Michael Hudson explains the US strategy to reassert geoeconomic dominance through oil, technology, finance, and transportation control
Glenn Diesen interviews economist Michael Hudson on his YouTube channel.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews economist Michael Hudson about what Hudson describes as a coherent US strategy to reassert geoeconomic dominance through control of four key monopolies: oil, artificial intelligence and information technology, transportation corridors, and dollar-based finance. Hudson argues that the wars against Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are not disconnected events but components of a single plan — articulated openly by Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant — to force rivals and vassals alike to recycle their economic surpluses into the US economy. He details how the memorandum of understanding with Iran collapsed because the US never intended to honour it, and how the fight over tolls in the Strait of Hormuz is central to the broader contest over who controls the revenues of the global oil trade.
Hudson devotes substantial attention to the transportation monopoly: he explains how the US blew up Nord Stream, is working through NATO proxies to block Russian oil exports through the Baltic, and sought control of Greenland to close off Arctic trade routes that would allow Eurasia to bypass US-controlled maritime choke points. He also highlights the destruction of Qatar's helium production — representing 20% of world supply — as an immediate industrial consequence of the conflict, compounding broader supply-chain disruptions across chemical, fertiliser, and technology sectors.
Hudson closes with a warning that 2026 is a world-historical year in which these converging dynamics — oil disruption, fertilizer shortages, NATO-Russia escalation, and financial fragmentation — risk producing a global economic and food crisis.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the question of whether there is a US plan
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Professor Michael Hudson joins us today. I would advise everyone to follow his work — I have left a link in the description. Thank you for coming back on, Michael. It's great to see you again.
Michael Hudson: It's good to be here with all of this news happening. The stock market's up. Everybody seems confident that there's not going to be much of a disturbance in world inflation or exchange rates from all of this. It's just amazing. We're talking about the war that's going on in the market as if it's really not going to matter.
Glenn Diesen: I'm wondering if it's delusion, market manipulation, or how to explain this. Anyway, that's some of what we're getting to today, because what is happening is quite remarkable. After decades of globalisation — the integration of markets and the buildup of huge unsustainable debt — we now see that this US-centric format for globalisation, that is, the world integrated and organised around the United States, this model has seemingly exhausted itself. It was organised around US financial markets, the US dollar, US-controlled transportation corridors. All of this is now being dismantled by economic warfare and even war.
You probably saw the interview with Scott Bessant where he makes the point that the wars on Iran, Venezuela, and even Russia all have an economic function: to strengthen the US dollar. I thought that was interesting because it does beg the question — to what extent is anyone behind the wheel, or do you see a plan here from the United States?
The US plan: oil, AI, transportation, and dollar monopoly
Michael Hudson: There has been a long plan, and it's very easy to dismiss Trump by saying he's losing the war with Iran — the whole memorandum of understanding seemed to be a capitulation to Iran — and you can see that it seems futile for Trump to get in deeper and deeper. So the assumption is, since he's getting the US in deeper and deeper, he must not have a plan because it's not working. But there is a plan, and not only Trump but especially his Secretary of the Treasury Bessant have been very openly expressing what this is.
Trump himself was outlining the plan already in his first administration, way back in 2018. He said the number one aim was that America's military spending abroad — an attempt to enforce a US-centred world order, dollarisation, US financial markets — had been since 1950 the main balance of payments drain on the United States. It was foreign military spending that forced the United States off gold in 1971.
Well, from 1971 until very recently, what took the place of gold? The US spent money into foreign markets. Foreign markets were recycling this back to the United States. At first, local recipients of dollars — companies, economies, governments — would turn over the dollars to the central bank. And what would the central bank do? As we've discussed before, and as I discussed in my book Super Imperialism, foreign central banks bought US Treasury securities — bonds, notes, short-term instruments. Then in the last few years, instead of this intergovernmental central bank recycling, you had foreign private investors buying US stocks and US bonds. All of this money was recycled into the US stock market, which was mainly being driven up on debt.
