Nima Alkhorshid: Hi everybody, today is Thursday, July 2nd, 2026, and our dear friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are here with us. Welcome back.
Richard Wolff: Glad to be here.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, let me start with what JD Vance said about how the United States is preparing itself with this so-called MOU between Iran and the United States.
JD Vance (clip): I think what the president has told us to do is use this MOU to sort of refill the world's oil economy, to refill some stocks, and then to see where the hand is.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah. Richard, let's start with you. They're basically talking about preparing to get back to the war based on what he said. Your understanding of the situation in the Middle East, on one side, you see the United States tries desperately to save petrodollar because of the connection. The oil in the Gulf is so important for the United States and the future of the petrodollar on one side. On the other hand, they feel that they need to get back to the war because Iran is not going to abide by, I don't know what is in that MOU, because so far the two sides are trying to get closer. But it seems the agenda, again, on the Iranian side, they don't feel, they don't trust the United States because they were negotiating with the United States while two times the United States has decided to attack them. First, Israel in June 2025 together with the United States. Then on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel attack again while negotiating with Iran. And today he seemed, it seems to me that the same scenario is repeating itself. What is your understanding, Richard, when it comes to the United States preparing its economy for a new round of war?
Richard Wolff: I have learned, and I believe the Iranians and the rest of the world have learned. Even the Europeans came finally to understand that paying close attention day by day to what either Mr. Vance or Mr. Scott Bessent or Mr. Trump say is a fool's activity. There is nothing that binds them. They say whatever the moment of that situation strikes them as needing them to say. To follow each step and to try logically to see how it fits with a broader strategy is to misunderstand what's going on. So I'm going to give you my take, but I understand it is me coming in trying to make sense. They're not worried about that. I am. Michael is. You are. Your audience is. Reasonable people everywhere are, but I believe that's a mistake. So here's what I think is going on. They need time. They do not have a way out of the mess they have made in the Middle East. They are in the process of losing all kinds of things they had that they hoped to build on, and now they are losing them. They hope to control Iran. They're not able to do that. They hope to continue to control the Strait of Hormuz by having free trade go back and forth through [the strait]. They can't do that anymore.
They thought they had a Gulf states that were all in hock to the United States to price their oil in dollars, to keep the dollars in U.S. treasuries, to invite American military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, and all the others. All of those countries, even Saudi Arabia, is now negotiating with the Chinese and others to reduce the American footprint in their countries, to reduce their reliance. Let me raise a specter for you. This is imaginative, but it tells you where the situation is. The only way out, think about it with me for a moment, the only way out of this endless absurdity in the Middle East is the following. China and Russia arrive.
They announce they will guarantee security to the Gulf states, to Israel, and to Iran. They will build a huge new port for the Chinese at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It will be invested in and built by the Chinese and the Russians. It will be leased to the Palestinians who will get their own state in Gaza and the West Bank. And Israel will be told: you have to withdraw the IDF to your own country. You can no longer go outside the boundaries of Israel. We will protect your, you can continue to exist, but that's the condition.
A Palestinian state, the port that we'll build there, and we will, we, Russia and China, will guarantee the security of everyone, and Iran will run the Strait of Hormuz. Now, I understand, oh, nobody is talking about that. That's right, because as long as you stay within the frame of what you have now, you're right, Nima. It just continues. And this ploy of Mr. Vance, you know, that's all this is. Babbel, we're going to refill the reserves. Well, first of all, that's not so easy. That's going to take quite a while. I can tell that there's not oil moving through.
And the easiest way to tell that oil isn't moving through is to watch the price of oil, which bounced back up over the last two days as people understand: wait a minute, there's not much movement over there. Oil still sits in many tankers. And we haven't yet understood how many countries and how many companies are shifting over from reliance on oil to reliance on electricity. If you look at the shares of stock, as I do, for example, of BYD and Tesla, the two major powers in the electric vehicle, and they're not the only one, but two big ones in it. They're zooming up suddenly after having gone down for quite a while. Why do you think that is?
Because the market for electric vehicles is looking better and better as all of this stuff keeps festering. They're not solving the problem. Mr. Vance is worried about one thing, only one thing, and that is whether he will be in office after November or not. That's where the priority. All the rest is an attempt to stave off a disaster for them in November. And arguing, we have a new project, you see. We're going to refill. Hopefully, that gives them some more time. That's all this is about. It's not a solution. It doesn't deal with the problem. And you can tell it in yet one more way.
