2025.06.12 – Dialogue Works
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, June 12, 2025, and our friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are back with us. Welcome back, Richard, Michael.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let me start with what Tulsi Gabbard published yesterday, which is so important when it comes to her position in the Trump administration, in which we know she is the head of intelligence in the United States. Here is what she said.
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Tulsi Gabbard says, “This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake and what we are facing now. Because, as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.
Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust.”
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NIMA ALKHORSHID: I’m going to start with you, Richard. When it comes to the situation with the foreign policy of the United States, we are in the Middle East. The situation is getting worse. With the case of Ukraine, the same. It doesn’t seem that we have any sort of solution. And with China, it’s getting worse as time goes by. But focusing on you, you’ve mentioned before coming up, you’ve mentioned the situation in the Middle East is some sort of stalemate. Your take on that on what’s going on there?
RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, let me begin by responding, if I may, to Tulsi Gabbard. Making a speech, if you’re the American intelligence leader, about the dangers of nuclear war and atomic warfare, is an amazing thing to come from the mouth of the leader of the one country on earth that ever used nuclear weapons on another country. It is the absence of an apology. The absence of shame. The absence of a willingness to face what you did, and you want the rest of the world to step away from what? Nobody else did what you did.
It’s extraordinary. It’s a level of self-delusion that is a single most danger to produce nuclear war, that kind of self-delusion. Anyway, to answer your question, the Middle East has been and is now a stalemate. And here’s what I mean. For much of the last century, the Middle East was the playground for foreign powers that invaded and took over in order to control oil. That was the issue. That was the goal. That was the program.
Literally, a number of the countries there were created as countries. They weren’t countries when all of this started. They were created later. And the single dominant theme of their creation, of the literal formation out of a desert population of a quote-unquote nation, was designed and orchestrated in Europe and in North America, where these things were done. Now, several events have made this story no longer valid.
Number one is the rising up of the Arab and related peoples in that part of the world, who have fought and overcome their colonial situations, at least politically, not quite economically, but politically. That’s one new factor. Number two, the overwhelming use of Israel by the West as its outpost, focusing everybody’s attention on the Arab-Israeli contradiction and conflict. Allowing the Western powers to continue to get from the Middle East what they needed so long as the Arab population was focused on Israel, which was merely the symbolic forerunner of what was really going on.
And then finally, the new situation, the decline of the Western Empire, the United States, and the rise, especially of China, and secondarily now of Russia as China’s ally. Russia being right up against the Middle East, bordering some of the countries there and close to them in many other historical ways. So now you have a stalemate. There’s still enormous influence from the United States and Western Europe, focused still, by the way, on oil more than anything else, with a secondary support of Israel. But that is derivative about the oil anyway. And no one knows quite what to do.
The Arabs are demanding a rising power and influence in the area, which their numbers alone support and justify. It is, after all, their part of the world by any reasonable understanding of how geography and populations work. The West is powerful and holding on, but the West is holding on to what is ultimately a declining situation for them. And that’s not even taking account of the fact that fossil fuels will be phased out eventually, even though one has to be struck by the ability of the West to continue to hold on to as much importance for oil as their economic investment requires them to do.
Okay, nothing can change here now. This is… the contradictions are too many and too complicated. And you can see that by the inability of the world to do anything, confronted by what is the sharpest point of that contradiction, which is the Israeli bombing of the people of Gaza. Everyone in the world, the overwhelming majority, has a position on that. And the position is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. The votes in the United Nations show that.
I mean, there are a number of votes, in which it’s the entire world on one side and Israel and the United States on the other. I mean, one could not have a more dramatic demonstration of a stalemate because the bombing goes on. Nothing is in a position to act definitively to stop it. So we have a war that’s now going on and on and on, and people are talking about removing an entire population. It’s extraordinary.
And the second example is Iran. You can’t do anything. The Iranians have very powerful relationships, developed now over many years with both China and Russia. There’s even a formal defense, mutual defense agreement between Russia and Iran. If you attack Iran, where does that go? Israel would like to do it because Israel’s only hope in the long run is to draw the United States in much more than it is willing to go in there and support them. Otherwise, at some point, and I’m not the only one who says this, the United States will take a new look at Israel and do to Israel what it has done elsewhere when it isn’t anymore workable.