All of this means of maintaining America's domination is now called into question. What Trump said is: the first thing we want to do is stop all of this military spending we're doing abroad. He'd talked about withdrawing troops from NATO already in his first administration, and he'd singled out OPEC. He said we're spending a lot of money defending the Middle East — West Asia — and they really have to somehow end up paying us. Well, of course, that was the whole idea of the petrodollar agreement of 1974–1975: that OPEC could charge whatever it wanted for its oil and would reinvest its oil earnings in the US financial market, stocks and bonds.
All of that was working. But still, the United States had in the interim since the 1970s lost its industrial power. It had lost its creditor status, turning into a debtor country. It needed a new strategy. And at the end of 2025, the US spelled out this strategy: we can't control the world economy anymore through industry or even our financial markets. We have to establish a series of monopolies to make America a rentier economy.
The three sectors the United States wanted to control: number one, the longstanding sector of oil. We've discussed that before — America wants to control the oil trade so that its allies cannot deal with other producers of oil that would interfere with the US monopoly. So while almost all the attention in the shows you've been doing and in the media has been focused on the fight against Iran and isolating Iranian oil — especially Iranian oil exports to China — there has been a similar US attack, bombing Russian oil refineries and gas refineries through Ukraine. The United States has been providing Ukraine with guidance and missiles to show exactly where to bomb, so that Russia will not be the beneficiary of the imminent rise in oil prices that will result from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz — which covers 20% of the world's oil trade — and now another 5% of the world's oil trade as the Yemenis have cut back Saudi Arabia's west coast export facilities.
So the world is facing a very sharp rise in oil prices, and the United States wants to be the beneficiary of this, especially through the exportation of liquefied natural gas. It wants to make sure it will benefit from this rise in oil prices as a result of the war in West Asia, not Russia. And it still wants to be able to isolate China from receiving this oil.
The petrodollar recycling model and the new Gulf investment strategy
What Trump has done — he said early this year, repeatedly, that he really wants to make the Arab OPEC countries pay for America's military costs there. Well, suddenly Trump was inspired by the fact that Iran now wants to impose tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran estimates will yield it about $40 billion a year. Trump finally found a way to charge the OPEC countries for the costs of the military. He calls it defence — being the guardian angel defending these countries from Iran and any other attacker.
He said a few days ago there are going to be tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. Forget international law about no tolls being allowed on international waters — there are going to be tolls, and we will get them, not Iran.
Well, immediately Secretary of State Rubio said: wait a minute. If you're saying that America will get the tolls instead of Iran, then that justifies Iran's claim that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is dead. The UN rules that international waters cannot have tolls unless they've been grandfathered in by signatories to the UN agreement — such as Turkey with access to the Black Sea, Egypt with its canal, the Panama Canal. Unless they've grandfathered these in, international waters can't have tolls.
Rubio said you can't say this. We don't want to give anything on international law that we can still use to try to prevent Iran from getting the tolls. So Trump then backpedalled, and a few days ago gave a press conference saying: all right, we've made a new agreement with the Arab OPEC countries. They are going to pay us for the cost of defending them as their guardian angel, but not through tolls. They're going to invest in the United States — just as after 1975 Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries invested their oil export earnings here. They're going to invest in US industry as partners.
And already this had begun to take form. Amazon, for instance, had made a huge investment in Bahrain in artificial intelligence — these huge fields of computers using energy. And that is the second element of what the US wants to monopolise.
The AI and information technology monopoly
In addition to controlling the oil trade and obtaining all of the recycled oil export revenues for its own economy, the US wants to control a monopoly in information technology and its associated computerisation and the internet. This is why what has been stabilising the US balance of payments has been a huge private foreign investment and government investment — including from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain — into the US golden seven stocks of information technology: computer chips, Amazon, Google, and all of the internet and public discussion platforms — X, Facebook, and so on.
