NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi everybody. Today is Thursday, June 19th, 2025, and our friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are back with us. Welcome back.
RICHARD WOLFF: Good. Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s start, Richard, with you. What’s going on in the Middle East between Iran and Israel? The United States had decided to talk with Iran on Sunday, and just before, on Friday, Israel attacked Iran. What’s going on in your opinion?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, you know, no one will be surprised who watches this program about my answer. But, you know, if you have a point of view and if things begin to develop that are consistent with that point of view, well, then you’re going to hear that point of view repeated. Here’s what I think is going on.
We are living through the final stages of the century of anti-colonialism. It’s over, this European effort that is several centuries old to expand from the European core and to take over the rest of the world, either on the grounds that it was empty and therefore needed to be populated, which was mostly not true, or that it was peopled by inferiors who needed the blessing of the Christian religion, by and large, and modern civilization and advanced economics, and so was lucky to be colonized because it sped up all of those important activities. Okay, that worked for several centuries. It allowed capitalism to grow, to grow its market above all else, to source its inputs all over the world so that the profitability of capitalism could be maintained.
If you remember, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, each in their different ways, talked about a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, by which they meant the mechanism whereby capitalism would shut down its own economic development. This could be postponed, as Marx showed in Volume 3 of Capital, if you were able to get cheaper and cheaper sources of raw materials and so forth, which the colonized world was good for. And the same applied to labor, once you made that mobile, et cetera, et cetera.
The last hundred years, so from the early 20th now to the early 21st century, has been the century of anti-colonialism, the end, the pushback, the exhaustion of colonialism as the mass of the people, Asia, Africa, Latin America, each in their own way, at their own pace, shaped by their own cultures and religions and physical natural conditions, fought for independence, fought to be out from under the colonial yoke. And the last and final stages of that we are living through.
And why? Why do I call it the last and final stages? Because I think there’s something very basic linking U.S. policy in Ukraine, in China, and in the Middle East. And in each of those cases, it’s an attempt to hold back the last stage of anti-colonialism, which is why I think it is a doomed effort. It will not work, whether it works in the immediate moment or not. This is going against history. And as history has shown us, you go against history, you lose. And we have been losing one ex-colony after another.
And why do I say they’re all the same? Well, I’m going to focus, just because I don’t want to keep talking, on China and the Middle East. Starting around 2010, the United States figured out, having deluded itself before that by pretending that China wasn’t developing, by 2010, it was so obvious around the world that even the United States figured out that China had not only never been a colony, not only set itself the goal of undoing what is called in China the 100 years of humiliation, but that they had figured out this mixture of private and state enterprise, which could achieve economic growth rates that nothing in the West could come near, including the United States. From that time, about 20 years now, the United States has shifted over into trying to slow, to stop, to reverse the economic development of China. And none of that has worked either.
Oh, here and there they may have achieved some slowing, but the larger picture, as everybody can see, is China grows; American efforts to prevent it fail. Okay, now let’s turn to Israel and Iran. You’ll see the same thing. Israel is an anomaly. It is settler colonialism after that’s no longer possible.
The only settler colonialisms that ever worked, which are a model for Israel, were the settler colonialism states that literally, genocidally killed all the local people, whether they be the Māori or the Aboriginals in Australia or the Native Americans here in the Western Hemisphere. But that’s over. You can’t do that anymore. You cannot extinguish the local population because the local population has friends, has associates, and has supporters.
The Palestinians are not in the position that the Māoris were or the Aboriginals or the American so-called Indians, etc., etc. So it’s a hopeless quest. But the United States needs them. It needs them as their proxy in the Middle East because the Middle East has a lot of oil. Okay, so now the Iranians enter. The Iranians are part of the whole rebellion against colonialism. Modern Iran is the rebellion against what the United States did to the Shah, excuse me, to Mossadegh back in the 1950s.
