persecution of Russian Russian speakers in Ukraine.

1:38:54But I thought and persecution, murder, mass murder, bombing of their apartments, destruction, killings, open, open killings. And what I had heard, though, at the time was that this was overblown and not actually the case. And it was just an excuse for Putin to annex territory. So it's interesting for me to hear from you that this is very much the case. Well, read the speeches of Zelensky. And I think Lavrov has certainly given his speeches, described the history case by case by case in great detail. The burning of all Russian language books in public, the banning of the performance of music by Russian composers, the banning of plays written by Russian playwrights.

1:39:58I mean, all of that is so well documented. Yeah, well, I mean, one thing it tells me is that I need to do some dedicated episodes on this topic just so that I have an excuse to spend more time studying it. But you mentioned earlier, you alluded to Europeans alleging that we're ignoring the Constitution. So why can't they ignore their own constitutions? And I happen to be taking a constitutional law course here right now. So I'm just particularly curious, what about our Constitution do they or you think that we're ignoring right now that's particularly relevant to our discussion? Well, in both cases of Europe and the United States, the First Amendment of free speech, you can look at what the United States has done to punish the judges of the International Criminal Court that ruled that Netanyahu and Israel were war criminals, and against the United Nations reporter who essentially presented the case against Israel.

1:41:14America has blocked the judges and the U.N. reporter from traveling to the United States, has frozen all of their assets in the United States, has prevented the judges from using credit cards, for instance, essentially has waged a personal war against them, saying if any member of the international judiciary or the United Nations takes a policy that criticizes the United States, We will make life personal hell for them. They do not have free speech. There's also the move in the last month against a Swiss military historian, Baud, who was very good. They've essentially confiscated all of his money and banned him from the Internet.

1:42:14You have in Britain the criminalization of making a public speech criticizing Israeli policy against Palestine or criticizing Ukrainian policy against the Russians. You've had a criminalization of free speech in the United States and the United States, from Europe, the EU to the United States, and Britain. So you're having all of these principles of constitutional law in these countries. And in my article that I wrote on Democracy Collaborative a few days ago, I go into all of the elements of international law and the Constitution that the United States has banned in its fight against the United Nations reporter and judge.

1:43:17Well, thank you for entertaining these digressions and tangents. Going back to Europe's, I mean, sorry, the United States trajectory from World War I to the present, when exactly was the apex of American and geopolitical, American economic and geopolitical power in this time period throughout the world, in the world? Well, it convinced the Europeans that what was at issue was private property and debt, and that Europe's government debts to the United States was, if the debts were not paid, that was a threat to the private property system, and that was socialism. So every means that Europe had for economic survival of its economies to avoid economic collapse that led to fascism was deemed socialism.

1:44:24Just as in Latin America, every attempt that governments made to achieve self-sufficiency in trade, self-sufficiency in their food that they could produce at home instead of importing was called socialism. and this demonization of any government investment itself, any price regulation, any anti-monopoly action was considered an interference with the free market. The free market meaning there are no rules at all to provide rentier exploitation, no rules to prevent monopoly rent, No rules to tax away land rent, which was the core policy, as I said, from Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill to the Communist Manifesto to the entire 19th century liberal movement of a free market, meaning a market free from rent seeking, a market free from landlordism, a market free from monopolies.

1:45:39The whole economic vocabulary was transformed. And you could say the apex of American policy was to create a new fictitious narrative of how economies really developed, how Europe and the United States had successfully industrialized their own economies, a whole, and as we discussed in one of our first interviews, a rewriting of the origins of civilization. As if it all began as if Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan got in the time machine and went back to Sumer in Egypt and created a free market. And that's what created money and interest and all of civilization. Whereas there never would have been a civilization if Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman had been advising the kings of Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Egypt.

1:46:38Well, I imagine it is quite difficult for you to predict the outcome of current events quite specifically, like what's going to happen over the next week or two, let alone a few months in Iran, for instance. But I wonder, given that we've spoken about the trajectories of the United States, of Russia, of Europe over the last 100 years or so, how you see that culminating today and culminating in the years or decades to come? Like what's happening in this global conflict over economic structure? Well, Donald Trump in the last week had said, this war is going to be over in four weeks. But it's not going to be over in four weeks.

1:47:25It's going to go on to the point where it creates an economic depression in Western Europe and in certain other oil-using countries. Now, it's true they all have oil reserves. America has huge oil reserves. Europe has it. There's going to be enough transition to avoid a quick depression because Europe is going to use up its oil reserves to prevent economic collapse, which would mean the political collapse at the polls of the leading Russophobic policies. But the fact is that the The whole financial trajectory that the West has taken since the 1980s is going to break down. It's been polarizing.

1:48:20All the growth in wealth in Western Europe and the United States has accrued mainly to the wealthiest 1 % of the population and at most the wealthiest 10%. The 90 % are being impoverished. Something has to give. Well, there really isn't any left wing anymore. That's the left wing doesn't have the ideology and the based on value and rent theory that used to be socialism, value, price and rent. How do we bring prices in line with the actual cost value to minimize the cost of living and doing business so we can use the economic surplus to finance their own growth? All that's gone. So you're going to have China and other countries trying to, pulling ahead further and further by using government as the coordinator and engine of growth, and the Western countries opposing governments with neoliberalism, shifting economic planning away from the government sector to the financial sector.

1:49:30So you're going to have a financialized West becoming increasingly polarized and impoverished compared to a more balanced public-private economy throughout the Asian countries and Russia that are joining together more and more. The focus really is going to be on China, Russia, and Iran. again. It's not possible really to see what are the other BRICS members going to be. There really isn't a BRICS ideology yet. There's no ideology. It's as if the rest of the world is acting just improvisationally on an ad hoc basis without any kind of an economic theoretical context for what's the purpose of our growth?

