Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy: A new era of global power politics

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau Putin and the apartment bombs Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games To the European Athletics Championships The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score The podcast that goes beyond the score sheet Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday For interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines.

1:07More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:19Hello, I'm Amol Rajan, BBC presenter, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, an expert on globalisation, the geopolitics of energy and the democratic and economic upheavals of the 21st century.

2:01We discuss whether the world is entering a new era of power politics, from the rebirth of American expansionism to the dynamics of global competition played out through the control of resources, in particular oil. She tells me about the new world order that is emerging through the changing relationships between nations. China is no longer anything like weak, but China is also asserting itself at least commercially in the Western Hemisphere across the Pacific. And that is existential for the United States because the United States then as a geopolitical power has never been in this position before.

2:41The only United States geopolitically that we know is the one that emerged out of the 1890s in a world in which China was incredibly weak. That world simply does not exist anymore. So we should, I think, regardless of whether it's Trump or anybody else in the White House, expect something quite significant to be going on in terms of the United States' relationship with the West of the world, because the conditions of its original rise have kind of unravelled. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Professor Helen Thompson. Can you just explain how what Donald Trump has just done in Venezuela is about making the Western Hemisphere, again, part of, if you like, US control?

3:23I think that the central point is about the physical resources, whether they be hydrocarbons, oil and gas, or whether they be metals that are there in the Western Hemisphere. and that what the United States was keen on at the end of the 19th century and going into the 20th century, that as oil exploration took off at scale, a very strong awareness that it did not want European companies in that part of the world because the United States thought that these were resources that in time that it would want. You can see it quite clearly like in Mexico where actually it was a British company that discovered oil and then various moves were made to try to ensure that the United States became dominant in the Mexican oil industry.

4:13Now that was quite complicated because of Mexico's internal politics too. But it's essentially saying like hands off to the resources of the Western Hemisphere to European companies. Not as to say entirely successfully to begin with. And I think that what we can see now is that we place Britain with China and what people in Washington see, particularly those close to Trump, is that over the last 20 years or so, that China's increasingly been investing in the resource sector in Latin American countries. That's true in relation to oil, it's true in relation to minerals and under the Trump administration, position is this is not acceptable.

4:55It's amazing what you've written about, which is true, about China's influence in South America. I didn't know that China is South America's largest trading partner and 22 Latin American and Caribbean states are members of its Belt and Road Infrastructure Initiative. And on reading this and discovering this, you realise that what Washington and what Trump is doing in Venezuela can be seen as a response to. It's not a sort of preemptive thing. It's almost a response to the fact that China has been trying to extend its influence. They've had a kind of Western Hemisphere politics. They've been trying to get increasing control over the resources of South America.

5:31Absolutely. And if you look at it from China's perspective, you have to start from the fact that they are in many ways, and rare earth is an obvious exception, a resource poor state. If you look at it in terms of oil, China needs to import about 10 million barrels of oil a day. It is the world's largest oil importer, having replaced the United States. In China's mind, that is a very serious vulnerability. And its response to that is to say we need to import oil from as many different places as possible, because we do not want to be reliant on anywhere in particular. So we'll take some from Russia, we'll take some from the Middle East.

6:16Take some from Venezuela. We'll take some from Venezuela, perhaps Latin America more generally. That strategy has worked pretty well, particularly given the ways in which other large oil importing states have had any number of geopolitical difficulties that have arisen from that dependency. But what I think you can say that the Trump administration is trying to do is say, actually, this is a pressure point for China. Regardless of what's going on in the Western Hemisphere itself, we can make life harder for China by interfering with the way in which it wants to import oil from different parts.

6:51of the world. And if you think that one of the big things that's gone on last year, probably in some ways more important than anything else in geopolitics, in terms of the shock, at least in Washington, was China's systematic use of a rare earth's embargo to undermine Trump's attempts at a serious reset of US-China trade. What Washington's seen is China use the United states rare earth dependency against it and i think that part at least of what's going on now is the trump administration saying we'll find the resource pressure points for china one of them is venezuela one of them is iran and you can see trump saying there'll be 25 tariffs on any state that is doing trade with iran at the moment and that hurts china's oil because 90 of iran's oil goes to China.

7:42What did China do with its rare earths embargo that spooked America and has prompted America to make moves in a kind of resource direction? What happened was, and if you go back to like April, Liberation. Liberation Day. Liberation Day. Tariffs. Pretty much the first move that the Chinese made in response was an embargo on seven of the 17 rare earths. It actually wasn't just to the United States, it was effectively worldwide. And that caused enormous unhappiness, not just in Washington, but in any number of capitals. You can see quite a lot of discontent being expressed by European governments.

8:22And if you go back and look at Trump's language, including the almost begging he does at various points for China to come to the table and make an interim at least trade agreement, it's all framed around rare earth because he knows that China has hit an incredibly vulnerable spot for the United States. And I think that you can understand part of what is going on now as the Trump administration, as I say, trying to do the same in reverse. China does not have the same single dependency that the US has over rare earths, at least in the energy sector. But it can find life a little bit more difficult.

