282 - Richard Wolff: China, Russia, Iran, and World War III

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41:49Then on the other, we've got the decline of the US and Europe. And then on the third hand, we have the fact, as you mentioned, that you're an economist. And I'm not sure if Marx has anything to say about this, because you're our expert on Marx, not me, but what exactly is the connection between war and economic decline?

42:21Economic decline. Let's start in the broadest sense. And here's what we learn, and Marx is very helpful in this. Marx, in case you're wondering, Marx wrote about the decline of European dominance. He was very interested in the Chinese economy, the Indian economy. He read up on it. He had lots of commentary on it, just like he had lots of commentary on the United States, which he found very interesting as well. I don't know if you know, but he was for many years a reporter, a European correspondent for a New York newspaper. And in his capacity as a correspondent for a New York newspaper, he wrote some of the best analysis of the American Civil War you can find anywhere.

43:19The role of slavery, the role of the Civil War, the dominance of the North, what it meant, all of that. Anyway, what we've learned through Marx and others, not just him, about the decline of empires is this. Every time an empire declines, and a footnote, every empire has, which ought to sink in the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Dutch Empire, the you name it empire, born, evolved over time, and then passes away. So if you are an empire, as everyone who pays attention knows the United States has been for the last at least 75 years, I would say more like 100, 125, then you know we obviously were born, and you know we obviously have evolved, And so the next step is that other one, the decline.

44:20Not about whether, it's just really about when. And I would argue it's already underway. We've peaked. Anyway, what we know about all empires that declined is that when the decline gets underway, the people who sit at the top of an empire, the richest ones, the ones who run it, the empire, the czar, the czar, whatever, you know, the Kaiser, every language has its name for this. They are the ones in a position to hold on to their wealth and power, even as it declines. It's the middle and lower classes, the working class, which is not in a position to save itself. And so the costs of decline are disproportionately imposed on the middle and the bottom.

45:17We are living through that. When Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, stands there with a chainsaw, if you caught that image, proudly announcing in the early days of Mr. Trump's second term how he's taking a chainsaw to the government bureaucracy, getting rid of the education department, firing all these scientists in the CDC, and so forth and so on. This is a theatric of the decline of social services. Meanwhile, the defense budget and all of the perks of rich people are being improved. The big beautiful tax cut is a wonderful offset for the richest among us. Whatever they might suffer from a declining government budget for social services, they can now afford as a private expenditure.

46:19Those are the taxes they just got reduced. I mean, it is obscene what's going on, especially if you know that history. But if you allow that to continue, as we are allowing it in this country, you are going to rip this country apart. Why? Because the mass of people are going to have, sooner or later, a realization that they are being deprived. American literature right now is full of signs of that. Article after article in mainstream media is talking about how Gen Z is getting very disappointed. My students are coming to me. They're not getting jobs the way I had it, being a professor with tenure at a major university.

47:11My students can't get those jobs. They're disappearing. My students are adjuncts. They teach two semesters over here at this school and they run across town and teach one course in the evening on Thursdays at that school. What is that? They can't do any research. They're busy grading papers. You know, more power to them. They're heroes and heroines in my mind. But I understand, and so do they. I'm sitting here in Manhattan. I just watched, basically, young people, 35 years of age and younger, do the work of winning the mayoralty election a few months ago for a young Muslim socialist, self-proclaimed, who's the mayor of our city now.

48:10This is a city with an enormous Jewish population. He's a Muslim who, when asked, what will you do if Benjamin Netanyahu visits New York, his answer was, I will have him arrested. The majority of the Jews of New York voted for this guy. He is the mayor, he is a socialist. Syria is a member of the DSA and all of that that implies. How could, how's this possible? Because those young people are angry and upset. They were taught to expect and believe that they would live a certain kind of standard of living, have a certain kind of job, not exactly this one or that one, maybe not their number one choice, but that they would, they don't have that.

49:01They have zero security in a declining situation. I have a daughter very close to me. She doesn't think there will be a Social Security when she gets to be my age. She just doesn't believe it'll be there. Where'd this come from? No one ever told her it won't be there. she just is picking up, and all her friends are the same. Their whole attitude towards the country is completely different from what I grew up in. So, I think we are already well underway, and the country is being torn apart. In one part of the country, the decline in their situation has made them turn to the right. That isn't surprising.

49:53This is a country that has flirted with the right wing all my life. It has repressed the left and encouraged the right. If people get under pressure and don't like the consensus anymore, of course they will go to the right, at least at first. If the right doesn't do anything for them, then they'll go left. I think that's what's going on in the country right now, and I think it will continue. And it's beginning to scare the people at the top, as they notice we just had another election and several more socialists won to sit in Congress from the New York area. And I believe it's happening in Colorado, in California, and so on.

50:40And it will happen more. So, when the empire declines, after a certain point, the people on top realize, uh-oh, we're holding on, but the situation is getting away from us here in America. The rich are holding on. They got wonderful tax cuts. They love Mr. Trump. Oh, yes, he overstates it. Oh, yes, he's screwed. but boy has he taken care of us. I want to remind everyone, his top priority, his first priority, in his first presidency, was the tax cut of December 2017, the biggest tax cut for corporations and the rich in our country's history. In his second term, his first and biggest priority was what he called the big beautiful tax cut.

