NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody, today is Wednesday, November 27th, and Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff are here with us. Welcome back, Michael and Richard.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Glad to be back.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started with what’s going on between Russia and the United States in Ukraine. We had a new hypersonic missile hitting Ukraine. And I talked with Professor Ted Postol. I talked with Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson, all of these military analysts. They’re thinking this is a new weapon. This is a new – it has the impact of a nuclear bomb, but it doesn’t have a nuclear warhead. This is the importance of these new weapons that they’ve used to send the message to the West.
But the question right now is, is the message or has the message been perceived by the West, in your opinion? Richard, you can start.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, for me, as always, I try to look at these things through the lens of what we have learned from history. And what we have learned from history is, among other things, that the capitalist era of the last three or four centuries has been remarkable for its technological changes. That is, remember Marx had a famous line, “all that’s solid turns into air.” Everything you assumed, true, will not be soon. Everything you assumed necessary, won’t be soon.
So that it becomes crucial, in the life of every capitalist, but indeed of every worker, of all of us, that you cannot assume in your thinking and your planning that the way things will be next year are a simple projection of how they are, now. This is a misunderstanding of how the world has worked, particularly in recent times. And there’s a debate about whether in the past it was all that different either. But in any case, we’re clear that things change all the time. All right.
It should have, therefore, been part of the thinking of the United States that the kind of military dominance that it had at the end of World War II, that this might last a while, but that it would be superseded, and there would be absolutely no basis to presume that the only people that would make technological advances are Americans. I mean, that’s silly. Nobody in their right mind should hold such a notion. And yet, look at what happened. As best I can tell, and I’m listening and watching all the same people you just mentioned. We have here a new technological development. It’s either an altogether new kind of missile, or if I understand correctly, a new adaptation of a missile that was being used from underwater, a submarine-based missile. But it’s a new development, one way or the other. And it shows that the Russians have a certain capability. You know, the military part of the Soviet Union was very advanced.
And it’s clear that at least under Putin, they have made every effort to do after the Soviet Union the kind of commitment to military preparedness and military studies and technological advance that the Soviets felt they had to do under Stalin and those who came after. Which shouldn’t again surprise anyone.
I mean, the whole history of the Soviet Union was the history of a breakthrough that became the demonized enemy of everybody in the West. And they were constantly besieged and threatened, and World War II was heavily inflicted upon them, etc., etc., etc.
It’s not surprising that they would A, be committed to military development, and B, be able to develop their technology either on their own or with the help of China. I’m sure we’ll never know that story in its totality. So here’s what I find remarkable: that the West seems to have been surprised.
But why? Why are you surprised? What is it? I mean, even commentators in the West have made a parallel with 1957. Well I remember that, in 1957, you know, I’m a teenager, but I’m already alive and aware, and Russia sent the Sputnik, the little satellite up, and they were the first ones to do it. And everyone in the West was astonished.
What? What, what is this? Here’s my sense: that the American delusion that the position it acquired with the collapse of the British Empire and then World Wars I and II would last forever was some kind of sign from God that the United States would be the center of the universe indefinitely.
And so when they learn, no, not the case, they are traumatized with anxiety and fear. But it’s not because of the danger from outside. It’s because of the delusion that led you not to calculate that this was part of what, what you’re going to face. The West keeps escalating in Ukraine.
Remember, if you go back to the beginning of the war, they were never going to put troops on the ground. They were never going to give them the Abrams tank. They were never going to give them the F-16 fighter plane. They were never, they were never, they gave it all. As the war goes badly, they escalate what they’ll do.
And it didn’t dawn on them that the Russians will counter-escalate, which the Russians have done in the ways that they could. At first, numerically. Russia is a large country. Ukraine is a little one. So the Russians can field an army three or four times what the Ukrainians can do. If there is no other way, or if that’s the best or cheapest way, then the Russians will escalate that way, which they did. And that helped them be victorious, which they have been.
Okay, now they made that decision. And by the way, for me, that was the most astounding thing. That a lame duck president, who has only a few weeks left, who has the, who his own party decided that he was not competent to run for president anymore, would be allowed to make the decision to free up the Ukrainians to shoot those missiles. What in the world? That there wasn’t an outcry about that tells you much about American politics. Very little about anything else.
