Yve here. Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson continue their discussion of Israel’s prospects and US culpability, here with a focus on Israel as a colonial project.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is October 9th and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff talk about what’s going on in the Middle East. Richard and Michael, let me show you an article that shows the spending of the United States on the conflict in the Middle East helping Israel. It’s almost $22.76 billion. And in this graph, you’re witnessing that in 2024, if you look at this graph, it’s $17.9 billion. And directly to Israel and the rest would be the conflicts that the United States went to the Red Sea to help Israel and other operations in that region. And here is what Matt Miller said to the press when he was asked about this helping, this aid that goes to Israel.
SAID ARIKAT: Taxpayers paid for almost $23 billion in the last year alone – that’s almost $3000 for each and every Israeli. So we have absolutely no leverage, no pressure – you cannot tell them do this or not do this?
MATT MILLER: So, we made very clear to the government of Israel what we believe are the best outcomes along a number of different vectors in the region. But as you’ve heard me say before, they are ultimately a sovereign country and have to make their own decisions.
SAID ARIKAT: Yes, but I understand a sovereign country that received from American taxpayers $22 billion dollars.
MATT MILLER: Well first of all, that number is not correct, it conflates a number of different things. It’s not correct. I don’t have the exact number, but I know the number you are referring to.
MATT LEE: So what does the U.S. government think that it has given Israel since October 7th?
MATT MILLER: So we give them $3.3 billion a year and there was additional money that was appropriated in the supplemental. The reason it’s hard to answer that question definitively is…
MATT LEE: Like you don’t want to. That’s why it’s hard to answer.
MATT MILLER: No, there are different ways of looking at it.
MATT LEE: I know there are. I’ve been through all of this.
MATT MILLER: There’s money that is appropriated, there is money that is allocated and then not actually delivered for years to come.
MATT LEE: Look, there are private educational organizations that have come up with estimates. This building, at least, which is in charge of arms transfers – at least, many of them – hasn’t seen fit to come up with an update since July of last year.
MATT MILLER: Yeah, I just don’t have the update, I’m just telling you that number, you can look at that number and see how it conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not either.
MATT LEE: It can’t be that difficult to separate what has been given to them post- October 7th in terms of things that were not approved before then under the MOU. Stuff that went to them specifically for the Gaza operation, and now Lebanon.
MATT MILLER: So it depends how you look at it – is it the amount that’s been allocated to them, is it the amount that’s been delivered to them, is it the amount that is gonna be delivered …
MATT LEE: I’ll take any of them now.
MATT MILLER: No, but that’s the point is when you ask the question it’s a difficult one – I don’t have the numbers here at my fingertips, obviously. I’m just pointing out that the number that Said referred to …
MATT LEE: Someone’s got to have the number some place?
SAID ARIKAT: The numbers were Brown University’s numbers, not mine. But, you know, it doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, we give them a lot of money, we give them a great deal of leverage, you know, we give them obviously a great deal of political coverage in the U.N. and many other places and so on. And to suggest that this huge and lengthy partnership really does not exact any kind of leverage with the Israelis – don’t you question that?
MATT MILLER: That’s not what I said. The thing that I said is that we’re a sovereign country with our interests, they’re a sovereign country with their interests.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Richard, he’s saying that he doesn’t answer the question. He says that Israel is a sovereign country. What’s your answer to that question?
RICHARD WOLFF: Iraq was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Afghanistan was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Vietnam was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. It didn’t give a damn whether that was a sovereign country or not. It didn’t respect its sovereignty for one second.
It just – as part of the war in Ukraine – seized $300 billion worth of Russian gold. Its sovereignty meant absolutely nothing. Come on. The answer to talk about sovereignty is a transparent fakery, as is all the mumbo jumbo about how to estimate the numbers. The question was about leverage, if you provide a lot of money.
The question was clear and it had nothing to do with quarrels about estimating the amount of money. This is a government that wants the freedom to do in the Middle East what it has always done, namely operate a colonial regime without telling the people of the United States anything other than fairy tales about respect for different religions, and the importance of Jerusalem, and other nonsense that future spokespersons at the State Department will no doubt repeat in the same mumbo jumbo style of Mr. Miller that we just saw.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, if Israel were a sovereign country, it would no longer be an American ally because the whole war that the United States is fighting, not only in the Near East, but also in Ukraine, is a war against sovereignty. That’s what this whole world war between the U.S. and NATO countries against the global majority – China, Russia and other BRICS countries – it’s a war to make a unipolar U.S. control to prevent the whole rest of the world being sovereign.
So the whole issue of sovereignty is silly – and obviously if you look at where the armaments of Israel are coming from – quite apart from money. These are American bombs being dropped on Gaza and on Lebanon. These are American ships that are supporting it. It is American money that’s also supporting it. And that doesn’t even account for the Israel bonds by non-governmental authorities. So the whole idea of sovereignty is irrelevant. You can look at this war against sovereignty, and especially against sovereignty – as Richard just mentioned – of Iraq and Libya, to use Israel as an American satellite to prevent the Near East from becoming sovereign, in control, not only of its own oil, but in control of the export money that it makes from this oil.
RICHARD WOLFF: Also, just an additional word. The United Nations allows Palestine to have a seat – I don’t remember exactly what the status is – but they have a seat to participate in at least some degree, and at least a large part of the world would assign “sovereignty” to the Palestinians based on all of the historic notions of what sovereignty entails. Clearly the United States does not respect the sovereignty of the Palestinians. So, once again, this use of the notion of sovereignty is extraordinarily selective. My goodness!
I mean, for me, the most impressive thing about the little clip you showed us was the fact that we live in a society where a collection of, what I assume to be, perfectly reasonable intelligent journalists sit there and ask such questions and don’t quarrel about the absurd refusal to answer. And they don’t quarrel about the absurd invocation of sovereignty. But they allow the conversation to absorb many minutes of quarreling about the details of the statistics.
Both Michael and I are economists. We work with statistics all the time. If you do, you know that they are loosely constructed numbers that have a million qualifications about them. And that if you don’t know the details of how they are gathered and how they are assembled and how they are edited, you really can do virtually anything with them.
You know, there’s an old statement among statisticians: “The statistics don’t lie, but the statisticians surely do.” Because they pick and choose which ones to gather, which ones to assimilate, which ones to edit.
This is childish manipulation, and the thing that most impresses me is that the journalists, they are complicit with this mumbo jumbo theatric. And they oughtn’t to be. They ought to have a bit more of a spine, a bit more of that part of the journalistic tradition which says, “ask the hard questions that these politicians are trained to evade and avoid.”
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s talking about the sovereignty of journalism. And I think we talked before about what John Kerry said at the World Economic Forum. He said, “Our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to be able to hammer disinformation out of existence.”
Sovereignty for journalism is what WikiLeaks did, which is why its leader was imprisoned for so many years. We don’t have sovereignty of the Press anymore than nations have sovereignty, and you could look at the whole part of the American Cold War attempt to prevent other nations from having political sovereignty as the attempt to make sure that the U.S. has unique unipolar sole sovereignty over the narrative. Is the Middle East War, the Israeli War, all about the captives that were made October 7th, a year ago? I think there are now a few dozen. Or is it about the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Not a word about the Palestinians captive in Israeli jails.