And yeah, they had a temporary victory. They put in the reactionary Shah, who was a pawn of the West. Eventually, because it’s history, the Shah was overthrown and ended up a sick old man protected by Henry Kissinger because the project of controlling Iran is over. Yes, it was captured by the religious rebellion. That often happened because the West was so busy killing off the revolutionary, socialist, communist opposition that it left either the proxies of the imperial or the religious community.
You saw that in Iran, they got rid of one of the largest and most powerful communist parties anywhere in the so-called Third World, the Tudeh party in Iran, which, if you go back and study, could have and would have been the revolutionary leadership of that country. They got rid of the equivalent in Afghanistan so that it was the Taliban, you know, the religious, the very people armed by the West to destroy the revolutionary anti-imperialism. It’s replaced by religious anti-imperialism. It’s the irony of it all.
So here you have the one remaining settler colonialism that has not or has not yet exterminated the local people in the way the older ones did. And it can’t really do it now. There’s too much opposition. Look what they are doing. Put aside for a moment the horror of it, but the extremity that Israel has to do what it is doing to survive. It’s hopeless. They face extinction or they face extinction. And they can have any future they want as long as it’s extinction. It’s like your parents taking you for ice cream, and you can have any flavor you want as long as it’s vanilla. You know, it is a disaster.
And what will happen now with Iran? Iran has friends. Iran has mutual defense arrangements with Russia and with China. And what are you doing here? Even inside the Trump administration, there are people saying, don’t be crazy here, what you are doing. You are isolating yourself. Well, that’s not news. That’s already been happening. Every vote on Israel and Palestine in the last several years has been the whole world against the United States and Israel. So it’s over. History is moving in a direction that makes all of this a hopeless effort.
Let me conclude this way: Whatever happens now, the current situation is laying out the path forward for Iran-you better get nuclear weapons or else this kind of game will be played on you whenever the West wants. You’re not getting rid of nuclear. You’re making it even more certain that Iran and many other countries watching all of this will pursue it.
People don’t get the news here in this country. But let me conclude with an illustration. Over the last few days, the government in Pakistan issued a statement: If any nuclear weapons are used against Iran, they, the Pakistanis, will use them against Israel. Iran is a very large country. You could use nuclear weapons there and it can survive. Israel is a very small country, small in geography, and small in population. It cannot survive a nuclear attack.
We are actually at the point where this is what is being done. I know the extremity of it scares everybody; I’m not saying it shouldn’t, but put it in its historical context, these are the desperate final efforts of the West to try to cope with the end of the whole colonial operation.
They can’t do it. They can’t maintain the strength of the dollar. They can’t maintain the power of Western financial arrangements. They can’t do it. And you’re watching the frustration and the rage that works that out. And it may overwhelm. Watch on.
Mr. Trump may have his chosen intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, explain to him that the consensus of the intelligence community is that Iran is several years away from being able to have a nuclear weapon, which, by the way, has been the finding about Iran for the entirety of this century. If you go back to 2004, when Colin Powell was the Secretary of State, he said so too. All right?
We are bringing up this dead horse about nuclear weapons being fashioned in the depths of a mountain. We’ve been doing this for 25 years. That’s what I mean. It’s a desperate effort to try somehow by argument, by intervention, by overt activity, covert activity, to stop the movement of history. And that’s a hopeless task. That makes these people crazy.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, go ahead.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think Richard has framed the issue correctly. We’re seeing the final U.S.-Western struggle against what the West sees as an attempt by the global majority to escape from Western control, especially U.S. control. And he talked about colonialism. World War I and the aftermath set a new stage of European colonialism with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. And that saw Britain and France redraw the map of the Middle East.
We all know how it cut across ethnic lines and caused the last century of instability from Iraq to Syria and the rest of the Near East. And the key to all of this was already emerging as control of oil. And with this control of oil and with the redrawing of old colonialism, you had the emergence of financial colonialism led by the United States. And you could say it’s really financial imperialism because the American financial policy started with imposing inter-allied debts on Europe, plunging Europe into financial chaos that led to World War II as a result of the Allies turning to Germany to pay reparations debts way beyond its ability to pay so that the Allies could pay the United States.