Look at the noise being made over Ukraine. And the rest of Europe is supporting Ukraine despite America walking away. They’re not that; they don’t feel that way about Israel. There’ll be less opposition if the United States walks away from Israel. So these are incredible tensions, but they are contradictions in a sense that nobody dares move.
And so when I hear, you know, the Israelis are considering invading Iran or bombing Iran or bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. I have heard that for the last 10 or 20 years. It’s a periodic theater for the mass media to get all excited and meetings to be held and conferences and the theater gets the personnel in the American embassy in Iraq to send their children out of the country. Come on.
You know, what is this? What is another, we’re going to have another scare? Or, of course, it is possible that people that are desperate enough in these stalemate situations will do something really stupid because they’re desperate when people do stupid things. There is, for example, much information emerging that the internal political and legal difficulties of Mr. Netanyahu may be catching up to him.
Will he then be provoked into doing something even he knows is stupid? Well, will the United States hide behind, I don’t know what, and claim that it doesn’t know about that? The way the United States didn’t know about the drone attacks on the Russian airplanes and on their fields, where they have to be by treaty out in the open and all of that. These are endless games.
There’s no more reality to this than listening after a night of drone and missile attacks to the Ukrainian government, telling you how it shot down all of the missiles and the drones, even while the press is showing the burning buildings. Or for that matter, the Russians. I can’t verify either of them, but I can tell when what we’re being told is quickly manufactured spin, as we call it in the U.S. That’s what we’re subject to. It’s very hard to get beyond that because so much information is withheld and so much information is phonied intentionally that we’re left with a limit to what we can say.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, about the military aspects, I can’t say anything that your other guests that you have on your show haven’t said much better because they’re on the spot there. What I can talk about is the economic point of view and the political view from the United States. And oil is the common denominator of U.S. diplomacy, both for Iran and for Russia. And it has been since World War II.
A center point of U.S. international strategy has been to control the world’s oil supply because oil is the key to energy, and energy is necessary for GDP and for employment. And the United States aim is to say: if we can control the world’s oil supply, we can do two things. We can cut off oil being supplied to countries that don’t follow U.S. Cold War policy, and that will cause a depression in them.
And also, oil because it’s produced in the United States as well as foreign countries, and because U.S. companies, along with England and the Seven Sisters, have long controlled most of the oil trade. Oil is the key to the financial standing of the West, to the balance of payments – a huge inflow. For the balance of payments, this has been able to fund America’s Cold War spending.
So you have oil upsetting all of this. The question is: what happens when this involves war? In 1954, when England and America jointly overthrew the elected Iranian government of Mossadegh and installed the military dictatorship of the Shah, that was a kind of covert war that they can afford.
The problem is: what do you do when actual military fighting is involved? And I think, regarding Tulsi Gabbard’s comment, the basic theme, the basic axiom of war is that atomic war is the only kind of fighting that a democracy can afford. It’s the only weapon that America has that is actually effective. It’s effective in blowing up the world, and there will be retaliation, and the U.S. will be wiped out. So it’s a kind of self-defeating weapon. But no democracy any longer can recruit an army to invade a country and take over.
Vietnam ended that for the United States, and no European country is able to mount a military draft. Any government, any democracy that tried to impose a military draft, would immediately be voted out of power or somehow taken out of power. So you can’t actually mount your own army.
America was able to attack Iraq and it was able to attack Libya. But these are wars against basically defenseless countries. I won’t say on the level of Grenada, they were a bit more than that. But if we’re talking about war with a major power, Russia or China or even Iran, America has no conventional warfare ability to destroy them or to beat them. That means that there is one alternative, and that’s to get a proxy army. And that’s exactly what the United States has been doing as an alternative to the domestic draft and the military war.
Its main fight has always been against Russia since the Soviet Union. And its main proxy army has been Arab fanaticism, the Sunni Wahhabi al-Qaeda. That was America’s alternative under Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan to try to fight against the Russian alliance with Afghanistan. And Jimmy Carter said, well, at least the Arabs and Christians all worship God.
Well, they worship in different ways. And so America founded al-Qaeda and set it up. It then extended al-Qaeda into the Near East, into Iraq, and into Syria, and it’s backed al-Qaeda in Syria, as you see now. And its other proxy army in the Near East has been, of course, Israel. And the agreement way back from the 1970s when I was working with the Hudson Institute was that Israel would act as America’s proxy army and intelligence service and general political satellite to prevent any independent development of Near Eastern countries going their own way and acting independently of U.S. policy.