Central to what the Iranians have said is: we'll make a deal if you give us the control of the Strait of Hormuz and if you get the Israelis out of Lebanon. And the United States is unable to do that. Could the United States do it ? Yes. Is the United States doing it ? No. Netanyahu continues to, you know, he's bombing other, you know, I think he bombed Syria the other day, just to add a little spice to it, to show that the IDF, however exhausting it may be, can still attack yet another country, yet another time. This is a joke. For me, and I believe the participants have now said this: both the Iranians and the Americans.
The Israeli objective, which was to nullify the memorandum of understanding, has basically been achieved. It sits there, but it has no force. Every day, one side or the other misunderstands. Stop. This is childish. Either you do it or you don't do it. It's clear, it's clear that the United States is not prepared to do what it signed it would do. Mr. Trump signed the document, and now he goes about doing what he has done with other commitments. We've talked about. Michael has been poetic about international law just thrown out the window. I want to remind everyone, I know I keep harping at it, but I find it unbelievable to this day.
The systematic murder of small groups of people in little boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific around Latin America, no trial, no lawyer, no judge, no procedure, no habeas corpus, no nothing, just kill them. Summary extrajudicial execution performed by the government of the United States with virtually no opposition. I know there are a few senators and a few congresspeople who have said something, and I don't mean to be disrespectful of them, but that's all they've done. They've said something. The number is now over 200. It keeps happening. Every few weeks or so, they blow up another group of people. It's extraordinary. And it tells you something.
It tells you that what we call the behavior of the Israelis in Gaza is spreading this lack of interest in any of the norms of war. And I have to say, even though I have my own criticisms of the Iranian government and politics, you really must empathize with the Iranians that they feel they can't talk to the United States. You can't trust anything they say or do. I mean, how could you, given what they have suffered ? And I don't just mean having their negotiators killed during the negotiation, grotesque as it is. But I believe another Israeli official in the last two or three days made statements about assassinating the current leaders in [Iran]. So it doesn't stop.
It is a mentality that has to be brought to an end by something, well, like what ? Well, my imagination: that the Chinese and the Russians coming in and basically saying to the whole world, the attempt of the United States and Europe to manage the Middle East once they had to give up their colonial power there has been a stupefying failure. They haven't managed to bring peace, they haven't managed to bring economic development. They haven't managed anything. We are closer to world war because of it than we have been in almost a century or maybe more than a century. That's a measure of failure. Let's bring in the Russians and the Chinese and see if together they can do a better job.
And I understand it's all in my imagination, but the imaginations we all have are simply projections of the situation we live in that shape our imaginations. So my frustration and that of a growing part of the world is going to have to find resolution somewhere. And what I just did imaginarily is as good a place to start as any.
Michael Hudson: I think Richard's focus on what the United States has done in bombing the boats off Venezuela and also on the other side of Latin America from Colombia is actually now at the very center of the discussions that are taking place about Hormuz and what Iran's rights are. What does this mean for the law of the sea ? There's been a lot of discussions saying, well, what Iran is doing and wanting to impose tolls is against the United States, I'm sorry, the United Nations law of the sea. But from the Iran's point of view, there is no law of the sea anymore. It started already in Venezuela with the attacks on boats. And then it's been continuing in the law of the sea violated in the Baltics, where the NATO countries, France, Estonia, and others are seizing Russian tankers through that [free seaway].
How do we reconcile what the United States is doing in the Baltic and elsewhere violating Russia's free trade and then saying, well, Iran cannot assert the control of Hormuz when the United States itself, when Donald Trump has said, we want to control the Strait of Hormuz, we want to be able to charge tolls to recuperate for us all the costs that we've expended on the weaponry that we've spent in Iran, in fighting Iran's terrorism, terrorism for fighting back against our terrorism and defending itself as terrorism. So what you mentioned, Nima, at the beginning of the show about what Vance said, how do we go back to the way things were?
Well, what does he mean when he said the way things were before ? He meant that the U.S. controls the world oil trade and won't let, will impose sanctions against people trading with Venezuela before the U.S. invasion, with Russia since 2022, and Iran before finally the U.S. released it, and trade in U.S. dollars. Now, especially Treasury Secretary Bessent has been in the forefront of explaining that all of this is connected. He said we have to control the world trade in oil from Venezuela, Russia, and Iran in order to preserve the dollar system. That is above all.
