Nima Alkhorshid: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, September 3, 2026, and our dear friends Richard Wolf and Michael Hudson are here. Welcome back, Richard and Michael.
Richard Wolff: Glad to be here.
Nima Alkhorshid: Let me start with something that was not so popular in the mainstream media, which is the SCO summit. What has happened in the SCO summit—as was reported by Al Jazeera—[We] see Turkey going to the SCO summit, and [we] see all these countries, from India, Iran, China, Pakistan, to Russia, all coming together.
[Al Jazeera reported on] the joint statement, which was important. It says that leaders of the SCO have signed a joint statement condemning the U.S. and Israel's war on Iran and Western sanctions on some of their members after a two-day summit in Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek.
This was important because of who signed this joint statement. It was all the members. India signed it finally condemning the United States attack on Iran. And together with Russia, China, Belarus and Iran, all of them signed this document.
But the whole plan right now, it seems, they got back to some sort of tit for tat war. They attacked Iran, and Iran responded. But the whole point of Scott Bessent and his policy is this. Here is what Scott Bessent said:
[clip start] "Is it necessary to collapse the regime ? Could happen. Maybe the people will rise up—100% inflation, lines, the military not being paid, the central banker was in panic last week—but as President Trump said, he believes the reason the MOU failed, the Iranians were not ready to make a deal. So we are going to make sure that they want to make a deal... [clip end]
Nima Alkhorshid: Michael, go ahead. Put the two together.
Michael Hudson: What can I say about what Bessent said ? Obviously, Iran has already outlined what the deal is, and it's the Memorandum of Understanding. And it's not going to give in on that.
The importance of the SCO summit is not simply their denunciation of the United States, including India, which is indeed important, but the fact that these countries together export most of OPEC's oil. You have Iran, Russia, and you have Kazakhstan. The SCO members are in a position to describe what's going to replace the U.S. order. And I think that's really the key.
We've been talking here for the last two years about how the U.S. order is ending. But right now, the whole world is moving ahead. And they say,"All right, what are we going to do to replace the U.S.—centered order?"And what's catalyzing all this is the imminent rise in oil prices and in food prices, especially in diesel fuel prices right now.
And the SCO summit has been moving to Vladivostok [in the last] couple of days. Most of the people there have moved to Vladivostok, where I also gave a lecture. And they're very specific about the fact that there's not going to be a post-dollar order until someone takes the lead.
And who can take the lead ? You have China, which has the critical mass, the industrial export power, the ability to build infrastructure through its Belt and Road system. And you have Russia and Iran together, and I should include Kazakhstan also, as the supplier of oil to the world that is going to be starved for oil as the prices rise. And as the prices rise this autumn, how are countries going to pay for it?
This is what we've been talking about for the last few weeks, I realize. But a lot of this came up at the Vladivostok summit. And they say China can supply financial credit, and Russia and Iran together can supply oil, presumably.
But they're not going to have any interest in supplying oil or credit to help the global South countries and Asian oil importers, South Korea, Japan, and others, with credit simply so that they can have enough money not only to keep their energy working and their homes heated and lit and their businesses working, but to pay their foreign dollarized debts.
And so I think that Russia and China are going to say,"Well, yes, we will lend you credit, but the fact is, you cannot afford to repay the credit that we're giving you if, in addition to paying us for this new credit, you're going to pay this whole backlog of the last 75 years of dollar debts to the bondholders, to the banks, to the International Monetary Fund that have all been part of the U.S. financial system."
"So you're going to have to make a choice. Do you want to say...[for the time being, certainly]...Let's declare a moratorium on these debt payments to bondholders and in dollars, the foreign exchange. And we're going to use our international monetary reserves to promote our own domestic economies' needs in this oil crisis, because this oil crisis is going to force many industries to shut down. It's going to cause breaks in the chain of payment. It's going to cause bankruptcies."
And I think, especially in the Asian meetings in Vladivostok, they're saying,"What we do not want to happen this autumn is what happened in the Asian crisis of 1997."