And as you’ve seen, I think for the last 20 years under George W. Bush in Iraq, you had al-Qaeda always working hand in glove with the Israelis, never attacking them. There’s been that difference. For the first time now, they’re head to head in Syria. And the question is: there’s a jockeying for position between the Israeli army in Syria moving eastward and the al-Qaeda group wanting to consolidate as much control as it has so that it can murder the Christians, murder the Shiites, and go on its fanatic killing philosophy.
So that’s sort of the political alignment there. But even so, now, as Richard has just said, there’s a political stalemate. America can’t rely either on Israel or al-Qaeda to fight Iran. There is a stalemate there. And the question is: how is this going to be resolved? And I think it helps to look both at Iran and the situation with the fight of NATO against Russia in Ukraine to see that the alignment is much more than just that of the Trump administration and the politicians.
On the one hand, you have Trump intervening, although Trump is the number one backer of Ukraine and started the Ukrainian escalation of war against Russia in his first term. He also wants to be the mediator and the honest broker acting completely dishonestly, fully in alliance with Ukraine against Russia. So you have his pretending to be the good cop to Ukraine’s bad cop.
But in addition, while Trump and his administration have their position via Ukraine and Iran, you have Congress and you have Lindsey Graham from South Carolina. And no matter what agreement may be made between Trump and either Iran or Russia, you’ll have Congress pushing its own agenda and it’s virulently anti-Iran, pushing for war with Iran, and pushing for escalation of sanctions and war with Russia.
But then, most important is the third factor, and that’s the deep state, the CIA and its partner, London’s MI6. And they’ve really been in charge of U.S. foreign policy against Russia and Iran for the last 50 years. And they’re both virulently anti-Russian. They have both together set up huge terrorist organizations, assassination groups, spying organizations, intelligence gathering, both in Iran and in Russia. And they are pressing for active war because they actually believe that the United States can win a war and they believe that America can win an atomic war.
And I’ve sat in on discussions with policymakers and generals where they indeed have made that very claim. And I think that’s what Tulsa Gabbard was relating to when she said they think they can get into their bomb shelters. They really think that a preemptive strike would be able to dismantle Iran or Russia.
This shows the amazing patience that Iran and Russia have shown in not making their own preemptive defensive strike, in the case of Iran, against Israel and U.S. military outposts in the Middle East, or for Russia against the NATO countries that are supplying Israel with weapons. Starmer in England, Macron in France, and now Merz in Germany. And I can say more later on. I’ll let the discussion continue, but that’s the alignment that we’re dealing with.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard?
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think that the stalemate will likely continue for all the reasons we’ve now kind of gone over, and that it will be resolved by the ongoing evolution of the world economy, which will be the more important shaper of what those people do than anything in their bloviating denunciations of one another. And let me give you an example.
Yesterday, Xi Jinping, the head of the government in China, announced that the 53 countries of Africa will, as of some immediate and future time, be allowed to export to China with zero tariffs on any of them and on any product at any time. All right, that’s a milestone. Look at the meaning.
The United States, after it deals with China and after it deals with Russia and South Korea and Japan and the other bigger economies that concern it, will turn its attention, who knows when, to Africa, upon whom the United States has hit enormous tariffs, 30%, 40%, and 50% on small African countries. You know that you have to shake your head in disbelief. So the United States is deeply threatening the economic viability of African countries by imposing enormous tariffs at the same time that China removes all tariffs for the Africans.
For those who don’t know, China has been a more important trading partner for Africa for the last 15 years. It’s much more important for Africa to trade with China than it is for Africa to trade with the United States. And all that this shows is that the relationship is getting stronger and bigger and more important, both for China and for Africa. And the United States is simply becoming increasingly less relevant.
No one should be surprised then when, a few days earlier, the American military general in charge of the Africa command makes comments suggesting that the Africa command of the American military is a failure. I don’t know exactly what that word means, but I get the message. And it’s not because the United States military didn’t do the right thing or the wrong thing; it’s the development that I’ve just described, say between Africa and China, that erodes it from underneath.
No military question really needs to be asked. It’s already answered by the fact that everything is realigning in the world in such a way as to resolve all kinds of matters by the flow of economic development, regardless of what is done politically or militarily.