Okay, the Russians then, having successfully escalated before, have now successfully escalated again with this new missile. And again, we see the United States. Oh, terrible. And by the way, things are being said over the last three or four days that show you how hysterical the British and the French have been making noises about putting their own troops into Ukraine. Are you crazy? Answer is yes. You’re crazy with fear and anxiety. The guy who’s the head of the Navy, the Naval forces, a Dutch admiral, makes comments about preemptive…
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bauer.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. Bauer. This is nuts. This is all nuts. This is, you know, hysteria. It tells you there must be unbelievable, frantic calls around the collective West trying to figure out what’s going on. But it’s unnecessary. There’s something very, very primitive going on here. I guess that’s what I want to get across. There’s this, there’s this problem of not having calculated that the Soviets might be really good at military. Because they were threatened in the entire 70 years of the Soviet… Let me remind everyone. 1917 is the Soviet Revolution. 1918, the troops of the United States, France, Britain, and Japan invaded the new Soviet Union. 10,000 American troops landed inside the Soviet Union and coordinated militarily with the white army in the civil war that racked Russia from 1918 to 1920. Japan, which was the fourth country whose troops landed in to put down the revolution, they didn’t leave Russia until 1922. So… and Lenin dies in 1923. So the whole beginning of the Soviet Union is characterized by military threat.
I mean, if you know that, you can’t be surprised that they put an enormous emphasis on military preparedness. And then when you watch a few years later, that Hitler, with all that he had assembled, marches into the Soviet Union and is squashed like an insect as a result, you realize, my goodness, the Russians may be poor, which they are. They were very poor then. They are poor. They are backward. They are illiterate. They are farmers. And they beat the crap out of the Germans. You have to then ask, “do you really want to go to war against the Russians?” It doesn’t seem to work out. Napoleon had to learn that. Hitler had to learn it. Kaiser Wilhelm in the First World War, he had to learn it. Now the Americans have to learn it. Hey, hey, hello. And then you’re surprised they have a new missile. Are you nuts? Who are you? Well, that’s the irony for me. It’s the West’s self-delusion that is being undone.
It was for two years now, and I’ll stop with it. For two years, it has been impossible for Biden or Boris Johnson, or Mr. Macron there in France, for them to understand that the Russians may win. It’s an unthinkable thought. Remember all those lines – we will do whatever it takes. What kind of language is that? That’s the language of people who are so sure that it’s unthinkable that they now have to face that the unthinkable is probably what’s going to happen.
And that they will come up with some bullshit from Madison Avenue, but they will sit down and the Russians and the Ukrainians will negotiate how much Ukraine gives away in land to the Russians, which is the only issue left for them to bargain a little bit over. You know, they’re going to get everything else, the Russians. Most of Europe already assumes it. But they’re going to lose. And it’s very difficult for them to lose. Let me, last point. Let me give you a statistic, which I didn’t know, which I learned this morning.
In 1979, if this is true, in 1979 the United States accounted for 79% of global trade in agriculture. Today, the United States accounts for 12.3% of the global trade in agriculture. That is as stunning a statement about what has happened to the United States in the world economy as I could think of.
American farmers are now horribly upset by the import, that’s what I learned today, of used cooking oil from China and Brazil. Because we now, you know, we burn that kind of oil in lieu of petroleum. It’s a biofuel, right? It’s a substitute.
And the Chinese are sending us their garbage, and the Americans are buying it because it’s much cheaper than the squashed soybeans oil that they have normally. And out of that story becomes the learning that the United States is in no position to control any of it anymore. Not the corn, not the wheat, not the soybeans, none of it. It is, and I don’t think anybody gets it. All of these little statistics are kept apart so they don’t amalgamate into a story that might make, and the same is true in the military. And that’s, I think, what we’re watching. I stop. I’ve talked too long.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Just, you’ve mentioned the link to the Soviet Union. The Russian President Vladimir Putin, right after this attack, he was talking about this new weapon, this new missile, hypersonic missile. He said, “we are all.” He mentioned himself and other people in that meeting together with the bomb. We are all come from the Soviet Union. It means that all originates in the Soviet Union.