Most of the world by 1997 had finally moved away from the International Monetary Fund and all of its U.S.-centered pro-creditor rules saying,"If you have to stabilize your currencies by borrowing from us, you have to privatize—sell—your private enterprises. You're in trouble. Sell off your utilities, sell off your companies to American and international investors."
And Asia was just absolutely exploited in this. And they remember it all. It was almost three decades ago, but this was such a trauma that they want to prevent this oil crisis from being another opportunity for the United States to say,"We know you need money to buy oil. Don't buy Russian oil, don't buy Iranian oil. We're telling [Ukraine] just where to blow up Russia's oil refineries, where to seize Russian ships, where to blow up Russian ports so that you can't trade oil with them. We're going to starve you of oil. And if you need to borrow from us, what industries are you going to sell off and privatize for our buyers to take you over?"
This is going to be the last great showdown. And countries are going to say,"How can we avoid getting ripped off once again ? We'll have to turn to the alternative to the U.S. order, [which] is China, Russia, and Iran."RIC is easier to pronounce.
So this is what is being put in place right now, and it's going to be put in place, I think, again, in a few weeks. You have the BRICS meeting [coming up.] And at both the Shanghai meeting and the Eastern Economic Forum of Russia, there were talks about,"How can we make a BRICS bank?"Well, there really won't be a BRICS bank as such because the only members who are able to take a large enough position in supplying either money or oil are going to be Russia, Iran, and China.
So this is all taking place very quickly. Bessent is going to try to block any payments and any payments from other countries to Russia and Iran and China for part of this. Bessent already said,"If we can find banks that are helping other countries [transfer payment to] Iran for its oil we're going to sanction them."Trump has said we're going to impose 50%, maybe 100% tariffs on countries that are trading with Russia and Iran. He's already talked about 50% tariffs on India.
So the U.S. policy [is]"Let's have a showdown with China and Russia and Iran!"What this is doing [in] trying to isolate them, is I think, as we've said before, [instead] isolating the United States because there's no question that, for the time being, China and Russia and Iran are not going to say,"Well, we'll give you oil or we'll give you money, but you have to give us control of your industries and the financial stranglehold on your economy."That's the Western position.
And remember, the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of these were countries that were carved up by the West in the past. China, with its century of foreign control under the opium trade, Iran under the Shah and later the overthrow of Mossadegh, Russia under the neoliberals, Central Asia—all of these countries have already been victimized, not only from the very beginning in the 19th century, but right through the Asian crisis.
And so this is why I think, as you've mentioned, the Western press is not discussing either the SCO meetings or the Eastern Economic Forum, because if they discussed it, they'd have to say,"Where is all this leading ? What are they discussing at the forum and how are they moving forward?"They'd much rather talk about the past. They'd much rather talk about what the United States is doing to shape the world and to just denigrate and counter whatever the Asians may do. Not about, well, what can they do that is going to counteract the countering?
And you can see that almost all of the actions that Trump has been making are helping China. Right now, in addition to having to pay higher prices for their oil, you're having all these Asian countries turn to alternatives to oil, mainly wind power and solar power. And China is the main exporter of the technology for solar panels and for wind energy, for windmills. It's as if the United States is driving these countries into China's hands in conjunction with Iran and Russia for oil. So we'll have to watch how this unfolds.
But whatever ends up either in the BRICS Bank or what is going to result is some alternative to the International Monetary Fund and to the U.S. financial system. And that alternative is the important thing.
It's not going to be the kind of creditor-oriented order that the United States created in 1944 when it was arguing with John Maynard Keynes of Britain, [asking]"What kind of a post-war order are we going to have ? Will the United States, as a creditor, dominate all of the rules of world trade and investment?"Or, as Keynes said,"Is there going to be some balance to prevent creditor powers from exploiting the debtors?"
And my talk in Vladivostok was all about how we're going to see today a replay of this whole 1944 debate between Keynes and the United States as to how to create a world financial system that does not simply polarize the international economy between creditor interests, as the United States at that time was, and debtor countries, like the rest of Britain, certainly, after World War II, and Europe and many other countries [became.]
Nima Alkhorshid: Richard.