51:37Remember? Just a few months ago. And that was another gift to the same people. He's showing them, don't worry, whatever else I do, a war here, an outrage against immigrants over there, ugly? Yeah, but I'm going to take care of you. And he did. And that's how declines of empires usually work. But if you keep doing that, you will eventually produce so much tension at the bottom, where you've unloaded all the costs, that people will begin to rebel. We're at that point now. So now what do you do? Now you got a real problem. If you continue what you were doing, you are now on the edge of provoking what?

52:33Well, you could provoke in other cities what ICE discovered in Minneapolis, which is you can mobilize an entire city to throw you out. And then what? That's one question. Well, one answer to that question, let's call it the Hegseth answer, is to 66 % increase in military, and literally organizing ICE as a private army on top of your regular army. The repressive. Many empires have tried that. That never works. between the end of the social services, because you're not having the money anymore, and the overwhelming costs of the military, it blows up. It just blows up. That doesn't work. What else can you do?

53:31Well, you can entertain fantasies. In America right now, the fantasy is we can control the Middle East. You can't. Where grab Greenland won't be easy. Grab Canada won't be easy. Retake the Panama Canal won't be easy. What have you got? Demonize China. We can do that, but we will certainly do that. But where does that, won't solve much. For 25 years we have tried to slow down China's development. And maybe we did. Maybe we slowed it. For much of the last 75 years they were growing, excuse me, between 5 and 9 percent a year. They now grow around 5 percent. So maybe United States gets some credit for Britain, but it's still way ahead of us.

54:39So to imagine we're going to be more successful in the future than we have been in the past, there is no reason to believe that. So my conclusion is that we are a shrinking empire. Let me take a small microcosm to show the importance. Iran is now going to be forever in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which remains a major passage for large parts of the world's international trade, not just in oil and gas, liquefied gas, but also in derivative products from oil and gas that include fertilizer, jet fuel, helium, and several other important commodities. And it's going to be a cost. Ships that go through that canal are going to give some money to Iran, because Iran is going to police it.

55:59Iran is going to control it. Iran is going to keep it clear. And Iran wants some of the wealth that its area makes possible. It's taking advantage of its geography, just like lots of other countries take advantage of their geography, and always have. But it's a cost for the United States. It didn't have to pay that. We are all going to pay a little more, even if the things we buy do not themselves cross the Strait of Hormuz, they rely on something in their production that does. And that will, cost will filter through. And then there are all the other countries that are watching Iran figure out how to become a player in the world economy.

57:06Not just a source of wealth for others, And if I had time, I would take you through the history of Iran. For a century, Iran has been the plaything of Western, European, and American colonial powers. Initially the British Empire, as so much of that region was, divided between the British and the French. Real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess. Like a set of Firestone all-season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence-inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road, season after season. Firestone all-season tires. For durability, you can count on.

57:58Just like people count on you. Firestone. Always dependable. Since 1900. Thank you. Back in 1953, an effort was made by the Iranian people to elect a government, which they did, democratically, reasonably democratic election, puts into power a man named Mossadegh, became very famous. And his election in 1953, he was committed to a campaign, make the oil underneath our land that Allah has provisioned us with, become a source of wealth for the Iranian people, not the British who controlled it. Immediately, the United States and Britain, CIA, MI6, went to work and overthrew the Mossadegh government, and installed their own leader, a man named Shah Pahlevi.

59:09And that was the Shah of Iran, who ran the country from 1953 to the late 1970s. He was a dictator. Who cared? Nobody. He operated with the Sadegh, which was the secret police. Generations of Iranians left the country because it was a dictatorship. Many of them moved to Los Angeles. Many of them moved to Paris. There are huge Iranian expatriate communities in all those places that were exiles from the colonization of that country. In the 1970s, the religious leaders, the ayatollahs and the mullahs of their branch of Islam, rose up in revolution against the Shah of Iran. He had to leave the country, which he did, and he went into exile.

1:00:13Where did he go? He went to the United States, where he was welcomed by Kissinger, Nixon, and all the rest, to his real home, which is here in the United States. And the Mullers and the Ayatollahs took over. Immediately the United States went to work to try to unseat them again, now that the empire role had been inherited by the U.S. And we've had nothing but enmity from the late 70s to today, between the United States and Iran, culminating in the war a year ago, June of 2025, when Israel and the United States attacked Iran. American memory being what it is, you may not remember. It was called the 12-day war, which will give you an idea of how long it lasted.

1:01:18But never give up. You cripple them. You claim to cripple them. Mr. Trump announced we, I'm I'm going to quote him, obliterated their nuclear potential. Well, as I mentioned to you earlier, you can't do that because Iran is allied with Russia and China, and the nuclear potential there exceeds anything you can blow out, blow up, without yourself being blown up. And that craziness we haven't arrived at yet. So now what has happened? Iran figured out over the last 50 years of continuous hostility from the United States after having suffered a generation of dictatorship imposed by the United States and the overthrow of their elected government by the United States.

1:02:14who's afraid of whom here? With what justification? Americans actually were told, you've got to be worried about the Iranians. They may have nuclear weapons and use them against them. Maybe, maybe, maybe. A long history of actual who attacks who versus maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Americans go for that kind of reasoning. If you want to savage the other, that's the kind of argument you kind of need, especially when you have no real evidence. But the real importance of Iran is none of that. Too many other countries have too similar a history. The importance of Iran is they won. They came, they figured out over the last 50 years how to defeat the United States.