9:00And it can particularly, I think, have to realise that its present strategy of oil diversity where imports is concerned might be a medium term problem for it. So in a world of might is right and power and force is what matters. And this, by the way, is what Stephen Miller, who's Trump's very influential deputy chief of staff, says, you've got to work out your opponent's weakness and their strength. And going after Venezuela is by extension a way of weakening China and weakening Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere. I think it's a statement to China about the Western Hemisphere as much as it is anything.

9:38Hands off. And look, the amount of oil that China's going to lose from Venezuela is not that much. It's probably about 4 % of China's imports at the moment. It's easy for it to make up like somewhere else. But losing, say, Iranian oil raises the stakes somewhat higher. And you can see that a parallel move has been made there. You can even see actually what's gone on in Iraq in the last six months. And this is where Russia comes back into the picture as well. The US oil companies are going back into Iraq. I mean, they didn't all leave. But one of the things that's happened is that the sanctioning of the two Russian oil firms, so Luck Oil and Rosneft, has made it difficult for those companies in Iraq that often are in some kind of de facto partnership with the Chinese companies, which have been quite important in Iraq.

10:25And now the US companies are back. That's another complication for China. Put all these things together, they add up. Now, I'm not saying that it's necessarily going to be a successful strategy, not least because in terms of its medium term ambitions about Venezuelan oil production being much greater and the US oil companies come back, it's a lot more complicated than Trump would make it out to be. But at the same time, I think it at least partially succeeds in showing to the Chinese that there are ways in which the United States can disrupt its ability to import oil, at least on the terms that China would like to import that oil.

10:59Quite. Lots and lots of people talk about something called the Monroe Doctrine. It's named after an early president of America, James Monroe, who coined that phrase in 1823. But it was Grover Cleveland, a much later president of America, who in 1895 basically enforced that Monroe Doctrine, which is about American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In Trump's re-inauguration speech, there's only one former president which he mentioned, and it was William McKinley. And his term was defined by, yes, tariffs, but also by the acquisition of territory. And Trump said in his re-inauguration speech, America will once again expand its territory.

11:35Why are they looking to it for such inspiration? Why does this period towards the end of the 19th century seem to have such loud echoes today? There's two different ways of going at that. There's the first, there's the question of what might be going on in the minds of the Trump administration. and Trump himself. I think that they like it because at that point, the United States was a fairly, you know, unashamedly expansionist state. But I think that there's another thing going on, which isn't really about what's going on in their minds, but it's about trying to understand that moment in, if you like, world history.

12:13And I do think it is like a world history moment rather than just a geopolitical moment. If we say that that's the beginning, the 1890s, of the United States becoming a geopolitical great power, it is also a decade in which imperial China is in serious crisis. And indeed, in its twilight years, it will be over by 1911. It's part of China's century of humiliation. humiliation and it's particularly bad in that decade because it's the decade in which that they lose taiwan to japan of course and so actually if you think about it in these terms then the united states rise as a geopolitical power first obvious in the pacific comes at this moment in which china is by any previous historical standard astonishingly weak and i don't think that these two things can be considered entirely separately from each other.

13:12But that means that if we go to now, and we think about the fact that China is no longer anything like weak, but China is also asserting itself at least commercially in the Western Hemisphere across the Pacific, then that is existential for the United States. Because the United States then, as a geopolitical power has never been in this position before. The only United States geopolitically that we know is the one that emerged out of the 1890s in a world in which China was incredibly weak. That world simply does not exist anymore. So we should, I think, regardless of whether it's Trump or anybody else in the White House, expect something quite significant to be going on in terms of the United States' relationship with the West of the world because the conditions of its original rise have kind of unravelled.

14:07You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service with Professor Helen Thompson. She's an academic at Cambridge University who has been unusually prescient about what Donald Trump would do in the Americas. A couple of years ago, she said that the Western Hemisphere was a hugely alluring idea to President Trump and that China's activities around Venezuela, around Panama would prompt an American reaction. She's obviously right when she says that we are in a new era of great power politics. But what she has often focused on in a way that I've maybe not understood or appreciated nearly as much as I wish I had is the central role of oil, not just in America's interest in Venezuela, but also in more recent events like the Iraq war and indeed the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the financial crash of 2007 and 8.

14:59And there is a sense, as you speak to the extraordinarily erudite and thoughtful Professor Helen Thompson, that actually oil and the battle over energy resources is one of the secret drivers of global history, and sometimes not so secret. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

15:41What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games to the European Athletics Championships. The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events. Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score, the podcast that goes beyond the score sheet. Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday for interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

16:31OK, let's return to my conversation with Professor Helen Thompson. Where does Europe fit into all this? Is there a kind of radical idea in Europe now breaking away from the US? In principle, the radical option would be to try to be self-sufficient. I mean, whether it's possible in terms of what sacrifices would have to be made for that and whether most Europeans are willing to make those sacrifices is another matter. Is it a stupid option? I mean, I can't think of any Western European leader, including the sort of hard right ones that might win as populists from the Netherlands to France, if Le Pen and Jordan Bardella get in there, who would advocate that.

