Michael Hudson: World Shaking Up! Epic Political & Economic Earthquakes

Yves here. In this interview with Nima of Dialogue Works, Michael Hudson discusses the SCO Conference as taking up the gauntlet thrown down at the just-finished NATO summit. Here NATO engaged in yet another expansion by naming China as a top bad guy for supplying Russia (when the US military gets 40% of its chips from China) and enlisting non-Atlantic-bordering nations like South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

Originally published at Dialogue Works

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: Michael, let’s get started with the SCO summit. And right after that, we’re having the NATO summit. It seems that NATO is fighting on behalf of the United States to try to preserve the U.S. unipolar hegemony over Eurasia and the Global South, isn’t it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, for the last few months, we’ve been discussing how the United States and its allied Western neoliberal economies have driven the non-Western world, the global majority, into protecting themselves and breaking away. And they’ve been developing a whole array of how they’re going to go about splitting.

It’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that has outlined in the last week or so exactly how the split is going to happen. And the first paragraph of their concluding declaration is absolutely wonderful. It threw down the gauntlet. Tectonic shifts are taking place in world politics, economics, and other areas of international relations.

At the same time, the use of force is intensifying. International law is being systematically violated. Geopolitical confrontation and conflicts are growing, and the risks to stability in the world and the SCO region are multiplying.

Well, no sooner did they say this than the NATO meetings are still being held even today in New York with President Biden meeting with the Ukrainian former Prime Minister Zelensky, now sort of acting as an individual. And you can see that the NATO meetings are recognizing that the challenge has been thrown down. And they’re announcing that they’re going to fight against this in every way they can by creating a counter alliance with as many countries from Eurasia as they can.

And both NATO and the EU bureaucracy are headed by Russia haters. And Olaf Schultz in Germany has said, well, if you hate Russia, you have to hate China too, because China’s sending things that help Russia defeat the West, like consumer goods that people can use, and food, and technology, and anything is a weapon against us.

So the world has to divide, and all we have to fight them is terrorism and bombing. We don’t have an army. There’s no way that we can field troops against them. We can’t invade them any more than they can invade us. But we can bomb them, and we can have color revolutions. And the SCO statements have anticipated all this and answering this.

But I want to talk about what they’re reacting against before we discuss what they’re doing. And they’re not only the 35 NATO member countries there, but they’ve invited all sorts of attendees, other democracies like Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE.

So this is going to be the third summit since the NATO war began in 2022. And not only are all these countries there, but they now have the English-speaking countries that are not part of NATO, Australia, New Zealand, and they pulled in Japan and South Korea saying, ha, you think you have Eurasia? Well, we’re going to have our own block in Eurasia, and we’re going to try to make our own set of alliances to try to block whatever you’re doing, and specifically to block the Belt and Road Initiative that the SCO is backing.

So NATO has just accepted the challenge of the SCO and said, this is going to be a fight against Eurasia and the Global South countries. And essentially, I guess we should call them the BRICS. They’re seeking to be independent from the United States and NATO.

And the West basically says, we can’t afford you to become independent, because all of our wealth has been coming from you. The world order that we’ve created since 1945 has been not the Mackinder type of Eurasian center, it’s been built all around the port cities, the sea trade, the periphery on the ocean. ^[1]

And it’s been the periphery, because the role of the periphery is to enable the Global South, South America, Africa, South Asia, to export raw materials, minerals, oil, plantation products, and also low wage manufacturing, just send them all out to the US, NATO, English speaking countries.

And none of the World Bank loans, or the International Monetary Fund loans have been designed to develop the interior of these countries, or their mutual trade. Their trade is exclusively to get it out of the Global South, out of Latin America and Africa, right into Europe, and right into North America. But don’t develop your own internal economy. Your railroads are going to go from the mines to the ports, not connecting your countries internally, or with your neighbors.

And that’s exactly what the SCO is set out to do. That’s what the Belt and Road Initiative is all about, to somehow create a basis for Eurasian integration, that is going to be for mutual trade and investment on, and they’ve announced this is going to be on an entirely different economic system from the neoliberal World Bank and IMF new system that has been enforced since 1945.

So we’re at a world changing development right here. And it’s just wonderful to see them spell all this out so consciously. And you can see that they’ve been— their spirit has been rising as they’ve seen the mounting preparations for attack by NATO and the US.

