NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, March 12, 2026, and our dear friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are here with us. Welcome, Mike, Richard.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Let me start today with you, Richard, and with what has happened, you know, the initial, the first day of the attack on Iranian, you know, the American attack on Iran, and they hit one of the schools in Iran, which was argued by many people. You know, it's not mostly Democrats are talking about how did that happen ? Because you can find it on the map. You can find everything. And every time Donald Trump comes out, they said tomahawk missiles. Then he said tomahawk missiles. Maybe it came from Iran. Then it came out that Iran doesn't have tomahawk missiles. The United States, together with Germany and the United Kingdom and France, they have these sorts of tomahawk missiles. And what is your understanding of Donald Trump and the way that he's trying to respond to these critics inside the United States and what's going on in the Middle East with the war?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I'm glad you started with me because I'm going to answer in a kind of blunt way with an answer I know to be incomplete and then let Michael and you fill it in and correct me where I make a misstep.
I don't understand the discussion that has been going on in which people seem to want to ask Mr. Trump a simple question. "What was the objective here so that we know when you've achieved it and we can all talk about that and we'll have a clear focus?" And Mr. Trump did what he has often done: not answered that question, but chosen instead to give multiple answers that don't consist with one, you know, are not consistent one with the other.
Is it regime change ? Is it to end their nuclear program ? Is it to deprive them of military capability to threaten their neighbors ? I mean, I could go on, you've heard them all. There's no interest in this that I have. Why not ? Because, I presume, in the way I think about the world, that a decision to go to war, which is one of the weightier decisions anybody ever makes, is, like all decisions, big and small, determined by many factors that don't all point in the same direction. That every political leader who has ever declared a war has had to face the fact that there were some aspects that made it wise to go to war and other aspects that made it stupid and dangerous to go to war, and that he weighed or she weighed them and reached a decision. I assume that that's the way this works. Whether that's consciously in the minds of the leaders or not really doesn't matter. It's what I think the process effectively is. All right.
Having said that, now I'm going to provoke. Here is what I suspect was the deciding factor. Not the only factor. There is no only factor. I don't even think there is a key factor. There are multiple factors, and you have to think about them as an inconsistent group. But the ones I want to focus people's attention on, are the ones that are not spoken. And they're not spoken much by the Republicans, and they're not spoken much even by the Democrats. And that is that this is like so much of what Mr. Trump ends up doing, a piece of political theater whose objectives are somewhere else.
So I don't think this is a serious war in the sense you plan out a program, you have contingency plans. Here's what we'll do if it lasts two weeks. Here's what we'll do if it lasts two months. Here's what we'll do if it lasts two years. And you take steps and you organize your allies and all of this stuff. I see most of that missing, which reinforces in me the following conclusion.
The two biggest problems Mr. Trump faced three weeks ago, or however when this decision was made, were number one, the endless scandal of Epstein, and number two, a bad economic situation getting worse. Many of the dimensions that we've been talking about on this program. I write about it, Michael writes about it, so we have been talking about that. And there was nothing he could do. And when the Supreme Court took away the tariffs, undoing the one bit of revenue generation the man had come up with, while he proposes a $600 billion increase in the military budget for next year, well, that means that we're going to be a deficit country in the trillions again.
So he's going to look bad there. Jobs are a disaster. Inflation is on the way to resume rising. It stopped across, it declined across Biden, and then it froze. He couldn't get it to go down any further. The Democrats have a field day, typical with the Democrats. They can't say what it is, so they come up with a clever ad term: affordability. You know, it's like something bad descended on America, like a rainy day, affordability crisis. All right, conclusion.
We're going to war because war pushes Epstein off of the headlines. It pushes the bad economy to the sideline or off the headlines. And instead, it focuses all the attention on the commander-in-chief as he discusses the flames and the bombs and the whole theatric of a war. He wants a theater war for as long as it takes to distract the American people. And the longer he can keep it going without the ramifications coming back to give him new problems, which it will.
But for the time being, here he has a distraction, and I can't think of anything else he could do, given who he is, that would offer him those benefits of distraction that this caper actually does. The side benefit: it keeps Israel going. You know, he wants to develop that relationship. There is a support in the United States, a significant one, to keep that relationship going. Okay, that's a little side benefit that he can get for it. And since he doesn't know history, you can see that all the time, and doesn't care much, he doesn't have to worry about what all those ramifications might be. Because if you try to think through what the ramifications of your acts are, well, the only resource you really have is history.