RICHARD WOLFF: Of course. Of course. I mean, look at him. I mean, he literally, his early career, his education, he is a product of the Soviet system. You know, no question. And, you know, and that’s a system that had its strength and had its weakness, you know, like any other system.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.
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MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you begin your question by referring to the American war against Russia. This is… you and other people are, for the first time this week, referring to it that way for what it is. It’s not the Ukrainian war against Russia. It’s the American war against Russia. That’s very significant. The people realize that. Earlier today, the Ukrainians, or I should say, the Americans and the British in Ukraine fired new rounds of ATACMS missiles and storm shadow missiles against Russia. Meanwhile, three days ago, Russia closed off the airspace over the missile area where it had launched the missile against Ukraine a few weeks, a week ago.
And it’s reestablishing all sorts of new silos for missiles aimed both with atomic and non-atomic arms. This is clear. And yesterday Foreign Minister Lavrov gave a very important speech, and he pointed out that NATO is no longer a defensive alliance. There’s no longer a pretense that it’s defending Europe against the imminent Russia military invasion as if they’re going to be troops marching right through to Germany again.
The only… the idea of defense in NATO has been transformed. The idea of defense must be to destroy all non-NATO countries. To destroy not only Russia, but China, and by extension, members of the global majority who seek independence from the unipolar U.S.-centered world. That seems crazy, but here’s what Lavrov said, quote: “just the other day, the head of the NATO military committee, Robert Bauer – that’s exactly who Richard was just talking about – said that this is no longer enough. And that in order to achieve the goals of protecting the NATO member states, it is necessary to preemptively strike at the targets of the Russian Federation, which, in NATO’s opinion, could pose a threat to the organization’s member states.”
All decency has been discarded, and the true intentions are already being announced publicly. Well, when you take this speech in conjunction with what President Putin has said. He said that any introduction of weapons that could be atomic or missiles that are designed to carry atomic as well as non-atomic missiles will be treated as an atomic attack on Russia.
Because why would anybody put a missile with an atom bomb on it, right next to Russia’s borders in Ukraine, if you’re not going to attack on Russia? And when the head of NATO says, we’re not putting these missiles with atomic weapons there to defend in case Russia attacks us, we’re going to attack Russia first.
Now, the United States has long had plans for a preemptive strike. Abel Archer, going all the way back to that, plans for an atomic war. And the man who I worked with 50 years ago, Herman Kahn, wrote the book Thinking the Unthinkable, saying, yes, there can be an atomic war. There will be survivors. That made him, the film, films are made on him. Dr. Strangelove was based on that. So the Americans assume that, yes, there can, and they are willing to upgrade it. Apparently, they think that, well, President Putin hasn’t attacked us yet. Maybe he won’t.
Well, I’m sure your military advisors who you’ve had on your show, very good, Scott Ritter and the rest of them have said, well, Putin doesn’t have to attack the, the NATO Europe, because it’s already winning so much in Ukraine.
What it wants to do is consolidate its gains for what Putin explained in February 2022, the aims to denazify Ukraine, to protect Russia by accepting its Russian-speaking provinces who voted to become part of Russia, not the Ukraine, since they were being treated like subhumans by the Ukrainian Nazis.
He wants to finish winning the war on the battlefield, and that’s just exactly what’s happening, and the war can only be fought on the battlefield, but that’s exactly what the West can’t do.
Richard has explained some of the reasons why the West can’t do it, but you’ve just seen also in the last 24 hours the Israeli agreement, apparently under U.S. pressure, to stop bombing Lebanon. We don’t know the deals yet because Lebanon said, well, wait a minute, the contract you’ve given us is not at all what we’ve decided on.
But the fact is that Israel realized that it cannot win a war against Lebanon because it’s fought with troops. The only kind of war that Israel can wage is by bombing. Well, that’s the only kind of war that NATO can wage against Russia, by bombing.There’s no way in which you can have troops there because to have enough troops that’s necessary to occupy a country, you would have to have a military draft. And if you have a military draft, the British or French or Americans will have the same reaction that the Ukrainians have.