And NATO said, we’ve invited these Asian countries, Japan, South Korea, because we’re now no longer a defensive force. Any pretense that NATO was ever a defense against the Soviet Union disappeared when the Soviet Union dissolved, along with its military associates.

And NATO says, well, our next big fight is going to be against China and the China Sea. And it’s going to be in Central Asia to destabilize the countries there, as they’ve just tried to do a few months ago in Kazakhstan.

And it’s this attempt at destabilization that the SCO has addressed directly and said, you know, we’re going to stop it. We’re going to want the NATO countries and the US to withdraw. And their bases here, we’re going to say, you know, you can go your way, you can live with your own economy, however you can do it without industry working. But you’re not going to either exploit us, and you’re not going to attack us, because now we have a united front.

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: Yeah. And it’s so amazing, Michael, in this in the final statement of the SCO summit, they were talking about that none of these countries should interfere in the internal affairs of the countries. It’s so important. This is the same attitude that we have been witnessing from the United States in the aftermath of World War Two.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. NATO says, color revolutions or us. And you’ve seen them move everywhere. You’ve seen the real color revolutions have all been in Europe since 1945. It began with when Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin sat down and drew a map. And in that map, Stalin let Greece be part of the Churchill Western division, and the communists in Greece were the major fighters against Nazism. And they probably could have taken over, but Stalin did everything to prevent a Greek revolution. Of course, the last thing he wanted was for Greece to be a part of another Yugoslavia. Just imagine Yugoslavia going all the way down the Baltic, all the way down, you know, the peninsula, and what that would have done.

The thing that Stalin feared, of course, was communism in Greece or, or Yugoslavia, or anywhere else in the world at that time.

So yeah, you can see the interference that America did with Operation Gladio in Italy. You can see the U.S. maneuvering in Germany, and all of the other countries, unsuccessfully in France until finally, it pulled the May 1068 revolt in France.

So the SCO countries are pretty much in agreement that they are going to actively, proactively prevent Western NGOs from setting up the so-called economic democracy movements of the United States, and preventing them doing to Asia, what they already did to Europe, which has made it a colony.

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: And right after this SCO summit, there was an article by Pepe Escobar, he was talking about the program, he said they started with the concept of greater Eurasian partnership proposed by Poon in 2015. But it seems the ideology of this plan was elaborated by Russian historian Sergei Karaganov in 2018, as you mentioned to me.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s really very interesting. Karaganov has just sort of been in the news recently spelling out a whole strategy. And what Karaganov has done is put this civilizational struggle that we’re seeing today between NATO and Eurasia in the long term perspective.

And he’s quite rightly traced it all the way back to the 1000 years to the Crusades. And the Crusades, starting in the 12th and the 13th century, were basically an attempt by Rome to take over and reverse Christianity.

There were five patriarchates [The Pentarchy] in the 11th century, and Rome was the very bottom of the patriarchates. They called it the “Papacy Of The Harlots”, because the popes were controlled, and the papacy was controlled, by local Italian families.

And Orthodox Christianity, as it survived from the Roman Empire, really, it was in Constantinople, but also in Antioch, in Alexandria, and Jerusalem. And this was the whole center of Christianity.

And starting in, I think, 1075, Rome said, we’ve got to take over all of Christianity. And we’re going to start something that is absolutely unprecedented in civilization. For the last 3000 years, there were many empires. There was a Persian Empire, various Asian empires, [the Islamic Empire], but they had a common denominator. They all were religiously tolerant. You all know in the Bible that King Cyrus of Persia permitted people to worship Judaism there. The Jews that were captured by Babylonia and brought back to Babylonia, he blessed them to go back to Judea.

And other, you had Islam having a tolerance, for instance, in Jerusalem. But you had one of the major Christian patriarchates connected to Constantinople, you also had, that was under Islamic control. They both had their churches there, there was tolerance.

The whole Ottoman Empire that followed the Crusades, very, very tolerant. You had Jewish, Islamic, Christian, all sorts of other religions there. The Romans said, essentially, no, there can only be us. And we’ve got to have a war on the whole rest of the world.

And that followed for many centuries. It tore Europe apart with the war between Catholicism. And finally, the Protestants of Northern Europe broke away in the split.

