Michael Hudson: Iran War Ignites Global Financial Armageddon

Welcome back. We are joined today by Professor Michael Hudson to discuss the devastating global economic struggle, uh, which is resulting from the Iran war and also essentially what is becoming then a, you can say, a competition for the economic world order that will follow whatever this world order, uh, whenever this world order comes to an end. Uh, so thank you, as always, for coming back on the program. It's always nice to be here because the questions you ask are, uh, have to do with how the whole economy throughout the world is evolving.

Yeah. And there's so much happening, uh, all at once. And these are really, again, historical times when we see the economic architecture from the past 80 years falling apart in front of our eyes. And we want to, I'd like to know what, what might follow after this and also explain how the different actors behave. And, uh, you wrote, wrote, um, you published very recently an excellent article with the name, uh, yeah, sorry, there was the title, uh, "Postponing the World's Financial Winter: For How Long?" And, uh, I would, uh, recommend everyone to write to read it, and, uh, the link is in the description.

So, um, I, I thought a good place to start would be the energy markets because this is obviously, uh, a big hit for the world economy. The US war on Iran essentially plunging all these international energy markets into crisis. H, I was wondering if you see a silver lining for the US in terms of these energy problems.

Well, energy markets is just about everything. Uh, you have fertilizer, for instance, and fertilizer prices, I'm told, in India have already gone way up. Certainly in America, uh, they're going up to such an extent that farmers are saying, if they pay for the fertilizer and for the equipment and for all the other, in, inputs whose price is inflated, they're not going to be able to make money on their crops. Well, of course, crop prices may go up because all over the world there's going to be a crop shortage without fertilizer, but farmers need to, uh, go to a bank and borrow before they can spend, uh, for the spring planting and, and the summer. And that usually entails selling the crop in advance for a guaranteed price. So, the big companies that are the crop trading companies are going to make a big profit, not the farmers. So they're really, really being screwed. And of course, they're the ones who are most loyal to Trump and the, and the Republicans. So, of course, uh, America, they can afford to screw the, the farmers because they're, uh, they're his base.

But pharmaceuticals are also in there. That's made out of all this, uh, fertilizer. Pharmaceuticals. Uh, the already the neon, I'm sorry, the helium, uh, has already been stopped, and so that interferes with the, uh, hospital, uh, scanning machinery as well as, uh, cryogenic freezing of, uh, computer chips. Uh, then you have just the basic energy for transportation, especially the highly refined, uh, airplane fuels that have already led to huge cutbacks in the airlines' planned flights for this summer for the tourist season. So energy is really the whole economy. And people, uh, uh, you get the sort of simplistic economic analysis say, well, energy is 10% of GDP, so GDP will go down 10%. But that's not very helpful because if, uh, you have all sorts of things that you need to make a profit, product, and if you don't have energy for it, then that means all the other things are not able to be employed either, and you have unemployment in manufacturing industry. Aluminum has already been cut back because aluminum's really made out of electricity to do the electrolytic refining of the bauxite. Uh, right down the line, the, the effect will be more than 10%.

And the genius of Iran's political stance is, uh, if you, the rest of the world, do not stop the United States and Israel from destroying us, which is their explicit threat, they're going to blow up all of our bridges. They're going to destroy all of our refining capacity. They'll destroy all of our electricity. Uh, they'll bring about a regime change and, uh, re-impose a police state like the Shah had, uh, that led us to have the revolution, uh, to overthrow him in 1979 to begin with. If you're just going to sit by and let the, uh, let the world ignore all of the body of international law and the laws of war that the United Nations Charter was supposed to do, then, uh, we're not going to go down alone. We're going to take the other Arab oil producers with us. That's going to cause such a shortage that it's going to cause an international depression worse than the 1930s. And the reason why it's worse than the Great Depression is because that was really a financial, uh, depression. But a cutback in energy and the tangible physical flow of goods is part of the production process itself. That is, that cannot be solved by writing down debts. Cannot be solved by saying, let's, uh, have a war economy and military Keynesianism to pull us out of the depression. Uh, it's much more serious.