Again, the narrative is all from a very strange perspective. It’s like the famous Hiroshige painting, a big tree in the foreground and the city far away in the background, the little tree in the foreground has priority over everything else. That’s the news that we get from the Near East, Ukraine and the rest of the world. Not sovereignty.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, can I ask a question? The main question right now in terms of what’s going on in the Middle East is the way that Netanyahu is behaving right now. And when you look at his behavior, what is Israel’s endgame under Netanyahu? How can we define that?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I must say with all regret and sadness, I will tell you what I have concluded watching all of this over the last, particularly this last, year. And I conclude by referring to a saying that has been raised by Israeli leaders, at least as far back as David Ben-Gurion.
And that is to say that the whole story can be summed up by saying that “the Jewish people, a people without land, were finally given a land without people.”
That’s a quote, I didn’t make that up. That’s a quotation repeated many times: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, from the river to the sea, a people without land – i.e. Jewish people – were given a land without people. Notice the little move there, the move at the end to suggest that people were given something that no other people already had, even though everybody who’s taken five minutes to look at the history of that part of the world knows that it has been densely populated for thousands of years by a whole host of people.
So the reality was, it wasn’t empty. It’s a little bit like what I discovered when I was just beginning as a college teacher and I had occasion to talk about the early period of the American economy, when we were still a colony.
And I discovered that a significant percentage of my students understood the Europeans who came here to have discovered a land without people, which they then proceeded to inhabit, moving from the East Coast across, until they finally reached the Pacific Ocean in the West.
When I reminded them, well, it wasn’t empty, then yes, they remembered from their western movies that there were these “savages” who were around somewhere, but who became quickly disposed of.
Well, if you know the history, it took centuries before you could herd those native people that you didn’t kill into the reservations they still occupy in significant numbers across the United States. Okay, the Israeli story seems to me to be summarized and carried forward by Mr. Netanyahu as exactly what I said. They want to establish that the area we now call Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are a land that had no people and is therefore now to be settled by a growing Jewish population. And the job of the Palestinians is to choose one of the following three options: leave or die.
Those are the options, and the Israelis become the agents of leaving or dying, and they’re trying both. And they’ll rely on either one of them to solve the problem, to fulfill the idea that it is a land without people that can now be settled by the people who don’t have enough land.
By the way, this notion of “land hunger” is a replication of what the Nazis called Lebensraum: room to live. The Nazis moved east in Europe to get it; the Israelis move west to get it. But that’s what this has become, and it will take a radical change of the mentality of the Israelis to change it.
Last point: when you’re an aggressor, and you’re also a settler-colonialism, which is what this is, nothing is more common than justify what you are doing on the grounds that you must do it, because the savages – that’s the people that are already there – are intent on doing that to you. And it doesn’t matter whether they are or not, you must tell that story because it justifies what you are doing. And I’ll illustrate it with a story, and excuse me if I told you this story before, but near where the University of Massachusetts is located is a town called Deerfield, Massachusetts. And it has an old part, which is the colonial houses that were built there back in the 17th and 18th century. And they have redone these houses to look in the way that they did in Colonial America. So it’s become a tourist attraction. It’s known as “Old Deerfield.”
And if you go there, as I have done, and you walk through the old village, and you look at the reconstructed housing, you will notice in front of each of them a plaque. And if you read the plaque, which tourists do, it says things like, here was the Jones family or the Smith family, and they came in 1702 and blah, blah, blah, and then on the night of the 14th of April, the savages attacked them. And I remember the first time I saw this. I said to myself, without thinking much, “what a remarkable thing – the Europeans come from thousands of miles away, they take the land, they take the coast, they fish the water, they attack the local people, they push them off the land. And they refer to them as the savages. What an amazing move! It’s the Europeans who were savage, who had the guns to be savage with. But you need to call them savages because what you are doing is so savage, it has to be justified as self-defense against savages. And so you call the other what you are. In psychology, this is so common, it’s called projection. And every psychological practitioner knows about it and tries to treat it.
But in our political discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, we all pretend we know nothing about any of that.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard has just explained is what really was meant by a land without a people. What are people? They are humans. And the Israeli leadership, again and again, has said that the Palestinians are not human: they are sub-humans.That is exactly what the Ukrainians are saying about the Slavic people. The Slavic people are not humans; the Islamic populations are not human. In both cases, they are called sub-human and a different species. And this kind of thinking goes way back to the United States at the late 19th century. The U.S. leaders thought of America as creating a new civilization. And that new civilization, somehow in the 1930s they began to absorb Nazism. And it was as if the new countries with their ethnicity were evolutionary, biological, new species. And the Americans were a new species.
The Israelis are claiming to be a new species, exterminating the sub-humans, so that there won’t be inter-marriage, like there was between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago. That treatment is exactly what was the feeling in the United States that I experienced in the 1960s. The Catholic Church sent me to New Mexico to discuss how to raise up the Indian tribes. There was an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who began talking about the “Indian problem.” And I jumped up and said to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “the Indian problem is the problem that they are Indians.” And that’s how the Israelis and the Ukrainians think about everybody who’s not them. When we’re talking about a political group of settlers – or in America, of Empire builders – claiming to be a new species, cleaning out the biology of these inferior races. This is Nazism. And that’s really what the fight is all about.
That’s why we’re now in a civilizational fight between the NATO-U.S.-West and its allies of like-thinking people who treat their adversaries as sub-humans. Or, as Biden says, it’s Democracy against Autocracy. The Autocracy are considered to be sub-humans, a different civilization, and all this somehow has genetically become a new species. And what the rest of civilization – the global majority – is trying to say, is “No, we’re all humans.” Americans have said, like I said, “No, you’re not humans.” That’s basically the position in this Cold War II.
RICHARD WOLFF: You see it also in this very sad tendency: I cringe when I watch a video clip of the President of the United States, in this case, Mr. Biden, referring to the leader of the People’s Republic of China as a thug. What are you doing? What kind of childish behavior is this? Mr. Putin doesn’t refer to Mr. Biden as a thug. He doesn’t do that. One doesn’t do. You don’t see too many leaders, even in private – let alone in a public interview – doing such things. What is this demonization of the – here we go – it’s “they’re all savages?”
So if you disagree with the United States, if your idea of a European security architecture, which is what they’re actually trying to figure out, how are we going to be secure each in our national boundary without threatening one another? That’s what they mean by a “security architecture.”
How are we going to work that out? Russia has to feel secure. Ukraine has to feel secure. They have to be able to function. Okay, that’s a problem. We will have disagreements. We won’t see it the same way. We’ll have to make some compromise. But, suddenly: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are the good and the noble and the vanilla, and they are the terrible evil empire.’ What is this? This is not just a quibble about words. Behind these words lies what Michael was just talking about. This notion that, really, this is a war of good against evil and in the name of the good, you can do what?