This whole system broke down in 1929, and by 1931 there was a moratorium. But while the U.S.-European relationships were breaking down, oil was being put in place. And after World War II, you saw what seemed to be what Richard was talking about: the withdrawal from American-sponsored colonialism. And to the United States, it tried to prevent this from the very beginning with a military umbrella.
This military umbrella has led to, well, it led to the overthrow of the Iranian elected middle-class democracy in 1953 by MI6 in Britain in conjunction with Kermit Roosevelt in the United States. And the imposition of the Shah and his SAVAK dictatorship led the United States to solidify its plans to control the entire Near East because if you could control the Near Eastern regimes, you could control oil. And oil was the key to American financial control of the world because oil was the most profitable rent extracting sector in the world.
I did a study for the Chase Manhattan Bank in 1965 showing that the average U.S. oil company investment in Middle Eastern and other foreign oil, the entire investment was recouped in balance of payments terms in only 11 months. So the United States realized that the Middle East was the key to American policy. Now, there’s been a lot of discussion, especially on your side, that certainly has a great point-that opponents of this looming war with Iran say that it’s not in American interest.
What interest do we have in fighting with Iran? Is this only Israel’s interest? Why is it our interest in fighting in Iran? Look at what happened in Iraq. Iraq was not posing a threat to America. Iran was not posing a threat to America. But to the American empire strategists, the post-colonialists are posing a threat simply by existing independently and seeking to act in their own economic self-interest.
Now, already 50 years ago, this logic of American imperialism in the Near East was guiding U.S. foreign policy. Around 1974 and 1975, probably late ‘74, I sat in on a military strategy discussion. I was invited by my boss, Herman Khan, at the Hudson Institute, to sit in on this. And the strategy was how to break up Iran into its ethnic parts in the event that there was another attempt by Iran to ever seek its own self-interest.
Well, the whole reason we’d imposed the Shah was so it wouldn’t do that, but in case the Shah sought to do that. And Herman Khan found the weakest spot in the Iranian multi-ethnic nation to be Balochistan on Iran’s eastern border with Pakistan. And Iran also contains the Kurds, Tajiks, and Turkic Azerbaijanis, and others, whose ethnicities are to be played off against each other. You can be sure that, in the last few years or decades, the United States has been working with these ethnicities to try to do in Iran what the Kurds were doing to destabilize Syria by pressing for their own interests.
This is the U.S. strategy that has been applied to Russia and China. If you can break up these great countries into parts and have client oligarchies in these ethnic parts that are split up, then they will be unable to lead the fight against the U.S. NATO-centered world order. Well, this fight is not simply against colonialism. Russia was not a colony, and China really was not a colony. But Russia, China, and Iran might lead the anti-colonialist and essentially the de-dollarization plans that are at work.
Well, three decades after this 1974 meeting of how to make a long-term plan for American control of Near Eastern oil, General Wesley Clark pointed out that Iran was to be the capstone in seven countries that the United States needed to take over and control in order to dominate the Near East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, certainly in North Africa, Somalia, and Sudan. All this was to culminate in the takeover of Iran. So, what we’re seeing today is not simply Mr. Netanyahu telling Trump, please protect us by attacking Iran.
I think you had Lawrence Wilkerson a few days ago, Nima, on your show saying that Netanyahu and Israel were certainly acting in keeping with a long U.S. plan for how to break up Iran. And here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government for a regime change. The assumption is that if Israel can indeed blow up Khomeini, that his religious leadership will fall apart and there will be a secular reaction that will somehow not really press for Iranian national interest, but will just be demoralized and will let the United States impose a kind of client dictatorship, sort of like we have over Jordan.
Well, the national interest in the Near East, first of all, we already know it’s centered in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates and Kuwait with oil. And the aim is not only to control Near Eastern oil, but the money, the vast investment funds that Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states have accumulated in running their trade surpluses have been invested, mainly in the United States, in treasury bonds and in stocks and bonds. And this investment is sort of holding them hostage.
Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states are really afraid to come to Iran’s support, even though they realize that the attack on Iran is to consolidate American control over the Near East. Because if they acted against U.S. interests, all of their foreign investment, their national funds and their private investments are held hostage by New York and London. Just as the United States confiscated 300 billion of Russia’s savings in the West, they could do the same with Near Eastern holdings. But it goes much further than that. To the United States, Iran is not only the key to controlling the Near East and its oil, but also for China’s Belt and Road program through a new Silk Road of railway transport to the West.
That’s the map. If the United States can block this road, then China’s attempt to create a new Silk Road by railway will not be able to link up with Europe and the Silk Road will not be able to go all the way to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, as China hoped to do. You can see there, it goes from Western China through Central Asia to Iran. Well, the same thing, the same logic appears with Russia.
And Iran is the key to blocking Russian development via the Caspian and access to the south. Under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank and prevent Russia from bypassing the Suez Canal and having direct export access to the south and all the way to India, as this map shows.
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So Iran is the key not only to U.S. control of oil, but to its fight against Russia and China together. And that’s what makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest in preventing the rest of the world from creating an alternative to financial colonialism and imperialism rests..
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, when it comes to the conflict that you’ve mentioned between Iran and Israel, do you believe that Netenyahu and his administration really believe that they’re playing some sort of role? As we’ve learned, they are just a pawn. They are being used by the United States, similarly to Ukraine. This doesn’t seem to be the case in the mind of Netenyahu and his administration.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I have no special knowledge of the inside of what’s going on in Israel, but for me, it seems clear, from what I can tell, that Israel understands, and I think they’re right about this, that without the support of the United States, their situation is over. They cannot prevail against Palestine. They cannot prevail against anybody without the United States. And therefore, they can’t make independent judgments.
So when I hear the United States is going to go into Iran, because of Israel, I don’t believe that. I mean, I don’t think the Israelis have that power. I don’t think they ever did. I understand they have supporters here in the United States who play important roles, APAC and other organizations like that. I’ve read that literature. I understand that. But that’s not enough. And they’re not big enough, even domestically, here to be able to do quite that. At least I don’t think so.
So for me, it’s more the United States pulling the strings and Israel performing what it is the United States wants them to do. You know, if you go back historically, Israel xxx played a very, I’m going to be polite now, ambiguous role in South Africa during all the long years of struggle to get them out from under apartheid. Israel played another ambiguous role with the Contras in El Salvador. If you remember learning about it, Israel was asked to do all kinds of things to support U.S. strategies and tactics.
And I think that’s what the deal is. We will support you so that you survive, but you have to do what we tell you, or else you’re on a short leash. So I think Michael’s arguments about why or how Iran may play a role is much more the driver of what’s going on. Israel is a junior partner. And, you know, it has been noted all through the Middle East for decades that the United States benefits because a great deal of the Arab world focuses on Israel and the horror of Israel and the humiliation by and from Israel. And this is very useful because it keeps the heat lower on the United States than it might otherwise be.
We have a facade. It’s Israel that is the oppressor. And of course, now in Gaza, this has gone to lengths that the Israeli state now approaches a situation where its behavior is too grotesque to be salvaged by anything. I mean, you are digging a long-term grave of your own in Gaza, independent of what you do to the Palestinian people who happen to be in your way.
I would say, though, not in disagreement with Michael, but I think we can put our two perspectives together. The attempt to slow down China, if you read Michael’s argument just a little bit differently, the effort to slow down China requires messing up the planned role of Iran in the Belt and Road Initiative, which, in turn, is key to China’s having the economic relationships that will save it from whatever damage the United States can do. For example, tariffs and so on.
They reroute their trade to the rest of the BRICS. They don’t need the United States in the way they once did. And that’s something they’ve been working on anyway, and they continue. And as to the United States’ emphasis on Iran, the Belt and Road, the route of the train, can be changed. If you can’t go through Iran, there are other ways to proceed.