And we not only control the world trade in oil, it must be priced in dollars, and the dollars must be kept in the United States financial system, just as Venezuela's oil export proceeds are now kept in a bank account in Miami under Trump's control. Vance and the U.S. authorities and Scott Bessent have said, Iran's, if we give any money under the Memorandum of Understanding to Iran for the savings that America has seized or directed its allies to seize in the Emirates, for instance, then these savings must be invested in the United States in dollars, and most of it should be spent in the United States.
And what he said is, we're going to have our people in Doha sitting right there to, he said, quote, the U.S. Treasury will have people sitting in Doha overseeing that transfer, how the money is allocated, and a very large percent of it will go to buy U.S. foodstuffs and medicines. So we will be recycling the money back into U.S. products, but it will be overseen by Treasury in the Middle East.
Well, what Scott Bessent has expressed as openly is the linkage between America's drive to monopolize the oil trade, to preserve the dollar financial system as the key, and the use of the military, because he pointed out that how do we know that other countries are going to, how do we force them to invest their money in the U.S. dollar ? Well, he said, the U.S. has a wonderfully broad financial market, and it's large, and so it's easy for people to trade in. But then what he said is: look what we've done to the financial market. We've seized Venezuela's gold through the Bank of England and money. We've had our European allies confiscate Russia's savings in the Euroclear.
And we've seized Iran's money. The U.S. financial system has been weaponized and is a threat to all other countries. And that is why they are afraid of pricing their oil in dollars and keep, by doing so, having to keep their oil export proceeds and their national wealth in general in U.S. dollar form. What you're seeing in the last week or so over the America's explanation of why it has to control any money that's given to Iran, including its oil export proceeds, has to be seen as part of, as Richard would say, America's desperate attempt to somehow maintain the good old days. And it's sort of like an old crippled man reminiscing about his lost youth.
Wouldn't it be nice to go back to the way things were ? Well, Iran says, it can't go back. And the question open for the rest of the world is, well, if it can't go back, how is it going to go forward ? And Iran says, well, it can't go forward under the existing law of the sea that would technically not let us collect tolls through Hormuz without the agreement of Oman, which has the right to let people go through its territorial waters. There have to be, there's a higher principle, as I think Abraham Lincoln talked about on the eve of America's Civil War. That higher principle than the existing international law written under basically U.S. Western direction is what's really at stake.
And so we're opening up the whole discussion beyond Iran to include Russia, Venezuela, and the whole, the Americans' control of the seas extends to Trump's desire to conquer Greenland and beyond it, Iceland, to prevent other countries, Europe and Asia, from having access from the Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean to go that route. What's at issue is who's going to control the world trade routes?
And what Scott Bessent and Trump have said very clearly is if we're going to force, if we're going to have the chokehold on other countries and their economies that we need by controlling the oil trade, by controlling the world dollar system, and controlling the sea trade, we have to control Greenland, Iceland, the Baltic, the Strait of Hormuz, and other parts of the sea, which is why they drove China, Chinese investors, out of its position in the Panama Canal. This is the big declaration of war against the rest of the world, as though it's really a war, an undeclared war, and other countries seem flummoxed over what to do.
And Iran has not made it explicit that this is what it is behind what it's doing, but I think it should. It should do what Abraham Lincoln did, talk about the higher power.
Richard Wolff: If I could add, let me go back again one more time to those fishermen that get blown away by Americans. Before the last, I don't know how many months this has been going on, but let's say eight or nine months. Before that, the American Navy, observing at least to some extent, the law of the sea that Michael refers to, if it had a reason to believe a boat, large or small, was engaged in the drug trade that is illegal, it would stop the ship, it would board the ship, it would inspect the ship. If it found the contraband, it would take that ship and put it to a port, either an American port or the port it came from. There would be legal procedures, court trials, all the rest of it. Something happened to make years and years of practice doing that become instead lawless extremity, violating all of the existing rules. And as I've tried to show you, executing people who, had they been caught for trade, drug trade in the United States and given a trial and had a lawyer and had a judge and been found guilty by a jury, they would have been imprisoned and punished. They would not have been killed. Instead, we killed them without the procedure. Now, that is very extreme, but it's an extremity that teaches the following lesson.