Palestinians who know something about the Christian Bible like to remind us about all the times in the Old Testament especially, when there are all these discussions about God telling people to slay this group and kill all of them and murder the children and … whoa. There you have already the beginnings of a justification.
Yes, yes, I know the Bible is full of other contradictory sentiments about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all the rest of it. But if you cherry pick, you can become the exponent of “I’m good, they’re evil, I am called to get rid of them” – literally. There’s a quote from an Israeli defense force person in the press recently explaining to a reporter how good he feels when he’s asked about bombing mosques and hospitals. He looks at the guy and he says, “But we’re winning, we’re winning.” Wow. He’s winning. He’s not asking what he’s winning – he’s just winning.
And that’s the struggle of good and evil when you think like that. In the name of that stuff, we have 5,000 years of slaughter and we’ll have more if we don’t outgrow it.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, here comes the question that how we can -with the situation that you’re having in Ukraine together with what’s going on right now in the Middle East and in my opinion, if Donald Trump wins, we’re going to have a big fight between the United States and China.
How can we make peace affordable for each and every player in this political arena or national political arena? Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: The only way to solve the problem in Ukraine is by war. You can’t have peace without war.
Some people say that war doesn’t settle problems, but sometimes the only way of settling a problem such as the U.S. and NATO and Ukraine trying to attack Russia is by war. And that’s why you mentioned the costs of this war before, at the beginning.
I think that the whole idea of what’s happening in the Ukraine is the American planners said, “Look at what really broke the Soviet Union’s power – it was the war in Afghanistan. It drained Russia. They had to spend all of their economic surplus on the military and send their population to fight in Afghanistan. Finally, this created such austerity and poverty and impoverishment that the leaders of the Soviet Union themselves decided it didn’t work.” They somehow expect that if the war in Ukraine is supposed to go on as long as it can, not to be settled, but just to continue to drain Russia until its economic surplus is spent on fighting the war and the population says, I guess, what the Russians were saying in the 1980s: “We want to have blue jeans like the Americans have. We want a consumer society and we can’t because it’s a military society.”
So the American idea in Ukraine is to spend as much as it takes from our side to keep the war going as long as possible and outspend Russia until the discontent in Russia reaches a degree where you can bring in a new Russian Yeltsin [unclear]. Well, Putin is also strategizing and said, well, he is not in any hurry to just march in and end the war quickly in Ukraine by marching to the deeper and beyond. He’s willing to go slow because there’s something that he says that is beyond the short-term cost of the military budget.
And that is the longer the war in Ukraine takes, the more it’s breaking up Europe. You’ve seen the last three German elections where the anti-war parties beat the Christian Democrats and the social Democrats. You’ve seen last week’s election in Austria. Again, the anti-war party won and as we noted before, the anti-war parties today are on the right, not the left. But we’re seeing the idea of the real costs both from the American vantage point and the global majority’s (the BRICS) vantage point- the cost is going to be how is all of this going to end up? What is the structure of the world economy to be? And the fight in Israel and Ukraine is just a sideline, a particular chapter, venue, in this much broader war. And the real way of looking at the cost is, “Who is going to support what countries?” Will the cost of the Ukraine war essentially, as Putin believes, end up dividing Europe, breaking up the European Union and paving the way for – in 30 years, I think Putin said – for there to finally be a restoration of the German and the European linkage with Russia and the global majority by which time in his hope, the whole world will be under a unipolar rule of law. That’s how to think of the costs that we’re undertaking now and what the war is all about.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let me come at this from a slightly different perspective that might be of interest to folks. Capitalism as a system has built into its structure an imperative to grow. Every capitalist understands that unless they can expand their business and thereby get their hands on bigger profits, they run the risk of being competed out of existence by somebody who can and will do that. And so they all have to grow. And we know that this has become internalized by the political leaders of all capitalist countries.
I’ll use the example that they teach in elementary school: If an economy is like a pie, and different people and different groups have different pieces, if you grow the pie, everybody’s piece can get bigger and we will all be happy.
If you don’t grow the pie, then a growth in some requires a diminution in the others and then we will be at each other’s throats. Very old idea, been around for centuries.
And in capitalism, that idea, together with the way capitalism works, means that countries with employers and employees and enterprises that produce and compete in markets have a drive to grow. That’s why it’s a national emergency if the statistics show the GDP isn’t growing fast enough. Oh my god, alarm, alarm.
Okay, now let’s stop and take a step back. For ecological reasons and climate change reasons, we now know we’ve got to stop growing – it’s threatening our survival. The people of the world have already figured it out because the birth rate of our planet is now zero. We’re not growing anymore. The United States, Asia. Only in Africa is there a net positive birth rate, and it’s shrinking there too. Okay, now we have a problem that a long-repressed part of the world, the global south, wants to have its standard of living be where it should have been two centuries ago. They’re not waiting anymore. So they are demanding a bigger piece of the pie. This, of course, threatens the United States because it can’t grow the way it wants to because it now has a serious competitor. China and the BRICS is already a richer entity than the United States and the G7. Okay, here’s then a solution. We question – don’t everybody yell – we question capitalism. Why don’t we change to a system that doesn’t have a built-in imperative to grow, because it’s killing us? It’s killing us ecologically, but it’s also killing us because the genuine and deserved demand of the global south for a place in the sun to raise their families, have an education, be decently cared for, medically and so on, is not going to be stopped – with or without a world war. All right, so let’s accommodate: Give them a bigger piece and rearrange – in the way that socialists have always advocated – to a much less unequal distribution of the resources of the world. That way we can stop growing, thereby meet our ecological danger and do away with the competition that threatens a war between a rising standard of living in the global south and a resharing that the rest of us here in the global north will have to undergo. But we do so because it saves our planet, and it saves us from war, and that’s worth it.
That’s a plan, but it requires the taboo be broken. Employer-employee is not the only way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services. It’s the capitalist way. It was what we got when we got rid of the lords and serfs, and masters and slaves – we replaced it with employers and employees. But we can do better than that and we are at a point where we have to. And so the issue of a socialism beyond capitalism comes right back on the agenda. It never really left, it just needs a little goosing from those of us who see it to make it become, again, what we’re all talking about and struggling to figure out how to achieve.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard described is occurring on a number of planes. He talks about the drive of capitalism is to grow. Well, that’s certainly the dynamic of industrial capitalism, but somehow that hasn’t been the drive of the United States recently. Richard, how do you grow by out competing your rivals? You cut costs, you make things cheaper, or less expensively, and better. But the United States has been losing its race. It’s true. Last month the US GDP is going to grow and next month it’s going to really grow because the hurricanes hit South Carolina and now they’re going to hit Florida. That’s going to be a big jump in GDP. It’s not going to increase America’s dominance or competitiveness.
The American idea of growing today – I think certainly the neo-con idea, the Democratic and Republican idea – isn’t the kind of growth Richard is talking about capitalism. It’s a purely exploitative growth: America can only grow by arranging the international economic order in a way that siphons off the real growth in other countries – China, Russia, the global south – and taking their economic surplus and transferring it to itself.