1:50:25What's the purpose of government? And for that matter, what's the purpose of this Cold War? What does America want to achieve by conquering the war with Iran except to carve it up and end up making Iran look just like we've destroyed Syria and Iraq and Libya? is the world going in the Middle East going to end up like Libya and Syria with Al-Qaeda and Israel together governing it or is it going to become more self-sufficient and Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries said well America promised that it would protect us and that's why we made all these loans to the United States and kept all our investments in the United States, but the United States didn't protect us.

1:51:17Look, Iran has blown up our gas export capacity. They've blown up our oil wells. They're hitting us at will. Maybe we cannot depend on the United States and Europe anymore. And Europe apparently has said, we're going to join the United States attack on Iran and come in. And so you're going to have this threat of it spreading. And if Macron and Merckx succeed in actually giving Iran an atomic missile to say, you know, now send it to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia's already said we're going to retaliate against the countries that produced the missiles. And Iran, we realized our fight isn't with Ukraine.

1:52:11Ukraine is merely the battlefield, the arena. Our fight is with Western Europe acting as a U.S. proxy. And if we're really threatened existentially with an atomic bomb from Europe, I think Putin said, the war will last one day, and as there won't be any more Europe. So, you know, that's what it's all about, confrontation. I think this time you'll have, just as Iran is fighting back, you'll have Russia fighting back and China fighting back and a spreading conflagration. At the same time that there is a polarization and a de-industrialization, and economic depression in the West. Burnout Paradise is hailed as the wildest night out in New York City by Time Out New York.

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1:54:06So given that we've spoken so much about Iran today, maybe it would come as a surprise to you that I'm surprised to hear you say that the focus going forward will be on China, Russia, and Iran. But China and Russia for a long time have been discussed as, I mean, these other crucial powers in the world order. And I'm wondering if Iran is so important just because there's this war going on there right now, or if it's because it's important for the balance of powers in the Middle East, or because of its connection to oil, or just because it's representative of something larger. 80 % of Iran's oil exports go to China.

1:54:53Now, it's true that only 5 % of these exports, imports of oil, are from Iran. But China is dependent on Near Eastern oil, as are other countries. And it realizes that this fight in the Near East is for American control of oil with the intent of depriving China of oil from either Iran or OPEC countries generally. And just, I think, in the last 24 hours, you had Britain sink a Russian tanker off Gibraltar and carrying oil. that Europe has said we're going to block Russian tankers from access to the Baltic so that other countries cannot import Russian oil. And all of this is an attempt to squeeze China.

1:55:50And China will be hurt by the inability to obtain access to oil, which drives its industry despite all of its leadership in creating alternatives to carbon fuels. It still needs it. So China needs Iran, and to use Iran is the protection against the al-Qaeda and the crazy, vicious Wahhabism that is being used to train the Sinkiang Uyghur areas to have terrorism. You have Syria and Ukraine training anti-Chinese figures to try to break the Uyghur area, the Sinkiang provinces, away from China right there. So this fight in Ukraine and... And Iran directly affects China's integrity because the intent is to break up, to use the Islamic terrorism and the U.S.

1:56:59terrorism and the Israeli terrorism and the Ukrainian terrorism altogether to break up Russia, China, and Iran into component parts. This is a purely destructive core of American policy and European policy and Western policy that is forcing China to make this a world conflict. So to answer your questions, all three, it's about oil, it's about military, it's about the larger picture, And it's about the whole, whether there's going to be, in fact, an economic freedom of countries to act in their sovereign self-interest or whether America will succeed in using terrorism to prevent countries from doing that.

1:57:52Well, the last question I will ask you for today is you and I, a little over a year ago, we had a joint conversation with Rick Wolf. And I've had many conversations with him about the quote unquote American empire and its decline. And I'm just wondering if how you how you see the American empire going forward. Is it declining precipitously? what are things going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years? Well, it's already transformed into the opposite strategy of what it was after World War II. That was what the national security strategy last December said. We're no longer basing ourselves on international law of sovereignty of nations.

1:58:41We're asserting American dominance. And this transformation is a sign that the positive basis that enabled America to create an empire by being industrially and financially strong, it no longer exists. And so you could say that the turn into saying all that we have left is the America's ability to create chaos in other countries. This is not a long-term solution. At some point, other countries are going to say, we want to avoid chaos. We have to act on our own to prevent chaos. And the way that we do that, we're not going to fight with America. We're not going to fight with Europe. We're just going to decouple.

1:59:29You go your way, and we go our way. So instead of the United States succeeding in isolating Russia, China, and Iran, the United States will end up isolating itself from the global majority. And that's essentially like once you've isolated yourself from the majority of the world and all you're left with is Western Europe that you've impoverished by dragging it into the Cold War, sanctions against Russia, then you're economically shrinking. And if you're economically shrinking, then your ability to finance your world military presence by other countries transferring their wealth to you is all over.

2:00:18And that's what empires are all about. Empires impose tribute. America has lost its ability to extract tribute, except by threatening to cause chaos on other countries. And other countries are now trying to decouple as rapidly as they can. That's why Merz has gone to China, Starmer has gone to China, and why the Europeans are saying, maybe we backed the wrong horse. Well, Michael, as always, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. So thanks so much for joining me today. Well, it was a far-ranging discussion. Thanks for having me, Robinson. I'm glad we could tie all these different strands together.

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