So, uh, in terms of the world economy, uh, it, it's all going, going to suffer if other countries do not restructure the way in which all of world trade and payments and finance and how countries save their international reserves is all reformed together. And that requires really a reform of the United Nations or even a career. It's sometimes easier to create a whole new institution, a new United Nations, rather than trying to fix something that is so broken by the United States interference and the corruption, not only of the veto power that the United States has to prevent the United Nations from doing anything that the United, major, that the United States doesn't want, but the corruption of the atomic energy authority acting basically as a spy for, uh, Israeli, the terrorism against Iran, or for the fact that the United States is driving the United Nations bankrupt by refusing to pay its bills, and the fact that the United States is blocking any kind of international movements to cope with the global warming, uh, and replace fossil fuels, oil and gas, to begin with, with either atomic energy or solar energy or wind energy alternatives. So all the, the entire spectrum has to be changed as a system. It's not just, oh, let's just get the oil flowing again. And that's what I don't, I don't understand why the stock markets are saying, well, maybe there can be a, a happy medium and everybody can, uh, make a, there will be a position in between global depression and total surrender of Iran and total control shift of international control of the oil trade to the United States to weaponize it to become basically the world dictator and do to the world what, uh, threatens, uh, to be the result of is throwing OPEC trade today. Uh, that, that's the choice, and, uh, this choice is seems to be unthinkable as far as the large investments, investors behind the stock and bond markets are concerned.

What you're describing though is an economic mutually assured destruction. That is, uh, and, and I can see why, I think you used that word as well, by the way, in your article. But I can see why Iran is, is, is, is doing this because, and no one came to its aid, essentially. That is, um, when the US and Israel attacked in this way, you know, in a very savage way as well, destroying its, uh, uh, its infrastructure, targeting nuclear reactors, talking about killing an entire civilization. You know, what I saw in European papers were, well, now the, you know, the Iranians will have time for, will have the opportunity to have freedom now that we, you know, now that they have been liberated from, uh, uh, you know, the, the dictatorship. And essentially every article, especially in the beginning, seemed to be about how to legitimize this. No one's talking about international law or pulling back. So, uh, again, if it's only them going to be destroyed, again, destruction of their civilization, uh, yeah, of course, they want to push back in this way. But, yeah, it does appear to be something that seems like a mutually assured destruction. But if the US, you know, it doesn't want, I guess it doesn't want the international economic system to completely melt down, but it doesn't want to give up its dominance, uh, either. So where do you see this going?

Is it would rather crash the whole economy, the world economy and itself than give up its dominance? It's willing to crash everything. And then you have the personality. Uh, Trump wants to be famous. And how, how can you be more famous than ending, ending civilization and pushing and taking a thousand years to rebuild it from atomic war? He will go down as the person that ended the whole, uh, a whole historical epoch of civilization. He, he has a motivation for blowing up the world. And he's appointed Hegsth as his mil, is the head of the war department, who is a, a Jesus freak who believes that, well, if you end civilization, Jesus will come and he'll save the Christians and send them all to heaven and everyone else to hell. You have crazy people in charge, and so it's not a, this is not a situation that you can handle according to all the rational models. It's an irrational model, uh, as you've seen by all of the newspaper reports of the fights that are occurring within the situation room of the White House when, uh, there are the generals are simply refusing to give Trump the code for the atom bomb because he would have, they said he would have used it last Saturday. That's how crazy it is. You know, it's, uh, it's just, it's incredible that that it's actually gone to this, uh, distance or length, especially for someone, you know, like Trump was going to bring, or he ran, who ran on bringing back normality or ending the forever wars.

And about the religious dynamic of this. I mean, it's, it's quite strange. On, on one hand, you see them being overly religious in the way they justify war and try to immobilize, uh, the military and the public, except for when the Pope criticizes war, then suddenly there's zero respect for religious authority. I mean, it's, it's, it's quite extraordinary. It doesn't seem very genuine, to be honest. But, uh, um, but what do you make of the Iranian defense here though? Because again, they're faced with an existential threat. Uh, they want to take down their, the opponent. Um, how, how do you see their, their ability to withstand all of this?