I don’t want to overstate this; the military and the political are important and have their influence. But I think, in this case, the stalemates that we talk about militarily and politically will likely be resolved by an economic development that is no stalemate at all. And you could see that in the London meetings over the weekend between the United States and China, in which there’s lots of spinning, but a bottom line looks like the United States had to give in order to get something and didn’t come out with any kind of new world order that is any different from the one in which the United States is losing.
And when Michael said quite correctly that the Vietnam War taught the United States the lesson of how dangerous it would be for the U.S. to try to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops from the American people, let’s remember the war was incredibly expensive. They made the mistake. The war came to an end because of the opposition at home and the United States lost the war. The Communist Party of Vietnam was the enemy, and the Communist Party of Vietnam runs that society politically now. They won, we lost, and we discovered that if you’re not careful, you lose the war at home, whether or not you’re doing better or worse on the battlefield over there.
This was very, very powerful and has affected our military and is behind half of what goes on that they will never tell you about, because admitting even the admission that they lost the war in Vietnam is difficult for them, not for anyone else in the world, but for them.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, when you take into account the economic view, Richard is quite right. It’s not a stalemate. It’s not a stalemate in Africa. Partly, we’ve just seen the United States abolish all of its foreign aid to Africa, which has been actually a great help in fighting disease and fighting famine. America has essentially told Africa “no more help.”
But I think the best illustration I can think of is what’s happening in Russia’s war with NATO. There have been a lot of the guests that you’ve had on your show, Nima, have talked about, you know, why is Putin going so slow? What is the pace of war? And it’s a war of attrition. It’s not trying to grab land. Putin is trying to save Russian lives.
But there’s another, a non-military reason why Putin is going so slow, very gradually, very defensively, making sure that he minimizes the number of Russian soldiers killed while maximizing those of Ukraine. And that’s because while this war is going on, Europe is being torn apart politically, as Richard and I have spoken on your show. When the United States has recruited foreign armies, it’s recruited foreign economies. And just as it’s willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, it’s willing to fight to the last German in industrial employment.
It’s convinced it has helped install leaders like the ones we mentioned earlier, like Merz in Germany, which is fully in favor of the war, despite what the German population wants. Essentially, NATO has hijacked the European Union by taking over the unelected von der Leyen and the Estonian, Kaja Kallas, to steer the EU in a diametrically opposite direction from what every test of voters has shown.
The voters want peace, not war. They want low energy prices, not high energy prices as a result of the sanctions against Russia. They want the government to spend money on social programs, especially to subsidize the cost of heating their homes and getting electricity now that their energy prices have quadrupled.
The dissatisfaction against Starmer’s Labor Party in England and the Christian Democrats in Germany and Macron’s party in France. All of these parties are being threatened by the nationalist parties on the right, from England to France to the German AFD and nationalist parties that are also coming to power. You just had that occur in Poland. You had that occur in Romania with Europe saying, we are no longer a democracy.
As Mark Twain said, if voting really mattered, they wouldn’t let you do it. And when it began to threaten to matter in Romania, they said, well, we’re not going to let you do it. We’re going to appoint who gets to win. Just as the United States appointed a Venezuelan leader to be the recipient of Venezuela’s foreign gold reserves in absentia.
Essentially, we’re having a breakdown of democracy that, of course, is leading to a nationalist reaction. I’m very disappointed that this nationalist reaction is all on the right, not on the left, but the important thing is that it is a reaction against the existing pro-NATO, pro-U.S., pro-Cold War interests. The longer that President Putin takes to very thoroughly follow his intentions that he’s been explaining in detail again and again for the last three years, the more Europe is going to be pulled apart while the German and European economies shrink and the Russian economy accelerates.
Certainly, this is becoming more and more obvious, and the strains are arising. You’ve already seen the economic and political strains in Israel as a result of the war in Gaza. And any attempt to extend this war to Iran, from everything that your military experts have been saying on your show, Nima, would be that Iran can essentially destroy most of Israel and many American camps and military installations in the Near East, which is why the United States has just pulled back the families and non-essential soldiers in all of these military installations.
So it looks like certainly either the State Department is trying to pull a stunt of saying, we’re really threatening to go to war. We’re pulling back all the non-essential people. Do you really want war, Iran? Either this is just a kind of threat, which is another weapon that the United States has, but it’s become another weapon of what Mao called a paper tiger.