Richard Wolff: Yeah, I've been thinking about this material also and came upon through some friends of mine who made me aware of the story of Panama and the Panama Canal over recent months. And I want to go over it briefly and sort of add it into the pot that Michael has begun to stir in terms of global shifts.
So start with the most dramatic factoid. If I have my numbers right, the average fee charged for a ship going through the Panama Canal, so that's either from the Atlantic to the Pacific or vice versa, in February of this year was $55,000. Over the last few weeks, the average fee paid by a ship going through the canal was around $5.5 million.
In other words, in six months, the price of passage went up 100 times. Okay, that's inflation of a different order of magnitude from the ones we normally talk about.
What is going on ? Well, again, it's kind of apocryphal. The first thing that's going on is to understand yet another consequence of the war in Iran. One of those consequences that Scott Bessent either didn't think about or didn't calculate or doesn't want to talk about, or all of them. Another one is to understand that wars always have these kinds of consequences that don't become clear until later.
As best I can tell, the rise in prices, this 100 times in six months, is due to two factors. Number one is the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is clearly closed, contrary to what Mr. Bessent and Mr. Trump keep telling us. It's closed because the ships can't get through. And what an increasing number of them are doing is taking the long trip around. And that requires using the shortcut of the Panama Canal, so that the demand of ships to go through has gone way up.
On the other hand, climate change has reduced the level of water, sea level, and so on, making the passage through the canal a more difficult and more complicated process than it used to be. In short, a tremendous increase in demand and a constriction in the supply.
And as all of us who've taken Econ 101 know, that under those circumstances, whoever presides over their Panama Canal will be tempted to do what they clearly have, in fact, done, which is jack up the price because there really almost is no limit. Raising your price 100 times in six months means there's virtually no limit to what you can do.
Okay. I find this fascinating because while it is a small corner, I'm sure there are 50 other examples that I haven't thought about or that no one has brought to my attention in which the reordering of the global economy that Michael is talking about is already moving value from where it used to be to a whole new collection of players.
Panama, a very small country, is now able to generate revenue it could never have imagined until recently, that the changing world economy is giving it all kinds of options. If the Houthis have effectively closed the Red Sea, the way the Iranians have closed the Persian Gulf, well, then the traffic in the Panama Canal has yet another reason to be boosted.
And if there are people around the world who preside over straits like Hormuz, and my understanding is there are a dozen or so of those all over the world, well, we're going to see a redistribution of value that is as profound as the reorganization of supply lines and everything else that is going on with all of this.
The last thing that strikes me is it's becoming clearer to me than it was before why the stakes are so high for the West, not only in Iran, but in Russia and Ukraine as well. In other words, it seems to me, I mean, if you all disagree, by all means say so, but that there is a recognition of what Michael and Nima in introducing us to the Shanghai meeting, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, that there is already underway this shift towards a new powerful position, not just of China and Iran, although clearly that's underway, but also of Russia as their partner, of Russia as having preserved the military in a way that now looks like they were prescient—they had foresight beyond anything anyone else understood by holding on to their nuclear and other capabilities. That has been extraordinary.
But I would also like to introduce the idea, which we have not explored at least as much as we could, that the West, or more accurately, the United States, is reacting already to the constriction of its role, particularly in Europe and in Asia. And that what we are seeing is alongside the events in Iran and Ukraine, we are seeing a surging reassertion of US colonialism. In other words, there is a systematic interest in Greenland, Panama, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba. I could go on, but notice they are all in the Western Hemisphere.
They are focused on the kinds of resources that Venezuela has, that Canada has, that Greenland is imagined to have, and so on. There's a withdrawal into a colonial Western hemispheric empire. That the United States is not giving up on colonialism at all, is discovering that a reaffirmation of colonialism, explored with all the modern weapons both military and technological, is a way for the United States to hold on economically at least to the kind of wealth and growth possibilities that the Shanghai Cooperation Council is taking away step by step in the rest of the world.
Michael Hudson: Well, what you've said then is that the United States is now regressing. It's moving from the financial neocolonialism that it's used ever since really World War I, and especially since World War II, to old-fashioned direct military colonialism. And I think that's right. You can see that's exactly what's happened in Venezuela, which is a grabbing of its soil.