They’ll vote the party out of power because they don’t want a draft. No country that has a political leadership subject to the will of voters can ever have a draft again. That means that the war can only be fought with bombs. That’s why the British and the American storm shadow and ATACMS are being used.
And when President Putin says, because we’re not really fighting Ukraine, because these are not Ukrainians, they’re steering and programming where the bombs are going to fall. These are the Americans and the British. So we’re going to go after the countries that are actually launching the bombs.
And that means Britain, maybe even the United States, Putin has said, but there’s a lot of discussion about, well, certainly there are the military bases that are surrounding Ukraine on the way to Russia, like in Romania. When the United States put the missiles in Romania, they said, well, we’re not fighting Russia. It’s in case Iran should invade us. Well, the thought of Iran invading Romania is pretty silly as you can imagine. Russia knew that this is the kind of silly talk that the West is using. But the point is that just as Israel couldn’t defeat Lebanon with troops, NATO can’t defeat Russia with troops.
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So the only thing they have is to continue to bomb Russia, and they think that Putin is chicken, and Putin is waiting for the appropriate time if there’s a really serious bomb that doesn’t just fall in a forest or in an oil depot or something, to go kaboom and say this is it. Well, President Biden has a response.
He talked to President Netanyahu, and Netanyahu said, the Samson option is what you want. You bomb him. Use the atomic bomb. And you tell him, do you really want to blow up the world? We’re going to bomb you. But if you bomb us, the whole world will go. That’s the Samson bringing down the temple. The whole world.
That’s what we’re in, and when somebody’s senile and knows that he’s losing the brain and therefore his personality, and when he’s surrounded by the crazy people that you have, Blinken and Sullivan and the rest, and the crazy NATO general that Richard mentioned, this is the situation we’re in today.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: When we have Donald Trump, it seems that in the eyes of Russians, there could be some sort of hope for the incoming administration. I’m talking about the Trump administration. And have you heard about Sebastian Gorka? He’s going to be the director of counterterrorism for Donald Trump. And here is what he said, Richard.
SEBASTIAN GORKA: Tip away that the president has mentioned. He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation, you will negotiate now, or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts. That’s how he will force those gentlemen to come to an arrangement that stops the bloodshed.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, the problem, Richard, right now is that there is no mutual understanding between Russia and the United States. And I talked with Colonel Jacques Baud, he’s in Brussels, and he’s a military analyst. He showed me that this new weapon, this new missile is capable of hitting all the territory of the United States.
And you see that these people are just going with the rhetoric in the mainstream media. It doesn’t seem that they do have some sort of understanding of what’s going on between Russia and how dangerous this war can get. For Ukraine, what’s… Jake Sullivan just recently said that Ukrainians are not capable of winning. They don’t have manpower.
It doesn’t matter how much more weapons we’re going to give them. But you see the escalation on their part.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me tell you again just how I see it. And I’m going to do the history again. You have a declining empire. It’s the empire of the United States and its satellites, which include all those European countries and Canada and Japan, the G7. Okay, that’s a declining empire. From a declining empire, here is what we have learned to expect. Desperate acts, because those are the kind of acts performed by people who need to convince themselves that they are not losing their power, which they are. So the more they talk like this, the more the situation doesn’t change, so they have to escalate their rhetoric. And Mr. Gurkha there, that’s all he’s there for.
Lots of babble about how tough we all are. It’s childish. And it’s historical amnesia that’s playing. The Chinese, the Russians, they are coming up in the world. The Global South is coming up in the world. They’re not playing the role of subordinate that they did before.
When I gave you that statistic about the United States’ role in global agricultural trade dropping from 79% to 12.3%, that’s the reality that none of this rhetoric changes. The United States is in decline. And by the way, Mr. Trump is putting into power people who are diametrically opposed to one another.
He definitely has people who want to come to a resolution with Russia. My guess is Mr. Trump wants to come to a resolution. He will do better politically by being the president who brought peace in Ukraine than anything else he can do. His economic program is incoherent. There is no way to make sense of it, except that it’s a person who doesn’t understand what he’s doing and doesn’t care. I’m assuming people tell him what the consequences of his economic acts are, and he simply doesn’t care. That’s okay. He won’t be the first one like that.