Economically? There's, let's compare the, uh, Iranian and the US ability. The US is, uh, essentially used up most of its available missiles, its, uh, bombs, its, uh, missile launchers. It's cut back its airplanes. It's afraid to move its navy within shooting distance of Iran. So, the United States has lost its military power to compel. That's why Trump said, uh, well, the army says I can't involve, can't invade on land to grab Car Island or to grab the uranium. We tried that and it failed. So, if I can't, uh, have a military invasion like we, we had it in such a nice operation in, in Venezuela, and if I can't just bomb them because they have their anti-aircraft, uh, radars that are going to shoot down our planes and the refuel, refuelers, and we'll lose their aircraft, and it's not going to knock them out anyway because Iran's defenses and Iran's whole administrative network is so decentralized, then we have only one solution, the atom bomb. That's why he asked on Saturday, give me the atom bomb codes. I don't see why the rest of the world doesn't see, uh, where this is, is going to lead. Because way back in the 1970s, when I worked with Herman Kahn, uh, the Hudson Institute, it was all about working, uh, out what the sequence of political and military responses would be to an atom bomb. And it pretty much means that everybody's going to need one. And, uh, you'd think, I mean, the, the joke is that in trying to prevent the fiction, the pretense that Iran was trying to get an atom bomb, now everybody realizes we need an atom bomb. If we don't have our own atom bomb, Israel can bomb us. Israel is the only country in the world that's permitted to have 200 atom bombs to use against whoever it wants. And, uh, we can't, uh, so we need 200 countries. Let's, we, all need them too. This is the double standard that's occurred. And, uh, again, countries are not taking steps to isolate the United States and Israel and say, look, if you're going to go down this route of threatening the atom bomb, if you don't get to control of the world oil trade to weaponize it and use it as a choke point to say, we can't get oil unless we succumb to, uh, your foreign policy and give and agree to shift our investment, uh, in our major industries into the United States as a center, that you're going to force us into a depression by cutting us off from oil. Uh, if, if, if you're, you're offering threatening exactly what, uh, Iran has anticipated for the threat.

So, uh, the, the US military doesn't have an ability to do anything, uh, s, to really conquer Iran. All it can do is bomb it. And the Iranians have, uh, may have, uh, despite what Trump says, their navy is not destroyed. Maybe half of it is. Their aircraft is not destroyed. Maybe half of it is. The missile launchers are not destroyed. What were destroyed were the balloons that they bought from China and inflated to look like missile launchers, which were, uh, bombed. That Trump said, we've destroyed all of their, uh, missile launchers. So Iran is in a, a much stronger military position defensively. And Iran's not an offensive power. The only countries that Iran can threaten are its Arab neighbors, uh, in the, in, in West Asia. It's not going to be a world power in, in the sense that America, Russia, or China is a military power. It's not going to be an investment power, uh, itself because it's been stripped of its foreign, uh, means of investment. It's not even going to be a major trade power. What is giving it all the power that it has is the moral power that it's got, saying, we, we are not going to stand up for letting the United States become the world's dictator and using, uh, oil trade, food trade, uh, the dollar as weapons against other countries, uh, to maintain one-sided exploitative control over them. We're not going to let that happen. Uh, and somebody has to draw the line, and it's Iran that has drawn the line. That's what, that's what its moral power is. And other countries really don't have any choice except either to tell Iran, you're right, we have to make a change. We have to stop this, uh, aggression by the United States and Israel to say, we will destroy your economy either militarily or economically if you don't do what we want, or they'll, uh, isolate, uh, themselves from the United States and Israel by going their own way. And essentially that means isolating the United States, uh, until it ends its, uh, military and financial attempt to weaponize everything that it does in every economic and, uh, social activity.