You can try to go back and see how historically these problems were conceived and resolved, and then you pick and choose and hope this subset might work in your particular circumstances. One of the reasons Michael Hudson's work on the ancient history of money is very valuable is because, as Michael surely knows, what he found in history was shaped by what he lives through right now. What he wants us to think about and see are the things that were done in the past: the role money played, and the role monetary policy played, that will give us clues into now.
Mr. Trump can't do that because he has no idea and no respect for the historical realities that he could use. So he ends up winging it, as I'm sure he says, and he's now winging it by means of a war. He is not the first president nor the first political leader to be driven to war by domestic political considerations. That's not new. I don't mean to suggest he's the only person who's ever done it, but I do think that's what's going on here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think it's perfectly natural that Trump is not going to announce what the real purpose is of the war in Iran is. His whole business career had one purpose: to cheat his partners and to cheat his suppliers and contractors. Well, he's not going to come right out and say, "My purpose as a businessman to cheat you. My purpose is to make you rich." And then he's going to cheat them if he can convince them to be suckered into the real estate deals that he did for so many years, so notoriously in New York City. I think that the purpose of the war is very clear. It's the same purpose that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian regime in 1953. It's all about oil. And it's not only about oil. Trump has said he wants to put in his own regime and let the United States take control of Iran's oil, just as he tried to do in Venezuela. It's all a repeat.
But controlling this oil has a much broader scope for what it's trying to do that he's obviously thought out and talked with his other nations is to control the whole world's oil trade, because you can't control the trade in oil without not only controlling the world's oil trade, but to isolate countries that are not under your control for this trade, such as Russia and Iran, and such as Venezuela was.
So I think it's about oil, and that's what makes what's happening something that is way beyond Trump's willingness, not to mention capacity, to explain to the world. And that is, this is really the start of World War III and all of the alignments that that's going to take. And it's a world war because oil is an international commodity. Every nation in the world needs oil in order to power its factories, to provide electricity, to light its homes and heat its homes, to back its chemical industry, and especially the fertilizer industry.
So, and because 20% of the world's oil trade comes from OPEC and indeed goes through the Strait of Hormuz, the effect is being felt over the entire world right now. And so, I'm not going to try to read either Trump's mind or even explain what's happening right now in the Near East because all of your military guests on your show are able to do that. But I think I can see where all of this is leading in the future. And the future is what this war is all about. How is the world going to be structured from here on in under U.S. control or under Iran's independence ? So, I want to talk about what both countries plan for the future, and each of them has a plan, and what this means for oil.
Iran has said that the war is going to go on until it's achieved its number one aim: to drive the United States out of the Middle East permanently. And just this morning, Ayatollah Khomeini has said that includes ending Israel. That's going to take a long time, and that means it's going to be a long war. There are all sorts of reports that Trump has telephoned Putin in Russia to say: "Can't you try to bring some pressure on Iran to have peace in the world and just let's negotiate a ceasefire ? You know, we've bombed it. Now that we've bombed it, you know, we're willing to stop." As if Iran hasn't made long-term plans for this, that it's announced to the world exactly what its future is going to be for the rest of the half year, for the rest of 2026. It's held back its big bombs because it's wanted Israel and the American military bases and OPEC countries to expend all of their air defense systems and missile defense systems against the Iranian drone attacks and the use of its old missiles. And once these systems are exhausted, now Iran is going to come in with the heavy hitting. It said this again and again as a strategy. And that's why, last year and again in the war last June, it's demonstrated its ability to penetrate Israeli and as a result, U.S. military base defenses. It will.
So it tried to say, "Look, if you really are attacking us, this is what's going to happen. We've shown you the future. We've shown you what it will do." And Trump really didn't believe that. Trump did have a view of the future that went to war. He said, "First of all, you know, we're going to bomb Iran. We have to, if we bomb the leadership and wipe it out, the Iranian people are going to rise up against and say that the leader is dead. We can rise up and have a pro-U.S. government, basically. Someone like the Shah and his father, who was [installed] in 1925. A client turned into client dictatorship." That's what he believed. And he thought that that would be a Yeltsin-like figure who would let American companies come in and develop Iranian oil by controlling it and thereby absorbing Iran, making it into a U.S. satellite. That didn't work. Trump also announced, and the military announced, "Well, we're going to back the Kurds. We're going to do to Iran what we have plans to do to Russia and China. We're going to cut Iran into five different ethnic units and we're going to start by backing the Kurds, who are going to fight for their autonomy."