Well, the problem is that now these stocks are going down because analysts have found out that in order for these companies to make the vast increase in earnings in monopoly rents they expected — as a result of building huge information technology centres — they can't do that in the United States because they don't have the electricity, and they don't have the water to cool the chips that make all this intelligence. So just as the United States offshored its manufacturing industry, it's now offshoring its artificial intelligence monopoly.
Where is it going to offshore it to? To the OPEC countries, especially the Arab OPEC countries. That's why Amazon went to Bahrain. And in the last two days the United States has made a deal with the UAE saying: you can be partners with us in huge US investments in building this information technology. You will provide your energy domestically to power this enormous American investment in information technology.
Iran's counter-strategy: severing the US-Gulf economic symbiosis
Well, a few days ago Iran focused its bombing on Amazon's investment in information technology in Bahrain. Iran's position is: what's our strategy? Number one, we want to drive the United States out of the whole West Asian region. The first thing we've got to do is drive out the military bases. It's done that through all the military bases except Israel — it's bombed them, and the United States military is in complete agreement: we're going to withdraw our military bases there. We can't afford them anymore, mainly because we can't protect them from the Iranian missiles that have shown they can penetrate our defences at will. And Iran has just finished in the last three days bombing what's left of the American military bases.
But Iran then says: if we are going to drive the United States out of West Asia, it can't just be the military bases. We have to end the whole economic and financial symbiosis between the United States and these local monarchies. Under this symbiosis — investing their oil export proceeds in American stocks and bonds and partnerships with American AI industry — their hearts are going to follow where the money is. We've got to prevent this economic symbiosis. So there's not going to be any linkage at all between the US economy and these economies, so that we can then essentially free the region away from the United States.
That means it's going to bomb and prevent all of this. This is really what the war is all about. And it's been depicted as an existential war on Iran's part because the United States wanted to do to Iran just what it did to Venezuela. It wanted a very quick war — you kidnap the president, you have a regime change that agrees to turn over its oil to the United States, all of Venezuela's oil export revenues put into a US bank account run by the US Treasury.
Well, a few months ago, Secretary of the Treasury Bessant said: we're going to do the same thing in Iran once we defeat it. And just before the June 17th memorandum of understanding was signed, Hegseth came out and said: what we're going to do is conquer Iran, have a regime change that will put all of Iran's oil revenues in a treasury account, and this account will have to be spent in the United States to buy US exports and US goods.
The collapse of the Iran memorandum of understanding
Well, then the negotiators worked out this memorandum of agreement, and it looks obvious — Iran has just withdrawn from that agreement a few days ago — because it became apparent that the United States never had any intention at all of actually meeting the terms of the agreement.
For one thing, the whole agreement was to be put in motion by a payment of at least a token sum of $12 billion of the hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian savings that the United States had told its allies — especially in the Emirates and the Arab OPEC countries — to confiscate. Well, Hegseth worked with the Emirates to say: don't give them a penny. And so the Emirates, Bahrain, and other countries said: we're not going to return any of this $12 billion, much less $100 billion, to Iran. We're going to say: Iran, you've attacked us. When we attacked you, you fought back. Your fighting back is an attack on us. We want reparations for the costs we've had to suffer from your defending yourself against the US, Israeli, and our own military attacks on you.
And Hegseth had spelled all this out just before — actually on July 11th — when the negotiators drafted the agreement that was signed on the 17th. Well, it's obvious this wasn't going to be enacted.
Regarding letting Iran administer trade in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States never had any intention of letting Iran charge any tolls or even administrative fees for registering ships, coordinating ships, or anything that administration of a strait would do. The US Navy came in and protected ships to try to break Iranian control by turning off their transponders and sailing close to the Oman shore, saying: the memorandum of understanding said Iran will govern all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, but this doesn't apply to Iran's own territorial waters. So there are going to be two routes through the Strait of Hormuz — the Iranian shore route, which is not international waters, and the international waters in between, which don't apply because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea prevents any country from charging tolls that isn't already grandfathered into the clause.