And I think that you mentioned Greenland, but what is a complement to that is what's just happened last week in Iceland. Iceland had a referendum."Do you want to talk about joining the EU or not?"And Iceland rejected this because part of the discussion, of course, was:"Well, we don't want to give European fishermen access to our own waters, where fishing is one of the major Icelandic industries."But internationally, Iceland did not want to join the EU and be subordinate to von der Leyen and Kaja Kalas's neo-Nazi attack on Russia.
And I think the [Icelanders] saw very clearly:"Here's what's going to happen: suppose that the United States indeed takes over Greenland. The next thing they want to take over is us, because they're going to want to block off all access from the North Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic."
NATO's fight and the U.S. neo-colonial fight against Russia [now includes the fact] that you're having the global warming warm up the Arctic. You have the whole Arctic Ocean as a means of bypassing the Panama Canal. You've just been describing, what a choke point that is.
Well, how do you prevent all of this trade all of a sudden being diverted from the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal up through the Arctic Ocean, which really is Russian territory because neither the United States nor Canada have really done much to develop the Arctic, and Russia is not going to let foreign military ships or other threatening ships into the Arctic for that.
Iceland is needed, in addition to Greenland, as a means of creating the choke point that the United States wants to create, saying it can control the access to the Arctic. It can control the law of the sea and the alternatives.
Just as the United States says there is no law of the sea that we've signed, we're going to seize Russian tankers. And they just seized a Russian research ship for the Arctic in the last two days because the international court controlled by the United States awarded Ukraine a claim against Russia for taking Crimea away from it. And because Gazprom was an owner of this ship, this is part of the war. So this seizure of the Russian ship and Russian assets essentially is a declaration of war by the United States, as much against Russia as you can be overtly."We are going to seize all of your property because [Ukraine] claims you've damaged us. We deserve reparations from you, and we're going to impose reparations once we conquer you."There cannot be a clearer declaration of the intent to fight intensive war against Russia and to drag Europe along with it.
Well, when we talked about Europe, I want to return to Richard's immediate point about the Panama Canal. One of the reasons that the Panama Canal fees have gone up are because the water levels down in Panama, global warming and El Niño, which is going to be apparently more serious this year than any other year on record in disturbing the whole Pacific weather report.
This is occurring not only in Panama, but all over Europe. You're having a drought lower water levels, and that has stopped river transport. This means that while Ukraine has said,"We're going to bomb any Russian ship in the Black Sea and prevent it from exporting food to food deficit countries."Russia is a major grain exporter and Russia retaliated by saying,"We're going to close off all [Ukrainian] access to the Black Sea so that it can't send its submarines and vehicles to blow up our ships."
So Ukraine is unable to export its harvest that is just coming in now to the Black Sea. And Ukraine cannot send its crops, its grain and its sunflower oil up through the Danube because that's also dried up. The Rhine River in Germany has dried up. The ships throughout all of Europe cannot be so heavily loaded because in the rivers the water level is not high enough.
So you're having this restriction in the transportation of grain going at the same time as you're having crop reductions throughout the world. The farmers have not been able to buy the oil to power their tractors and still make a profit on the price that they have committed to, they're able to resell their grain to the large private sector grain buyers and grain distributors that sort of monopolize the whole marketing of the grain.
So there's no diesel for the farm tractors. You're having the bad weather affect the crop exports here. So what the world is faced with in this coming late autumn, I'd say November and December, is not only the vast soaring of oil prices as the U.S. Petroleum Reserve is out, but a vast increase in the farm prices, the crop prices, food prices, and as Richard has just said, transportation costs for all this are high again.
Obviously, the ships of OPEC oil, Persian Gulf oil, are unable to get insurance [coverage] for the ships as long as the United States says"We're absolutely blocking off Iran's trade with oil to starve it."And Iran says,"Well, if we can't trade, then there's not going to be any Persian Gulf trade until other countries step in and stop the United States."