It's interesting that this role fell on the Iranians to essentially check the US on this because, uh, you and I spoke, have spoken before about how a confident hegemon, that is the British in the 19th century or, or the Americans in the 20th century, when, when they're confident, they have an interest in having an open, liberal international economic system, that is, everyone should have access to technologies, industries, there should be, you know, free access to international transportation corridors by sea or land. There should be free access to currencies, banks, etc. But, but once the hegemon is in decline, it will, uh, seek to, well, reverse its decline by essentially weaponizing all aspects of economic connectivity. So all the connectivity which was previously a source for global growth is now weaponized to restore the hegemonic power. Now, you know, we see this being used against, uh, China, I think, uh, yeah, to, to a large extent, not just tech, energy, transportation corridors, but also increasingly Russia. But Iran, it looks like they, yeah, they're the one who put the foot down. And but they also have some abilities to the Strait of Hormuz. I think this is quite fascinating because by stripping the US of control of the Strait of Hormuz, they can do a lot of other things. I see now that they set some conditions. They essentially set up a toll booth now, and they said, we have, you have to, everyone has to pay a toll. Especially the countries who attacked Iran or sanctioned Iran, they have to pay reparations. So that's an additional bonus on top. And also they don't want dollars anymore.

This is quite extraordinary.

Well, they're not possible to have dollars. They had dollars, and the United States has confiscated them. If you have dollars, you, uh, the United States will immediately steal them, as they stole Russia's $300 billion dollars. The dollar is unusable by any country that wants its own national sovereignty. I want to say, you use the word liberal, and this is a completely misused term in general. The takeoff of the industrial nations, Britain, uh, Germany, the United States, they were not liberal. The word liberal has come, really means neoliberal. It means no government. Liberal means Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, in today's vocabulary. And it means, uh, you, you dis, you have to dismantle all government subsidy of the economy. Instead of the governments running, uh, uh, natural monopolies such as transportation and communications and providing free schooling and, uh, free, uh, health care. All that was 19th century. It wasn't, uh, neol, it wasn't liberalism. The word they used was socialism in one form or another, or social democracy, perhaps. But, uh, they did not use liberalism, though they rejected the whole idea of free trade in order for governments to shape the markets, to so as to prevent rent-seeking, shape the markets to prevent real estate prices from going up by taxing away land rent, to prevent monopolies from taking place, either by things like the antitrust act of, uh, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 in America and Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, or the better yet, the government will take all of these natural monopolies into public hands, as was done in the case from Europe to the United States. United States with the Erie Canal and so on. As to and there was a whole doctrine of looking at government, uh, capital formation, public infrastructure investment was a, a factor of production. But unlike industrial capital or capitalist capital, private sector capital, and industry capital, the aim of, uh, government investment was not to make a profit. It was to lower, it was to provide its, uh, basic services for key sectors at subsidized rates or even freely, so that you lower the economy's overall cost of doing business. And at the end of all of this, there, this, this government control was, uh, in finance achieved most purely in Germany, in Central Europe, at the end of the 19th century, where the government and industry, and the banks moved hand in hand to direct the financial system to provide credit, not to make money financially for financial investors, but to finance capital formation and industry to build factories, largely in the arms-producing industries, of course, but to produce actual industry. Well, there was a, all of this was what classical political economy was all about. The ideal of the whole political doctrine of industrial capitalism was cap, in, was to minimize economic rent. It was value theory. That's what Ricardo talked about. John Stuart Mill, uh, Carl Marx, they were all talking about how do you keep prices in line with actual cost of production, the value, and get rid of economic rent, which is the excess of market prices over value because of the special privileges that we inherited from medieval European society, the privilege of absentee hereditary land ownership by a landlord aristocracy. The monopolies that were created by international banks from the 14th century on to enable kings to have revenue to carry their war debts, and, uh, general banking to provide credit for economic growth. Well, there was a, after World War I, all of that plans for how to develop an industrial economy was, uh, essentially put aside, and finance replaced industry as the focus of gaining wealth and making a fortune throughout the West. And if you look at today, uh, the most successful economy in terms of growth of production, living standards is China. And what it's done is exactly the same principle that made the United States wealthy and productive and so dominant in the 19th century. It, it's kept natural monopolies in the public hand. The transportation is very inexpensive, bit subsidized. Health care, education is subsidized. But most of all, China's kept banking in the, uh, in the hands of the government, so the Bank of the People's Bank of China will create credit for actual tangible production. Unfortunately, a lot of this has gone into overproduction of real estate, but the idea is you're not going to make loans for, uh, financial speculators to borrow money, buy a corporation, and then essentially loot it, and leave it, which is what's happening, uh, in the West. And certainly all week long, and for instance, in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, there's a discussion to say, well, the, major banks and major investment funds that have lent money for private capital formation to take over companies and, uh, finance their initification, their downsizing, and essentially just looting these companies. We're not letting pension funds cash in their holdings unless they take 50%, 80% lose, lose all their money because the whole American economy has become a bubble. So when I talked about what's the effect of, uh, the energy stopping, before one of the effects is to bring down this whole highly leveraged financial sector, the whole debt-leveraged buyouts and the debt pyramid, mainly in the United States. As in the depression, the United States was the most highly debt-leveraged economy. The whole financial sector will be coming down. So what, what will be destroyed is not only physical output. It's the whole system of financialization that has led the United States to lag so far behind China, for instance, and countries that, instead of being liberal, say, well, the government has to play a positive role in providing for certain basic needs and to prevent exploitation. If you don't have a government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from developing, then, uh, you're going to end up like the United States, a failed economy, or like Germany and most of Western Europe, a failed economy as a result of their neoliberalism. So, uh, I just wanted to be very careful about using that word liberal. It's a, it's an, a term against government and against socialism specifically. That's what caused the whole reaction against industrial capitalism because industrial capitalism itself was evolving into socialism, into, uh, government playing an increasing role in the economy by investing in, uh, infrastructure, by preventing monopolies, by taxing away or preventing, uh, land rent and monopoly rent, and, uh, financial exploitation from occurring. So there, there, there's a whole ideological superstructure that has gone by the wayside along with the collapse of, uh, production.