And Iran said: well, we never signed that agreement. And Iran is in a state of war with us. Oman is in a state of war with us because Oman is hosting US military bases from which missiles and bombs are being sent into our territory. So of course we have control over the strait.
This is what the fight is all about. Iran had planned to impose these tolls when the 60-day ceasefire period was over. Trump said: no, you're not going to impose the tolls. We're going to impose the tolls to reimburse ourselves for all of the cost. And we're going to get 20% of the oil export proceeds of the Arab countries who export this oil — 20% of the value is all going to be paid to us as a toll.
Well, that's what the legal fight is immediately about. There goes the international law of the sea. There goes the memorandum of understanding.
Why the US fight against Iran is existential for both sides
So you can see that when this is the aim of Trump, you could say his attacking Iran is not simply because he's deluded into believing we can destroy Iran's military, destroy their defences, destroy their missiles, hit the civilians and the hospitals and the schools and demoralise the population so much that they will want to put a US-backed regime in place. This is all an illusion. But for the US, this fight against Iran is as existential for the United States plan of how to control the world economy as it is for Iran to defend its own sovereignty and its own existence against the United States attempt to invade it — breaking it up by trying to get invasions from Baluchistan and from the Kurds and others.
This is really what the fight is all about, and why it's going to go on and on. And in the process of going on and on, it will block the oil trade, leading to a stoppage of oil, leading to the world production crisis and financial crisis that we've discussed in our earlier shows.
Glenn Diesen's assessment: the logic of the US strategy and its risks
Glenn Diesen: I'm thinking — if I was in Washington advising Trump on how to restore US geoeconomic dominance, I would probably advise what they're doing now, to a large extent. For the US to revive its technological dominance, to control international transportation corridors — the maritime corridors — to restore America's financial dominance with its currency, you want to keep rivals of the United States weakened, keep them divided, prevent them from integrating, and also keep the vassals dependent. If you want to find a new formula for American dominance, that seems to be a good pathway.
Now, as you say, they very often make comments that support this logic — the idea that all international waterways must remain under US control, even through piracy. We see that part of the way they measured success in Venezuela was, according to Bessant, that they will now have to sell their oil in dollars, their proceeds will have to be invested into the United States. Trump himself bragged about how much money they've been able to extract from Venezuela. We see the same with Russia — comments about torching Russian oil refineries through their Ukrainian proxy. Bessant made the comment that after the war the Russians will probably be forced to start selling their oil and gas in dollars again. And Lindsey Graham made the point that yes, Iran is oil-rich and this will now fall under US control when it's over. We had all these American leaders at some point making the same chant — short-term pain for long-term gain, we're going to get it under our control.
Not just American control, but the oil would have to be sold in dollars. Part of the deal the Americans wanted — which they were quite open about — was that whatever the Iranians make from oil, sold in dollars, would give the US exclusive right to sell agricultural products to Iran. So again: sold in dollars, used to buy US products. And at the same time, when the Americans are punishing Iran, they're torching all the bridges and infrastructure used to connect the Eurasian landmass — part of the Belt and Road Initiative that connects Iran to Russia, China, and so forth.
We see that the allies or vassals of the United States in the Middle East and Europe are now asked to increase their dependence on the US, and the US will also monetise this — they have to now pay for all quote-unquote protection. We see the same with the wars on Iran: China should be cut off from a key supplier of oil, and China's tech development should be scaled back to restore US tech dominance.
I see what they're going for, and if we throw all the morals out the window and global hegemony is the key objective, all of this makes perfect sense. The fact that they're saying it out loud is quite interesting. But I guess my question is: how likely is the US to succeed in these objectives, and what could go wrong? The US wanted to break Chinese tech dominance — it proved that wasn't really feasible. They also see that Russia is willing to go all the way. Iran isn't being defeated. They're not giving up. They see what the Americans are doing. The Iranians, as you said, are willing to destroy data centres of the United States in the Middle East. They're willing to knock out — I think they took out the desalination plant in Kuwait — which means they can actually make these countries cease to exist. They're willing to go up that escalation ladder because it's all or nothing for them.