1:03:12They're never going to defeat the United States in wealth and power. They're a country of 90 million people with very limited resources. We are a country of 330 million people with huge resources. So they understood, they knew, they understood how to defeat this country, to focus everything we can do. We got this Strait of Hormuz, we got the water, we got the missiles, we got the alarm. Tears, and they went to work and they did it. It's like the Chinese. They went to work to build a competing economic powerhouse and they did it. You know, the American colonists, after they fought the two wars with England.

1:04:02The War of 18, the War of 1776, and then the other one, the War of 1812, the same issue. When they were finally independent, they went to work to become a powerful economy, and they went from being a poor backward North American colony into being the American dominant global economic power. All that the Iranians and the Chinese are doing is that. They have to find a different way because they face a different set of circumstances. But focusing in that way, the irony is that the Iranians showed other countries how to do it. They're learning it in Oman right now. They got a piece of that strait also.

1:04:51They're working with the Iranians to control the Strait of Hormuz together. All the other countries in the Gulf that sit on oil and gas, you can bet right now, this is very important, they are busy rethinking everything. That's why the war Iran is important. Every country is rethinking everything. Every country realizes, whoa, we thought the United States ran the show. They couldn't run this show. They've been bested. They can't control this, they can't. We thought they could. We have military bases in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in the United Arab Emirates, and so on. We had the military bases there to protect us.

1:05:54The Americans said they would protect us. They didn't. We're target practice for the Iranian missiles. And they get here all the time. Israel's Iron Dome. Does that protect Israel? Not at all. These powerhouses aren't. We've hitched our futures to the wrong horses. And we've got to change. We've got to rethink. We've got to send a delegation to Beijing to talk to the Chinese about covering our bets. We can't be the American friend. That's too dangerous. Look at what, look at the missiles that hit us. Look at it, look at, we don't want this anymore. And the Iranians are in a position to do that to us any time they want to...

1:06:53Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Now what? Every country, but also every large company, including every large American company, they won't tell you about it, but they're having meetings right here. And I'm blocks away. I'm living, I'm talking to you from Manhattan, downtown New York City. Few blocks for me, they're having meetings all the time. I know some of them personally. How do we reconfigure our supply chain? Can we get around the Strait of Hormuz? Is that cheaper or more expensive than paying something to the Iranians to get our ships through there? Should we stop relying on petroleum and go electric. Oh, but we can't go electric because the United States has 100 % tariff on Chinese electric vehicles.

1:07:49Well, let's send our lobbyists to Washington to get the tariffs reduced so we can get the same high-quality, low-cost electric truck that our competitors around the world are buying from China every day. Everything is changing, including here in the United States. The adjustment to the changing global economy is fully underway. And in that story, Europe is fading into a place we will in the future look at for mainly quaint historical tourism. I should stop there. well Rick I hope you know that even though we have these conversations for our audience I get so much out of listening to you speak and I always learn so much every time we talk I tell you what I'm doing I try I try to ask myself the questions that should be being asked as a general conversation of the United States.

1:09:13These are the questions that our newspapers, our journalists, our magazines, we should be having a debate. How do we handle this? You know, I used it once before talking to you. I'm going to use it again. I hope you don't mind. No. The British had to figure out. They fought two wars in the United States to prevent this colony from being lost to them. And they lost them both. They sent entire armies to the United States to fight that war. The way the U.S. sends armies to the Middle East or the Far East or Vietnam or Afghanistan or wherever, we send our armies. Very, very expensive. and then you lose on top of it.

1:10:08So after the second one, after the War of 1812, the British made a deal with the United States. A deal. And here's how the deal went. Okay, you beat us, say the British. But we would like to isolate your victory from the rest of the immense British Empire, which, as you know, the sun never sets on, because we have an empire in Asia, we have an empire in Latin America a little bit, and we have an empire in Africa. So, how about this? You don't bother us in Asia and Africa, and we won't bother you in Latin America. Take the whole thing. Leave us with the Bahama and Bermuda and the islands and that, and you know, the little bit we have there.

1:11:07Don't mess with that. But the rest of Latin America, we know that in America as the so-called Monroe Doctrine, because it was finalized under President Monroe. But it was an outgrowth of a deal. And you might think of it as a deal in which the British ruling class says to itself, we can hold on to most of our wealth, our power, everything that we've made possible in the British Empire by ripping off India and the rest of our empire. We can live with the loss of North America, as long as it doesn't infect other parts of the world. We don't want the Indians and the Africans to realize what the Americans did.

1:12:07And the United States said, great. In exchange for you not sending another army and working a deal maybe with the French that we have to worry about, you come at us, because the French had a history in Canada and the French had a history in Mexico. So we cut a deal. All I'm saying is the United States might want to think about that and ask itself the question, might the Chinese mean it when they say they would like to make a deal? Give them the room to grow and become wealthy too, which is what they ask. Make room for them. Will it cost you a little? Yes. But your effort to stop the Chinese is one big fat failure.