Ideology is the last thing to go, apparently.

Yeah. No, that's a good point. U often the word liberal is used because of the openness of the system. But, but,

But it's not open. No, no, no. I agree. And nothing.

United States says if any, if we have open trade, then we can't control it. The United States says there cannot be open trade or investment. If we can't grab, if, uh, there's, if everybody can use the dollar, then we can't grab it all from them and force them to do what we want. Nothing's open. It's a closed system controlled centrally by the United States. Liberalism is central planning, but it's central planning, not by government, but by the financial sector and by the political, uh, military sector. That's liberalism. You have to realize it's centralized planning, not by the government, not by democracy, but by financial wealth and the military to protect its dominance.

No, that's, yeah, that's where was that going? I, I think the rent-taking, rent-seeking, not just from their own public, that is the American public, but also from other countries as well. I think this is why, uh, yeah, that the assumption that countries who break away from the US-led economic system that they would only suffer, but we see, well, like in the Russian case, that they can actually make, have, have many benefits as well from not, uh, yeah, paying these rents. Uh, but given that this is the US situation, when he was a hegemon, he had, you know, certain privileges in terms of, uh, everyone using the dollar, everyone using the banks, everyone using his technologies. How, how do you, as the US now struggles as a declining hegemon, it seems to be pursuing a very different approach. It has a very, I guess, extractive approach to, to trade. He wants to maximize.

Money is if you don't.

But who, who would, who in this situation do, do you think want to invest in the US economy, given that it's kind of obvious what they're going for now?