Well, in the last few days, you've had the Iraqi and the Iranian Kurds send notes to the new Ayatollah. "We are not going to attack Iran. Don't worry. We know that that would be suicidal. We've already lost enough trust in the United States before and been wiped out. Don't worry about that." So that dream that Trump had has failed. And he really thought that somehow he could destroy all of the Iranian missile defenses. And essentially, shock and oil were going to do to Iran what America did to Iraq in the 2003 war. All of the future that the Americans have forecast: a short war leading to an American victory or at least wiping out Iran. And as Trump said, "If we don't wipe out, really defeat Iran now, we're just going to have to spend the next five years rearming ourselves and attack it all over again."
So it's going to be a war to the end. Well, Iran also says, "You're absolutely right. It's going to be a war to end the whole U.S. occupation of the Near East." That is going to take much more than just a few months or a few weeks that Trump was hoping it would be solved by the time he goes to China and meets with President Xi to talk about it. So you're having Russia, China, and Iran all together supporting what's happening. And the effect of this on the rest of the world, that's drawing us all in, has forced the rest of the world to take sides. Europe is being torn apart by the energy pressures that has and has thrown its support behind the United States and Israel so far. And the population of Europe, as we've said before, is against the war, but there are not going to be new elections to replace Starmer and Meritz, Macron, and Merz for a while.
So that's going to be there. The question is, what are the Asian countries going to do ? Well, blocking the Strait of Hormuz for six months causes not only a blockage of oil, but a blockage of natural gas. And the main victims of all of this are South Korea and Japan. What are they going to do with all of this ? It means that their major industry of their industries are going to be shut down. It means unemployment. It means a shrinking GDP for Europe as well. So America's allies are going to be bearing the major cost. And to prevent this world crisis from bringing on the kind of world depression that occurred in 1929 to 1931, Trump has said, "All right, we're letting Russia provide the world with oil." He's trying to prevent Russia from supplying China with oil. And Iranian shipping has been supplying China with oil, but it's only been able to supply about 5% of China's oil needs.
So, Russia is going to step in. And just in the last few days, President Putin has said, "Well, Europe doesn't want our oil and gas. Let's do it right now." They've already said they're going to cut off their purchase of it in April. Russian ships have been turned around, and instead of delivering oil and gas to Europe, they're supplying it to the countries with which they intend to develop long-term relationships when this war is over. And the relationships are going to be with the BRICS countries, with Africa, and with South America. In particular, Brazil is important for all of this because Brazil imports 80% of its fertilizer. And this is needed for Brazil to grow the soybeans that it's exporting to China for its foreign exchange. Fertilizer is the key not only to feeding its own population, but to supporting the balance of payments in other countries. The global south countries are being absolutely squeezed by these rising oil prices and gas prices. And the inability of them to get fertilizer threatens to cause a crop failure in Africa and South America. And the only way of avoiding this, as long as the Strait of Hormuz is closed to OPEC oil, is from Russia or from Iran.
Well, Iran is going to continue to support mainly China, so it's really Russia that's going to be developing all of this. So, while the United States' plan was to capture Iran and restructure the world's oil trade, it turns out that the restructuring is going to probably strengthen Iran and Russia for the long term unless the United States wipes out Iran. And that's what this war is all about. The United States is threatening to accelerate it, and Iran is just taking off with its big missiles that are going to continue to go on.
And I know that I've gone on along, but I want to say, just for later discussion, I want to pose two future things that I want to talk about. A major, the aim of Iran is said to isolate OPEC from the United States and from the dollar. First of all, it says OPEC countries cannot let the United States use their territory as military bases. That's why it bombed Bahrain, Kuwait and other countries. Second, Iran has said, "In order to really lead the Arab countries to avoid reestablishing these bases, we have to stop the economic linkages between the Arab countries and the United States." And one of the major linkages that they've pointed out are the large computer companies that want to have computer stations to process automatic intelligence. Google, Microsoft, and the others.
So the Iranians have said, "We're going to bomb enough of their installations here so that they cannot do this." And they've made a final, really radical demand on the other Arab countries. "You have to begin disinvesting in the United States. All of your huge national savings and the personal savings of the Arab monarchies have been invested in U.S. stocks and bonds, mainly bonds and bank deposits. You have to disinvest with the United States." Well, that's already occurring voluntarily by the Arab countries because they say, especially Saudi Arabia, "We're a very heavy debt-leveraged economy. And now that we're not getting oil export revenues anymore, we need to balance our budget and to avoid defaulting on our financial linkages by liquidating some of the savings that we've been built up."