1:13:06So what have you got to lose? You might avoid a horrible war. You think a war in Europe or a war in the Middle East is dangerous. You're going to go up against the Chinese? Four times your population? Now almost you're equal economically with a nuclear weapon arsenal. I mean, are you kidding? You're going to be that stupid? No, I don't think so. And I think you can have a basis. We should be talking about this. I ask myself the question. Then I try to answer the question, or even to let my imagination help me try to answer it from different perspectives. And I tell you, the benefit of doing that exercise is that you get a larger, better, more inclusive story to tell, picture to paint about what's going on.

1:14:09And if I have anything to offer any of the audiences I deal with, it's an attempt to try to understand. It's a very human thing. No matter what the problems are, if you understand them, it's a big step forward. Even if you can't solve them, to understand them. You know, why do we go to a therapist? We're having trouble in our relationships, in our studies, in our work. And we go to a person who helps us think through our own evolution as a person to help us understand where these problems come from. In that understanding is a therapy. It's therapeutic to do that. Well, I'm trying to be therapeutic about the dilemmas we face collectively, socially, nationally.

1:15:15We've spoken about nuclear weapons with regard to Iran. And we've also spoken a bit about Europe's rearmament and the war in Ukraine. And I'm wondering if you think that there is a genuine possibility of nuclear war in either sphere or both. I'm afraid my answer is, much as I wish I didn't say this, I think the potential is there and I think it's serious. And I will tell you why. In both places? No, I'm thinking of Europe. In the Middle East, Iran isn't going to do it, probably because it doesn't have the weapons. And if it did have the weapons, which it doesn't have, there's no evidence that it has them.

1:16:10if it did have them it would be so self-destructive to use them that it's hard to imagine I don't think the United States the stakes aren't high enough and the risk too high there is one player in that situation who might, that's Israel might they use it? I think so and their situation is becoming desperate their alliance with the United States is now more, what shall I put it, frayed, questionable, in trouble, than I have ever seen it in my lifetime. So are they in a position of desperation? I think so. Without the United States they can't survive. They have been now on a war footing for many years.

1:17:09They're not a very big country, seven, eight million people. I'm talking about the Jewish part. The other part is so repressed and suppressed that I'm putting it out of this story. It's part of the story, a very crucial part. They have not defeated Neither Hamas nor the Palestinians, but the seven or eight Jewish citizens of Israel have worked themselves in their accord. They made a decision that military was the way to secure themselves. And in the process, you know, I'm a Hegelian on some level. they've made themselves deeply insecure. So insecure that they might do something crazy, like use a nuclear weapon on Iran.

1:18:08Extraordinary. But no, I think the greater danger is in Europe. And the reason is the step-by-step escalation. What John Mearsheimer, who has a great deal of wisdom about these issues, even though he and I are politically light years apart, he's a person you can learn a great deal from. I assume you know who he is. He's a political science professor at the University of Chicago. very, very, very insightful about these things. Anyway, he calls it the escalation ladder. It was Russia that invaded Ukraine back in February of 2022. The West immediately lined up behind Ukraine, but promised not to escalate.

1:19:05It did then escalate. It brought in tanks when it had said it wouldn't. It brought in step after step. And now finally in recent months, two or three months now, it has provided Ukraine with an endless supply of drones, which Ukraine has used to bomb St. Petersburg, to bomb Moscow. Now, so far, the damage they've been able to do is not very great. The Russian capacity to knock these things down is very developed, and they're no doubt developing them more. But direct attacks on the hinterland in Russia is a major escalation. And they did not do that in the first several years of the war. And during that time, Russia slowly but methodically defeated the Ukrainian army, even though it was financed and equipped by the United States and Western Europe, to the point that the biggest joke about the war in Ukraine traveling around the world is that the West decided to fight the Russians down to the very last Ukrainian.

1:20:29In other words, the Ukrainian people pay the price for a war between the European West and America on one hand and Russia on the other. During that time, that war has been escalated every step of the way. We are now at a point where Putin and the Russian leadership, and I should say that unlike Mr. Starmer in England, he's already gone. but Mr. Macron in France, or Mr. Mertz in Germany, or Ms. Maloney in Italy, or Trump in the United States, the popularity of the polls Mr. Putin has puts all of them to shame. He is extremely popular in Russia. I only mention it not to justify him or polling, neither of which I'm a great lover of, But you don't see the daylight between leader and follower that you see on the other side.

1:21:37We can't know what Mr. Zelensky's position is because he hasn't allowed an election since the time of his service ran out. His term is over. It was over quite some time ago. He forbade new elections. He operates as a dictator. Whatever you think of that, that's the reality that we have. The Russians have announced that this latest provocation for them, this latest escalation, will be responded to. And they are taking their sweet time to decide how to respond to the fact that the Ukrainians are using drones, and you know, even if you shoot down 90 % of them, 10 % get through, they do damage. They start a fire here, they blow something up over there, and they have done that.

1:22:37Particularly in the Crimean area that Russia took over, but also in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they're two most important cities. I mean, I'm trying to get you to think about what it would mean to the American mentality if there were drones bombing New York and Washington, as we were speaking now. So people living in Moscow tonight will turn off the light and climb in the bed, and it will occur to them that the noise they're hearing is a drone blowing up something next door, a mile away, or in your bedroom. Who knows? As an American, it's hard to imagine that happening at home. Right. But that is, and for the Russians, please understand, they have not had this since 1945.