Well, that's the fantasy of all this. Donald Trump says, well, you know, we can go one of two ways. Uh, either, uh, we, Iran, you know, will attack Iran to make one last stab to grab its oil. Which is how we begin. That's nothing to do with Iran wanting an atom bomb. Uh, it's nowhere near an atom bomb. Uh, if America wants its oil, or, and in that case, there will be a world depression. But if there's the world depression, he, Trump said, we'll come out ahead. We look at us, we have oil, we have gas, uh, we, we don't need, uh, oil, oil and gas. Other countries will suffer more, and that means we will suffer less than they do. And that's what winning is in a shrinking environment, to suffer less than your opposition. Well, that's his fantasy. Uh, but he doesn't realize that, uh, while, uh, the, yes, the United States has oil, uh, and gas, but it doesn't have industry. It doesn't have any means today of being, uh, of producing industrial goods, because it doesn't have an industrial labor force. And even the construction labor force, most of the blue-collar work and the dirty work, the low, low-wage work was being done by immigrants. And Trump has cut that all off. So you no longer have the in, uh, immigrant, uh, personal care, restaurants, and other things that immigrants do. Uh, crop, uh, crop picking that immigrants do, or the blue-collar labor working in factories because there aren't any factories now for them to work in. So immigrants have always done, uh, the hard work, just like you, uh, is the case in the Arab Emirates, where it's mostly an immigrant population. Same thing in Saudi Arabia. That's, uh, that's how countries recruit the labor force. And the, the, the United States cannot compete industrially or agriculturally with other economies to say, "Oh, well, we'll export something for you and, uh, for what you need, and you, uh, sell us what we need, your raw other raw materials, your high, your, your whatever it is you produce." Because the, the cost of labor is so high in the United States, not because Americans' living standards are high. The, the living standards of, of labor in America have gone down steadily ever since 2008, and really since 1980, or the 19, late 1979 was really the key for America's labor living standards. You could afford to buy housing there on out of the wages that you had. But especially since Obama's, uh, build out, uh, the banks and the junk mortgage fraud that, uh, essentially wiped out, uh, a lot of the, uh, low-income people, and since 2008, all, almost all the growth in wealth in America has been, as we've said, to the top wealthiest 10%, and it's wealth of the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, not the industrial economy at all. So the industrial, the American industrial economy has been essentially dissolved. You had America make a deal with Korea and also with Japan to build, uh, affiliates in the United States. And so Korea said, "Well, you know, we came over here. We tried to hire American labor. They're not good at construction labor. They're just too sloppy. We, we have to bring our own labor over." Same thing with Taiwan. They had a multi-billion dollar, big plans to build a computer chip factory out west, and they found out, well, we have to use our own workers. We can't use American workers for it. They, there's essentially no one wants to be a blue-collar worker in the United States. And the only people who do, were willing to do the blue-collar jobs, are now being deported, uh, or under threat of deportation, because they've immigrated, and doing a blue-collar job is how you get a foothold in, in this country. So, uh, there's this fantasy that somehow if, uh, there is a world depression, America can come out the winner. It's, uh, well, of course, it's going to show that America's hollow. It will be like, uh, like, uh, John McCain called Russia, a gas station with atom bombs. Well, that's all that America would be left with under Donald Trump's alternative, to say, "Okay, we've brought the rest of the world in depression. We have oil and gas, and we have the atom bomb. We don't have any industry, and our agriculture's broke." So he's turned, he's turned America into a gas station with atom bombs if he goes that route of causing, uh, of, uh, forcing Iran to defend itself by saying, if, uh, we're going to be attacked and destroy our economy, we're going to bring all of the world with us, which is going to force you to make an alternative, or just to live in a permanent depression until you figure a way out of that, uh, that'll save us along with you. That's, that's the political dynamic at work that I see.

Yeah. This assumption that if the international system breaks down, uh, the global economy, somehow the US will be able to float to the top. It's, uh, well, some of it can have some strength in that argument in terms of the US having a lot of energy, uh, sovereignty. But the whole similarity one often hears with World War II seems a bit, um, yeah, wrong because, you know, in World War II, there was the, the emergence of the big business, there was a lot of technological development, and overall, after the war was over, the US was the world's factory. It was the world's bank. These days, it doesn't, uh, it outsourced its industries. It's the largest debt country in the world, in world history. So, it's not, it's not positioned well as it was back then. So, the idea that one can come out strong in a war like this, it doesn't make much sense. But my, my, my, my last question though, was just on, on the partners of, of the US. Because if the US is shifting towards extracting more economic concessions, and you hear, you see this in Europe, where, you know, Trump can hand over the Europeans any trade deal they have to sign, whatever, you know, they have to show up at his golf course and sign a deal they don't want to sign. You see some, some suggesting that the Gulf States should repay the US for the weapons, uh, it has spent in fighting Iran. In East Asia, there's been comments that Taiwan and others should begin to shift their high-tech industries towards the United States. So again, this very extractive economic, um, approach which is now kicking in to reverse the decline. U, you know, nobody wants to do this. It appears that the main leverage the US has is that, uh, it's, it's the security dependence. The US is security guarantor. But a declining hegemon often invites insecurity. It doesn't provide security to the same extent, as evident in both Europe and, and the Gulf States. So how, how durable do you think this is?