And essentially, Iran's position to the rest of the world, and I think this came out again certainly in the Eastern Economic Forum, was that"You are the countries that need the oil. You're the countries that need the food. It's up to you to take the lead in blocking the United States. And the only way that you can prevent the United States from cutting off your oil, cutting off your food, to forcing the prices of food and oil up so high that you have to turn to the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury for swap agreements to be able to get by and avoid a new Asian economic crisis,"—the only way that they can avoid this is to join with China, Russia, and Iran in creating an alternative in the form of a new financial system with its own international bank.
And I won't go into all the details of what this bank will be, but essentially it'll be very much like what Keynes described in 1944.
That can all be a future program, but everything is all converging right now with the United States acting in a role of"We will create chaos in the rest of the world!"Because Trump has just said, Oh, well, we're going to take Venezuela's oil that we've just seized, and we're now going to add it to the National Petroleum Reserve. And so, we don't need OPEC oil. We're independent. Let the rest of the world starve, and they'll all come begging to us."
Well, I think Larry Johnson, among others, pointed out that Venezuelan oil is a very heavy sulfur oil. It's not the kind of oil that you can't simply add to the National Petroleum Reserve, which is largely a lighter oil. In fact, Venezuelan oil is sludge, and it won't even get through the pipeline without being diluted with more refined, lower-gravity oil. And that's just not going to happen.
So, the whole U.S. plan to create an alternative to the SCO and Asian Economic Forum meeting and the alternatives that are coming up is based on bad science policy, bad engineering policy, bad climate forecasting, and a military inability by the United States to actually fight back. It's all amazingly self-destructive!
And I think the United States is going to continue to empty out the petroleum reserve, even at the cost of destroying some of the caverns that the oil is stored in in Trump's desperate [attempt] to keep gasoline prices low here to try to convince voters not to turn away from the Republicans for the midterms because of his fear of being impeached and his desire to maintain his stranglehold over the Republican Party.
Nima Alkhorshid: Go ahead, Richard.
Richard Wolff: Well, I guess I'm the person to make the worrying get more intense. I was struck amidst all of these considerations, also by the seizure of that Russian research ship that Michael talked about, but also by one of Zelensky's recent comments in which he threatens to use the drones to make the airports inoperable, all Russian airports inoperable. And that must mean for civilian traffic, there is going to be no ability of airlines to use Russian airspace.
My understanding is that Europeans no longer let planes fly from European countries to Moscow and St. Petersburg anyway. They have to go circuitously via the Central Asian republics or via Turkey to go to Moscow and so on. But obviously, if they do that, then Putin said at the Shanghai meeting that there would be an appropriate response by the Russians to Ukraine doing that.
[It's] beginning to, step by step, become a full-fledged war engagement. I mean, you're sending drones filled with explosives, each to the other country. The Russians are sending missiles in huge quantities. The Russians are using their Air Force. Ukraine doesn't have much in the way of an Air Force, doesn't have much in the way of missiles, but apparently has an unlimited supply of drones.
So the war is becoming drones from Ukraine and drones, missiles, and air force from Russia. That will continue, as far as I can tell, to give the benefit to Russia. It will grow and win this war.
And that will confront the Europeans, who have shown that they are prepared to go quite a long way. I mean, even the other day, the murky discovery of a drone next to a cargo airplane in a German airport, and the German government blaming the Russian government, the Russian government, explaining that it had no interest in and reason to do that, etc., etc.
I mean, I don't know how many of these incidents have to happen before you get, and then what happens to the world economy if the Europeans go to war against the Russians ? I understand the Russians are probably in a better position to fight such a war than the Europeans, which isn't saying much, but probably true.
But my guess is it's going to change all of the dimensions we've been talking about here. It will interact in a complex way with the oil trade, the gas trade, the food trade, the weapons trade, and so on, and then becomes a kind of pathway into the so-called Third World War that a growing number of people seem to see coming down the pike toward us.
Michael Hudson: Well, Richard, you talk about Zelensky making the threat. It's not Zelensky, it's the United States and NATO and Germany making the threat. And precisely because of what you just mentioned about the false flag attack at the Leipzig airport in Germany.
[Putin] gave a wonderfully funny response to this at the SCO meeting. He said, "Well, you can see what happened. There was a discussion. How do we have a false flag to make it appear as if [Russia is] attacking Europe so that we can attack Russia as the neo-Nazi Germans and EU want to do?