1:23:41Right? So for 75 years, more than 75 years, they have not had to worry about this. They may have worried that there might be a nuclear war someday, but not bombs going off, you know, on the bus ride between my home and the office where I work, the downtown Moscow or something, or St. Petersburg, or other places where these drones have done damage, particularly oil refineries, gas stations, things like that. By the way, the damage done by Russia in Ukraine is much greater. The Russians send over huge swarms of drones, and the Ukrainians have a degraded air defense system, so many more of them get through.

1:24:33So, I don't want to be misunderstood here. The damage is happening on both sides, but it didn't happen before inside Russia. It happened to the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have controlled for years now. Those have been bombed and so forth. But this is an escalation, and the Russians have said, if you escalate, we will retaliate. Don't do it. It's a red line. And that red line has now been repeatedly crossed. Okay, so here's where we stand. Everyone who pays attention, which unfortunately is a minority here in the United States, but everybody who pays attention is now, I'm one of them, I am now waiting to see with great worry what the retaliation of the Russians will be.

1:25:34Their foreign minister, Lavrov, has twice now said in the last several weeks, twice. He has urged Western diplomats, including Americans, who have offices or headquarters in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, to leave Kiev. He's telling them, it is not safe for you to stay there. We're letting you know so you can get take the time get out of there. Well that's a none too subtle hint at what might be coming. So one possible retaliation, because they have they have bombed or droned Kiev already. It would not be the first time. But they are able to send over a much greater impact, a much greater number of drones and missiles.

1:26:40And a footnote, if you pay attention, you will know that the Russians have shown the world a new kind of missile. It has a name. It's called Oreshnik. that if you don't know this, it's because you're not paying attention. I'm not giving you any secrets. I don't know any secrets to give you. I'm just telling you what's in the newspapers and what's verifiable in the newspapers. The Oreschnik is a missile against which the West does not yet have a defense. So they send it, we get it. It ain't gonna be stopped. It's not going to be interfered with. It has a speed and it has a structure. I'm sure the Americans, given what we do, we will figure out a way to defend against it, just as the Russians figure out ways to defend against America.

1:27:39But for the time being, in this moment, you can't defend against it. So, one retaliation will be massive destruction of their capital. I suppose they're trying to force Zelensky to leave as well. If Zelensky leaves Kiev, the damage it will do to his standing inside Ukraine is enormous, and so that may be what they're after. The second option is that they will change their strategy, and whereas initially they had wanted only to take that eastern end of Ukraine called the Donbas, the name of that area, most of which the Russians already have, but they don't have all of it yet. The idea was that they would take that and stop, leaving the rest of Ukraine, most of it, to be its own country.

1:28:46They may now change that, and they may add the one port of importance that Ukraine has on the Black Sea, and that is the city of Odessa, a long, old city of Russia, which will then become Russian again, instead of Ukrainian. So that may be how they retaliate, by taking that city, which they haven't taken yet. And then there are two questions. If they do that, what then will the Europeans do? Because then the Russians will have retaliated to an escalation, with an escalation of their own. And so then in this sense, you know, the ball goes in the other court. Will the Europeans feel that they then need to, and what will they do?

1:29:38At that point the question becomes, whatever the Europeans do, let's assume for the moment that they don't revert to nuclear weapons, which would be really stupid. I mean, do the Europeans have nuclear weapons? Yes. The French and the British certainly have them. But they don't have anything like the arsenal that the Russians do, and everybody knows it. So it would be very strange to do that. What about the Russians? Well, Mr. Putin has two or three times now basically said, not exactly in these words, but pretty close, that if the escalations continue, that would be the last step, leaving the impression that he would consider it's called tactical nuclear weapons, because you're trying to contain the impact, so it doesn't become, you know, the free-for-all in which everybody's missiles are destroying everybody else.

1:31:04But the capacity to control that is dubious, to say the least. If you watch characters like Hankseth, then you're talking about an out-of-control cowboy. And I don't know, you know, I don't know how the army deals with people like him. I don't know how that works. I don't know at what point they say no, and it's no. But I know that that happens. We know that in retrospect. But is it a possibility? Yes. And, you know, that would be a first. I was born around the time that the United States dropped two atomic bombs in Japan on two civilian cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I've always felt that Americans are the last people on Earth to ever talk about or think about dropping nuclear weapons on other people, because we are the only people who ever did that.

1:32:21and a little bit of shame and a little bit of care is a is an obligatory accommodation to that historical fact the japanese have never forgotten than we oughtn't to either.

1:32:50If you think that a nuclear war would inevitably lead to a world war, what do you think a world war in the 21st century, especially given today's geopolitical landscape, would look like? So beyond, I mean, or even direct military conflict, Like, would there be proxy wars, sanctions, cyber attacks, energy warfare, or all of the above, things I haven't mentioned? All of those are possibilities. I haven't done the work in my own head to try to puzzle through, if it's even possible, an imaginary scenario of how that might work. my suspicion would be that once again it would be the Europeans who do that kind of craziness.

1:33:54And I mean not just the Europeans that are in Europe, but the Europeans that have settled in North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, all of that. the settler colonial outreaches of European culture and European politics. I can imagine a world war among them, but I can imagine an extraordinary effort of the Russians because of their history, and the Chinese because of their different history, doing everything they can to exclude themselves from this, partly because they know the horror of these wars, and partly because they would expect to pick up the pieces when the war is over. the decimation of Europe from a non-nuclear war, from World Wars I and II, was so total that in a way Europe has never recovered.