So you're having the Arab countries already beginning to sell off the savings. That's one thing that's happening. Another is something that's going to happen as a result of this World War III that's very much the same as occurred after World War II. That is, it's going to end the monarchies in many Arab OPEC countries. You've already seen Bahrain's king, who was a protégé of Saudi Arabia. He's fled the country and gone to Saudi Arabia. And Bahrain has a primarily Shiite population, whereas the king is Sunni and gone there. I would expect that monarchy to fall, just as World War I saw the monarchies of Europe end. England kept its monarchy because they were turned into a tourist attraction, basically, without any real effect.
But the monarchies ended. Well, also, Jordan is probably a monarchy where you're going to have the domestic, largely Palestinian population, overthrow the monarchy of Jordan. And I think that the aim of Iran is to replace the Arab family monarchies with monarchies that are more sympathetic to them and at least tolerant of the Shiite religion, no longer the Sunni Wahhabi supremacists. So I think you're going to see this is a major characteristic. And of course, the other thing I think we should talk about for the future result of this World War III is the First World War led to the creation of an international organization, the League of Nations. The United States did not join it because it said, we won't join any international organization in which we don't have veto power. No one's going to tell us what to do.
Well, the world fell into depression, World War II. After World War II, there was another attempt to create a body of international law, the United Nations. That has now been dissolved. We've seen the utter hopelessness, the utter inability of the United Nations to stop this war, to stop the United States, to stop Israel, to stop the genocide that you're seeing that is now spread from Gaza to the West Bank, and to stop what Israel has been doing in the last week is it expects Iran to be able to wipe out most of Israel. It sees the handwriting on the wall.
So what is it doing ? It's moving to Lebanon. It's taking over Lebanon to say if we can't live in Israel and that's all bombed out. Well, there's one country that's not bombed out, Lebanon. We're going to bomb it just enough to move there. So you're seeing a whole attack on military aggression in the world from the U.S., Israel, Access, and its allies. Probably the result of all of this is going to be either to restructure the UN or more likely to create a brand new organization that will not have U.S. veto power, will not have the U.S. control, and will have its own financing and budget and probably move out of New York, which, as we've said, the Secretary General Gutierrez said the UN is broke and it's going to have to move out of New York anyway by August.
So I think these are what I think we should talk about, how the world will be evolving as the war winds down. And whatever the results are, it looks like Iran is going to be in terms of the timing, certainly, not the United States. Iran is in terms of the timing. And as the oil crisis goes down and the gas liquefied natural gas crisis and the fertilizer crisis leading to a chemical industry crisis and an industrial crisis, all of this is going to restructure the world just as seriously, I think, as World War I and II did in their ways.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, one important point that Michael just mentioned is the fertilizer. We've learned from the American farmers that, due to the war that started by Donald Trump, the price of fertilizer has increased sharply. And the people are talking about it in the United States. On the other hand, Richard, let me a little bit focus on what is the outcome of what Donald Trump is doing in a long run. For example, for South Korea, for Japan, and for all these Persian Gulf Arab states. These are, you know, at least in the eyes of the leaders of these countries, they thought that the American bases would bring prosperity and security to their countries. And how do you see the outcome of what's going on right now ? Because they're bringing, you know, they left South Korea naked, simply naked. They're bringing the air defense system to the Middle East. And you see all these bases being somehow, most of the radars being destroyed during, you know, we are getting to 12 at least two weeks of war. What is your understanding of these leaderships in these countries toward what Donald Trump is doing?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think they have to face the same reality that the United States faces and that we have been discussing for months. I am so taken by it, I have no choice but to say it to you. We are experiencing, I have said this before; we are living through the decline of the American empire. I have been asked countless questions. "What's your evidence for thinking that?" And then I point to the economy and the difficulties that we're having. But I don't need to do that anymore.
This war is a literal chapter in the decline of the empire. When one of the leading officials of Iran says what Michael repeated a few minutes ago, that the goal of Iran is to remove the United States from the Middle East. Well, another way of saying that is the American Empire, which included the Middle East, all those bases in all those Gulf states, and all the fund relationships with oil, that was a key part of the American Empire. And things have now come to the point where there's a part of the American Empire, Iran, forced by the nature of the global oil market and everything else to be a part of that empire, has come to the position and now they can act on it. You know, Prime Minister Mosaddegh, back in 1953, he didn't want to leave office. He was pushed out of office by the United States and Britain, basically. Okay, but now, even when you kill the Ayatollah, it doesn't matter. There's another Ayatollah standing right behind him. And there'll be another one if they kill this young man. Because it's no longer the conditions you had then. You now have an empire that's in difficulty, having its own problems, shaping what it can and cannot do.