Any Gulf country that uses its dollar revenues, which they all do, and uses a large portion of them to buy securities issued by the United States Treasury, runs the risk of a parallel change in procedure. Scott Bessent will get on the telephone to his counterpart in Bahrain and say, We are not happy with the decision you've just entered into with Iran. So you can kiss your loan to the United States Treasury. Goodbye. It's confiscated and it's an act we have the right to do because if we have the right to kill fishermen in boats that we haven't put through a legal procedure, we have the right to take your money. Get lost. You have nothing. What are they going to do?
Under the current rules, the United States could say, we are effectively at war with Bahrain because they've made a deal with Iran. That's, by the way, what they said. We are effectively at war with those fishermen because there's a war against the drug trade. I mean, they're playing loose and free with the language to get around the law. A very old gambit. We are in the position, if Michael is right, that we are forcing countries to lend us money. That's not a loan anymore, friends. That's called tribute. You can call it spaghetti. It doesn't matter what you call it. It matters what you are doing. You're forcing those people to give you the money which you feel free to repay or not.
You used to say, well, that's not a worry because you couldn't afford the message you send to the rest of the world. But the United States is desperate. It can't afford the message it sends by killing those fishermen. It can't afford the message it sends by losing a war with Iran. But what options have they got ? They have very, very few left. The Gulf states are figuring out. I believe the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia is either in China as we speak or on his way. Why do you think that might be ? What is it exactly that the Gulf states have to discuss with China ? And the answer is to get out from under the United States. That's what their objective is.
You don't include Europe because they're not relevant anymore. They're even more desperate than the United States. Who cares ? Nobody cares anymore. Europe's disaster. And what is it all part of ? It's a decline of the Western Empire. It's over. They've lost the Empire. They don't know how to build an economy without an empire. You can understand that. They've had several centuries in which ripping off their empire was a crucial part of their life. The United States does it informally. They all did it formally. But it's over. You can do it. That's what Iran is teaching the world. You can't keep doing it. Eventually, the people you do that to figure out how to stop you from doing it.
And we don't face that. We practice denial coupled with desperation. And that's what we're watching. We are watching. We are living through the disintegration of the Western dominance of the world. And it's going to take ugly forms and twists and turns. But it's important to remember what the larger procedure is, otherwise, you get lost in the details. And paying attention to what Mr. Trump says from one day to another is to misunderstand. That's not the clue. That's the symptom. You need to do the analysis because this is pathology on display, as is almost everything else.
I mean, we are, if I may be allowed, for your audience, many of them know that the President of the United States is now covered by two kinds of headlines. One headline focuses on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution by producing an open-air replica of a state fair. A state fair is a relic of the agricultural history of the United States. State fairs normally happen at the end of the summer, around harvest time, as a kind of celebration common to many cultures around the world, that when the fruit of the earth is collected for the survival of the community, there's a celebration of all that the earth enables us to have to live.
But for a country that has long since relegated agriculture to one or two or three percent of its economic system, we are an urban, suburban, industrial service economy. Is there no better way to celebrate than a kind of nostalgia notion ? And then, of course, by doing it in the middle of the summer instead of the autumn, it's too hot and nobody goes today in Washington. The temperature is off the chart. The photographs of this great state fair show it to be empty. It is a joke instead of a reality. And the other headline we get today is about the personal wealth Mr. Trump was able to manipulate the cryptocurrency market to make a billion dollars, even while his fellow investors were fleeced of their money by him. And he's with a big smile, he's made another billion. That's America today. It is a desperate, desperate effort of those at the top to hold on while the ship is sinking. It is extraordinary. The biggest billionaires are Mr. Thiel just bought a house in Argentina. He knows he has to get out. He knows the ship is sinking. He moved his family as far away from Silicon Valley as you can get. And others are buying mansions in remote parts of New Zealand and Australia. What is this?
This is a society officially denying what each in their own individual way are taking account of and reacting to. And for the rest of us, for the majority, we better understand and stop this process before it takes us all down with it.
Michael Hudson: Well, Richard, I think there is some good side, appropriate side of this state fair celebration on July 4th. It's going to be held right near the algae-filled pool near the Lincoln Memorial. It's stuffed with algae because Trump gave the contract to fix it all up to a convicted felon who had been a partner of his way back from his real estate days. And this is part of his payoff to friends. So it was a giveaway, again, a taxpayer expense, buying support by throwing federal business their way. Sounds like a whole metaphor for me. If people are going to, it's going to be a hot day, the algae is going to be smelling and people are going to be marching and breathing deeply. But besides that, I think what you've done is spell out the broad dynamic of all of this that is the context for what we're seeing in Iran right now.