This is not a growth of part of the production sector of the economy. It’s a growth of the circulation sector of the economy. Marx drew those two distinctions – production, circulation, which is part of the distribution. The American growth has been parasitic. The NATO-U.S. unity is like a parasite on the body of the global majority and they call that growth for the United States in Europe, but it’s parasitism. All of that, as Richard just said, we’re facing the overhead of global warming. How do you prevent it? Well, China has taken the lead according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in cutting way back carbon emissions, way back coal, and by taking the lead and creating solar power and atomic power. The U.S. position is to oppose the importation of Chinese solar panels because that’s not their philosophy. The oil lobbyists are now backing both political parties in the United States to make sure that any agreements – like the Paris Agreement that America signed – will not be followed in practice.
You have the United States and Europe pushing the growth and pollution. You have the green party in Germany saying that coal is the fuel of the future. It’s coal and cutting down the forests. It’s not oil, it’s not gas, it’s not power. It’s simply that. And you achieve this global fix-up by war.
Somehow the anti-war party is supposed to be a key precondition catalyst for all of this environmental change. You’re having this bizarre conflation of ideas in the U.S.- NATO, as opposed to the rest of the world, just as Richard has pointed out.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, do you want to add something?
RICHARD WOLFF: No, no.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Right now, Michael, in your opinion, when it comes to the Biden administration, it seems that they’re trying to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. But in your opinion, why are they not successful? Why are they not successful in their attempts to put pressure on Netanyahu?
Last time we talked here, you said that the United States is running the show. Richard, I want you to comment on this as well. I had some sort of division between the analysts like you and Richard and other analysts. Some of you are believing that the United States is running the show in the Middle East and the other ones are thinking that the Israeli lobby in the United States is running the show. Who’s running the show with these endless wars?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we talked last week about this very topic. Netanyahu is doing just what the United States wants. The dream of Netanyahu is the same dream of the US neo-cons: war with Iran. Because if you can conquer Iran, then you just close up everything between Israel and Iran. You take up Syria, Iraq; you move down into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. You take over the whole Near East.
Obviously, Netanyahu is doing what the United States wants, because the United States is giving it the bombs every week to drop, giving it the money every month so that it can continue.
So what we’re seeing is a good cop-bad cop pretending. The United States doesn’t want to be blamed by the whole-world abhorrence for what is happening in Israel. So it pretends to say, “That’s not us; we want to be the good guys; we told him to be gentle when he dropped his bombs and not kill anybody.” But he’s killing people. And we keep giving him bombs and telling him to be gentle with it. Well, what can we do? We don’t have control – he’s a “sovereign country” as you played at the beginning. So all of this is just a charade.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I would argue very similarly. I don’t see this great struggle between the two as anything more than poorly staged theater that is not. Yeah, maybe for some people around the world, it’ll be convenient to believe that they can hold on. But I would look at it in a long-term strategic way, as follows: For many, many years now – for basically the post World War two period – this has worked very well, this alliance between the United States and Israel, for them. It has allowed Israel to go from a poor, largely agricultural backwater to an important modern economic power; to grow its population far beyond what it could have internally by itself. And it has allowed the United States to have – right in the middle of the Middle East – its own special agent dependent on it, loyal to it. I don’t want to go over all of the murky ways that Israel played strange intermediation roles when it came to the survival of apartheid in South Africa; when it came to the funding of the Iran Contras Central America. The hands of Israeli operatives are present in many of those – they were a loyal service. They operate a very good intelligence system in the Middle East, as the killings of Nasrallah and others have shown us. They’re probably better than what the United States could do, so that’s a service they can provide, that the United States either couldn’t or doesn’t want to be caught doing. So it’s all the Israelis who get the bad rep.
But here’s perhaps the most important: The Israeli economy is dead, it’s finished. It will take a long, long time to recover from what it is doing. An enormous portion of its adult manpower is busy in the military. They’re not working at their factories or their offices, or anywhere else.
Large numbers of people have left the country – that’s not reported on, but I know it to be the case – etc, etc. That Israel is going to be dependent on help from the United States economically, enormously, in the years ahead. So the United States has a proven, reliable agent who will need them in the future, and is therefore not in a position to deny the United States anything that it suggests it wants. I don’t see the United States having no leverage, as that journalist did.
The United States has plenty of leverage, and the reason it’s not using the leverage is there’s no reason to. Or let me put it differently: Where they’re using the leverage, we don’t know about it. Because they don’t want us to, and the Israelis dare not reveal the leverage if the Americans don’t want it, for all the reasons I’ve just given.
If there were no Israel, the United States would look for an alternative agent in the Middle East. And whoever you might imagine could play that role, they’ve decided that such an agent, if there is one, would be less reliable, less pliable, that you would operate less leverage than the one you have.
Does the AIPAC and the other domestic supporters of Israel inside the United States have influence? Sure they do. Professor Mearsheimer and his colleagues have demonstrated that for many years with countless studies. But I don’t think that would be enough, anywhere near enough, to explain what’s going on.
This is an alliance which has served the interests of those who run Israel and those who run the United States. And that’s why they preserve it. It’s not to have nothing to do with leverage. They have leverage. That’s why they preserve it. And the only thing holding back the Israelis, when they disagree with the United States, is the fact that they know that that leverage is there. They’re not going to take that chance. The biggest problem for the Israelis is the very large portion of Jews in the United States who do not support Netanyahu, who do not support the policies now.
And the way they handle that is to focus their foreign policy, not on the Jews in the United States, who are in the main, unreachable by that. But instead to go after the fundamentalist Christians, to build up the idea that Jesus is coming back, and that in order for him to come back, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, has to be in the hands of the Jews. The Bible says that somewhere. They fasten on that. And so that’s where the Israeli government has its film festivals and its exchanges and its tourism. I mean, that’s all dead. They’ve not earned any money on tourism for the last year, and none is likely to have happened. But those are Christians that are going over there hosted by the Jews in a very careful campaign, so that they get the support they need for Mr. Biden to do what he wants to do.
This is an agreed plan by both of them to maximize the freedom they have to do what they are doing. And the people who want to drive a wedge between the two of them, unless you have something very powerful, that’s not going to happen. There’s too much that pulls them together. You’re certainly not going to shame them by saying that “Mr. Biden doesn’t want you to invade…” and you invade it anyway. As Michael correctly says, this is a theater. This is a theater – that is how they manage the deal that they have.
It is like a good cop-bad cop deal, or any kind of deal where the two sides include in their deal the pretense they both contribute to, that that deal isn’t going on.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree with what Richard said.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, recently we had finally – just to finalize this session – recently we had Emmanuel Macron finally saying something against war. And he said that we have to control the arms and aid going to Israel in order to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. And after that Netanyahu responded to him, “Shame on you” and “How you can say that,” and all of that.