They will be expensive. That will be a cost. The United States can slow them a little bit. But in the end, they would have to do a lot more. And they will try. They will try. They’ve been trying for a long time. They’ll continue to try. They have no other policy.
They are not yet persuaded that they have to sit down with the Chinese and work out a deal. They don’t get that part. And they don’t think they have to do that yet. On the other hand, when they lose, even if they lose a little at a time, slowly the balance shifts. They lost the war in Vietnam, or else Vietnam might have been a very different situation. They lost the war in Iraq. They are losing the war in Ukraine. They lost the war in Afghanistan. They had all kinds of plans for those countries. Those are gone or they’re sitting on a shelf waiting to be resurrected at some future point in their fantasy when the world makes it possible. But their options are shrinking. Their freedom of action is shrinking.
And that’s part of why they put so much emphasis on Iran, because it may be one of their last chances to try to stop the march of history. But my money is on the history. I don’t think they can do it any more than Britain. I don’t want to harp on it, but I think it’s relevant.
Britain fought the two wars to prevent the runaway colony, the United States, from achieving independence and then from developing itself. The British tried. They tried in 1776. They tried again in 1812. And they were ambivalent in the American Civil War about whether they should side with the North or the South. But once they lost the two wars and once they saw which way the Civil War was going, they understood they couldn’t do that anymore. So they cut a deal.
The first part of that deal was the Monroe Doctrine, which had very little to do with Mr. Monroe. It had to do with the fact that the British said, okay, okay, okay. You don’t bother us in Asia and Africa, and we won’t bother you in South America. In other words, they made a deal. I don’t admire it, I understand it’s the quintessence of colonialism.
It’s like in 1884 when they sat down in Berlin and carved up Africa among the participating European countries. The same thing, but it is the recognition that repressing the United States wasn’t going to work. And to the credit of the British and the Americans, they held to that plan even as their roles were reversed. From the United States being a minor colony of Britain, today we have Britain a minor colony of the United States, and the British have no option, no choice, and are behaving in just the way we would imagine. Hopeless economic decline, horrible politics, and abuse of the working class on a scale that even other European countries do not allow, at least not yet. Extraordinary. It’s really extraordinary.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think that Richard is quite right in the way that he’s framed the issue that the United States indeed has lost the wars that he’s mentioned. But this fight with Iran has become, in its turn, an issue for framing the U.S. plans for a vast new military buildup. And you can see it’s a crazy plan. The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s iron dome defense has shown the whole folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy for the American military-industrial complex to make a similar boondoggle here.
So far, only the oldest and least effective Iranian missiles have been used because their aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a few days, a week at most, Israel will be unable to block any serious Iranian attack with its really big hypersonic missiles. Well, this already was demonstrated a few months ago when Iran showed how easily it could bomb not only Israel with demonstration, but it could bomb U.S. military bases, even when it gave them advanced knowledge. Here is where we’re going to send, you know, the missiles are not going to explode, they’re not going to blow up your soldiers, but we’re just going to show you how easily we can get right through your defenses.
Well, the center point of Trump’s Republican budget that is now in Congress for enormously increasing the U.S. deficit, increasing the United States debt, and official government debt is based on the need to essentially say, oh, it’s all for Israel. And just as Richard said, they’re using Israel as an excuse to try to deflect foreign anger away from the United States, “Yeah, focus on Israel. It’s all Israel’s doing, not our doing, even though we’re supplying Israel with bombs and doing everything that Richard described.”
So I want to explain the congressional dynamics in giving Trump the right to actually declare war on Iran. This is the constitutional fight in Congress. A president is not supposed to go to war without getting the support of Congress. Trump has not got that yet.
Congress has not passed a pro-war authorization for Trump to do this. So we’re in a constitutional crisis in the United States now that Trump is simply ignoring, as he’s ignored the Constitution in other ways, saying, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” There’s not much that they’re doing. So the U.S. military budget is being vastly increased by this crazy American iron dome plan here.