But he will do better politically by bringing peace than by continuing this war. So he may have Mr. Gurka, or whatever his name exactly is, out there to make the noise. But while the noise is being made, the deal underneath the noise, that’s being made. And in that deal, here’s what I can assure you. Nobody cares what happens to Ukraine.
Barely the Ukrainians do. And they’ve already suffered what they’re going to suffer. You know, millions have left the country, many of whom will never come back. They’ve had half their country destroyed. It’ll take them a long time to rebuild. That’s what they will concentrate on. Peace is what they want.
Let me remind those of you who don’t pay attention. Two weeks ago was the most recent polling done by the Gallup poll. That’s an American company. The Gallup poll has been regularly polling the Ukrainian people, asking, are you for peace and negotiations, or do you want to pursue the war?
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Last week, for the first time, the percentage of people saying we want peace and negotiations went above 50%. It’s now about 53%, 54%. It was the same week that the United States escalated by telling Zelensky, “use those missiles.” The decision to use the missiles was made at the same time that over 50% of the Ukrainians who are actually living in the war have had enough. They don’t want any more. They’re willing to have negotiations. They’re willing to cede territory and all the rest. So I think what you’re seeing is dangerous, and I’m not arguing that it isn’t dangerous.
I’m not arguing that you might get a person, and maybe that’ll be Trump, who throws all caution to the winds, and again, history. There’s only one country on earth that ever used nuclear weapons. That’s the United States. So you can use that as a betting person to see who’s going to use it first again. Just for one country, it’s again. No other country is in that position.
It means that if the United States is defending itself against the possibility that Mr. Putin will use nuclear weapons, think how much stronger his claim is, because he’s saying he’s defending himself against the country that already did use nuclear weapons, and not when it was itself under attack. It dropped them in Japan.
And by its own statements, in order to reduce the number of casualties, the American military might have had to suffer if they had had to invade Japan rather than get a negotiated end of the war. And that’s a debated topic, I know. But even give them that. They are willing to nuclear bomb other people. Who’s got the right to defend what?
So that’s why when you have arguments that are as weak as this, then I don’t think the argument is any more the issue. It’s like children having a fight on the playground. One of them says, “I’m going to hit you with a truck.” Well, you understand what he means, but he can’t wield a truck. It’s telling you he’s desperate. He can’t solve his problem, so he has to fantasize. That’s what I get here. I think these are fantasies, fantasies of a preemptive strike, fantasies of nuclear war. You’re desperate.
Look, twice, I believe, Mr. Putin, over the last two years, when confronted with statements made about escalation, did want and did remind the world that we have nuclear weapons, hello. You may want to think about what you’re saying and doing, because we have them. And if you force us, we will use them. The United States isn’t being forced by anything, but it’s confronting its own lapse.
It didn’t take into account that the Russians may come up with a new weapon. That’s what people in an arms race try to do. I’m sure the United States military is working on ways to come up with new weapons. Only the United States, though, has the arrogance to imagine that the Russians can’t do this also.
The Chinese have matched every technical leadership the United States has. We have Google. They have the equivalent. We have Apple. They have the equivalent. We have ‘fill in the blank.’ They have the equivalent. Hello. They’re going to come up with a technical breakthrough sooner or later.
They already produce the best quality electric vehicle at the lowest price. They won that. They’re going to win other advancements. One of the reasons you sit down and work things out with Russia and China is because this arms race is crazy, because it’s so unmanageable. And who proves it? The Russians. They just reminded everyone of this by using a new missile.( with a new missile, reminding everybody). And the West, my guess, I predict, which I don’t believe in, the West will get over its hysteria. It’ll realize, OK, we’ve got to be careful now for a couple of years until we catch up. That’s the position everybody else has been in relative to the United States. Welcome.