So my question is: to what extent do you see the US being able to control the economic consequences of these conflicts — be they economic or actual wars against China, Russia, Iran — because a lot of things can go wrong, and at the same time the US economy isn't doing that well either. Yes, the stock markets are up, and if that was the only indicator of economic health, wonderful — America would be back. But many things can go wrong here.
Transportation control, the Arctic route, and the limits of US strategy
Michael Hudson: You're right to have mentioned transportation. To answer your question: in order to enforce US control of the world oil trade and get its income for itself, and the artificial intelligence and computer technology trade, the US does need to control shipping and international transportation as well. How can you export your oil without doing it by ships or by overland means such as pipelines?
The very first fight that Trump picked was with Europe — and most of America's main opponents, I won't say enemies, but its main opponents. It wants to tighten its control over Europe and make sure that Europe is locked into dependence on America's liquefied natural gas and transportation. This required two things: number one, the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, as we've discussed; but number two, what you're seeing now — the constant bombing of Russian shipping through the Baltic. For a long time Russia exported its oil through the Latvian east coast — Ventspils — that went through the Baltic. Russia is still exporting oil through the Baltic, and you have Estonia and Latvia permitting NATO to basically stop Russian oil exports through the Baltic.
Well, all of that violates the UN law of the sea. That's not free trade. The United States objective now is: in 1945 we supported free trade because we were the beneficiaries. When England promoted free trade in the 19th century, that was called free trade imperialism. That's what America did after 1945. But now we're not for free trade anymore, because if we can't control foreign oil as a rival, we will destroy that oil. We will destroy Russia's capability to refine its oil. We will destroy Russia's ability to transport its oil to other countries. We will destroy its pipelines. And the same with Iran — we will destroy Iranian ports and Iranian shipping so that it can't export to China, India, or anywhere else.
So the control of oil and control of transportation go together. That's why the first fight Trump had with Europe was over Greenland. We've got to take control of Greenland, because if we can have a link from Greenland to Iceland to Britain, then we can block access from the North Atlantic into the Arctic. And if we can block that access, then Europe and West Asia won't have access to the Arctic trade route — to avoid having to go around through South Africa or having to go around the US-controlled Panama Canal.
I'm a little surprised. Russia has been trying to arrange with China the Power of Siberia pipeline, saying: the United States is trying, in violation of the law of the sea and all free trade rules, to prevent us from shipping our oil. The only way to get around it is through a pipeline. And that's what China has been trying to do through its Belt and Road Initiative — essentially integrate Eurasia, the whole Asian continent, so that it doesn't need to rely on the Mackinder strategy of controlling the periphery. But China and Russia have argued over what's going to be the price for the oil.
Russia quite correctly says: we can see that the price of oil is going to go up because the United States is goading Iran and the Arab countries to destroy each other's oil production, while NATO is fighting against Russia to destroy its oil export capacity. And without OPEC oil, there's going to be a huge oil shortage. The United States will supply this basically through shipping liquefied natural gas to countries that need this energy. This is why Trump has fought against alternatives to oil in the form of wind energy and solar energy, which China has dominated.
Whether the US strategy can succeed — and the role of the Gulf monarchies
So that's the link between transport and the broader question. Now, for your question — how can this succeed? It can only succeed by — let's start with the American fight against Europe, to subordinate its allies Europe and Japan to the United States. The whole assumption, the materialist approach to history, is that countries are going to act in their economic self-interest. Well, Europe isn't acting in its economic self-interest. That would be to get inexpensive energy to power its industry and avoid the de-industrialisation you're seeing in Germany and other NATO countries. It can't afford the higher prices of oil, and its chemical industry can't afford to operate at a profit when there is an interruption of the derivatives of the oil trade — sulfur to make sulfuric acid for mining and fertiliser made out of natural gas, not to mention helium.