But that ethic of only one way of thinking, and the intolerance of the Western social organization behavior, the intolerance of its religion, coupled then with the imperialism and the exploitation of England, Holland, France, other countries, all of this was completely new to the world.

Already, I think, as you know, I’ve dealt for a long time with Sumerian and Babylonian history. Already in the fourth millennium, you had the Sumerian city of Uruk sending out attempts to get raw materials. Bronze is made out of copper and tin. There were a few cities, fortified cities, it’s set up in the fourth millennium. But then the fortifications all disappeared.

They said, wait a minute, there’s no way we can have peaceful relations with other countries by essentially fighting them, too much overhead. Let’s have trade, they’ll give us raw materials, we’ll give them our handicrafts, the textiles we make, the rugs, all sorts of manufacturers that we make. And that set the whole stage for what happened.

That’s how Kublai Khan set up his empire as he set about across Russia. Well, Karaganov points out that the sort of founder of Russian independence, Alexander Nevsky, went to China, went to Mongolia, met Kublai Khan. Russia was part of this whole Eurasian open mutual development. And he’s placed the whole consciousness, you could say, of Russia, and by extension, the rest of Asia, in this cultural and even religious context, especially the religious context.

And that’s why you have President Putin, in so many of his recent speeches, focusing on the Russian church that the Ukrainians, the first thing they’re doing is saying, you know, we’re Westerners, we’re going to close down and destroy your churches because they’re Russian churches. This is the Western mentality.

And you can imagine for those Russians who still adhere to Russian Orthodox Christianity, you know, they’re saying, wait a minute, Ukraine is trying to force on us the same kind of destructive wars that tore France apart with the Protestant and Catholic wars, that the Catholics drove out the Huguenots, who were the Protestant reformers, and they became the technical class from England to Germany to France to America.

Karaganov has pointed [out that this] is not only an economic break, not only de-dollarization away from the dollar, it’s really not only a conflict of religion, it’s a whole conflict of what civilization and the rules of civilization and a decent world order are all about.

Well, the SCO was very emphatic to say, well, the United Nations had the right idea and the principles that it stated that it was for equality, peace, but that’s not what the United Nations has become. Because the United States said we will not join any international organization in which we do not have veto power. The United States insisted on veto powers in the UN, and it’s been able to veto any condemnation of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, or any policy that’s against U.S. policy.

And you’ve had already for the last few years the global majority saying the whole Security Council is the United States and its satellites. And I remember when the United States tried to add Japan to the National Security Council, China said, that’s like just giving America another vote in the UN. They wanted to spread it out.

Well, one of the things the SCO has called for is for a change in the representation of the United Nations. But at the same time, Karaganov has pointed out that the United States, the United Nations really cannot be reformed because of the U.S. veto. And the U.S. has already captured many of the key United Nations institutions.

The International Kangaroo Court, for instance, that accused Putin of being a terrorist and issued an arrest warrant so that he can’t attend the United Nations is an example. The OSC, the disarmament agent of the UN, controlled by the United States.

And there’s a recognition, I think, certainly by Russia, and I think that spread to the SCO, that, well, we’re going to leave the United Nations intact, but we’re not going to be really an active part of it. We have to create our own shadow United Nations to do what the principles that the United Nations originally promised to do, but didn’t do. So we’re going to have to have our own court. We’re going to have our own version of the International Monetary Fund.

And they said, this is going to be based initially on payment of trade and investment in one’s own currencies for mutual currency. There’s going to be a shadow NATO, which really is what the SCO has developed into. The SCO really began as an anti-terrorist organization in Central Asia, because that’s where the United States was trying to eat into Russia in its attempt to dismember it and divide it into smaller parts, not only breaking up the Soviet empire, but Russia itself, and then moving eastward to break up China.

The SCO very explicitly recognizes this and is taking proactive actions to prevent it. And the NATO meetings simply make it very clear that its intention is indeed to do everything that the SCO was set up to fight against. So, as I mentioned, Karaganov puts it in the whole long, long fight of this is, if you’re talking about a fight for civilization, a new civilization doesn’t begin in just one year or a decade. This is a split in civilization that actually occurred a thousand years ago.