1:35:09It did recover in the formal sense, but its position in the world lost forever. They're done. Their colonies are gone. Their role in the world is gone, their economic, political, military... in no way... Europeans are an afterthought, you know, that they're not relevant anymore. And terribly painful for them, no preparation of their people for this, no preparation now. It's mostly, as I said, denial that they are committed to, prophetic as that is. And I think it's a warning shot. If the next war does to the West what the last two did to the European part of the West, and that's a good shot, a good bet, well it'll be the Chinese and the Russians and the Indians and the Brazilians who pick up the pieces.

1:36:12And they know it. And I think they will keep out of the war, knowing that they will inherit, much as the United States inherited what was left of the empire, the economic core of it, the politics was gone. All of these countries became independent, led by India, but all of them. The United States inherited only what was left, and economic dependence, which has been undermined and eroded ever since, culminating now with oil in the Middle East and the country of Iran. I think this is a lesson to the rest of the world. Let the crazy Europeans blow themselves to smithereens. We'll pick up the pieces.

1:37:03We will inherit what they destroy. It'll be a shame. We'll have to rebuild it, but we can do that, and we will all, we'll rebuild Europe so it becomes the wonderful, look, large parts of Europe already are dependent on tourism. Now, all of it will become dependent. It'll be one big, in France, one of the great areas, is called the Valley of the Loire River. And the Valley of, I don't know if you've ever been there, but the Valley of the Loire River, it's about a two-hour drive from Paris, southwest of Paris. It's a beautiful river, and it always was. It has a special kind of wine that is grown there, Loire Valley wine, very famous around the world.

1:37:57And along the way are the Chateaus of the Loire. And it's a major tourism area. You drive down from Paris and you visit these medieval castles, which is what they are, one more spectacular than the other. It's a fantastic tourism, but that's all it is. Very little industry, very little anything. It's tourism, lots of tourism, a beautiful place to be a tourist. etc. etc. etc. And the French food and the French wine and all the rest. And now, you know, more and more of France. It's already a country that depends on the wine and then the cuisine and the fashion and that goes with tourism and other people will produce what the French once did.

1:38:47Their manufacturing areas are all atrophied. They're in the north around the city of Lille. They're in the middle around the city of Lyon, and they don't have all that much. It's the tourism. And that'll be what is Britain. Britain is a cold, wet island off the mainland of Europe. It hasn't got much going for it. And it'll be less and less and less. And I think the rest of the world sees this and says, isolate the Europeans. And by the way, I think Mr. Trump is the number one isolator in the world today, and that history will record him as such. All the steps he's taking to isolate China or Russia, it all fails, and it ends up isolating the United States.

1:39:45when he stood up at the beginning of his second presidency and announced he was hitting every country in the world with a tariff. He held up a list of countries and rattled off how much he's going to hit this one with a tariff, starting off with Canada and Mexico, our erstwhile Allah. What is he doing? He's a little mouse standing up, shaking his fist at the whole rest of the world, which together, you little mouse, is an elephant. This is dangerous, what you are doing. You are isolating yourself, and the numbers and statistics are already there. The one big industry that has really taken a tremendous hit in the United States is tourism.

1:40:34The rest of the world isn't coming here. I'll give you another one from my own experience. Universities left and right are in deep trouble. The New School University here in New York City, where I've been a visiting professor, is effectively closing down. Where I used to teach in Western Massachusetts, it's called the Five College Area. One of those five colleges was a place called Hampshire College. This is its last summer. It is closing at the end of this year. Students are being told, go elsewhere. Faculty are being told, good luck in the career. And one of the reasons, foreign students aren't coming.

1:41:21It's not safe. If you're brown or black, ICE may pick you up and put you on a deportation plane to east and nowhere before you can find a way to get back if you can get a lawyer and get a hearing. Americans don't seem to like foreigners. The things they say, the things they do, incredible. So they don't come. We're becoming isolated. Every country and company in the world are saying, don't do business in the United States. If you become reliant on the United States, they may hit you with a tariff. The president may decide they don't like you or the country you come from. We don't even let people visit the United States.

1:42:17get a visitor's visa from many countries. We are isolating ourselves. And we're getting closer and closer to the time when the rest of the world says, good riddance. We don't need you. For manufacturing, we got China. For different skills and different cultures, we got Asia, Africa, and Latin America. what do we need the Europeans for? And the answer is not much. And what we got from them, we already have. What we need to get, we can get from them or do ourselves. We've been really good at it. The major producer of automobiles in the world once was the United States. Once was the United States and Europe.

1:43:16It isn't. Automobiles are now an international business, and the number one producer of automobiles is the People's Republic of China. Hello? The number one country in the world producing sources of energy other than fossil fuels that we need to get rid of for our physical health. Plus, we're running out of them. Well, who is the master of wind energy, solar energy? Uh-huh. The people, the Republic of China. I could go on. You don't want me to go on because you're going to get depressed. And you've been dizzy, many of you, denying what I just said and all the other examples I could trot out here in front of you.