Well, the original plan was 'Let's have a bombing at an airport.' But then they said, 'Wait a minute, we really don't want to hurt people because what if the truth came out and they find out it's a false flag ? What do we do?'
So the compromise was reached, and the compromise was 'Okay, we are going to blame Russia for attacking European airports so that we can retaliate by telling Zelensky, here's where to bomb, here's where to bomb, here's where to bomb, you know, with our satellite control that we provide him with. But we'll have three bombs, but we can't let them go off.
Well, first of all, we're going to have it in Leipzig, in East Germany. You know, we don't even want to take a chance on a West German being hurt because the West Germans are the ones who want to go to war, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in West Germany.'
So they said, 'Okay,' and Trump said, 'Let's let one just be found on the ground, not exploding. Okay. Let's have the other one sort of just fly through the air and not hit a plane, but just land on a runway. And the third will just be a dud. That way, nobody will be hurt, but we'll have not one but three drones, and we can say Russia must have done it without any investigation, without any evidence at all.'
And of course, it's always possible that Ukraine picks up the pieces of the Russian drones that are sent militarily against its drones and its army. And Ukraine collects these pieces of Russian drones, turns them over to the NATO, EU people, and they sort of collect them for use in just such a false flag occasion."
So the whole thing is to make it appear as if, yes, Russia is attacking us. And why do they do it now ? Well, the EU is under enormous time pressure right now that they have to start the war against Russia very soon because the leading pro-war parties, Mertz in Germany, Macron in France, and the Labour Party, or whoever the British party is, are the pro-war parties. And they're all so unpopular. They're all going to be out of office.
Germany has tried to ban the AFD, the "Alternative für Deutschland" Party, because they're against the war with Russia. And the EU says it's terrorist. If you don't want to go to war, and if you don't want to bomb civilians, and if you don't want neo-Nazi ethnic genocide, you're the terrorist for opposing all of this. And they've been arresting people who are against this terrorism. And I needn't go into that. I think most of your readers get into that.
So, the EU warmongers are desperate to whoop up a fear that Russia is going to invade Europe. Well, no country—as we've said—no country that is at all democratic as Russia is, can ever afford to have 10 or 20 million of its soldiers killed in a land invasion of Europe. That would be crazy.
The war will be fought by bombs, and that's exactly what NATO and the U.S. plan to do. It's the only kind of war that democracies can fight, and that's what is trying to aggravate this whole situation now, especially as the U.S. military and the NATO military are getting desperate because of America's failure to defeat Iran in the Persian Gulf and now taking on the big fight against Russia before they can make the really big fight against China. That's what ties all of this together.
Richard Wolff: It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the Chinese manufacturing base being so much larger than anything the West has, even combining several of the West's [manufacturing bases—what's left of them], coupled with [Russia's] now enhanced military capability. I mean, they've now waged war for four years, four and a half years. They know what works, they know what doesn't work. From the little I know about military affairs, what you learn in the course of a war is as important as anything, maybe more so than what you can remember from the last war you fought, which is now technologically obsolete.
The Russians are a crucial partner in terms of the obstacle they represent to Western Europe on the one hand, the alliance they provide to China so it has the time to catch up militarily to where the Russians already are and to surpass the Russians. It becomes logical to try to cripple the Russian system and its ability to be a problem for Europe or an ally for China. And we're seeing the West groping its way. The elections coming up in all the European countries, confronting all of their political establishments with major challenges, are matched by what happens here in the United States. If the election actually goes through, if Mr. Trump doesn't use the global situation as an excuse to overrule or simply postpone the elections—that will set in motion political intensities of conflict in the United States that I don't even want to think about, but we may have to.
But if Mr. Trump prevails or doesn't prevail, that will have all kinds of consequences too. People should understand the remarkable things he's done these last two years are because he had the Republican Party under his thumb and in charge of both houses of the legislature here. That permitted things that would not otherwise happen. And that may be lost in these elections. So there's a lot of uncertainty about where the things we've talked about today, where they can go, given the over-determination coming from all these other, at this point, unknowable possibilities.