Well, I think it occurred, in my book, The Collapse of Antiquity, is how the split occurred 2000 years ago with Greece and Rome run by oligarchies instead of the kingship that you had from the Near East all the way to the west of Asia. All of the rulers of Asia from the Middle East to Asia prevented a domestic oligarchy from developing. And they prevented a domestic oligarchy from developing by preventing a creditor power to develop because it was a creditor oligarchy that used credit to pry away the land from the existing holders, the citizens who manned the army.

Well, you can look at exactly how this split between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and all the rest of Asia is mirrored today in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The European military imperialism of colonialism has given way to financial imperialism. And you have the Global South countries indebted. What do they have to do? They have to do the same thing that the Greek and Roman peasants did. They owed money to the creditors. They have to give up the land and now the oil rights and the mineral rights and the bridges and the communication system and the water systems all to the West.

So if you put this fight of the SCO versus NATO in the long perspective and you say, substantively, what is it that they’re fighting for? You really realize that for 5,000 years, there was the kind of civilization that had inequality. Especially by the 13th century BC, you had a whole cosmopolitan group of countries, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia. They were all sending gifts to each other, intermarrying. They’d send their daughters to intermarry with other people. All of that was done peacefully, basically.

And the West has always acted by military conquest. And that’s really what it’s called. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an anti-terrorist military organization because you can’t have a distinct economy and society and religion without having the military defense.

The first thing that America and England did after the Soviet revolution in 1917 was to invade Russia. And that fighting of the white Russians and far in the east was all the first four years. And the ongoing hostility, including the west’s backing of Hitler’s attack on Russia, all forced Russia to have this huge military overhead. And the SCO wants to avoid the need for this overhead. They want to have their development not led by the military-industrial complex, but essentially, they want their development to take a form that’s diametrically opposite to the IMF principles.

The IMF says the way to go is to create more exports and pay your debts or get other countries in debt by lowering your wages and preventing labor unionization and letting the wealthy people run your economy.

Well, as I think we discussed before, how every western economy really began by upgrading the conditions of labor by public health, public education, and support of labor productivity. That’s really the aim of the SCO and the BRICS.

I mean, the SCO really is just the ideological arm of the BRICS so far, because while the BRICS are all discussing among themselves, you know, how do we really work out the nitty gritty and dot the i’s and cross the t’s, the SCO is the institution that has taken the lead in us spelling all of this out.

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: Yeah. It’s so amazing, Michael. Recently, Orban from Hungary, he had an interview with Bill in Germany. He was comparing the attitude of the United States to the attitude of China. He said that when he went to China, China has a plan for the conflict, a peace plan for the conflict in Ukraine. At the same time, the policy in the United States is all about war. The European Union is the same attitude.

It seems that the SCO summit and these organizations are trying to make some sort of alliance between other countries, the global majority, in order to prevent more wars.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, when the United States and NATO says war, it’s not the kind of war that you had in the past. It’s not like World War I or World War II. You think of war as being an army fighting another army, going into the country, conquering it. General Patton marching across Germany to conquer it or the Americans landing on Normandy Beach.

But the West can’t do that anymore. Not only would local populations refuse to be drafted, but NATO is out of arms. It’s used them all up in Ukraine.

Beyond that, there’s another problem. The arms don’t work. The tank that was supposed to work very well against undefended Iraq and Libya didn’t work against a really professional army like the Russians. They don’t work if you have the guide bombs against them or any kind of aircraft that can fight them. They get stuck. A bazooka can shoot them down. So the tanks don’t work. The airplanes don’t work. The defense systems don’t work.

And the one thing that America was able to export to other countries was supposedly the military technology, the F-16s. And they don’t seem to work either. And especially they need very, very smooth runways. And Russia has just blown up almost all of the runways in Ukraine so that the F-16s that NATO said, we’re going to send them right now. They said that yesterday. But where are they going to fly from? NATO said, we’ve been training them in Poland. We’ve been training them in the United States. We’ve been training them in Germany.

Well, Karaganov, more than anyone else, has said what I think President Putin and Lavrov are too polite to say explicitly. Karaganov has said, look, Russia has had many red lines. Every set of red lines, America and NATO have just gone right by. And they really think, oh, Russia is not going to respond. It’s afraid of us.

Well, Russia hasn’t responded because, number one, it can just sit where it is in Ukraine and let the Ukrainians attack them. And it’s always better to defend than attack if you want to save your army. The losses of an attacking army are much heavier than a defending one.