And the context is really, as you pointed out, it's the end of the Western colonial order that was locked in in the 19th century with the fight for colonies, locked in by the subsequent financial colonialism of getting all of these colonies to borrow money and the newly independent political countries from Haiti to Greece to Mexico to Egypt to Tunisia to Brazil, all these countries that had borrowed money, fallen into debt, and then found that the great powers had sent gunboats to put creditor control over their financial system to take control of their finances to make sure that the foreign creditors get paid. One of the problems that Nima just mentioned at the beginning was Lebanon.
Look at Lebanon. Lebanon is the perfect example of what is obsolete in this order. It was carved up in the middle of World War I by the French and British that gave control to the French over Lebanon. Well, by the middle of World War II, 1943, when Lebanon was ruled by the Nazi, the fascist Maronite Phalange party, the French said, well, it's time for you to become independent and have a new constitution, which we're going to arrange. The head of Iran, of I'm sorry, the head of Lebanon must always be a fascist Maronite Christian. The second in charge must be a Sunni representative. And the speaker of the parliament, the least important position, will be a Shiite Shia.
The Shia and the Lebanese Christians got together and said, the Sunni and Lebanese Christians have got together and wanted to join Israel's extermination against the Shia. And this is all the Shia. Now you've had a sharp decline in the Christian population of Lebanon. They've moved out. The Sunni population isn't increasing much. It's the Shia population in the south that has risen to dominance not only among the voters, but in the Lebanese legislature. But the constitution won't let it be elected. That's the kind of anti-democracy that the West misshaped when it carved up the whole West Asia in the wake of World War I's ending of the Ottoman Empire.
It was to have been carved up between France, Britain, and Russia, but you had the 1917 Russian Revolution, so Russia was left out. And you've had all of these ethnic conflicts that you're seeing right now, the drawing of borders, specifically cutting across ethnic and religious lines, precisely to set the all the minority, to make everyone a minority in their country, to set all of these groups against each other so that they wouldn't join together to say the Western order that has created this mess is over. So I don't think there can be any ultimate solution of the fight against Iran without essentially rewriting the Iranian constitution.
That requires essentially Iran to back the Shiite majority there to take over. This seems to be such a problem that it's more than a problem. It's the quandary. There's no way out without some kind of violent civil war. And there's going to be civil war, I think, throughout the Emirates. The key player in this, I think, is going to be Saudi Arabia. You've seen in the last few days the reports coming out that America had planned to attack Iran a few weeks ago. And Saudi Arabia was told of this, got wind of it one way, and said, you cannot use our air bases in Saudi Arabia to attack Iran because these air bases are not protecting us.
They're making us unprotected against Iranian retaliation because the weapons you've sold us don't work. The protective missiles and radar don't protect us. The weapons of attack don't work. We have to turn to Iran, Russia, and China for weapons that work. You're not come here. And according to the New York Times report, the airplanes, Trump's airplanes, had to turn back and were not able to attack Iran. Much different is the situation of the Emirates with Dubai and the other countries.
How long can the Emirates that have tied all of their economic hopes to the United States and its financial markets remain as U.S. ally and Israeli ally against Iran, against what is essentially becoming the global majority ? I don't see how there can a civil war from Lebanon to the Emirates can be avoided as part of the backwash from all of this. I think we're just beginning to see these dynamics that have been set in motion by Trump's attack to try to maintain American power is creating a destabilization that's finally going to lead not only the West Asian region, but the whole world to say we really do need to create an alternative to the U.S. order. How are we going to do it?
Well, you've recently seen India and Japan throw in their lot with the United States. India, in all practical purposes, has withdrawn from BRICS and said our loyalty is to the U.S. and Israel. And that leaves a very large part of the BRICS cut out. South Africa is in a mess. It's really up to China. Russia and Iran to take the lead and begin spelling out just what kind of order they want. And I don't see much work in this. And all that Richard and I can do is to spell out what the internal logic seems to be.