So when you ask what happens to South Korea, my answer is that's what we're watching. The recognition in the minds of all of those governments in the Middle East, in those seven Gulf, or whatever they are, seven or eight Gulf states, you know, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, all of that. They're discovering that having an American military base is not only a wonderful thing, it's a horrible thing. It makes you a target. But you can only be a target if other forces are closing in on the empire. So then, what's the conclusion ? Well, the issue between the United States and Iran is exactly the same as the issue between the United States and Russia or China. Russia and China have an alliance that explains and enables and reflects their way of challenging the American empire. Drawing a line at Ukraine's border, saying that the Russians, that we will not allow NATO to take over Ukraine the way we allowed NATO to take over Poland and the Czech Republic and Slovakia and Labor. We all know this story. NATO moved to the east and Russia couldn't do anything.
Then Russia decided, in response to this situation, it had a radically changed many of the things. It got rid of the whole effort to be a socialist country out the window. Big change for a country like that. Big change. It decided Europe was not where it was located. Asia was where its future lay, and it replaced Europe with China. I mean, these are enormous changes to the global situation.
And so the United States has a choice, doesn't it, with Russia and China. It can either fight to keep the empire going, in which case it risked World War III. World War III didn't come on the agenda now with Iran. I mean, people are talking about it now. That's a step forward. But it was the same issue before. Europe made the decision to risk World War III by uniting against Russia in Ukraine. That was a decision made by the Europeans because they thought, without admitting it, that they could shore up the American empire upon which they depend. Big mistake. You didn't understand how far the empire had already declined. You didn't understand the forces making for more decline.
So you allied yourself to the wrong horse, and they're suffering it right to this minute. Keir Starmer, in the first days of this thing, stood up and said, "I won't let the Americans use British airfields." Within 24 hours, he was in favor of the war, and 24 hours later, he turned against the war. And now, Mr. Starmer, and this is really important, Mr. Starmer, whose popularity is in the toilet, like Mr. Trump's, only worse, who has no chance of winning the next election and staying in power, has a chance. He is beating the bushes in Britain, if you pay attention, which I do, attacking Badenoch, the head of the Conservative Party, and Farage, the head of the Reform Party. They have three parties in England that matter at this point. He's attacking them for being pro-American in this war. Why ? Because he might actually stay in power because the British people, like the American people, don't want a war with Iran. He could save his domestic position by cheering on the decline of the American empire. When your closest ally is dishing you this way, it's over.
Now, of course, nobody will admit it, but the very logic of the arguments we've been articulating, Michael, me, and you, for months now, that's what this is. This is the next step: logical and predictable of the dismantling of the empire. A political force, and if Michael is right, a military force has come together that's in a position to tell the United States you either get out of the Middle East, which is what that high official said last week, the high Iranian official quoted, no rep, no denial later. Our goal, the journalist asked, how long will you fight ? The answer, I believe, it was the foreign minister, as long as the United States is not out of the Middle East. Oh my God, there it is, in stark letters. We are now in a position where it's not Ukraine. This is a whole massive region of a world economy more integrated and therefore more dependent on each of its regions, a huge crucial globe, ultra-pole as in all between Asia and Europe, only now global, is in a position of saying to the United States, you're not wanted here, you're not needed here, and we're going to drive you out. What is the United States going to do ? I'm less able to predict the future than Michael. He's one of the many ways he exceeds me in his capabilities. I can't do it.