Well, look, that's just what the Emirates have just said. Uh, we, we had thought two things. We thought that when we bought US weapons, they were going to work. And the, the weapons are only like, uh, to have an expensive Rolls-Royce in the garage. It looks nice. Uh, but it's not really the most efficient car. The weapons are not to fight with. They're not to fight a war with. They're not to attack. They're not to defend. They're just to hold on the ground and to make America happy. The weapons don't work. And having a base here, uh, has ended up a threat. When America attacked Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Arab countries said, "Well, we weren't consulted." And the European consult countries said, "Wait a minute. Donald Trump wants now us to die to the last European with trying to have a land invasion of Kark Island and Iran." So, we'll die when America is not willing to do. The fact is that, uh, America is acting unilaterally by itself in its own interest. And so having a, a US military base there is essentially putting yourself as a bullseye for Iran, and similar all over the world, to, uh, to destroy, because the United States military bases are there as a means of attack. They're not defensive, they're aggressive. And if they're aggressive against any enemy, the enemy's the, uh, opponent is going to fight back and wipe it out, and they'll wipe out the country that has the military base in it. So obviously that's not safe. Uh, but most of all, I'm glad you mentioned the thought that, uh, Trump has said, well, Iran has to, Iraq has to pay us for all the cost that it had for the war we waged to destroy them. And, uh, we're going to get pay, capture the repayment for that by grabbing its oil. That's, he said that explicitly. And so he's grabbed its oil. And there, he's obviously he wants to do the same thing with the Arab OPEC countries. Well, we defended you. Now you have to pay us for the cost of defending you with our military-industrial complex of overpriced, uh, missiles and, uh, aircraft and missile launchers and everything else that didn't have anything like the military effect that we told you it would have. It were a paper tiger, to use Mao's phrase. And why on earth would any country want an American military base being a military being a paper tiger that's not going to defend it? That just makes it a bullseye, uh, a target of countries that America is trying to launch a war with, as it tries to threaten to destroy them if they don't surrender their sovereignty to the United States and to Trump personally.

It seems like a strange time in world history to be banking on US security guarantees. I mean, it's, you know, that's, it's just, it's not in the, that the US doesn't have the possibility anymore either. It's, I'm, I'm so, I'm very shocked by when I look around the world how, how little adjustment there actually is to the new realities, that is, this new distribution of power, the assumption that we can still have the hegemonic policies of the 1990s and apply them to 2026 when the distribution of power clearly is now post-hegemonic. And, yeah, multipolar.