But now that they’re talking about missiles, when NATO talks about war, it’s not a war of soldiers, because Ukraine doesn’t have any soldiers. And how can they talk about providing weapons, all sorts of new weapons to Ukraine, when there’s nobody to use them? The army is empty. It’s in retreat.

So the question is, all this money that is being paid to the military industrial complex of the US, Germany, France, where are they going to be used for? Well, the implication is, well, we can use them in the China Straits. We can use them in Asia. That’s why we’ve invited Japan and South Korea here to try to stir things up and really make China fight, just like we’ve provoked Russia to fight.

So the only kind of war that America can fight is a war of destruction, not occupation, not conquest, but just bombing. And that is terrorism. And of course, the Americans back up the bombing with supporting the terrorist groups like ISIS, or like the Israeli Defense Forces, or the groups, the kind of groups that they mobilized against the south of Russia before when they tried to spur great trouble in Chechnya, for instance, and Georgia.

This is the challenge that the SCO is facing. How is it going to cope with the fact that America is threatening to make Asian countries look like Ukraine?

Well, the first move of NATO seems to be via Poland, because just before the NATO meeting, Poland and Ukraine signed a mutual defense treaty. And the Polish president said that if there is a Russian missile that is going westward over Ukraine, which of course, that’s the direction it goes in when it blows up the ammunition dumps and the other military center, then it’s directed at Poland.

And we can from Poland, set up all of the missiles that America and NATO have given us, and we can fight these missiles there. And they’re pretty long missiles, and we can send them all the way into Russia.

So Karaganov has said, look, this is the ultimate red line. The war in Ukraine is really a war of NATO against Russia.

Two weeks ago, after the Americans directed Ukraine to bomb the beach in Crimea, Lavrov said, we’re at war with the United States. He called the American ambassador, we’re [at war] with the United States. This means that [Russia] can now fight back beyond Ukraine. It’s not about Ukraine anymore. It can fight back into wherever the missiles from Poland, or from Romania, come from. Russia can blow up the military bases there from which the missiles come, and the associated military bases, the spy bases. It’s already said there can be no more American spy planes over the Black Sea, because they’re directing the terrorist attacks from Ukraine. We’re going to shoot them down.

So I think that the Russians no longer are hesitating to fight against the United States itself, or other NATO troops.

I think one of the things they must have been discussing, and it’s almost made explicit, but you can see that they’ve been discussing it. We recognize that the war that NATO is fighting against Russia is a war against us by NATO. It’s not limited to Ukraine. It’s okay for Russia to fight back.

Well, Karaganov has said, well, at some point, the Americans have broken, have withdrawn from every atomic missile treaty. The short-range treaties, they’ve stopped them all. So there’s no longer a short-range treaty. They seem to be preparing to be in a position to put missiles in Finland, or Sweden, or Norway, right on our borders to hit St. Petersburg, not that many kilometers away, or even Moscow.

So at a certain point, we’ve got to say, well, now that you’ve stopped the intermediate-range missile treaties, we can use atomic warfare against you.

And what Karaganov said is the West, neither the Americans nor Europeans take seriously the real threat of atomic war anymore. It’s like back in the 1950s, after America’s attack on Japan, they all knew that there was an atom bomb. They all worried about it. They knew Russia had it. When I was a kid in grade school, we had to get under the desk every week for when the Russians bombed us in Chicago. You can imagine the silliness. They put in radar stations in Chicago. You know how you put food into a radar oven to heat it up? The radar stations were right at the beach, 57th Street Beach, and people began getting all sort of burned up inside from the radar stations to save them from the Russian invasion that seemed imminent at the time. That’s how crazy it was. But people have forgotten all that.

And there’s a belief that, well, there can be a fight in Ukraine, but it’s not going to touch us in America. It’s not going to touch the Germans or English or the French. Well, now, I think what they were discussing in the SCO, certainly under Russia explaining to them what exactly is happening militarily is, well, there may be, we’re going to have to shake them up and show we know that every military game that the American military have planned for Russia versus America, Hezbollah versus Israel, America versus China, the Americans lose.

And we can tell the military, look, your State Department and the CIA and the neocons all want to work is, quite frankly, they’re crazy. Do you really want to get blown up? Because we’re just showing you, we’re using this modest atomic bomb, too bad about Poland, too bad about Romania. But at least we didn’t drop the bomb on London or Paris yet, or South Korea or Okinawa in Japan.