17:13I mean, for Europe to sort of decouple from America, I mean, I don't know what that decoupling looks like because their economies are so sort of interconnected. But really, we're talking about defence independence there, aren't we? And Europe does not have a defence. It also would require energy independence. And actually, over the last three, four years now, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe is actually more energy dependent upon the United States than it was previously, because it's important, much more liquefied natural gas from the United States. And I do think that this gets a core difficulty for what might be called the bid for strategic autonomy from the United States to use Macron's language.

17:56The condition of doing this will be a reset with Russia, recognizing Russia as a civilizational state that is part of Europe's own civilization too, albeit not exclusively. He's right in that, because if you think about it, if Europe is going to have to look after its own defence, free from the Americans, it does not want to have to be doing that at the time of having particularly confrontational relations with Russia. In fact, more confrontational than before. But I mean, the possibility of a reset with Russia disappeared with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So now, in terms of the bid for strategic autonomy or the aspiration for strategic autonomy for Europe on the defence side, it's a much harder ask than it was when Macron was making those speeches in 2019.

18:46And it's then complicated by the fact that, as I say, that the energy dependency is now actually greater than it was. So the corollary, in terms of energy, would be an energy reset with Russia, which I don't think most European governments are in any mind to do. You're held up as kind of, and understandably, given your research and interests, as kind of the preeminent interpreter of oil as an engine, get it, of human history. Who today is benefiting from the fact that they've got oil in the ground beneath them? How is oil affecting power politics today? Russia, I mean, has been, I think, the biggest beneficiary over a longer period of time because it has been a steady oil producer, with the exception of the problems that came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

19:43And it has had, since Putin at least has been leader of Russia, a leader who is determined to use Russia's oil power as an instrument of geopolitical power. And high power. Yeah, I think the problem that Putin has is that significant blows have been delivered to him over the last few years. They're not just about oil, they're about gas and particularly like the loss of significant part of the European gas market. What he has found is that the United States is actually willing, it must be said in some ways, particularly under Trump in the last year or so, to make things quite difficult for the Russian oil companies.

20:34And I think, as I say, the exhibit A of that at the moment is the sanctions on Rosneft and Locoil that essentially forced their withdrawal, not certainly Locoils, withdrawal out of Iraq. The United States has been a very big beneficiary, I would say, of shale oil over the last decade and a half because it has allowed the United States to have more foreign policy options than it did in the world in which it was the world's largest oil importer. That doesn't mean that the United States has been able to do what it likes where oil is concerned. And it certainly hasn't been able to do what it likes in the Middle East, quite the contrary.

21:15And actually, the United States is still dependent upon importing oil, which I think has ultimately constrained the attempts of every president from Obama to try to detach from the Middle East. But the United States would be in a much more, I think, geopolitically difficult position if the shale boom hadn't occurred. Just to bring it finally, finally, finally to geopolitics, in big sweeping historical and geopolitical terms, what do you think we're living through at the moment? Is it the start of something else or is it just the kind of fag end of something? I guess the way I think about it is that there was a period of world history that came to the end in the 1970s.

21:58And actually, you know, the end of the European empires and the consequences of that geopolitically in the Middle East and for oil production were quite like central to that. And the end of that era put everything into play, which is why the 70s were such a turbulent decade. And there was, from about 82, a way out of that, which interestingly did involve the Western Hemisphere, which was increased oil production in the Western Hemisphere, Alaska, Mexico, but also not the Western Hemisphere, like North Sea. and that was very convenient from the point of view of western democracies because it wasn't arab producing or iranian producing oil that was making things easier and that that period the interlude if you like came to an end around 2005 so i i think that we've been living in a much more fraught energy world and that central since then and that central to that is not just the return of China but India too the the way in which actually the much larger population of Asia in relation to Europe now has real significance and again it goes back to this issue of then how do we think Think about that first part like of the 20th century and that period in which China is absent and India is ruled by the British.

23:35It's a kind of I mean, I'm still struggling to understand how I quite frame this myself. But I think we just need, particularly in Europe, to see how odd those centuries of European dominance, particularly the latter part of it, actually. They were the exception rather than the norm. And I do think that the world becoming not just more China-centric, but more Asian-centric is actually quite central to the period in which we now live. And I think this goes back to fossil fuels, particularly oil, but not only in an interesting way, because then we can say, well, look, the really odd thing was that first Britain with industrialisation via coal, And then the United States and Russia, Soviet Union, as oil producers, shaped this world of hypercapita fossil fuel energy consumption without that much participation from the two most populist countries in the world.

24:43And once that changes, and once they're on trajectories in a fossil fuel world to being hypercapita energy consumers, not that they're quite there yet, in India's case. That is like a, that's just radically different than the world that came before it.

25:05Thank you for listening to The Interview. For more compelling conversations, search for The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You'll find episodes from the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, British Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, plus many others. Until the next time, goodbye for now.

25:54chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games to the European Athletics Championships. The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events. Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score, the podcast that goes beyond the score sheet. Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday for interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines.

26:39More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

26:50Thank you.