1:44:09The West, desperate to hold on, is isolating itself because it doesn't understand what it is denying. If it did, it would sit down and try to work out a live and let live program for this world. Let me remind everyone of a little bit of history. World War I was so devastating, killed so many people in ways no one had foreseen, that after it was over, all of the countries involved, and many others, decided to organize something that had never existed before. They called it the League of Nations. And for several years, they all sent, all the countries sent delegates. And the job of the League of Nations was very simple.

1:45:18Make sure we never do to ourselves what we just did. never again might have been their slogan. In a few years' time, Germany, Italy, Japan quit and geared up for what? You guessed it, another world war. Their effort to work out a plan to live together failed. They went to war again. And that war, the second one, was even more devastating than the first. So many of them thought they learned their lesson. And after World War II, they organized another League of Nations, but they didn't want the bad luck of using the same name, given what had happened. So they called it instead the United Nations.

1:46:28And because of the dominance of the United States, the only advanced industrial economy that had not blown itself to bits in World War II, because the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans kept us too far away, aviation hadn't, and military hadn't developed, so that the Japanese could get at us beyond Pearl Harbor, or the Germans and Italians could get at us across the Atlantic. So we were the ones that came through. So in our primary city, New York, the United Nations headquarters were built, and where they stand literally a few blocks from where I'm sitting right now, United Nations headquarters. But over recent years, the United States has pulled away from the United Nations, refusing to pay its share of the costs, looking down on the United Nations, largely ignoring the United Nations.

1:47:42That's what Germany and Italy and Japan did after World War I. Not a good sign. Could we maybe, whether we call it the United Nations, which is already there, or something else, Couldn't we at least talk about working out an institutional arrangement so we debate these issues, argue, find compromises and peaceful solutions? None of the long-term problems of any European country were solved by these horrible wars. The wars set them back. The wars drove millions of people out of those countries who never went back. Those countries have had to deal with the enormous short, medium, and long-term costs of these horrific wars.

1:48:54Really? More of them? That ought to be a conversation that we have. It isn't one we have, but it ought to be. It will be the conversation once the phase of denial that we are a declining empire sinks in, and we stop denying it, we face it. It's the young generation that probably have to do it. The older ones are so deeply caught up in the nonsense of imperial dominance that they can't. They will take to their graves the pretense. If you want a wonderful metaphor, it's been going on the last few weeks, or at least the last few days. It's Mr. Trump's official celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States independence.

1:50:06By having what he thought was a quintessentially American institution, the state fair, you know, that many of our states have in the summer or more often in the autumn harvest time. It's a leftover of the time we were an agricultural country, which is itself a peculiar kind of nostalgia. We haven't been an agricultural country for a century. This is quite a while. We are, in case you've missed it, an urban country. The overwhelming majority of our people live either in a city or in a suburb of a city, and often in a suburb where they work in the city where their suburb is where they live. We are an urban culture, but not our president, who by the way lives in New York and Miami, which are two of our larger cities.

1:51:08But anyway, he wanted a rural, So he had a state fair. It is very remarkable because since it is an exercise in nostalgia located in a city, D.C., nobody's attending it. It's completely staggering aerial photographs of empty. It is so perfect. This exercise in denial of our urbanity, in nostalgia instead of asking the hard questions, in a celebration rural instead of urban, well, there you have it. You have a country that is denying its own decline, helping itself to the idea that if they increase their military budget by over 65 % in one year, and they already have the biggest military budget on earth.

1:52:24That craziness passes for reasonable, will be voted on probably by a majority of people sitting in the Congress, and you realize how far denial can go. How it's married to repression, which after a while is the only way denial can keep him in power, by repressing those who, like that famous child, noticing that the emperor was naked, said something about his nakedness, said something about the nakedness being denied by all the people who pretended to be adults in the room. We're at that point, too. And it is long past urgent that we get through it and get beyond it and start talking and debating our real situation and what we can do to make it decent for ourselves and our children.

1:53:40As we near the end of our time for this conversation, I want to put a bow on our discussion of nuclear war. And you certainly haven't said that you think it's inevitable, either in the Russian or Iranian sphere. But what I'm wondering is whether or not you think it is something that's just either going to happen or it's not, and there's nothing we can really do about it, or if you think that there are actually implementable, plausibly implementable policies that somebody might enact that would prevent this. I don't think anything is inevitable. Let me make that really clear. Even everything I've said to you about the decline of Europe, the decline of the United States, it's not inevitable.

1:54:41If you asked me, are there conceivable circumstances under which that could be postponed, delayed, even reversed? Yes, there are. There are. There probably always were for every empire. On the other hand, I'm as close to that as I can get, which is there'll always be a distance. I can't predict the future. I don't think anyone else can. That's what the word future means. It's always uncertain, but it is very far along. So I'm very confident in predicting that the odds are it'll continue to decline. Is there something we can do about it? Absolutely. That's what I'm doing, what I think we can do about it.

1:55:32Asking these questions, making these arguments, asking for people to engage these arguments, teach me if I've made a mistake, add something if I've overlooked it. I'm sure there are those things that I could see differently or give more weight to or whatever you want to call it. I'm pleading for that because I think if we all get together, we will all understand that the nuclear option is the one we need to do everything possible to avoid, since it is the worst possible end to our conversation. And I believe in conversation, I believe in the power of human thought to come up with very good solutions.