So I think that the West is so desperate, because the Western ideology is, if we don’t destroy the SCO now, they’ll destroy us. They’re projecting, they really imagine that the SCO wants the West. And what you’re hearing from Lavrov and Putin and Karaganov and from the Chinese counterparts are, you know, we’re disgusted with the rest. We’ve seen the West as a failure. Don’t you get it? The West has failed. We don’t want to fail. We don’t want to be with the West. We don’t want contact with you. Or we’re going our own way.

And the West can’t imagine. They’re saying, wait a minute, this is the end of history. We’re there. We’re the end of history. We are history. And you had the wonderful line of President Biden says, hey, I’m not senile. I’m controlling the whole world. I’m doing, I mean, this is, I’m not crazy. I’m running the world. This is the mentality in the United States foreign policy. All of this has been coming out in the open in the last week.

This is really the opening, like there’s a shot and an alignment. They’re drawing the lines. And that’s just what we’re seeing. And the lines are really not only the U.S. NATO versus the global majority. It’s really barbarism versus, if not socialism, a mixed economy with governments and private enterprise together, developing countries mutually with each other, instead of each country by themselves trying to trade with North America and Europe.

That’s the revolution we’re seeing. And it’s a civil, it is a civilizational revolution in the sense that it’s returning to what the basis of civilization was way up until the West really took over. And you had this Christian ethic of hatred and destruction and the Catholic inquisition, which is really what neoliberalism is, the economic ideological inquisition.

And other countries are doing what is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation. This is the reformation of the rest of civilization against the West.

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: Michael, what’s so amazing? There is a new report that shows China supplies 40% of all semiconductors needed for the production of key weapons systems to the United States defense industry. When you look at the list, you see Lockheed Martin, you see Raytheon. All these companies are receiving 40% of semiconductors, unbelievable, from China. And they’re still thinking of picking a fight with China.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s what’s so interesting. You know, most of the historians and I grew up have a materialist view of history. And we think that, well, countries are going to follow their material interest. And usually that means governments are going to represent the economic interests.

Well, certainly the American companies, not only Raytheon, but also Apple, other [companies] saying, wait a minute, all of our production is based in Asia. We’re dependent on China for cobalt, even for rare earth elements, for refined aluminum, for all of these things. And the Americans need Russian takeoff cylinders for outer space. How on earth the business people can say, if there is a break, where does that leave us?

There’s no way that the United States or Europe can somehow rebuild their industry without de-financializing their economy, without getting rid of the whole debt overhead and without raising the wages and the living standards of labor.

And the one thing that holds America and Europe together is their class war against labor. And they’d rather fight than have— this for them would be a civilization shock. So the West has had it. I mean, this is it. And it doesn’t even have a plan B. It only has plan A. We’re going to bomb them until other populations say, stop. Oh dear, we’ve got to change our government because our government makes them bomb us. Let’s have a friendly Western government like our own Boris Yeltsin. And they will stop bombing us and then we’ll have peace and we won’t be bombed anymore. But instead they’re putting all their support behind Boris Yeltsin.

While in the United States, most of the Americans that are pulled are against the war, NATO war. Most Europeans are against the NATO war, but, and they’re completely dispirited now. And that’s another point Karaganov makes. They’re dispirited and there’s lower and lower voter turnout in every election because they realize that it doesn’t matter who they vote for and who their representatives are because European policy is made by NATO and the EU leadership, von der Leyen and the other Russia haters. And they do not represent the views of voters. There’s no referendum on, do you want a war against Russia or not? Do you want further fighting in Ukraine or not? None of the most important occurrences that are happening in the world are put to a vote or any kind of democratic discussion. And if there’s any disagreement in the West’s idea, if we don’t bomb them, they’ll bomb us. You’re called a Putin puppet. You’re saying, well, that’s just what Mr. Putin says. That’s just what President Xi says. Why would you be saying what President Xi says? You want peace? Well, that’s what China and Russia say. Do you really want to be a Russian and Chinese stooge and say, you want peace instead of war? You want prosperity instead of exploitation? You know, that’s unpatriotic. We’re going to have to remove you from YouTube. We’re going to have to remove you from X and the other media. And of course, you won’t have any access to the open publications, the professional publications and media in the West. No more New York Times op-eds, you know, if you believe that kind of thing.