The Reagan administration had toyed with this beam the bomb attempt to say, “Oh, well, we can get lasers, huge lasers to blow up any kind of Russian or other foreign missile attack on us.” Well, that was shown to be unworkable, but it cost a lot of money and profits for the military-industrial complex. Well, not only is the military budget vastly increasing, forcing the U.S. into deficit, but the military budget is only half of what the United States is actually paying on military because American foreign military aid to its allies, Ukraine, Israel, South Korea, Europe, and Asian countries, to buy U.S. arms all appears as foreign aid, not as part of the U.S. military budget.
The U.S. is concealing the enormous cost of this new Cold War buildup to the American economy. And this cost of the war is doing here just what it’s doing in Germany and Europe. It’s forcing a cutback of social programs, a cutback in medical insurance, and Medicaid is part of the bill.
We’re having a polarization of spending towards the financial 1% at the top of the economic pyramid, with tax cuts and with a payment to the military complex (MIC), not only by direct contracts, but by all of this foreign aid that is immediate. The dollars for foreign aid don’t ever leave the United States. They’re paid directly to the military to provide the arms that the recipients of this foreign military aid have received in order to so-called “Defend themselves,” with all sorts of boondoggles connected to it.
So that’s really the constitutional problem. And I want to, just in passing, mention one other constitutional issue. Article 51 of the UN Charter says that a member state may not attack another state unless it’s attacked by that country. The U.S. is violating the UN Charter as well as its own domestic policy. The 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) in America is not applicable to this because the United States hasn’t been under attack.
The U.S. is attacking or planning to attack Iran. So the whole body of law, the whole context that was supposedly put in place to have the United States create a post-World War II order of world peace and trade and investment has been torn apart by this. And it’s torn apart, again, by the pretense that the war in Iran is in America’s national interest because our interest is preventing any attempt by other countries to withdraw from the U.S.-centered financial system. Any attempt to de-dollarize their economies, Trump has said, will be met with enormous tariffs on these countries.
This fight goes way beyond simply bombing Iran. I think Richard’s introductory comment said, this is like the final struggle between Western hegemony, way beyond military colonialism, between Western hegemony and the global majority seeking to break free and follow its own national self-interest.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard?
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add a couple of things that are different topics, but I’ll show you how they link. The United States, as most countries, as most people who follow know, has got one of the worst crime problems in the world. We have guns, as everybody knows, and we use them, as everybody knows. And more people are shot, either killed or injured by guns in criminal activities of one kind or another every year.
Nonetheless, we have always required that police officers whose job it is to deal with that problem have a badge that must be visible so that anyone they arrest or anyone who observes them can get their name and their badge number and they are not allowed to refuse a request for that information. We now have a militarized police force, the ICE, which is allowed to wear masks and to refuse to identify itself.
Okay, what are you doing if no one in their right mind could suggest that the immigrant population, documented or otherwise, represents a threat to the American people more urgent or more immediate than gun crime? We don’t allow the police to deal with gun crime by officers who have masks and don’t have to identify themselves, but we are doing that with immigrants. And we have endless displays of ICE agents surrounding a farmer in the field, a car wash worker in the corner car wash, a person who does the dishes in the back of a restaurant or cleans the hotel room-the glorious jobs that our immigrants are supposed to be taking from us.
So what are you doing with police, who are not required to follow the rules of a civilized society the way the police are who are asked to deal with violent armed criminals? Wow. Wow. This ought to be front and center a big problem. Why isn’t it? Well, I would argue that we now have a population that the people who run this country believe can be treated this way. And I think it is very naive to imagine that if you’re going to behave towards perfectly non-dangerous people… I read today of a farmer in California who works in the vineyards, you know, the wine country, being surrounded at his church while he’s doing his religious activity, surrounded by ICE people, yanked away. His children and his wife do not know where he is.