This security you talk about for 70, for 80 years now has been a fiction. It's the enabling fiction to say, we will provide you for security in case Russia invades, uh, Europe. That's as if Russia is going to invade Europe. Russia has no, it's a, a fiction to think that Europe needs security against Russia. Uh, Russia wants to be left alone by Europe, and it's willing to fight Europe and to bomb Germany and England and France if they try to attack, uh, uh, Russia, as they're doing, or provide, uh, Ukraine with, uh, missiles to attack Russian oil and refinery production, as they're doing. Uh, Russia has already turned its back on Europe and wants to go with the East because Europe is part of a failed civilization. It's going, it's going downhill, and it's Russia's not only rejecting Europe economically, but its social values and its rotten political system. A system that says, if you say that you're against a genocide, we're throwing you in jail. This is a democracy. We're in charge. And, uh, you cannot in a democracy say, uh, we're against, we're, the Palestinians shouldn't be exterminated. That's against civilization. You go to jail. Germany said that. Britain said that, and France has said that, and they're arresting people to say that. I mean, this is a despicable culture for the rest of, of the world. And they're seeing the whole nakedness of, uh, the, the, the fact that Europe is not a democracy at all. And that all of this, say, we're here to protect you, you have to pay us to protect you, is really just, you have to pay us to be able to put in place a military system to threaten you with destruction if you don't do what we want, and follow trade policies that are unequal and benefit us, not you. America has to win, as Donald Trump says. And you have to use the dollar that, uh, we can just print to get buy up your industry, your raw materials, and other things. Uh, you have to pay the debts that are you run up from running, uh, trade deficits as a result of following, uh, the, the, uh, pro-American, uh, investment policies that the World Bank and the IMF produce, that say, don't produce your own food, buy American. The whole system that, uh, was supposed to pretend to be keeping the world economy prosperous and free, turned out to making it more and more unequal, more and more polarized, less and less safe, and more or less prone to leading to exactly the culmination of this, uh, irrepressible conflict that we're seeing today.

Yeah. I was, um, I was interviewed two days ago by a German newspaper, and, uh, and, uh, you know, I was making the point that if Europe wants to reverse its decline, it has to end the dividing lines in Europe. That is, end the conflict with Russia. You know, remove Ukraine from the front lines of, of this new war. And, uh, and I was asked, to what extent is possible, because our values are so different, because we have liberal democracy, and the Russians are so authoritarian. I was like, this is the same Germany. I mean, again, where you protest against a genocide, and they throw you in jail. It's, it's, uh, oh, it's quite extraordinary that this is still the, the very narrow, uh, framework we have to interpret the world around us, that it's simply, you know, good guys versus bad guys. Anyways, any final thoughts before we wrap up?

Well, the whole question is, what is democracy? What seems to be democracy, uh, in the West is exactly what it was in, uh, Aristotle's day in Greece. He said, what claims to be democracy is really oligarchy. But, uh, you can let people vote for, uh, who is going to be the personal leaders and the administrators, but you cannot vote for what kind of an economy are we going to have? What kind of a society we have? All of that is determined by the wealthiest, uh, uh, oligarchic parts of the population. The, the whole purpose of democracy is supposed to be, how do you run an economy to prevent it from polarizing and to act on behalf of the population at large, increasing its, uh, living standards and its productivity and its happiness? That can only be done with a strong enough government, uh, in a position to prevent a financial oligarchy from developing and polarizing the economy and dismantling government authority to put the authority in the hands of the, uh, creditors and the landowners and the wealthers. So the whole idea is that, uh, the whole ancient Near East, Babylonia, Sumer, uh, they all had rulers who would prevent debts from impoverishing the economy, from, uh, pre, prevent the land from being forfeited to, uh, buyers, to, uh, centralized landowners who accumulated it all, to prevent the ancient Middle East, Western Asia, from suffering in the way that Western civilization did, from, uh, classical Greece to the Roman Empire. And we're still living in the results of that idea of oligarchy, creating a government, calling it democracy, and saying a government not controlled by the oligarchy is not democratic. When, uh, you, and that a country like China, whose government is trying to act on behalf of increasing productivity, wealth, and living standards, is called, uh, an autocracy. Well, this is, this is the vocabulary of deception that we're, uh, we're living in. And that part of this, uh, resolution of the economic conflict we're having today has to be a resolution of the, uh, ideological misuse of language to provide a, a more realistic vocabulary to explain why it is that Western economies are polarized and getting poorer and poorer, and other countries, China, is not, what, what is it that China's doing that we are not doing that has enabled it to uplift its population? That, uh, there has to be that discussion, which hasn't even begun yet. It's, it's still in the unthinkable phase.

Yeah. Far away. Well, thank you very much for, yeah, sharing your insights. It's, uh, yeah, quite extraordinary what we're seeing. So, uh, yeah, thanks again.

Well, thank you for having me.