Richard Wolff: There's also a lesson from history. We are experiencing something that looks to me very much like the 75 years before World War I. And I want to spell it out very briefly. We had the dominance of the colonial experience reaching a peak, say, immediately after this time of the Civil War in the United States, the second half, roughly, of the 19th century, where everything that wasn't claimed by one or another European country was taken over. It culminated in 1884, the famous conference in Berlin, where literally the major European countries took a map of Africa and carved up Africa into the Germans, you got this part, the Germans got East and Southwest Africa, the French got mostly West Africa, the British got mostly everything else, etc., etc., etc. And then you had what ? A series of explosions, some of them in North Africa, some of them in the Middle East, some of them in the Far East. And what were they?
They were moments when the colonial empires bumped up against each other, when they both had their eyes on a piece of property that either wasn't taken yet or whose control was a little wobbly so another one could come and they had skirmishes. They were aware of it, short-lived little military confrontations. But it became a situation where everyone became slowly aware that they were inching closer and closer to a catastrophe. The British and the Russians contesting in Asia, for example. Each one, the Russian before their revolution, right ? Becoming an empire of its own, particularly in Central Asia and so on.
And it all built up until an utterly obscure reality, the murder by who knows who of an obscure nobleman in Sarajevo, you know, in the Balkans, and then they all go to war. But that war had been prepared in the previous 75 years. They knew who they were allied with. They had built and rebuilt their alliances as part of the colonial project. The ironic Hegelian reality that as they became richer and richer by a bigger and bigger empire, which they more and more ruthlessly exploited, they were moving towards a mutual destruction of everything they had created. Those were the years in which the Belgians cut off the fingers of the Africans who they punished for not working hard enough.
The mentality, like shooting fishermen in boats, what are you doing to another human being ? Didn't matter. They were desperate. Belgian little country. It controlled the monstrous country of Congo, perhaps the richest part of all of Africa. And they tried to hold on and they tried. They lost it, of course. They lost everything. The war destroyed it all. And when they weren't finished, they had a second world war as if they could rewrite. Adolf Hitler wanted to do what ? Lebensraum, room to live. One of the reasons they had their colonies taken away from them at the end of World War I.
The victors, France and England and America, took away the colonies from Germany for themselves, because that's what the war was for. They didn't understand they were destroying themselves. They didn't understand they were provoking the Germans to try to get it back, which they almost did in World War II, et cetera. We are in the, it's as if the hiatus we call the Cold War, when you actually had capitalism held back a little bit by having a large part of the world excluded, called the Soviet Union. Now China joined. China's actually the excluded one now, more than everybody else. And they too are watching the self-destruction of the West because it can't get rid of its colonial heritage.
It can't get rid of the urge to get larger. Look at Mr. Trump. Yes, he's a clown, but the clown has rediscovered the root. Somehow he's going to save America by snatching Greenland. You've got to be nuts for this. But it's the colonial mentality. How do you solve our problem ? Take back Panama. Make Canada the 51st state. Grab it. It's the lunacy of the Midas touch. You know the famous fairy tale, he touched everything into gold, and then he touched his favorite daughter, and she became a lifeless object of gold. A Hegelian lesson. This is the lesson here. Capitalism is finished. It's over. It's had its time. It is in the process of disappearing.
And in that disappearance is the desperation we're living through. And it's scaring everybody as it should.
Michael Hudson: Well, this thought of disappearing makes it desperate. You're right to point to the role of the colonial powers. That's what they wanted. Of course, they wanted Africa and Latin America and what's now the global south. But most of all, they wanted something with all of the raw materials and the population and the implicit power. That was Russia. And the way to it was by way of the Ottoman Empire to carve that up as a gateway to Russia. That was the ultimate European, to be the ultimate European colony, all of this. And the fact that there was a Russian revolution of communism simply made Russia the ideological enemy, the enemy that I think Britain had always led the European opposition to Russia. You're right. There was a linkage between the Germans and the Russians, but the British were always against it ever since the Crimean War. And they were against it because they wanted to control Russia. That was the aim of British investment in Persia. The first thing the British wanted to do in Persia was to control the railroads. And Persia, for its part, was worried: well, if we let the British have the railroad there, well, what about Russia ? Well, Russia wanted its railroad.