You’re not the one country anymore with nuclear weapons. It’s over. It’s over. It’s over in agricultural trade. It’s over in the domination of the dollar. It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. This is being hammered home. And sooner or later, even if it’s done in a demagogic way, American politicians will get on that truck and say, “we’re the ones that are going to save us in this situation by working out a deal, because that’s a lot safer than rattling the sabers.” And that person will win that election.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. I think here in Brazil,I was surprised that here in Brazil, the electric cars or hybrid cars are the Chinese companies that are competing with each other. But there is no one else competing. Yeah. That’s unbelievable.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. Well, you know, China has about, by the way, for people who don’t know, China has, I think, 20 or 25 distinct companies competing. BYD is the big monster, but they have a bunch of them and some of them are a little bit better in the, you know, the battery technology and others have this technology..
But yes, sooner or later, what’s happening in Brazil will happen everywhere else. And by the way, the United States is shooting itself in the foot with all of this. American companies, because of the 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, by the way, imposed by Biden, that before Biden, the tariff was about 27%, Trump tariff.
Trump leaves, Biden comes in, raises the tariff just to show that he has no independent politics at all. And so, okay, so the United States, if it wants to buy the best, cheapest electric vehicle, any American company would have to pay double whatever the price is.
You’d have to give the Chinese, you know, $30,000 for the vehicle and then give Uncle Sam $30,000 worth of tariff. So it costs you 60 thousand dollars. Meanwhile, your Brazilian competitor can get the car for $30,000 off the truck. This is an enormous competitive advantage. The American will have to pay $50,000 to get an inferior GM or Ford or Tesla.
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That’s the joke. It’s very bad for the future of the United States, what they are doing. They are protecting jobs in the car industry in this country. But they are losing jobs from all the competitive disadvantages that happen when you jack up the price of a crucial input to your country’s competitors relative to other parts of the world.
That’s why in Europe, they don’t have a 100% tariff. They’re not even discussing it. Their tariff is below 50%, which is bad enough. And the Chinese are slapping them on the wrist for doing it. . But what is happening to a country that does this? You’re creating the conditions. Again, I warn my American political audience. You’re setting yourself up for a politician who will come along, explain clearly and simply what I just said, and say,” I’m not doing that. I’m not disadvantaging the American capitalist from his competitors by imposing these silly tariffs.”
And once that’s explained, all of the hoopla around the tariff will disappear, as it did 30 years ago, when we had the beginning of the neoliberal age, and everybody believed free trade was the royal road to endless prosperity. That’s nonsense. But the notion of protection with tariffs, that’s nonsense, too.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, jump in.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard and I seem to be the two new Dr. Dooms explaining all this. To give some background for what he mentioned about the United States being the first country to drop the atom bomb, that was actually intended…the action of dropping it on Japan was a move against Russia.
The reason it was dropped at that time was to prevent Russia’s entering the Second World War by invading from Asia against Japan. Truman wanted to have peace before Russia could move to protect its Siberian territories in the West against Japan and recover the islands that Japan had seized.
The bomb was dropped because the Cold War had begun. And the dropping of the bomb on Japan not only ended World War II, it initiated the Cold War from the beginning. From the very outset, all of the atomic weaponry has been based on the U.S.-Russia conflict now expanded to include China, Iran, and the whole 85% of the rest of the world.
Now, Richard also mentioned Gorka. What do we do about the fact that over the weekend, Sebastian Gorka, a crazy person who is very passionately in favor of an atomic war against Russia, now was appointed security advisor. The first thing that Mr. Gorka did was to say that he’s in full agreement with Blinken and Sullivan on the Biden war position.
He said the Trump position is exactly the same as that of the Biden neocons. Well, again, as Richard pointed out, there seemed to be a lot of different people with different ideas in Trump’s administration. While Trump, just a week or so before, had given a wonderful speech saying that it was time to wind down the national security state. He said that America’s wars, pushed by the CIA and the National Security Council and America’s politicalization of the law under the FBI, is to attack enemies of the other party, whoever that might be, have been destroying America.
Well, that was a wonderful anti-war talk and certainly reflected the voters who had supported him instead of Blinken or who just stayed instead of Biden and had just stayed home rather than voting for the war party of Harris. That was, on the one hand, he played to them.