Nima Alkhorshid: Michael, just because we're about to wrap it up, I want to ask the final question to both of you. Scott Bessent, he mentioned that he's going to strangle the Iranian economy. And this is part of their game. And where do you see Europe?
Because you remember during [Trump's] first administration, he withdrew from JCPOA, put tremendous sanctions on the Iranian economy, strangled the Iranian economy. It was the old game. But in those days, Russia and China somehow cooperated with the United States before JCPOA. But in the aftermath of the JCPOA, they decided not to help the United States. Europe was in good shape. The global economy was in good shape. GCC countries were cooperating with the United States.
How do you compare the situation during his first administration and the way they're talking about putting economic pressure on Iran [now] ? Here is what Scott Bessent said.
Scott Bessent (clip): That out. We've created new authorities for the Treasury to be able to sanction airlines, maritime, digital assets. So this is all hands on deck. Teams from Treasury, the State Department, and DOW have gone out of the world, and we are having very fulsome talks with anyone supporting the regime.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yeah. Go ahead.
Richard Wolff: For me, it's very clear. The conditions have become much, much worse for the West, for the United States, and they've become correspondingly more desperate. They don't know what to do. The military doesn't work. The sanctions didn't work. And they've run out of options. And so they're going to do more military and more sanctions. I mean, you know, they're not prepared to change the policy, and they're not prepared to question the policy tools they have.
And I understand why, because there are no other policy tools that I can imagine that they can sit down to. Look, they could change their policy, sit down and have a new JCPOA. Call it a victory, call it better, you know, all kinds of packaging you could accomplish if they were willing to sit down. They don't want to have to sit down to work out anything. And by the way, I think that's part of why you saw that list of leaders that we began today's program with at the Shanghai Cooperation, the Turkish leader and the Indian leader and some of the others. They are doing what every country is doing. We've been talking about this for weeks. They are rethinking and restrategizing a new world economy.
And it's only a question of what particular forms they will take in reducing their dependence on the West and increasing their integration with the East. That's what they're doing. They all know that. They all know why they're doing that. And everything the United States is doing is telling them, do that some more. Now, don't get caught doing it. Don't make it so obvious that Mr. Bessent has to single you out because you don't want the bombs to come on New Delhi. You want them to stay in Tehran. That's a bit cruel, but I think that's what's going through their mind. So they're going to be very careful. They're going to have picture opportunities with Mr. Trump. And they're going to have picture opportunities with the Germans and so on. And the Turks are going to deal with the Germans, blah, blah, blah, very carefully. But the direction of what they're doing is unmistakable.
Michael Hudson: Well, Nima, you asked what will Iran do ? And I think that Iran is going to look at who's going to join Bessent's sanctions that you've just broadcast. Is Europe going to join them?
Well, once there is trade resuming from the Persian Gulf, Iran is going to say, "What tankers are we going to let through for what ? Who's going to get this oil ? Who are we going to favor?" They are going to, I think, discriminate not only against oil that is destined for the United States, but is destined for Western Europe. They're going to favor other members of the SCO and BRICS countries. They're going to favor global south countries and Asian countries. That's what their whole future orientation is, not with Europe or the United States.
Well, what's this going to do to the EU if the EU is left out ? It's already in the crisis that we've talked about. It's going into a crisis of oil and gas prices that are rising. [Europe] is going to be starved for gas and oil, especially Britain. And Trump is chortling about this. He says, "This is great. We're going to be in the driver's seat. We can control Europe."
But the U.S. control of Europe is going, and Britain and Germany especially are going to be so exploitative that I think it's going to create a counterreaction. And it is just going to isolate the pro-war parties from the rest of the population that is actually paying the higher gas and oil and electricity and food crisis for all of this.
So Bessent's act is just coming out and saying, "Iran, Russia, China, we are your enemy. You'd better figure out how to go it alone without us." And that's the message. And you can be sure that they've got it.
Nima Alkhorshid: Yes. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Michael Hudson: This was a nice discussion.Thank you!
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Editing: Matt Connors
Review: Ced
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