But I am tempted, like I know Michael is. And my temptation is to say here that Mr. Trump should listen to the message from Joe Rogan and from Megan Kelly. He should listen, get out now, cut your losses, because what are you going to do ? Take over Iran ? Ninety-two million will wage a guerrilla war against you forever. That's what they're telling you. You'll not be able to get oil out of that country. Every time you put a pipeline in, they'll blow it up. We know this story, we've been to, we've seen this movie. You've got to admit the empire is over. Sit down with the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese, while there is still in them a recognition that they too would be better off working a deal out with you than waiting to see how far you will go. That's the option we have. The rest is make-believe.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, you've just made the all-important point that should be the frame for the whole discussion. This war has destroyed the whole enabling fiction that has underlined the whole U.S. Cold War policy and the whole U.S. support of Israel and its war against Russia and Ukraine and its war against Iran. This enabling fiction is that the world needed U.S. protection against attack from Russia invading Europe, a silly fantasy, or from China conquering, militarily, Asia, a silly fantasy, or from Iran attacking. Iran hasn't attacked anyone. It turns out that we're just seeing that, as you just illustrated perfectly, that instead of protecting the world from America's enemies, the U.S. is the great creator of chaos. The U.S. is the great threat to the world.
And this is going to last no matter even if the United States were to go on fighting with Iran, that's going to be what is shaping. What is going to happen when the U.S. finally gives up and is driven out of the Middle East, not simply by Iran, but by Europe, by Asia, by Russia, by China, with all of the countries that realize that until the United States stops fighting, which it won't do until it drives the United States out of the Middle East, that their economies are going to be shrinking as a result of an inability to supply energy, gas, chemicals, fertilizer, and all the things we've been talking about. That's really the choice. And I think one effect of this is not only going to be in terms of trade, for the oil trade, and for their economic growth, but it's going to be financial. And this is where the current war, and I do want to call it World War III, is going to be different from World Wars I and II. After World War I, the dollar emerged supreme because it insisted on the Allied countries paying their war debts for arms they had bought before the United States entered the war. They said, "All right, we'll pay you. We'll just insist that Germany pay reparations." The result was a collapse of the European economies, not only Germany, but France with its hyperinflation, with Britain with its general strike of 1926. And then we had the Great Depression.
Well, there was an enormous flight of refugee capital and flight capital and gold out of Europe and other countries to the United States during the 30s. So that when World War II ended, the United States already had 75% of the world's gold supply. Well, once again, the United States was able to establish pro-creditor rules that have governed the entire international financial system since 1945 in U.S. favor. The U.S. and dollar and gold were the two forms and currencies in which trade would occur and in which other central banks and other countries would keep their national savings in loans to the United States, to the government for treasury bills, to corporations through treasury bonds, and through U.S. government agencies such as Fannie Mae.
All of this is now being threatened, not only by other countries rebelling and saying this is unfair, but by the fact that the United States itself has destroyed this system, by weaponizing the dollar, by weaponizing the financial system as a means of imposing sanctions and forcing its allies to impose sanctions against Russian oil, Ukrainian oil, and to isolate Iran for ever since 1979, when finally they drove out the Shah and the main rallying point against the Shah for all Iran was the Shiite clergy led by Khomeini at that time, because that was the mosques were the only places in Iran, you could go where the Savak couldn't follow you, grab you, and torture you.
Well, the result of this isolation since 1979 has been other countries, instead of linking their oil to Iran, they linked it to the Arab OPEC countries, which weren't isolated. And you saw that in the United Nations vote that happened yesterday. And it's amazing. The U.S. and its allies sponsored a vote blaming Iran for attacking American Israel when it was the victim of the attack. And yet more countries supported this resolution against Iran than had ever supported any Security Council proposal in United Nations history. So we're dealing with a situation now where the whole world is only thinking about its oil. Where is it going to get its oil with the Arab monarchies ? There's been no thought that maybe it'll get its oil, number one, from Iran as well, as Iran has driven the U.S. out of the Middle East and as Russia and China by themselves have ended America's attack on freedom of the seas and its attack on international law providing freedom of the seas. And with Iranian oil restructured, this is going to go hand in hand with what I mentioned: a transformation of the politics of the Arab oil countries, ending the fight encouraged by the United States to have the Sunni and the Shia fight each other so that America can divide and conquer the old British empire style.
So all of this, this realignment is going to happen because other countries will realize this situation of an American war for Israel to control the Near East has failed. Neither Israel nor al-Qaeda in Syria, the Wahhabi terrorists, nor the United States can protect our oil. It looked like the only way of resuming oil supplies to the whole world is on Iran's terms. The U.S. bases must be removed from the Near East, and the Arab monarchies must either decouple themselves and their finances and their foreign investment in their computer centers there. Unless this happens, the whole world will continue to shrink. That's the choice before it, and that's what makes this a world war that cannot maintain the current economic system except the price of all America's allies going into 1930s-type depression as a result of the war. That's what has broken up the whole enabling fiction that America is protecting the world rather than terrorizing the world and destabilizing the world and creating chaos throughout the world economy.