Why would he have appointed someone like Gorka, and what does it really mean that almost his entire cabinet is so passionately anti-Russian and pro-war? Seems crazy on the face of it. The only idea that I can explain why he has this seeming opposition or sort of schizophrenia of his appointees is, he’s terrified that the deep state, the CIA, NSA, and the FBI is going to fight against him and do something as nasty as what happened to JFK. He wants to protect himself, certainly to the point at which he actually takes office and can have his appointees begin to stop the deep state and do what he wanted all along to do, to sort of solidify and start his second presidency on the first day, he says, by establishing a peace in Ukraine.
And I think in the last few days, he’s been indicating what his idea of peace is. It’s not war. I think he hopes to make a transactional agreement with Putin. I think that what is in his mind, and if the crazy idea is not my idea, it’s the idea that I’m getting from what his advisors have said, is that we can make a deal. And it’s the kind of deal that senators have said, “well, what America wants in Ukraine is not simply a place to have atomic weapons against Russia.”
We want Ukraine’s land, very rich soil. If we can control Ukraine’s agricultural exports, if we can haveBblackRrock and other companies buy Ukrainian farmland, then we don’t have to export American grain. We can continue to control world agricultural trade, not simply by selling the products of American farms, but by selling the products of the Ukrainian farms that BlackRock and other American investors want to take over. Oakland Institute in California has published every few months a whole running story of the American multinationals’ takeover of Ukrainian land.
Well, then you have Lindsey Graham and others saying,” well, we not only want the land, we want their raw materials resources.” Ukraine has lithium. Even more important, Ukraine has rare earth metals that are needed to make the magnets that are a part of making chips that work. We need the electricity that the various rare earth metals have.
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Well, rare earth metals take a long time to dig up and cause enormous environmental damage, unfortunately. And also a long time to refine. China controls most of the market in this, because other countries didn’t want the environmental cleanup costs of having to do this. So China let Taiwanese investors come in. So the Central Committee people have told me, buy up these raw materials. And essentially we’re selling rare earths only at the cost of the labor and profits designed to produce them, not taking advantage of the enormous raw materials rent that you can have by selling the rare earths at what it would cost foreign countries to develop, if indeed they could develop them rapidly. And that’s not something that can be done rapidly.
So I think that Trump imagines that he can say, all right, President Putin, we’re going to give you what you want. We’re going to let you keep the lands that you’ve taken. You want to denazify Ukraine. We’ll go along with that.
We have no love for Mr. Zelensky, and you can prevent NATO’s weapons there. We’re not interested in going to war. What we want is economic(). We want the land and the raw materials. We want everything economic, which is the whole reason to have a country, apart from having a place to blow up very quickly if we so desire.
So I think he hopes to do that. And I can imagine what Mr. Putin and Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Medvedev are all going to say in response – they’re going to say, “well, the problem is, Mr. Trump, we may make an agreement with you, but how do we get Congress to go along with it?”
“How do we get the CIA and the deep state and the Army from simply ignoring what you said, like they did before, when they wouldn’t follow your desire to decouple from Afghanistan? Then, they didn’t do it. And how can we trust the West to make an agreement?” But most of all, it’s much too early for an agreement.
The time you have a peace agreement with another country is when the war is over. You don’t have a peace agreement while the war is going on. And Russia is moving very rapidly to take over Ukraine, moving very quickly to the Dnieper River, which is sort of the dividing line in Ukraine.
And on the Russian eastern side of Ukraine, that’s where the raw materials are and much of the farmland. And Russia is going to say, “well, we’re going to leave, we’re going to follow what Mr. Medvedev had produced in a map. We’re going to leave a rump Ukraine centered in the Galicia territory of Lvov. The Nazi territories are going to be there.”
“But we’re going to denazify them, which means probably getting rid of the entire administration there. We’re going to have a show trial, a Nuremberg type trial, to put the Nazis in jail. And we may leave Ukraine all the way up to Kiev or we may not, depending on the details that have to be worked out.”
“But we’re not going to make your agreement. It might have worked out in 2022, but that’s over now. We’re going to have to wait until the war is over and negotiate from the position of what happens then.” And obviously, it’s going to be a position of U.S. strength. And there will be a delay and delay and delay.
I’m sure that President Putin will be very polite if indeed he ever deigns to talk to Donald Trump. But when he said, “well, all of your statements are when you were in office, you broke the treaty for missiles, short-range missiles. You broke every treaty that America had made. We really can only have peace when we’re in control.”