And I think Iran, Russia, and China are coming to think of America now as a paper tiger because the whole military strategy of the United States has proved to be inferior to that of the countries it’s attacking. In Ukraine, it was based on tanks. Well, tanks worked in World War II. Tanks worked in Iraq and the Near East against pretty defenseless armies. But tanks don’t work any longer on the battlefield against another actual landed army because you have drone warfare.
The drones can defend themselves against tanks at a much lower price. The Air Force doesn’t seem to work. If there’s any attack on Iran, it has to be by American airplanes able to carry the bombs capable of fighting Iran. And Iran apparently has the Russian, and its own, air defense that makes the United States hesitant to trust the Israeli and U.S. Air Force in all of this. That’s what makes it seemingly a standoff.
But then you have the wildcard, as Richard said, of somebody acting really stupidly, meaning ideologically or just on their own volition. And whether it’s someone as unstable as Donald Trump and his inexperienced cabinet, or whether it’s the deep state that says, yes, we’re probably going to lose, but we’re not going to lose if we go and have a war with Russia and Iran now as badly as we’ll lose in five years as we get weaker and weaker compared to their growing strength. So that’s the real problem that we’re dealing with.
The U.S. military strategists and political strategists are, to the extent that they’re realistic, realizing that the U.S. military advantage that they have had based all of their foreign policy on since World War II is now gone. And how do you try to maintain your unipolar economic policy when your military policy is gone? When the cost of recruiting a client army, such as NATO or Israel or those of Arabs al-Qaeda and the Wahhabis, how are you going to do that when you’re steadily losing relative power to the countries that you have decided as your emissaries?
They’re in a defensive position. America is in the offensive position. That’s really the issue. And the other trigger can be, of course, at what point will the defensive position say, we see an airplane taking off from the West. Maybe it’s coming to us. Let’s shoot it down. That’s probably going to be the next big crisis, whether it’s over the fight against Iran or the fight against Russia. It’s 50-50.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, before coming to you, here is what the NATO Secretary General said about the conflict with Russia.
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The reporter asks, “Do you agree with Kyiv that, to end this war, it’s going to require additional long-range strikes into Russia to take out its industrial capacity?”
Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, responds, “Well, to end this war, we need Putin to come to the negotiating table and not with this historian, who is now popping up in Istanbul twice and again telling us about the history of Russia and Ukraine from whatever the 12th century, I don’t know what it was, and constantly restating what they stated already in 1922. You need a Russia, which is serious, that wants to negotiate and end the war. And to get there, it all, I think, starts, of course, with keeping Ukraine strong in the fight.”
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NIMA ALKHORSHID: We had, by the way, we had an article in the Financial Times. It somehow tries to picture the Ukrainian army in such a way that the latest attack on nuclear bombers of Russia was done by AI. That they don’t need manpower because they know Ukraine has the problem of manpower in the fight against Russia. They’re trying to change the rhetoric. They’re trying to keep Ukraine in this fight that they know is destroying Ukraine. Go ahead, Richard.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think there’s again the answer lies in being aware of the history. The very effort of that person on the clip to put away the historian, that’s not interesting except as a reflection of the need not to think historically about these questions because you don’t like where that thinking takes you. So let me do it and give you another way of understanding it.
Ever since 1945, Europeans have been in awe of the United States. After all, the United States was where, in the end, they borrowed the money to fight World War I. The United States was the country that could produce military ships and planes and bombs in World War II that were what the Europeans relied on more and more as the war progressed.
The irony, the historical irony, is that the United States was the industrial superpower of the first half of the 20th century and was therefore in a position to become the dominant empire because the Europeans fought a war which exhausted them, destroyed them, and created literally the market for American industry. Before the war, by the nature of economics, and after the war, by the nature of the war, as the Marshall Plan showed, the United States was in a position to lend them the money to use to buy the American industrial output without which there wouldn’t have been a reconstruction or it would have taken much, much longer.
So here’s the reality. In Europe, after 1945, and up to this minute, every active politician learned if he or she didn’t know it before that the way to go up the career ladder in the governments of Europe was to be known, to befriend the United States. To be pro-American. To be eager to accommodate the superpower. And every politician who didn’t get that memorandum was pushed aside, often by the United States, who made it crystal clear: we don’t like this one. We don’t want that one. We’re not happy with this one. That’s how it worked.