RICHARD WOLFF: If I could add quickly, if my information is correct, closing the Strait of Hormuz also deprives a number of those Gulf states of food and water because they are isolated and they need the ships to bring them food for sure and then water, depending on whether Iran has hit the desalinization plants the way; apparently, Israel has hit desalinization plants in the Middle East. So it could become very urgent very quickly if you're seeing no food. That's a different level of crisis.
But now let me expand on a point Michael made. Imagine, because it's already there, a movement among the Arab people of the Gulf state areas, a political movement that says, "We are mortgaged up to here by the debts of our leaders, which we are required to pay." They are super rich because they get to skim off the oil business; plus, they collect the interest off the loans to the U.S. government. We have military bases that render us targets. We have the enmity of Iran that risks the closing of the Strait of Hormuz pretty much when they want to. Here's an alternative. We get rid of the monarchy, Michael's earlier point, and we declare, henceforth, we will nationalize, we'll take over, and we'll have little Mosaddeghs in every one of these countries. We'll take over the oil. We will carefully sell oil to multiple buyers so that we never get into a lopsided dependence on any one of them. That's already done by other countries. And likewise, we will make our investments if we don't use oil money to develop our economy. Let's remember: every advice given by an economist, myself included, to these governments over the years was: you better take your oil revenue and diversify because a day will come when either you'll run out of oil or the oil business will disappear and you will have nothing. They all nodded in agreement, but they didn't do it. None of them. Tourism is not an alternative.
Okay, now there's a political party operating in the United Arab Public, in Kuwait, everywhere, which has a program, a nationalization program that solves the relationship with Iran, that changes the relationship with the United States, and builds a new relationship with China, which will be eager to buy as much oil as they can sell. And not that China is the only one, not at all.
The Europeans will need it and so forth. And they can diversify. This is a much better future for them than the leadership in position now can offer them. If you add a little civil liberties and a little civil rights, wow, and a parliament that really matters and voting, you begin to have a program for progressive political change in the Middle East that has a real chance and that has not been part of the equation in that part of the world for quite a while. And it echoes. Here's the irony: it echoes ideas that were advanced many years ago about the future of Iran by the Tudeh Party in that country, which had conferences and debates. I remember some of them, which raised; that's where my idea about this comes from.
So it's more of a Middle Eastern-based notion of their position in that part of the world. Everybody should understand. If you think in ethnic terms, which is okay, you can't think only Shiite Sunni. Persians are not Arabs, and that distinction is very important in that part of the world and has to be sort of factored in. But I don't want to lose the most important dimension, which is this is a momentous moment in which the decline of the American Empire becomes much more visible than it was before. It takes another step, but even more dramatic is the visibility. A leader of Iran is in the position to say, America is out, and it is serious. And the United States, sooner or later, is going to have to deal with that demand because they've started a war that at this point looks like it will not end until that demand is met.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's very interesting, Richard. You've described the Arab countries as being in the situation that Iran was in in 1905 when it tried to begin to get rid of the ruling family dynasty that had ruled the country for 100 years and had invited in Britain to have all sorts of trade concessions, especially in the tobacco trade. Iran rewrote the constitution as a means of dislodging the ruling family. And finally, in 1925, there was an overall revolt to replace the ruling family with self-rule by Iranians as a whole.
Well, the British intervened, as they had been doing for 30 years, and installed a military leader, the Shah's father, also a Shah, who essentially acted as a client oligarch on behalf of Britain. And that was even so, they could not prevent Iran's attempt to elect a head Mossadegh who wanted to take regain control of Iran's oil for the people at large. And that's why there were the MI6 and the CIA to overthrow him. What happened in Iran is exactly what you forecast as happening in the other Arab countries. They are absolutely concentrated wealth by a very selfish and ignorant ruling class. I've met their kings; they are living in the short run, very parochial point of view. They are made fun of by the British and by the other Western bankers and officials that have had contact with them. They are as obsolete today as the kings and queens of Europe were after World War I. There's no question. You don't need the two-day Communist Party today to overthrow them. The pressure of the populations themselves, we can even call it democratic pressure because the majority of the population know that they're just oppressed as low-wage laborers, while these kings have such enormous wealth that they're wasting it all. You talk about diversifying the economy. What have they done ? They've diversified into luxury housing, all of these huge housing projects and tourism.