The ICE does not tell them where he’s going and does not allow him access to his own family or to the lawyer they have procured. You know, to think that this kind of behavior unloaded on these people would not be applied next to others. Well, you can already see there are already all kinds of signs of the ideological right wing wanting to make that application. Before the huge demonstrations last Saturday, I watched a sheriff somewhere in Florida; I don’t remember the name, explaining on television that if any of those protesters come here and they don’t do what we tell them, we will shoot them. We will kill you, says the man in full uniform who is the police chief of this jurisdiction.
Okay, if you’re a responsible leader, you know that among the people who take instructions from you lower, are people whose understanding of boundaries is, let’s say, underdeveloped and who will misunderstand what you’re saying as a license to persecute people. You know, Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t give the order, but below him are the people who bomb hospitals. It’s remarkable where we are being led.
And you know, it’s possible that that isn’t orchestrated, but it is also possible that it is, and that there is a notion here that one needs to prepare the American people for a long period of war, as all of these battles are fought out, just in case it turns out that you can’t bunker bomb your way out of the morass of Iran. I do want to remind people, because I think many don’t know, that Iran is a very large country in a way that Afghanistan and Vietnam and others aren’t or weren’t. This is a different kind of enemy. We haven’t had that before, and we didn’t do well in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I want to remind people: we didn’t do well, even though the United States is the most militarily armed country in the world and among the richest. And those enemies, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, were among the poorest countries on this planet, and they won and we lost. That itself should make you worry that there’s a larger historical process going on here that you maybe ought to ask some questions about rather than to assume. And I am very worried that if this goes badly for Israel and for Iran, it will only serve to persuade that part of the country that supports this activity to support more of it.
It’s that old problem-If the plan doesn’t succeed, you have to do more of it. If it doesn’t succeed again, you have to do still more. Whereas the rest of us are saying, see, this is not a good plan. No, no, no, no, no. And those lines have been drawn in this country now pretty well. And the support for Mr. Trump, even though I also will note that there are now quite a few people in Mr. Trump’s MAGA organizations who do not want this war in Iran. Tucker Carlson speaks out against it. The strange woman from Georgia, Greene, speaks out against it. Steve Bannon speaks out against it.
Okay, these are very serious dissenters, and they have a fairly strong following. Now Mr. Trump has to deal with the damage to his own movement of moving in this direction. But of course, he has to worry about the damage if he doesn’t. And that’s what happens to you when you’re on the wrong side of a historical process. You can’t find anything that solves your problem. You’re reduced to picking the one with the least damage to your situation, but damage you’re going to have.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s point is that we’re living in a lawless country, lawless domestically as well as internationally. And his other point is that it’s self-defeating. You could look at Trump’s plan to bomb Iran as a tactic in this plan of U.S. hegemony, but it’s a tactic that is at the expense of long-term strategy. It’s self-defeating.
And just as the American-NATO plan in Ukraine to bleed Russia and to impose sanctions on Russia backfired and had just the opposite effect of increasing Russia’s self-sufficiency and strategy, every tactical move that the United States has employed has impaired any possible success of its long-term strategy in actually locking other countries into the U.S. dollarized international order. Obviously, what is happening now has created such a revulsion among other countries, as you can see in the United Nations discussions and the vote to censure Israel. And it should be to censure the Trump administration and the Biden administration for fully backing it and enabling its genocide.
You can see that the effect is to speed up and catalyze the breakaway of 85% of the global majority from the U.S.-NATO center that had been the old colonialism. Since we’re almost over, I just want to say one thing about how I see what’s happening in Iran. I don’t think that Trump is going to bomb it while the stock market is still open. Remember, after our show last Thursday, we thought, “Well, is the United States buildup in the Middle East simply trying to be a negotiating tactic to tell Iran, ‘Look, we’re really serious’?” Well, then you had the Israeli attack on Iran that had been obviously planned for almost a year.
The Israeli attack on Iran was not mainly from Israel. It was within Iran by Israeli agents and U.S. agents and British agents that had prepared the attack on the defense facilities that Iran had against air attacks. The Israeli attempts at air attacks have not been successful from Israel, only by local bomb owners. So I think that the United States is going to make a more serious attempt to attack.