When you read now about the behavior of the woman American diplomat, whose name I forgot, who put Mr. Zelensky into power, that was not unusual that an American diplomat, an ambassador, or a….
NIMA ALKHORSHID: You’re talking about Victoria Nuland.
RICHARD WOLFF: That’s right. Victoria Nuland. Thank you. She’s not unusual. She is not distinctive. There’s nothing interesting or exceptional about her, including dismissing the Europeans who cared about them. That’s what she’s famous for. But she only said out loud what everyone knew.
Why am I telling you this? Because the leaders of Europe today, Starmer, Macron, and Merz, that’s who they are. They have built their careers. They have spent the last 30, 40, 50 years building a career around being the patsy for the United States. That’s who they know. That’s where their self-image comes from. They’re not going to turn against the United States because they’ve gotten to the position they have precisely because they were the most acceptable to the United States. No one should be surprised by this. Of course, that’s where they go.
And if there is a moment when an unusual American leader like Trump questions what’s going on, it’s going to take some time before others who question like Trump, displace this generation of European leaders who are simply carrying out what they have developed.
It reminds me of a famous cartoon I used to see in the movies. And there’s an image of a duck running off the edge of a cliff. And it gets to the edge and it keeps on running for another few minutes before it looks down and realizes there’s no cliff anymore and then it drops like a stone. You are going to see in Europe over the next months and years the steady, slow disappearance of the U.S. pandering European political elite. And they’re going to be replaced by people who see the world differently and who reject a future because it’s not looking very good for them.
And then Mr. Merz is the ultimate. Because Mr. Merz not only made his political career by being a patsy, but he worked for Blackstone or BlackRock, one of the two leading investment houses, as the head of their German office. Okay, you can’t be more American than Mr. Merz. So he is, he’s the poster boy, and Macron isn’t different, and Starmer isn’t different.
We’re watching the last of the Mohicans here, but it’s not a tribe in America, it’s a tribe in Europe. And getting together around Ukraine is like old home days. It’s these people once again being in their element, fighting the evil Russians on behalf of the Americans, standing up for democracy, and intoning all of the catechism of that kind of politics. And like the duck running off the edge, they can’t stand looking down because if they do, they will see that the United States, to whom they are showing their good obedience, isn’t there anymore, but has turned and left and is looking at them as if they were the patsies that they always were.
There is no greater hatred than that of the master, who no longer leads the slave and needs to get rid of that slave and has to come up with an excuse and not understand how much the slave did for them. This is pathological politics that we are watching.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think Richard has summarized the European political dynamic quite well. I’m beginning to wonder how much Trump really is trying to set out a new position, vis-à-vis the Cold War. After all, it was he who broke the original agreement with Iran, and he who escalated the situation of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
There’s one theory that I think some of the guests on Nima’s show have suggested: that what Trump is trying to do and what the American deep state is trying to do is even though they know they cannot win the war, even though they accept the principle that, yes, it’s a stalemate, at least they can use the stalemate to continue to drain Russia, drain Russia, and drain Russia, as long as America is not paying the expense, Europe is paying the expense, Israel is paying the expense, the Arab countries are paying the expense, as long as they can do that.
But the whole idea is to somehow be enough of an annoyance to Russia, which is the highest level of victory they can have, an annoyance, and an external cost to say to Russia. Well, you know, we can stop all of this. You can come over to our side if you will agree to join us in sanctioning your natural enemy, China. I think that is the fantasy that the dream state has.
I’m beginning to worry about Trump’s policy; it’s as if Trump is following all of this deep state fantasy that, yes, if we can just somehow pressure Russia enough, the fantasy was that number one, Russia’s growth would decline, the ruble would decline in price, not rise. The voters in Russia would turn against Putin’s United Russia Party, not support it, as populations do when they support their leader, when their country’s at war.
Their whole fantasy was based on even though not winning, they could somehow persuade, they could hurt Russia enough that it would come over to their side to avoid the hurt and be willing to ultimately commit suicide, let the United States move into Ukraine, carve up Russia and destroy Russia, and then try to do the same against China.