1:56:22If we're figuring out how to store information forever, how to have a search engine that can literally whiz in a matter of seconds through reams of literature and come up with a little story to tell about a topic, which we can now do with Google or ChatGDP and so forth, then we can certainly solve these other problems. I look upon our technical expertise as a little bit deeply misplaced. I like the old joke. You know, you've solved the problem of some arcane disease that is serious but affects other people, but we can't deal with the common cold. You know, I would rather have our scientists work on the common cold.

1:57:11I would rather use the social index. So, I would like to see us working our brains on the problems you and I've been discussing right now these last two hours. Let's go to work on that. Let's have a real think tank where people with really different perspectives get together to work on a problem and present what they've got to another think tank that has a whole another way of doing it, and let's see what comes out of that. Instead what we have is we have, you know, we have a capitalist version of all of this. The think tanks are captured by this or that money group, and they do what they are told by the money group to do.

1:58:00I mean, it's pathetic. It folds the solution back into a subordination to the problem. That's not what we want. What we want is, can we do it? Could we do it? I think so. Hawaii, I think so. I think the impulse of this League of Nations was the right one. I think the United Nations was a good bit better, and a good bit stronger, and lasted a good bit longer. We have to build on that, and we have to be serious, and we have to include the people we disagree with. Nobody's outside the pale. No more. And for Americans it will have to be learning the lesson. You can disagree with people who see the world differently from you.

1:58:49You can't demonize them. You don't have to allow yourself to be demonized either. But the demonization is dangerous because it is childish. When a toddler has a little truck taken away from them and runs towards a little boy or girl who took the truck, meaning to smash them in the head with another truck, an adult intervenes and tries to explain to the child, you're entitled to feel bad about the loss of your truck. You're entitled to demand it back. You're entitled to sit down with that other little kid and work that out. You're not entitled to hit him over the head. They are a person like you.

1:59:40What would it feel like if they hit you? I know this is for children, But adults are the result of children, and many of them never grow up. Calling your enemy every bad name you can think of. Worse than Hitler. Another Stalin. Stop it. It reflects badly on you. And you're oughtn't to do it. It's a dangerous step in a dangerous direction. I think all kinds of creative solutions could be found if we did not get in our own way.

2:00:26And the pessimist in me, though, thinks, sure, I can conceive of creative solutions that could avert possible catastrophes. But the fact of the matter is that the people who are in control of our future, the Putins, the Trumps, the Netanyahus of the world, I feel like they're not listening to these conversations that are being had. Okay, then the solution is to either make them listen or get rid of them. And eventually people do it. You know, I know it's... Thank you. It's a slow process. I probably, I don't remember, but I probably have reminded you of a famous politician whom I admire for many things.

2:01:25But this politician was berated by his colleagues who said to him, my God, it's taking a long time. The people are not acting. We have these terrible leaders like you just said. They were pessimists like you. It takes so long for the people to realize. And he looked at them and he said, you know, you're right. For decades, he said, it feels like nothing happens. And then in a few weeks, decades happen. That's the answer. It takes a very long time. And then suddenly, although the minute you look at it, It isn't so sudden. But it seems suddenly everything goes very fast. A year ago now, July, last day of, what is it?

2:02:28Today is the first day of July. So a year ago, July 1st, 2025, if you had said to me, the mayors of New York are one disaster after another. I would have nodded. I couldn't disagree with you. I've lived in New York now for 25 years, and I've been a New Yorker in my heart longer than that. And it's been one disastrous mayor after another, even one that I liked and helped a different defazio anyway and if you had said to me oh these awful mayors I would have said yes and are the people gonna rise up and get rid of them I said well it don't look like it and between July 1 and November an army of young people it's mostly who it was went to work across the city and overturned the history of new york city it elected a muslim socialist to be the mayor of new york a 35 or 36 year old man whose father is a famous world Marxist scholar, whose work I have used teaching as well as developing myself, who's a professor at Columbia University as I talk.

2:04:04His son runs for office as a practicing Muslim socialist. New York has a bigger Jewish community than most other American cities, all other Americans. The Jews voted for him too. Everybody voted. You know why? I talked to my neighbors here. We all voted for him. Everybody voted. Why? Because everybody says the same thing. The Republicans and the Democrats are intolerable. They're empty suits. They are people who say whatever the wind requires them to say until they get into office where a on, they literally forget anything they may have said before. We can't stand it. We can't stand waiting again, just like those subordinates said to that famous politician.

2:05:01And what Zoran Mandani is the guy's name, and what he said to them is the same thing that famous politician said. He said, let's get ourselves together, and let's go to the people, and let's say, you've been waiting long enough. We know you're pissed. You have every right to have better leadership. I'm it. Give me a chance. And we just had an election. Three more like him we elected, including a Jewish man who endorsed him for mayor, dropped out of the race for mayor to endorse him, and now ran for an office and won and beat an old conventional Democrat the way Mamdani did. I think that gives me hope that there will be movements, and I expect them everywhere, including Russia and China, to give you different leaders than the ones you have.

2:06:07that look it's true that leaders can do what they have done in the past it is also true that people can throw those leaders out as they have done in the past

2:06:22well rick i will keep this short and sweet that's an optimistic note on which to end And thank you, as always. My pleasure. And my conversations with you are giving me things to think about more as well. So I appreciate them also as opportunities for my thinking to develop.