The US Strategy of Controlled Anarchy: Syria, Ukraine, and Beyond

The U.S. Strategy of Controlled Anarchy: Syria, Ukraine, and Beyond
By Michael Sunday, December 15, 2024 Interviews Ukraine Permalink
[This interview posted on 12/15/2024 is available on the Internet, https://michael-hudson.com/2024/12/the-u-s-strategy-of-controlled-anarchy-syria-ukraine-and-beyond/.]

Transcript – 2024.12.12 – Dialogue Works – Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: The Desperation of America’s Empire at Its Peak!

Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: The Desperation of America’s Empire at Its Peak! • 1:10:31 •

NIMA: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, December 12th, and our friends Michael Hudson and Richard Wolf are back with us. Welcome back.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you very much, Nima. Glad to be here.

NIMA: Let’s get started with the situation that you’re witnessing right now in Syria.

When you look at the conflict in Syria and what has happened to the Middle East, in your opinion, what is the bigger picture of what’s going on? Let’s start with Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the bigger picture is that, as you say, it’s much bigger than Syria.

The United States says, “We are ending up with total war with Russia and with China.”

Russia is saying, “We hope that there’s peace in the Near East.”

China is saying, “We want peace. We don’t want war.”

I don’t understand why they’re saying this. Why don’t they say, “We realize that this is a war to the death.”

Russia talks about a proportional response, certainly in Ukraine, for instance.So if there’s just an attack and bomb, it will have a proportional response.

But what’s the real proportion at work? The proportion is the Cold War. “We want to control the whole world. We want to break up Russia into parts. We want to break up China into parts. And we’re going to make step after step after step until there’s a response.”

And the fact is, the Americans, if you’re a general, the Americans, you never know how far you can push until somebody else pushes back.

And there really hasn’t been any pushback. And if you’re told by Russia that there is a proportional response, then Russia and the Americans and NATO can do whatever they want, step up and step up and know that there will only be a response to the local tactic, not to the overall strategy.

I don’t see any strategy on the part of NATO.

Well, your question is about Syria. And obviously, the whole country is now in motion. There really isn’t any Syria anymore, much as there probably won’t be a Ukraine anymore.

You see Israel taking Western Syria.

You see Turkey taking the Kurdish areas and what it can.

And the Americans saying, well, we’re taking all the oil to give to Israel, is our agreement.

You have the leaders of the ISIS al-Qaeda group wearing T-shirts made by Mossad. Apparently people have seen that.

So this has completely cut off Lebanon from support by Iran. I don’t know what Iran is thinking.

Probably Saudi Arabia is thinking, well, they’re really trying to grab the whole Near East. Maybe we should be very careful about joining BRICS and threatening to move our assets out of the dollar because we could be next.

America has turned on one so-called ally after another, you know, starting with Saddam Hussein, who was put in by the CIA originally, just all the way rest.

It looks like the U.S plan to take over all of the Near East and its oil is working, using Israel as its battering ram for that. Israel will get the land. America will get the oil and control of that. And that’s sort of the, it looks like the division of labor.

Now, what does all this mean for BRICS and for Russia and China? They’ve talked about having alternatives to the dollar, de-dollarization. They’ve been talking about having alternative institutions to the International Monetary Fund in the World Bank. But the question is now, do they need an alternative institution to NATO? Do they need some kind of coordinated military plan?

I can understand Russia not intervening in Syria at all because Assad was utterly incompetent, utterly rigid. He refused, he refused to make any kind of accommodation to anybody else. He was almost a nutcase.

And the Russians quite properly said, well, if the Syrian army will not fight, we’re not going to send our army into there because this really isn’t our fight. If we can keep our naval bases and our air bases there, that’s all we care about. Russia can lose Syria and it’s not serious. It’s not vital to them.

But what is vital is the United States being able to now move against Iran.

You’d think that China that gets a lot of oil from Iran would be worried and have some desire to intervene in the area. But China is sitting it out. And so the Americans think, well, we can pick off one country after another, one area after another. And it’s more than salami style. We’re now going in big chunks, much more than salami. I don’t know what a good medical or culinary metaphor there would be. But everything’s up in motion and all of the initiative is in NATO.

Russia and China have said, we will only react. We won’t act. We will react.

And they’re not reacting. I don’t know what to make of that. I just, I don’t think anyone can foresee what’s going to happen in Syria, because all these myriad of special interests are now going to be fighting among themselves.

And even within the jihadis, one jihad group will fight against the other. And I’m sure they’ll be set against each other by the American and Israeli and British interveners. So it’s anarchy.

Anarchy is what the U.S. plan is. That’s U.S. foreign policy, to back terrorists everywhere and make it impossible for other regions to have a reasonable response.

And you’d think that the British countries would try to have an alternative to anarchy. I don’t see any alternative in sight. So I think the anarchy is going to continue moving further and further eastward.

NIMA: Richard.

RICHARD WOLFF: Without wanting to be always beating the same drum, let me beat the same drum.

For me, these are symptoms of the decline of the American empire.

I don’t think there was a Syria. Or to put it differently, Syria was already for quite some years, a society in which, yes, you had the family of, [Assad], his father and now him.

But they had lost control of good parts of that country already.

Part of the reason the army couldn’t function was because it wasn’t the army of a government. It didn’t have the loyalty already of large parts of the society. It had the enmity or the disinterest of other parts.

So what you had was an unreal society disintegrating more and more into its parts.

And in that situation, everybody looked at it and said, what can I get out of this? What is the least I can lose here? What is the most I can gain?