How do you see the situation in the European Union changing toward Israel, or we are still having the same old policy toward Israel and its attitude?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me speak a little bit to Emmanuel Macron and I’ll quote the American filmmaker Michael Moore who last night when asked about the election made the following sentence: “Donald Trump is toast.” That was Michael Moore’s statement. He did correctly predict that Trump would win in 2016, so people should be careful before they dismiss what Michael Moore has to say. I make no prediction so I’m not doing that. Mr. Macaroon, as my French family refers to him, as President Macaroon. He is, in other words, a cookie.
He is toast – there is no question – he is political toast. He was never a serious politician. He proved that before he became president and just in case anyone missed it, he proved it again while he was president. He had the distinction of being a sitting president when earlier this year the national elections in France, divided among the three major parties, and his party – the party of the sitting president – came in third out of three. That’s his achievement. Goodbye, Mr. Macron. But he is desperate. Everything he does is guided by the last minute desperation of someone who has no base. He is hated by the old conservatives. He is hated by the socialist party of which he was once both a member and a minister. The man was minister of education, if I’m remembering correctly, in the last socialist government.
He’s hated by all of them because he is such a flip-flopper, finger-in-the-wind to see which way the politics wind is blowing. So now he has his last desperate effort. He’s going to appeal largely to the people on the political right – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of reasons – and the people that are on the left – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of different reasons – and try somehow to attract them. But they already hate him. They do not trust him. There is no reason. I would like to remind you that less than a year ago Mr. Macron was the leading European politician advocating for European troops to land in Ukraine and fight alongside the Ukrainians against the Russians, prompting Mr. Putin to make one of his statements, that “if other leaders in the West were thinking along these lines, he wanted to make it crystal clear that this would be an attack on Russia which Russia would respond to with any and all means at its disposal.” You’d have to be dead not to understand what he was saying. Now, this man wants to stop killing people in the Middle East. It’s not serious, and to the chagrin, not just of Mr. Macron, but of all French people, no one is taking him seriously.
And in that he was helped, because Mr. Netanyahu not only chastised him for saying these things, but went on to say – and I didn’t make this up, I’m virtually quoting Mr. Netanyahu – that “on the side of Israel is civilization, and on the other side is barbarism.” Well that’s our conversation a few minutes ago. There we have it again: “Savages and the good people.” And Mr. Macron – in the mind of Mr. Netanyahu – just crossed over the bridge from the good guys to the bad guys, and next we’ll be hearing him referred to as “a thug.”
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What can I add to that? Richard’s described the situation perfectly. All I can do is paraphrase and that’s not much of a discussion.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much for being with us today, both of you, and hope we can keep these talks and great pleasure as always talking with both of you. See you soon. Thank you.
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Same here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bye bye.
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Macaroon and Toast. Lovely!
Blobonomics is at the heart of the US system that you describe. Too many layers of involvement by political actors on both sides of the aisle intent on siphoning off what they can to maintain some power. In the era of Bush 41, that was the thousand points of light, only not what the public thought it was with grassroots political involvement in helping neighbors. Instead, it was a cynical scheme to get taxpayers used to the idea of a big new infrastructure that was not directly government involvement. Filter the funds, pursue the desired ends, in a new way outside the old defense appropriations that people were led to believe they knew. Money laundering and insider trading are just two of the more apparent effects.
The looming question for the US is how to transition away from the blobonomics and its purported consensus without plunging the country into a depression. Europe and other countries face their own versions, influenced by the US. Which will fall first? Europe seems to have the leading contenders there.
I’m glad both Hudson and Wolff agree that the US’ main goal is to destroy Iran and that in the case of both countries we are in a good-cop, bad-cop situation. Again, I have to repeat here that the goal of the Washington regime is to conquer the world for its imperial realm–this the goal for almost the entire foreign policy community since the old “realists” have been purged from that community. It is Israel’s goal to continue to populate the lands of the savages and create a “greater Israel.” The only major obstacle for them is Iran so their needs and Washington’s needs coincide.
Modern capitalism is even more oppressive today than it was during the Robber Baron era because, at that time, there was room outside the capitalist structures and a lot of opposition within the country. Whereas today the only main opposition to capitalism is by libertarian conservatives who see today’s capitalism as perverse but oppose socialism. As for the left, there is no left to speak of as we can see from the failure of the Greens to get anywhere.
What does “conquering the world” look like? The USA has decimated its domestic manufacturing, owes trillions to foreigners, and has decaying infrastructure.
And has a disgruntled population.
It appears USA citizens are bystanders in a game played in DC where the rules are being changed on the fly.
The “Oral Rules Based Order” supercedes the “Written International Law”.
We got Calvinball, have for decades. https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvinball#google_vignette
Though now that I re-read the definition, I’m reminded that c-ball does have rules and structure, just a lot of joyous exceptions. The empire is playing a global Game of RISK! (Tm) Linked to Monopoly ™, of course, where in the end there can be only one survivor who owns everything. Beats recalling that Monopoly ™ was created to warn of the horrors of rentier capitalism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Monopoly
Put these notions together with the universal Israeli norm of never being a freier, and you’ve got the black heart of colonizing Israel today. https://forward.com/community/382636/how-israeli-culture-killed-the-mensch/
> … Monopoly ™, of course, where in the end there can be only one survivor
> who owns everything. Beats recalling that Monopoly ™ was created to warn
> of the horrors of rentier capitalism.
And don’t forget the unwritten rules guiding all successful players of Monopoly, the most important of which is ‘cheat as much as you can, whenever you can’. Just like in the real world.
Note that I said “Washington” not USA. The Empire is international with offices and based throughout the world. The actual citizens of the USA are irrelevant as far as Washington is concerned. This should be obvious.
Yes. The DC Bubble and Echo Chamber lives and lies in a world of its own, which is why the so-called election is irrelevant as are the principals Donny, DJT and Kamala KDT. They will do as they are told … or else … Pay no attention to the stentorian bellows of the one and the sly digs of the other.
Why give it, the DCB&EC, even the illusion of your support. Boycott the election.
Wolff: “… even though everybody who’s taken five minutes to look at the history of that part of the world knows that it has been densely populated for thousands of years by a whole host of people.”
Ilan Pappe lays waste to the idea of “a people without land, were finally given a land without people.”
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57540.The_Ethnic_Cleansing_of_Palestine).
The current massacre in Gaza is not without precedent. As Pappe shows, Palestinian villages, even pre-1948, were brutally decimated, the woman and children sent packing, the adult men shot. Its not a pretty picture, but if more Americans knew this history, perhaps there would be greater outrage at the war crimes our government is facilitating.
Nah— we’ve been propagandized and suppressed so deeply that “if Americans only knew” is an odious notion.
Not gonna get any help or hope there. All those temporarily embarrassed millionaires, don’t you know.
Yet Israel is losing American public opinion. So take heart!
Why does Biden now seem content with Israeli plans for attacking Iran?
Perhaps Biden agreed to giving Israel carte blanche in return for agreeing to delay until after November 5.