Well, tourism and luxury housing are not a diversification of the economic base. This is exactly what's going to be an issue. And it means, finally, the Arab countries are catching up to the position that Iran was in, already 100 years ago.
RICHARD WOLFF: And a footnote. Let's remember, the British Empire, when it was finally dying and being pushed out of India, Asia, everywhere else, understood that, in leaving, it would do something like what armies sometimes do when they retreat. It's called a scorched earth policy. And what the British version of this was, you divide the territory you're forced to leave. Find whatever forces you can that are hostile to one another and exacerbate that hostility.
Look at how the British undid everything Mahatma Gandhi tried to do. He wanted to bring the Hindu and Muslim people together in many ways. They made sure that didn't happen. The great separation: the Bangladesh later Pakistan, all of that. Well, in the desert area of the Gulf, they created seven or eight little countries instead of another Iran. Iran is big. These countries are very little. It understood it would have an easier chance managing and manipulating if it had this family in charge of these square miles and this family.
So it'd be the emir here and the sheikh over there, and they could buy and replace them easily. And when the American Empire, after World War II, replaced the British, this was ready-made for them to resume the same thing. The Iranians, in a way, had had to struggle with the effort of the British to do that there. They knew very well what they were up against. They worked real hard to try to hold that country together, which is paying off now confronted by the United States. It's a little bit like what China was able to do by never quite being anybody's colony, half, but not quite. And that held them together for a solidity that is standing them in good stead now that they come later.
So I think we should keep in mind that those countries in the Gulf states are very new. They are very artificial creations of a declining British empire, and therefore they have a new world, as the American Empire that replaced the British is also dying. Hopefully, they will not be passed on to yet another empire that they should have in their minds as the crucial thing not to allow to happen to them.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the point you've just made brings us back to the original question that Nima asks: "What is the plan of the United States?" The U.S. plan has always been short run. It was to be what the Germans called a Früchrieg, a happy war, a short war. They will attack Iran, the people will rise up, Trump will appoint a new leader, and Iran will be in the U.S. orbit. This was a short-term thinking, and he had no concept of the long-term consequences. And the Arab countries so far have the situation that you describe as Britain having created, divide and conquer. Let's put each local kingdom in the hands of a particular royal, a particular clan and family. That has prevented any kind of organization here. That has forced the Arab countries to live in the short run for the last hundred years. And what you and I are talking about is that the world cannot afford to live in this short run anymore because the short run is chaos. And the only solution is a long-term restructuring. And neither the United States nor Europe nor Israel have thought of restructuring. It never occurred to them that there could be a restructuring away from the shards of the British Empire and the American Empire that's replaced it.
Well, now this restructuring is being forced on not only the Arab countries and kingdoms, but on Europe, on Asia, and on the global south. They're all having to restructure the world in a way that leaves the United States and the West to be isolated. All it has brought about is chaos and genocide and a violation of all of the international laws that the world thought was going to govern the economy for the long term after 1945. Now there has to be a new institution, new international laws, a new financial system, a new trading system, and new military alliances. That's what is, that's the future.
RICHARD WOLFF: I know we're running out of time, but I would like to end with asking Nima a question. And I'm asking you because you are of Iranian origin. Here is the big question. Can the Iranian people today do two things ? Tolerate, withstand, absorb the military assault of the United States and Israel ? And can they do it long enough for everything we have said today to play out ? Do they have the capacity ? Because I know much of the world, that's the question, number one in people's minds.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: My answer to both of those questions is positive because Iran sees no other solution to what's going on. They have tried to negotiate with the United States two times, and both times they were deceived by the United States. And they themselves said that there is no ceasefire. They're not thinking of ceasefire. They're not thinking of negotiations with the United States.
So what is the path forward for them and for the Iranian people ? They're not going to put an end to this conflict, to this war, so easily because they know if they go with some sort of ceasefire, they're going to be attacked again and again. They don't want this and they don't go in that direction. I think they're prepared to go all the way down, to go totally against the United States and what the United States and Israel are seeking for, in Iran. And the people are prepared. And what I see, what I witnessed, I was there for 40 days, I saw something, you know, the people are not, they understand these, all these sufferings that are happening right now in Iran because of these economic difficulties coming from the United States and their tremendous sanctions for more than 46 years. This is a nation that was, you know, sustained itself for more than 46 years of sanctions. And they are prepared to go as far as it takes to defeat the United States in the region.
RICHARD WOLFF: All right, that's what I wanted to know.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Photo by omid armin on Unsplash
Transcription - ced