That’s the Cold War fantasy that the deep state has, and that the deep state’s trying to gain enough support for, from the crazies in Congress, from Schumer on the Democratic side to South Carolina in the Senate on the other side. I think that’s the real dynamic that they’re facing. And it’s a crazy dynamic, and it’s bound to fail. And as Richard just said, the master gets very angry when it sees itself losing.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add that the missing element, Michael is right, the missing element here is having a significant part of your population, whether it be of your political leaders or of the society as a whole, who asks the obvious, which is if you keep doing what you’re doing to Russia, if it doesn’t seem to be draining them, turning them in on each other, upsetting the society, then maybe what you’re facing is what you should have imagined in the first place, that sometimes when you attack another country, you solidify it and unify it and mobilize it to be your enemy.
And then you’ve made the mistake of losing because you have strengthened your own enemy. You have to ask that question. It looks like Russia has gotten exactly that. Mr. Putin gets enormous popular support from polling, including polling done by people that are not friendly to him. So we’re not stuck with only one kind of evidence.
And look, Mr. Trump’s attack on the world by imposing tariffs on everybody makes the rest of the world very much able, no matter how sleazy their politicians might be, they’re all in a position now to do something that has more than a grain of truth, to blame whatever the economic problems are of their country on the United States. You have positioned yourself as the big bad herder. You’re the one who’s hurting their exports, their imports, their balance of payments, their gold holdings, whatever the hell it is. There is a logical link of that to the tariffs and all of that.
Look, there’s a new leader of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce just announced. Okay, the new leader does what the old leader did. We like Trump. Oh, yes, tax cuts are wonderful. But you know, this stuff about tariffs? Awful. They don’t want these tariffs. And why is that important? Because the business community of America will go along with everything Michael just said about the American government as long as it doesn’t look like they’re going to lose. Because at that point, it’s not attractive anymore.
Mr. Trump better be very, very careful. Running after the fantasy of the State Department, as he described it, as Michael just described it, is all well and good until it isn’t. And when it doesn’t work, when it’s beginning to cost, then the questions will be raised.
My goodness. Just as now, the questions will be raised. Not by people who are against his policies on immigrants. They don’t care. They’re not against deporting. They don’t care. But if you can’t function in downtown Los Angeles, because of the policy, then they care. That they do not want. That’s disruptive to business, to commerce, to tourism. They don’t want any of that. And that’s a problem. And that’s a problem you should have understood you could be worsening by the very policies that you’re pursuing.
There is no evidence that the Russians are facing a situation that would require them to do what the fantasy Michael just described would have them do: throw in the towel, give up the fight. Not at all. There’s nothing. There’s no evidence at all. The right wing is correct in this country that the Russians continue to fight the war and that absolutely nothing you have done to them has led them to come to the table.
The only really interesting thing is if putting tanks where you hadn’t put them, putting F-16s where you hadn’t put them, whether raising the sanctions, by the way, the latest European sanction package is called package number 18. That’s because 17 previous ones did not work. That’s why you have more of that.
But there’s an old joke. You keep doing the same thing, hoping for a different result-suggests that you’re not sane anymore. We are at a very dangerous point. There isn’t much left in the way of slack. And by the time they figure it out, which is another six months, most military experts think the war in Ukraine will be over within six months because the Russians will have finished the job. And we are in a very bizarre moment of this whole story.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the interesting thing, Richard, is that you and I can say these things on Nima’s show, and even the Chamber of Commerce can begin to show realism. But if you and I worked for the CIA or the State Department, they would say we’re not team players. We’re not on the team.
We would be forced out, just like Ray McGovern describes his having been forced out by the CIA. That our voices are not heard within the U.S. deep state or within the government or within the leaders of the Democratic and the Republican Party. That’s the problem. They have thoroughly insulated themselves from reality. I guess you could say that’s the big picture wrapping all of what we’ve been discussing.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yep. All I can tell you is every now and then, despite my having the label Marxist put on me, I am invited by a hedge fund in downtown Manhattan. And when I get there, I say always ask my first question: why are you having someone like me talk to you? And their answer, if they’re smart, and those are the ones that hire me to do it, they answer, well, we know what the other side thinks. We see it all day, every day. We need to understand what critics think. That’s what part of our job is. Of course, we invite people like you because, because quote, it would be stupid not to.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Exactly. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you.
Thank you to our team:
Transcription: hudsearch
Editing: Harrison Betts