So, Persia's role in all of this was to try to balance the drives from Britain on the one hand and Russia from the north that Russia had sort of recaptured from Persia, Azerbaijan, and what became the oil-producing provinces area of Baku. That's the whole dynamic we're seeing now. And we're seeing the end of this world. And as there's still the drive by the NATO countries to attack Russia directly, not only via Ukraine is a battlefield arena for this, but now you're having Germany and the EU, France, especially with Britain, all talking about creating missiles to saying now our missiles can get deep into Russia. And what are we concentrating on ? We're concentrating on Russia's refineries.
If we can prevent Russia from producing oil, then we having conquered Venezuela by the United States, blocking and destroying Russia's oil capacity. The New York Times is fantasizing about long oil lines in Russia, not even getting gasoline. And then they can control Iran as the final capstone of the whole control of West Asian OPEC. Then the U.S. can weaponize the oil trade and via it, weaponize the dollar and essentially become the dominant colonial power over the whole world via using its NATO satellites to carve up Russia and Iran like the colonial powers of Europe carved up Africa and Latin America.
Richard Wolff: You know, there were moments in German history that I've been a student of most of my life, and there were moments in German history where the fantasies were very similar. There was something called the Berlin to Baghdad Railway project.
Michael Hudson: That's what did it. That's what locked in British opposition.
Richard Wolff: That's right. And a wonderful book, if people are interested, written, I believe, by an American, maybe British, named Herbert Feis, F-E-I-S, called Europe the World's Banker. And it's one of the greatest books ever written that simply traced through the struggle of the major European powers with particular focus on the Middle East, how they fought and built their way to the mutual destructions of the two world wars. His interest was in the period leading up to World War I, but it is literally like a playbook for what we're watching today. And here were the two fantasies you might enjoy. One, the Berlin to Baghdad railway, that would then be the place in which the Germans would dominate the whole flow of commerce and so on, linking these two parts of the world, Europe and the Middle East. And the second one was a story that I remember my mother told me. My mother was born in Berlin, and my first language is German. And these were the stories. The German manufacturers fostered a story for the German people to think how profitable it would be if they could convince everyone in China to brush their teeth because then Germany could produce the toothbrushes for those millions and millions. It was a fantasy, like Michael just said, the fantasy of Russia with its raw materials.
But the joke is, Russia doesn't need to invade Western Europe, contrary to the hysteria of the leaders there. It has all of Siberia. It's the biggest country on earth. It hasn't developed any of it. If it needs Lebensraum, it has it. It's a small population in an immense country, right next door to China, which is an immense population in a small country. It's the Europeans who have to destroy each other to get Lebensraum. That's the joke. It's the fantasy that is a reflection of their desperation, because otherwise they'd have to face, how do we organize the European economy so we all can live and live ? How do we do that ? You know, they tried it at the League of Nations.
They tried it again at the United Nations. After the two horrible world wars, they got an idea. But they never did it. Before World War II, Germany, Italy, and Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. What do we see now ? The United States has withdrawn effectively from the United Nations. It's the same game being replayed. And this time we have no excuse for not knowing how this works because we've already gone through it within the memory of people still alive.
Michael Hudson: One of the professors I was closest to at the University of Chicago when I was taking my degree in German history and philosophy was Professor Jolles, who was the translator of Clausewitz's book on war into English. And his lectures on German history did indeed focus on the Berlin Baghdad Railway as being what finally led Britain to say this is going to crowd us out of being able to take over the Near East and make war on Russia and as our ultimate attempt to absorb the Ottoman Empire, giving France sort of some shreds like Lebanon. Also, regarding the Hope by your German company for toothbrushes, my archaeologist friends point out that toothbrushes were invented in China out of pig bristles, that they actually did it to beginning. So it's bringing coals to Newcastle, as they would say.
Richard Wolff: It's like this origin of Italian pasta is apparently Chinese noodles.
Nima Alkhorshid: And pizza, by the way, get to the roots of pizza is not coming from Italy. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Richard Wolff: Yeah, today we're very interesting and letting our imaginations be provoked may be very useful way to deal with these issues and not let us get caught in the ups and downs of Mr. Vance. And, you know, these folks are not the sharpest knives in the drawer to be as polite as I can. And all that they're doing is trying to hold on to their political power. And the rest of it is really secondary for most of them.
Michael Hudson: I wish you could ask some of your military specialists that you have on so much and your Iranian specialists what they foresee in this. Ask them to exert their imaginations as to this. What kind of a new world international order this is going to be leading to?
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah, sure. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. Thank you.
Richard Wolff: Very good.
Michael Hudson: Bye-bye.
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