There is a theory that Netanyahu thinks he can get even more better support from a President Trump than from a President Harris. According to this theory, Netanyahu thinks that the more outrageous and odious he can make Israel to American progressives, Arab/Lebanese/Muslim Americans, etc. before Nov. 5th, then the more he can raise the numbers of those groups in Michigan specifically who will not vote for Harris and may even vote for Trump to get revenge on the Democrats/Harrisites for supporting Netanyahu’s rising odiosity.
Netanyahu doesn’t necessarily have to actually attack Iran before Nov. 5th. He just has to talk about it louder and louder in order to repel more and more Michigan voters away from Harris. About Lebanon, he has apparently decided that the actual groznification of Lebanon is required to repel enough Michigan voters away from Harris in order to swing Michigan’s electoral votes to Trump. So he will ramp action against Lebanon up fast and hard with enough lead time before Nov. 5th so as to get the Trump electoral victory in Michigan which he desires. Ironic that the protest voters of Michigan will possibly give Netanyahu the President Trump he wants more than he would want a President Harris.
So even within the general theory outlined in this Post’s interview, there are machinations and epi-machinations to put one particular flavor or another on the general outcome.
Interesting theory. Netanyahu might not have the friend in Trump that he thinks. Despite his bluster, Trump is nowhere near as aggressive as Biden or Harris. Trump doesn’t fantasize about being a “war president”. So Trump may not desire to up the ante in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the South China Sea the way Biden and Harris do. Of course, if the Deep State controls and decides foreign policy it doesn’t matter who is elected POTUS.
Well, what matters to Netanyahu’s actions in the short term is what Netanyahu thinks will happen or who/what Netanyahu prefers to have elected. If Netanyahu turned out to be wrong about the greater benefits to Netanyahu and Greater Likudistan if Trump is re-elected, then the joke would be on Netanyahu in that narrow sense.
If Trump gets re-elected because of the growing support from Never Harris voters in Michigan, and Trump is indeed better for Netanyahu Likudistan the way Netanyahu thinks ( as well as buying Netanyahu 4 more years, or maybe 12 more years delay in standing trial for corruption), then that would give the Never Harris voters of Michigan 4 more years, or maybe 12 more years, to savor the irony of the outcome of their votes.
And by that time Lake Erie might be getting warm enough that we can stock it with alligators and cottonmouth moccasins and plant bald cypress all around the shores so that the Never Harris voters can take their minds off of things and stuff by enjoying the moccasins and the alligators.
The transfers are not of cash, people!
Bombs!
But the USA has no leverage …
I think the thrust of the interview in the Post is that the leverage ( bombs) which America has is being used by the DC FedRegime deliberately on purpose to keep leveraging Israel to keep dropping them to keep advancing the long-term DC FedRegime goals in the middle east. The DC FedRegime IS using its leverage over Israel precisely and specifically to KEEP Israel IN the fight, bombing.. bombing..bombing..
(The question arises . . . did the assassination of Rabin have secret DC FedRegime approval and maybe even help and assistance? Because it did achieve the prevention of Israel taking itself off the board and out of the fight to keep the middle east controlled by the DC FedRegime.)
Or have I misunderstood the interview?
How does the DC FedRegime control the Middle East?
Is chaos and USA loss of prestige evidence of the control?
The world already knew the USA could destabilize countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Vietnam.
A system in control has some stability.
I find it difficult to view the Middle East is/was/will be in USA’s control now or in the near term.
As a Japanese was quoted during Bush I, “we don’t care who owns the oil, just that they sell to us”.
Seems a reasonable approach to me.
Well, the Hudson etc. interview, whose thread this is, offers an explanation as to how that control is sought and/or exercised.
Interesting what they had to say about how this insane idea of growth forever has to continue, even in the face of diminishing resources, causes so much problems. Talking about who get how much out of a diminishing pie just leads to zero-sum games which ends in conflict. Maybe that is what is at the heart of modern problems here. There is so much debt in the west that they needed to pillage Russia’s $75 trillion of resources to put off that final reckoning. And in Israel, they have to go for Greater Israel as those ultra-orthodox are pumping out 6 or 7 kids each who will need their own settlements to live in down the track and Israel is not big enough for them.
“Interesting, what they had to say about how this insane idea of growth forever has to continue…”
While the idea that growth forever may be irrational, given natural resource limits, the idea must be dismissed by nations following the lead of China. What China found definitively during the Obama presidency was that however benign China might be, the most advanced technology countries were choosing to limit and undermine the development of China. China had to be “contained,” and that meant a relatively backward technology and poor country forever.
China could never accept the idea of growth limits, nor could any hopefully-developing country looking to the way China was formally meant to be contained by America and following countries.
Consider that however benign Chinese development has been, the US formally insists on portraying China as “militarily aggressive” and “economically coercive”:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/an-alliance-to-counter-beijings-aggression-isolate-economically-trade-defense-coalition-371e2aa9
October 8, 2024
An Alliance to Counter China’s Aggression
The U.S. and its allies can isolate Beijing economically by forming a new trade-defense coalition.
By Rahm Emanuel
China’s operating principle—power and might equals right—is evident in its combative diplomacy, military aggression against its Indo-Pacific neighbors, and economic coercion. These strategies, however, have backfired. China’s attempts to undermine its neighbors’ sovereignty have had the opposite effect. Over the past three years, the U.S. and its allies in the region have strengthened their partnerships and transformed the security landscape, isolating China.
The Biden administration has upgraded its arrangement of individual security partnerships, often called the “hub and spoke” alliance system, with an Indo-Pacific latticework of multilateral security, political and diplomatic partnerships. In the past year alone, two key partnerships have been formed: one between the U.S., Japan and South Korea, and another between the U.S., Japan and the Philippines…
Rahm Emanuel is United States Ambassador to Japan.
Arent’ those ultra-orthodox content to keep living in jam-packed urban apartments the way they are living now? And what percent of those ultra-orthodox among the ostentatiously anti-zionist haredims who keep demonstrating against the Israel gov?
I think that the only thing stopping Israel attacking Iran is the influence of the Pentagon. Without their support its not going to happen. And I think the Pentagon is worried that they do not know for certain the new arrangements between Iran and Russia. So in a similar position with the Ukrainian demand for long range weapons to attack Russia , the Pentagon is currently denying the green light for Israel. Which probably means that the Israelis will look to assassinate leaders or smuggle a dirty bomb into Iran to satisfy their blood lust. No-one could be sure of Iran’s reaction to either, but they probably would not trigger Russian involvement.
Russia needs to understand that if Iran goes, so goes the caspian sea. i am betting Russia really understands that, and will do what ever it takes to ensure Iran is sovereign and survives.
Putin is touring the stans. he understands their importance to the fascist free traders.
Iran appears to be inclined to follow Putin’s lessons with Ukraine/Nato/US militarism. Keep the rhetoric focused; expose the limitations of enemy weaponry; attack military/infrastructure; keep the US off-balance.
Russia will likely come to Iran’s aid, if needed. (Those US Carrier groups in the ME will all be sunk by Kinzal missiles.)
I am bothered by the Orientlaism of this remark. Iran has been preparing for a war with the US vastly longer than Russia has (Putin the master negotiator thought for too long he could come up with some sort of mutually acceptable solution, not having internalized that the US really wanted nothing less than Russia as a vassal state).