But last weekend, when the Israeli attacks began, the pre-trading of U.S. stocks and oil prices showed the stock market was going to go down on Monday. The oil prices were going to go up. But when trading opened, the stock market was up and actually went up. And oil prices went down, not up.
There’s a kind of blindness in the hundreds of billions of dollars of investors that actually believe that all of this is going to blow over and that the United States will successfully be able to lock in its control of the world’s financial system, trading system, and military supremacy. They believe that they will be able to defeat China, Russia, and Iran, who are leading post-colonialism, the global south, and the rest of the countries that had been colonized by Europe.
But remember, before the actual colonization, which was primarily in the late 19th century, you already had the newly independent republics from Latin America, Haiti, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia all run into debt dependency. They all issued bonds that almost immediately defaulted and led to the Europeans imposing monetary commissions to take control of the fiscal policy of these countries. This was independent of colonialism. This was a purely financial character. The European control of debtor countries already at that time was pioneered.
This is what the United States is trying to continue today. Not only colonialism explicitly of a military character by appointing direct control of governments, but financial control and dollarization. That’s what is ultimately thought about by the United States.
And as I said, I spent my 30s, the 1970s, in describing all this through my book, Super Imperialism, which explained all of this. And that was the Defense Department, the State Department, the White House, and the Treasury all followed exactly the logic that I’d spelled out in Super Imperialism, which I’d hoped would actually create a reaction against this. The U.S. government strategists used it as a how-to-do-it book instead. So that showed me at that time how all of the exploitation that we’re seeing today was being put in place already in the early 1970s.
RICHARD WOLFF: If I could just add one final thing, Nima, I know we’re running out of time. Michael’s comment makes me want to reiterate once again, so we don’t miss it: the utter irrelevance of Europe to all that is going on here. Look, every strategist that I’ve read knows that if damage is done to Iran, one of the things Iran will do is close the Straits of Hormuz there, through which something like a quarter of the oil traffic in the world has to pass, and which couldn’t pass if they blocked it or threatened it with missiles in the way that the Houthis have been doing nearby. And who relies on the oil going through the Suez Canal and so forth? It’s the Europeans. Where are they?
They can’t handle another inflation of their energy cost. They can’t handle the one they’re living through now. They worry each year about whether they get through the winter. That’s where they are. Their industry is hemorrhaging while they wait for the hammer to drop on the tariffs. I mean, it’s too much.
You are overstraining these societies, and they have nothing to say. They’re not at the relevant meeting, they’re not part of the relevant decision-making. They will, of course, live with the consequences. The United States will escape many of them. So it’s again, it’s a testimony. And if I’m right that we’re looking at the end of colonialism, then for Europe, it is the end that has already happened.
They are whatever the opposite is of on top of the situation; they are underneath the situation. As the sparks explode, their houses will be set on fire. But other than watching it all, they have no role to play. It’s an extraordinary step and moment in the history of colonialism’s decline from its origins in Europe.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I have to point out that China and India are also very major customers of Iranian oil. And that has led to some discussion. Well, is Iran really going to sink a ship in the Gulf of Hormuz and impair China? And we know that China has been sending airplanes to Iran.
I have no idea at all what China’s policy will be. But the Americans are willing to create this anarchy for Europe that Richard has just pointed out in order to say, “Well, look at how it’s going to hurt China.” And, of course, it’ll also hurt India. And I don’t know how that’s going to affect Indian-U.S. relations. But the disruption is going to be global, way beyond Europe. It’ll affect all of Asia and South East Asia and South Asia.
And the United States will be able to remain largely immune in the sense that it is independent in oil, but its stock market and financial markets are not independent. And the effect on the United States won’t be an inability to get oil, but the fact that oil prices are going to go way up, pushing up inflation here as well – exactly what Trump has said that he’d wanted to avoid. So it’s going to destabilize the U.S. economy just as much as the European, Chinese, and Indian economies.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Great pleasure, as always.
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you, Nima.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: See you soon. Bye-bye.
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