One of the first production sites that Iran hit was Qatar's helium production — that was itself 20% of the world's helium trade, totally destroyed. It cost, I think, $5 billion to install originally and took a number of years to install. All of this is unavailable for the next few years, causing a helium shortage. China and the United States are major producers of helium. China has stopped its helium exports, and the United States is now using its helium monopoly as a lever of international control.
So the United States retains a lot of levers and control. And the fourth monopoly that we didn't discuss is dollarisation — the financial system monopoly. The United States tried to exclude its rivals from the SWIFT bank clearing system. China set up an alternative to that. Everything the United States has done by imposing financial sanctions on other countries — trying to say we can cut off your financial payments — without that, how can there be an oil trade? How can there be a trade in industrial products if you can't process the payment for it? You not only need to transport this trade, you need to transfer the monetary payments. The whole American strategy is no longer a win-win strategy between it and the rest of the world. It's: what choke points can we use to control the world economy — the choke point of whether they can get oil and energy to power their factories and light their homes and supply their chemical and fertiliser industry, information technology, and grain.
To answer your question: the American strategy can only succeed as long as the United States can impose choke points on the entire world — either by imposing sanctions that other countries will not have an alternative means of escaping through their own payment systems, such as China has been developing, their own oil production — Russia and Iran — their own transportation, the Arctic route, and the Russian ability to fight NATO military attacks on Russian shipping through the Baltic and other areas, and US attacks on shipping through the Indian Ocean.
So the answer to whether the US can maintain its control and its new almost neo-colonial imperialism depends on its ability to make a win-lose trade on the world: if you want oil, you'll have to pay our monopoly oil prices, and the profits the oil producers make will all be invested in the United States or spent on US exports. To ship, you'll have to submit to US permission to use US-controlled ports or routes that we're closing off if you're not subordinate to us. For information technology, we've imposed sanctions.
Well, just yesterday the United States lifted sanctions on exporting the most advanced computer chips to the Emirates. It's done that so that the Emirates can invest with the United States — tens of billions of dollars to create these new computer chip transfer centres, like the Amazon cloud investment in Bahrain was supposed to have done. The idea is that they've convinced the Emirates to throw in their lot with the United States, and the United States gave the Emirates this permission in exchange for its agreement to help the United States bomb Iran.
Well, one of the success factors of this US policy depends on how long can the Arab Middle East be ruled by these rotten semi-feudal monarchies. How long can the Emirates survive? How long can Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia itself survive, when most of the population is either Palestinian or Indian, where you have a very unequal society controlled by Emirates who have thrown in their lot with the United States?
This is going to — almost every war's backwash has been settled by huge political upheavals. World War I saw the end of many European monarchies and the transition to some sort of constitutional monarchy or quasi-democracy. The Ottoman Empire was broken up and divided into colonies of Britain and France, redrawing the map of the carved-up Ottoman Empire. Well, the question is now that this war is over, is there going to be a similar political revolution going throughout West Asia — establishing economies that actually use their oil, not to recycle their economic surpluses to the United States, not to fall into the position that countries like Germany or Britain are in as just being satellites of the United States, and certainly not Japan, which America is trying to get rearmed to serve the United States?
Are they going to go down the same route as Japan, Britain, and Germany? Or is there somehow going to be a social revolution there, like America feared would be the case after World War II? Are we finally going to see the carve-up that occurred after World War I — with the Sykes-Picot plan to redraw the lines and put in British and French-installed local monarchies — finally brought into the modern progressive era?
That's going to be part of the question: whether the United States plan can stop progress. Can the United States stop the rest of the world from acting in its own economic self-interest — to promote its own development instead of being subservient to promote the US economy, which will not use this income for its own development but really just to maintain its monopoly control and military threat to other countries? That's really the question.