Iran does not want war at all. Your comment also comes off as if it does. But Israeli is determined to have one.
I often wondered why someone like Gorbachev schooled in Soviet Weltanschauung fell for Western lies and left his country so weak. Then I read how U.S. recruited the Soviet Ambassador to Canada who became Gorbachev‘a adviser.
Putin came with Siloviki into power with a destroyed Soviet polity snd had to rebuild without exposing their goals. That it took 20 years to rebuild simply means they „had to call the bear uncle until safely across the bridge“ as Turks might say
“Then I read how U.S. recruited the Soviet Ambassador to Canada who became Gorbachev‘s adviser.”
Could you share a reference to this? Would be interested to learn more.
Thanks!
Imo Iran can only be beat with nukes, but even then israel would likely be wiped out and Persian gulf energy exports would mostly shut down. This would then shut down eu, odd they support israel war.
Plus Hezbollah probably can’t be nuked, it’s too close to israel. Hard to see how israel survives all out war with Iran, but also the frog seems unlikely to survive the slow increase in temp. Bombing Beirut seems to more rapidly increase resistance, and tiny israel infra is quite vulnerable.
Say us is calling the shots… we know our leaders are pretty dim bulbs from all their past nutty warmongering ideas. And Netanyahu too. So why assume us hubris is making smart moves now?
But Imo nothing until election, then Biden is officially lame duck, maybe military can avoid stupid at least until end jan, Iran/russ defenses might then intimidate.
Some of the things I see and hear:
As the war continues to expand in the Mid-East, the line from various govt officials on all sides is that they are trying to stop the wars from expanding.
Anything Israel does is not treated like an expansion of war by officials in the West, only other Mid-East countries responses (especially Iran’s) are considered to be a threat of expansion of war. Thus, the US, Israel and associates can expand war in the region as much as they want and Iran (and other countries) can only respond “legitimately” when they are attacked directly.
Iran has allies, however, as a bloc their primary concern at the moment is getting together a payments system that helps their corporations and elites avoid sanctions from the West.
Israel has more financial and military support from around the world than Ukraine (who is fighting a more powerful military), however, one of the narratives making rounds is that Israel will collapse from within and by that time (after suffering years of destruction, death, disease, and population loss) the other countries will rise from those ashes. Then, there is some assumption that all the countries that helped Israel will then be gung-ho about helping the other bombed out countries for the benefit of the people they previously watched (and helped) get bombed to hell.
I suppose there is no better way in the minds of other govts to ensure they determine the future of the countries in the Mid-East. Imagination appears to be lacking on their part to consider any other alternative.
> Wow. He’s winning. He’s not asking what he’s winning – he’s just winning.
In respect of US support of Israel’s military, I don’t think the quoted figures include the recent contract to upgrade the F-15IAs to F-15EX spec along with 50 new planes, altogether worth $18.82 billion:
https://theaviationist.com/2024/08/13/us-approves-sale-f-15ex-israel/
This is a contract rather than direct aid but it will substantially increase the IAF’s capabilities.
… and it allows Israel to accept some aircraft losses in their continuing war.
Many thanks for this. The neocons seem to have split into at least three factions: those who wish to give priority to Russia, those who wish to give priority to West Asia, and those who wish to give priority to China. There is a greater or lesser degree of overlap between each of these factions, but they may nonetheless constitute three relatively distinct poles of attraction. Biden has given the impression of being part of the first faction, at least until relatively recently.
Given that the Biden Administration appears to have succumbed [temporarily and at least until after the general election?] to the arguments of the Pentagon that there should be no further advances up the nuclear escalation ladder with Russia (there being a 50:50 chance of Russia providing a nuclear response had the escalation continued), and given that the UK appears to have adopted the same messaging, there seem to be distinct signs that enthusiasm for Ukraine is waning within Washington.
However, that does not mean that the Russophobe faction of the neocons have backed down. What it might instead mean is that, wishing to camouflage their abject and costly failure over Ukraine, the Russophobe faction is now wanting to join forces with the Iranophobe faction, seeking to attack Russia via its Iranian proxy in lieu of Ukraine. The waxing of Russo-Iranian relations has perhaps added additional traction to this shift. The Iranophobes, presumably highly embarrassed by the behaviour of their Israeli proxy, can therefore amplify the risks associated with the real or imagined threat posed by Iran (and, therefore, Russia) in order to camouflage Israeli ‘impunity’ and so enhance the credibility of their claims within Washington and within a highly sceptical ‘West’ (especially since the economic interests of the Europeans, lacking oil/gas deposits of significance and facing continued stagnation, are in almost total opposition to those of the Americans). The united Iranophone and Russophobe factions can also claim that China stands behind Russia, in order to outflank the claims of the Sinophobe faction, at least for the time being.
Just as the staggeringly incompetent Biden Administration has succeeded in fusing China with Russia, so it has also succeeded in fusing Russia with Iran. Given the extremely chequered history of Russo-Iranian relations this is yet another ‘signal achievement’ of US diplomacy under Blinken, by some distance the worst secretary of state in US history. Russia and Iran have fought six wars (1661-53, 1722-23, 1804-13, 1826-28, 1911 – when Russian troops shelled the majlis, and in 1941 – which resulted in an occupation that lasted until 1946). Russia also effectively turned northern Iran into a protectorate after 1907. Until lately, the Iranian folk memory of Russian predation was almost as visceral as that of British and American predation. However the Iranophobe faction evidently views the Russo-Iranian affiance as an opportunity, and neocons are never the types who will turn down even the slightest pretext for aggression, regardless of the risks. Biden and Blinken might also view escalation with Iran with a greater degree of equanimity, because it would enjoy full bipartisan support, would improve the profitability of US oil majors (and make the Europeans even more dependent on US oil and gas imports), and will be less politically problematic than escalation in Europe, not least because it will be further away from major [white] population centres.
Of course, it goes without saying that each neocon faction is equally deluded, malevolent and moronic: they are all alike malignant cancers upon the political economies of the US, and of the international community, and are in desperate need of being excised forever lest they bring forth apocalypse.
I am very interested in this particular Ruso-Iranian war: 1661-53. Start, middle, end, etc…
Brilliant comment.
China was always about supporting Russia. Then, as Russians came to understand that they could never be accepted as Western Europeans, * Russians turned decisively to China.
See Tolstoy’s depiction in “War and Peace.”
Russians ARE European but not West European in any respect – Orthodox Church is Eastern – and Cyrillic Script is Eastern
Culturally Russia is an integral part of Europe – anyone who knows history knows that – but Western Europe extends to Oder-Neisse
“Just as the staggeringly incompetent Biden Administration has succeeded in fusing China with Russia, so it has also succeeded in fusing Russia with Iran. Given the extremely chequered history of Russo-Iranian relations this is yet another ‘signal achievement’ of US diplomacy under Blinken, by some distance the worst secretary of state in US history.”