So you have the West. I think I won’t say that the Western voters are in the dark. I think intuitively they know that all this is wrong and most important, self-destructive, but there’s nothing they can do about it. That’s why most of the votes in the Democratic primary were for any other candidate. There’s nothing, that’s all they can do.

That’s why so many parties in Europe were voting for the right-wing parties, because there really isn’t any left anymore. The American interference with domestic politics, the left-wing politics, social democratic politics, Germany, England, Blairism, and the New Labour Party, third-way parties, all of that is largely the product of the mighty Wurlitzer, the careful orchestration of European politics. And that’s really not a democracy. As I said before, Aristotle was right. Most constitutions that say they’re democracies are really oligarchies.

NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Just to wrap up this session, Michael, what’s so important right now is the position of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia recently just stopped extending the agreement with the United States on petrodollar. And at the SCO summit, they were participating in the SCO summit. And right now, Saudi Arabia has hinted to the European Union that it will sell Western bonds if G7 countries confiscate $300 billion in Russian assets. Bloomberg reported this. This shows how the behavior of Saudi Arabia is changing.

MICHAEL HUDSON: This is incredibly bold of Saudi Arabia. And I think we discussed them last week in our show. Saudi Arabia has so many of its investments and assets in the West, largely in the United States, but somewhat also in the Europe, that it’s not going to take the United States on directly, but it’s taking on the US proxy in Europe and saying, we know that America is egging you on to grab the Russian assets and at least turn the interest rates, the $5 billion in interest that it makes on the $300 million of Russian reserves that you’ve grabbed, to give it to Ukraine to fight against Russia. You’re using Russian money to finance it against Russia.

Well, you know, we think that you sort of wrecked Europe as a safe place to put your money. What it’s really done is throw down the challenge to the basic agreement that was made in 1974. As we’ve said, that Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries can sell oil for as much as they want. They can quadruple the price of oil to mirror President Carter’s quadrupling of the price of wheat. But they have to keep all of their savings in the United States.

Well, now the Saudis realize, well, we know that it’s the Americans that are pressing Europe to grab Russian money to set a precedent. And if this precedent works for Europe, then the United States can follow it. And if the United States follows it, and we’re a member of BRICS, and now here at the SCO meeting, they can take all of our national wealth fund, the trillion dollar wealth fund, they can seize over there. And then we’ll have to start all over again.

Of course, what would be the point of sending any more oil to the West, if they’re just going to take it all for nothing and keep all our savings from us?

But I think this is a sign to the West saying, yeah, you better disavow this explicitly. So if you want to have our money there, otherwise, they’re going to steadily move it out. They’re already denominating some of their oil sales in yen or other foreign currency. They’re gradually going to do what President De Gaulle did, move their dollars into gold, or move their dollars into something else. They’re going to disinvest from the West. That’s what decoupling means. And that’s what the BRICS and the SCO are all about.

And so the fact that Saudi Arabia was so bold to say this, it’s saying to the U.S., what are you going to do about it? Well, the United States can say, well, you have billions of dollars that you’ve invested in our arms and our aircraft. Who are you going to get the replacement parts? You know, if you really break the mess, you won’t get the replacement parts.

Well, you can be pretty sure that the Saudis are thinking, gee, we better buy MIGs. We better turn to buy aircraft from countries that we can get replacement parts from, should there be an interruption in trade.

So you can see that they’re all, they realize that the lines have been drawn. There is a war on. This is a war that has not yet gone beyond Ukraine, the proxy war there. That’s just the beginning. And the job of the SCO is to try to prevent it from spreading beyond Ukraine and let Poland fight the rest of Europe to try to take it over, like it used to fight against Germany and the Baltics. You know, let there be an internal, I mean, Poland is really, it used to be called the hyena of Europe by Churchill. You know, let it go to war with itself and carve itself up, but just don’t have anything to do with a civilized people to the East.

^[1] The “Mackinder type of Eurasian center” refers to a geopolitical theory proposed by Sir Halford Mackinder, a British geographer and geopolitician. Mackinder’s theory, known as the “Heartland Theory,” posited that the central part of Eurasia, which he called the “Heartland,” was the key strategic area for controlling the world. He believed that whoever controlled this region could dominate global politics and trade due to its central location and resources. [ChatGPT]