Europe's legitimacy crisis and the structural fragility of US vassalage
Glenn Diesen: Well, that's a good point. The ability of the US to restore its dominance doesn't only depend on the ability of its rivals to fight back — which they are — but indeed on its allies accepting very destructive vassalage, as you see in the Middle East. They're paying a higher price for their partnership with the US now. And it's quite different from the relationship with the United States in the past, because after World War II the US free trade empire — yes, the Europeans were completely subordinated to the US — however, at least it was beneficial to some extent. The US was considered a benign hegemon: it made sure that its frontline states were prosperous. The West Germans were more prosperous than East Germans. The South Koreans were more prosperous than North Koreans. Taiwanese Chinese were more prosperous than mainland Chinese. The frontline states were thriving.
But now, as the US can't afford this format for dominance anymore, it begins to cannibalise its rivals and demand excessive vassalage. And as you said, I think the core is: how do you make states not act in their own interest?
This is important because if you look at the European case study now — they're not acting in their own interest. Their economies are getting weaker. They're politically getting weaker. They're having a legitimacy crisis, because in a re-divided Europe, it's not in Europe's interest anymore. It creates conflicts and war with the Russians, which enhances dependence on the US and makes them economically weak. And if you see the leadership across Europe, it's like a competition in how unpopular you can possibly get. And in this legitimacy crisis, you will inevitably see new political alternatives emerge. The good example is Germany with the AfD — growing out of nothing to becoming the most popular party. What are they saying? They're saying we should act in our interest. And what is that? We'll have to diversify energy supplies, have to make peace with Russia, diversify technology, work with China as well, diversify transportation corridors, diversify finance. In other words, don't tie yourself only to the United States. And I think it's going to be hard for the United States to continue this position, because as long as its vassals can't act in their own interest, the whole thing becomes very shaky, and at some point something cracks.
Anyway, Michael, I thank you so much for taking the time.
Russia-NATO escalation and the risk of a global food crisis in 2026
Michael Hudson: I want to say one thing — we still have a little bit of time. You mentioned war with Russia. That's really the key. How long will Putin essentially prevent the Russian military from responding to the NATO attacks on its territory — the missile and drone attacks hitting its refineries and now hitting civilian targets, the drone attacks on Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the attempt by NATO to put more weapons in Finland and other Baltic countries?
How long will Russia refrain from responding by doing what Putin had threatened to do — bombing the factories that make the missiles that are bombing us? The factories in Germany, France, or Britain that are providing the missiles. At some point, Russia is now realising this is not a fight against Ukraine. Ukraine is the arena for this fighting. The fight is with NATO, and Ukraine just doesn't matter. The Russian troops are moving westward in Ukraine, moving towards taking over Odessa, blocking Ukrainian access to Odessa and to export their own grain and sunflower oil and other materials. But this doesn't prevent the NATO countries from just sending missiles from Ukraine into Russia.
The enemy isn't really Ukraine any longer. It's Germany, France, and Britain, acting as US satellites in attacking Russia and letting the United States plan — I think it's in Wiesbaden and other cities where they are guiding the missiles that are hitting — I'm sorry, the Ukrainian missiles that are hitting Russia.
I think the fact that they're doing that is one reason that Russia is, in a tit-for-tat response, saying: all right, we're going to help provide Iran, if it needs it, with satellite guidance for its bombs to fight you. So that's the escalation that's occurring. And I say this escalation — if it really is existential on both sides — is going to continue to be very destructive, and the collateral damage will be the world economy, the Asian economy, Africa, and the Global South, which is not going to get the fertiliser that's going to reduce their ability to feed themselves. There will essentially be a famine. This year, 2026, is going to be a world-historical year for the showdown when the dynamics that we've been discussing all come together.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, I was going to say — interesting times. Even if all these wars ended now, it's hard to see how there wouldn't be a food crisis this autumn. Anyway, I always feel a bit wiser talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you for having me on, Glenn.