That means not the United States in control. So this is essential. I think there must be somebody smart enough in the administration that even if they won’t tell Donald Trump, your plan won’t work, they know that it won’t work. And all they have left are bombs, not only the ATACMS, but the atomic weapons.
So that’s what it is. I think the next big move that we’re going to see is a Russian attack, not atomic. It doesn’t need an atomic weapon. It can use all sorts of other weapons it has to thoroughly wipe out the American military bases in Poland, in Romania, and even beyond.
Imagine a bomb falling on MI6 right now across the river from London Bridge on the Thames. Just imagine, you know, what it can do. It can say, well, Ukraine’s not attacking us. England’s attacking us from MI6. You know, boom, there it goes. I think it’ll first hit Romania, Poland, and maybe the American troop concentrations in Germany. Maybe the American troops in England, possibly if there are any troops in France, there are two. But I think that’s going to be the most likely outlook.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, before wrapping up, do you have something to add?
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I’m a little worried about what Michael said vis-à-vis being Dr. Doom, he and I, somehow. I’m not, I understand the risks. I understand the dangers. I share the moments of anger when I watch these leaders taking unspeakable risks. Since I know many of them one way or another, even personally, it’s horrible. The arrogance, particularly, of the West is just horrible. On the other hand, much of what passes for politics in our country, and Lord knows the election we just had again, is all about political theater. And you know, most of the people performing know it’s theater, and most of the audience knows it’s theater. We don’t take it seriously. We don’t take it literally. It is necessary to get interesting images across to the people, and then they vote on those images.
But most of the blah, blah, it’s a kind of window dressing. I don’t want to go so far to say it has no effect. Of course, it has an effect. But it’s very, very secondary. You know, when Michael said that a lot of the people who vote are, in fact, voting for war or peace. Yes, that’s what I mean.
ORDER IT NOW
It’s the big issues that, in the end, are somehow in the head when they go in and vote. And I think what they’re learning is that the endless war,, that’s part of what Mr. Trump’s success has been. He at least says something about endless war. The very phrase, ‘endless wars,’ he helps to make a negative. He can use it against his enemies.
And they’re not very good at defending themselves against it. Sorry. So I’m hopeful, I want to end with that. I’m hopeful that we come to an end with this tit-for-tat escalation, that all of the people are frightened. Now, not just the Russians wondering how far the West will go, but the West having to wonder how far the Russians will go beyond the Ukraine, not in the fanciful invasion of Europe. What in the world does Russia want, or what could it do with five Ukraines? They’re having enough trouble controlling one Ukraine. What are they going to do, invade France and Germany and Italy? It’s silly. But that new missile, that can be shot anywhere.
Anywhere in Europe instantaneously. I think they have four minutes or five minutes from the time they can detect it to what they’re going to do about it. And they can’t do anything in four or five minutes. You know, so they’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the escalation is a two-way street.
I think they thought they didn’t have that problem. They could escalate, and all that would happen is Russia would whack Ukraine, about which they don’t care. Now, it looks like they’ve brought things to the past where Mr. Putin might, as he says he has now the right to do, bother the French or the Germans or the Italians or the British or the Americans in their home country.
He’d do to them what they just did to him. I’m hoping, and I think it’s possible, that that will accelerate that part of the Trump base that wants peace, that does not want this. Above all, remember that for the vast majority of Americans, good or bad, they don’t want any sacrifice for Ukraine.
It’s just not a saleable object. But I do have to go, so my apologies. Thank you for making this program, Nima. Thank you, Michael. I learned from every one of these, so I’m very happy to participate, both as a contributor, but also as an audience of our collective effort.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I meant to compliment you, Richard, when I said, I included you in Dr. Doom, as I’m always called that. You are simply being realistic, but to the vested interests here, anyone being realistic like you and me is called Dr. Doom, because for them, our realistic world is their doom. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
RICHARD WOLFF: Which is actually good, because it means they are understanding us on some level. All right, folks.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Bye-bye.
Credits:
Speech to text: Ced
Speaker Diarization: Jonathan Becnel
Proofing:
– Chris Platania-Phung
– Nachilomwe