Few truer words e’er written or spoken …
The Biden-Blinken Foreign Policy Familyblog-Up will go down in history as the one that accelerated the decline of American empire (for the better of the world). It’s painful now, yes, but this fusing is real and extends to the deepest parts of the global south where it is laying the groundwork for the dismantling of US hegemony.
Many thanks to you and CA (and apologies to Kouros for the typo). I may have been unfair in awarding the palm to Blinken, as other fanatics and warmongers (such as Dulles, Rusk, Kissinger, Rice, Clinton and Pompeo) are also deserving of dishonourable mentions; indeed, several of them are peas in a pod with Blinken.
The way I see things, if the war mongering rhetoric is not dialed back substantially all roads lead to nuclear war. Putin and Xi need to understand this and prepare appropriately.
“Prepare?” Apart from making sure that your missiles fly and your command systems are hardened, there’\s not much preparation you can do. You can build a deep bunker, like Cheyenne Mountain, and sit in it, but what’s the point if there’s nothing left outside it?
I usually agree with Hudson on the primacy of a transcript over a video (or so I interpret his words.)
With Wolff however there is an emotional surplus not to be discarded. After all we are not only intellectual beings.
Besides information being simply processed this is extremely facilitated on a psychological level by visual and vocal presentation via a performance of another human being manifesting hope. Hope makes info and knowledge meaningful in a very real sense.
And I would guess actually better processable by neurologic terms (are there any surveys on this?)
Will spread the word among friends and foes. I too hope they will carry on with this show and – just like with Hudson´s other show – get into matters more deeply. There is infinite scholarly wisdom here to be mined.
Thus, am indebted as listener to both NC and the participants of the discussion.
Sadly these lonesome nightly encounters have become the major moments of joy in the past 2 years.
I’ve now decided to go watch the video, even after reading the transcript. Hope much needed. Will take it where I can get it. Thanks buddy.
One point which this discussion does not address: just how crazy is the plan to go to war with Iran?
The US invaded Iraq because it was weak, had an unpopular government and nobody would defend it. The idea was that this would provide a base for the conquest of the middle east (at least I can’t see any other reason). This certainly failed and the war turned out an expensive disaster. This despite the fact that Russia was still on its knees and China hadn’t really stood up yet, so the US had no real competitors.
One reason why the US invaded Iraq was that it didn’t deem it practical to invade Iran, because Iran was much stronger than Iraq. My impression is that the US/NATO war against Syria was in part an attempt to undermine an ally of Iran and thus possibly pave the way to attacking Iran. This failed. Meanwhile the US attempted to use diplomacy to undermine Iran by stopping it from developing nuclear weapons, but this failed.
The plan as laid out by Hudson and Wolff seems to be as follows:
1. Attack the strongest country in the Middle East in alliance with the most unpopular country in the world, conquer and occupy it despite the fact that it is in political, military and economic alliances with Russia, China, India and Brazil.
2. Install a puppet government which will somehow be supported by the extremely nationalistic and deeply anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-American government.
3. Use that position to conquer the rest of the Middle East in alliance with the most unpopular country in the world and make everyone there love Americans, Israelis and NATO people, while the rest of the world looks the other way.
4. Use this control of the Middle East to defeat Russia, China and if necessary India and Brazil.
5. Profit!
I do not for the life of me see how any sane person could pursue this plan, although I accept that Hudson and Wolff are probably right.
The Blob have to do something or they will be reduce to nothing, In some ways it dose no matter who is the enemy of the moment, just that there is an enemy of the moment, except for Israel which appears to use money to influence US politicians, which is safe because the donations have been washed outside the US.
No one wants to stir up trouble because it is a legal way for many people to become notable and wealthy.
Thanks, MFB. This is an absolutely wonderful summary of my views.
I’ll indeed be elaborating what all this means for the future of international law in my next Nima broadcast. The West is waging a war against civilization itself, claiming that enemies of Ukraine, Israel and hence the US are a subhuman species. That’s what’s at stake. Who is inhuman?
US invaded Iraq because Tony Blair egged Bush on whereas Chirac snd Putin and Schroeder held a press conference attacking the policy.
Iraq had a pipeline from the Kirkuk oilfield built by Britain to the refinery Britain built in Haifa and Israel wanted the pipeline turned back on
Iraq has huge oil reserves which would give US control over oil prices
Invading Iraq is easy through Basra which is how Britain did it using Indian Army troops in 1941
US bought Iraqi generals with bribes not to fight –
Iraq was invaded because sanctions were expiring and France snd Russia would oppose renewing them so Blair ran point for Cheney to go to war before sanctions expired
I do not know if many of you recall the Carnation Revolution 1974 in Portugal following Caetano removing General de Spinola for his criticisms of Portugal‘s colonial wars in Angola snd Mozambique with the MFA officer corps staging a coup……,,,,that is how I see Israel evolving
Since the Smotrich and Ben Gvir loons have created a Settler Army the IDF will end up with a civil war
Alastair Crooke sees Israel evolving–devolving–in the same direction, more or less, as you see it.
This could be in line with Pape’s view that the Jewish-descended population of Israel could be considered to be divided into two subnations . . . the secular Israelis ( Israel) and the national religionists of various sorts ( Judea). ( An interesting question . . . which way would the antiZionist haredims and the Israeli Palestinians break?)
So the civil war you consider possible even within the IDF itself would be between Israelis and Judeans.
Is there any part of the IDF and/or Security Services still Israeli enough that it/they could secretly plan a coup without the Judeans being aware of it? Could they carry it out and declare themselves an “alternative government” for long enough to give every Israeli a chance to rally to it? If they could do that, would the Israelis be strong enough and ruthless enough to kill several hundred thousand Judeans within the first week or so? And keep killing them at that rate until the surviving Judeans agree to abject surrender or until the Israelis have killed every last single Judean in Israel?
Because at this point that is the only way I can see for Israelis to be able to Make Israel Great Again ( MIGA).
If the Israelis can achieve that, then they would be able to set the stage for a Two State Solution if they really wanted it. How could they do that? They could take every illegal settler in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights back into Lesser Israel ( or kill them in place if they would rather not go). They could move the Big Wall around the West Bank to being totally on the Lesser Israel side of the line. They could formally repeal the laws declaring the annexation of Golan and East Jerusalem annulled and voided and making those areas Occupied Territory again subject to total return to their owners. Then they could sit and wait to see if the Arab-Palestine side decides those confidence building measures are for real and worth engaging on the basis of.
But Israelis would have to kill one or two million Judeans ( using Pape’s terminology) in less that a month in order to terrorise and demoralize the rest of the Judeans into accepting Israeli rule and the Lesser Israel Future. The numbers of Judeans needing to be killed could be considered “genocidal”, but it wouldn’t be genocide. It would be politicide . . . killing mass quantities of people to get rid of their undesirable politics.
Hitler would not be the inspiration. Stalin would be the inspiration here.
( And the Israeli atom bombs could be used as an anti-involvement deterrent to encourage the Arab and Iranian neighbors to keep a respectful distance and not get involved and let the Israelis sort out the Judeans all on their own).