And then you had very bizarre consequences. The Israelis gain the part of the territory that they can immediately bomb and snatch. Doesn’t look good. It looks like Israel has opened yet another front in a war it wasn’t doing so well at already.

You know, it ended the one against Hezbollah because it couldn’t do it. And the one in Hamas is continuing not to go all that well, despite the horrific global reputation that Israel will pay for in the decades to come.

I don’t see them as doing very well. I see them as desperate, but they gained some territory and that seems to be very important for them, although I don’t understand how they understand that as a gain, given the price they’re paying.

Then they have the fact that the jihadis who are anti-Israel more intensely than almost anybody else are now having gotten stronger than they were before. They had come to some kind of, you know, modus vivendi with the old Syrian government. Now they have these jihadis who are going to feel very solid.

There are already, from what I understand, well-established relationships between the jihadis in Syria and Hamas in Gaza. So that’s not good for the Israelis. Those jihadis are going to be helping Hamas more than they were before, because they’re going to be able to.

And then I think Michael is right that Iran and Russia decided not to rescue the Syrian leadership again. They’ve done it in the past. They didn’t want to do it again because they’re changing their policy.

They’re trying to figure out how now under these changed circumstances, which make it in a way easier for them to change their policy because they’re not betraying the sitting government of Syria, which they would have been in the position of doing before.

So it’s not that I disagree with Michael, but I add up the pieces, and I don’t see this as a big advance for the West. I really don’t. And I don’t think it changes the larger trajectory.

I think the West is losing in Ukraine, which is a bigger deal than Syria by several orders of magnitude. That defeat is continuing. It is not changing.

I think the Chinese and the Russians, and Michael may be right, the Chinese and the Russians believe that the direction of economic change in the world favors them. And I think they’re right. And that time is not on the side of the American empire. I think they’re right. The United States is wielding the only weapon it still has.

It has lost its economic predominance. It’s not in a good position. It tried to use economic war against Russia in Ukraine. And that is an enormous failure. It didn’t work. They can’t use their political position because they don’t have one. They’re isolated. They vote with the Israelis. And that’s about all they got as a way of political allies. Everybody else is rethinking their alliance.

I think you’re watching, by the way, the slow implosion of the South Korean situation. That was an American event there. As best I understand, the Americans had put pressure on the South Koreans to deliver huge amounts of ammunition, 155-millimeter artillery shells to Ukraine, because nobody else can do it. The South Koreans have the machinery and have the stockpiles.

But the parliament in South Korea is left-wing. The majority of the parliament is left-wing. And they will not permit the shipping of artillery shells for Ukraine.

So the only way to get that done was for the president to do what he tried to do. Declare martial law. Disband the parliament in South Korea so that he could govern and do what the Americans want. Not only did this not happen, he’s about to be kicked out. He’s gone. And the parliament is there. This is a defeat for the United States. Potentially a very important one.

South Korea is, I don’t know, the seventh or eighth-largest economy in the world. It’s a very serious business, what’s going on there. And it will transform Asian politics.

Well, you know, China, Japan, South Korea, Philippines. That all changes.

So here’s my conclusion.

Michael may be right that the next step for China and Russia will be to formalize the BRICS as not only an economic alliance, but a military alliance. And they will do that because the United States has shown that having lost its economic weapons, having lost its political, global, ideological position, all it has left is its military superiority. And it’s trying to use that and it’s trying to use that and it’s not going well.

That’s the reality. And I think they may end up with a military feeling they have no choice because of the risk that the United States will rely more and more on the military because it has no other weapons.

And it will be interesting to see whether in the early months and years of Trump, how he will navigate this shrinkage of America’s global position.

But I guess I disagree a bit with Michael. Not on any of the particulars, he said. Those are correct. But on how he then puts it together in terms of the larger picture. I don’t think this is a major change in the course of events.

Let me put it this way.

When empires collapse, they collapse in the sequence of the disintegration of their weakest links.

It’s a little bit like Lenin’s answer to the question, Why did the socialist revolution happen worse first in Russia? Why not in Germany? Why not in England?

And his answer was Russia was the peculiar weakest link. On the one hand, it had an advanced capitalist sector. But on the other hand, it was held back by a momentously backward agriculture, which was 95% of the people in Russia in 1917. So it had peculiar qualities. And remember, Lenin devoted a 600-page book called The Economic History of Russia to explain to the people why Russia was the weakest link where socialists could work.

I think Syria was a very weak link in a chain that can’t hold it anymore, that is being ground to bits. It was already a divided place. It wasn’t really governed by a center. You know, Assad only controlled Damascus. You could see with Homs and Hamad and the two other big cities, Aleppo, he controlled nothing there. It was a fakery what he controlled.

I think you’re just seeing these are not holding. And South Korea, for me, is another. It’s not holding. It’s just not holding. And you’re going to see odd places like South Korea and Syria.

And what’s going to show up is that they are, each of them in their way, the weak link that can’t handle the deepening contradictions.

And here’s an irony. I think the next one may be the biggest shock and surprise of them all. And that’s Western Europe. They are being ground.

Michael and I have talked about that.

The Europeans are being caught in an impossible situation. They will have paid the biggest economic and political price for the war in Ukraine, which they are going to lose. They can’t hold on. The United States will not hold on. Ukraine will disintegrate, more or less. And they will have paid a price and gotten nothing.

And that is going to produce, from below, pressures in this society that are going to be unbelievable.

If Mr. Merz in Germany replaces, and he’s a right-winger, if he replaces Schultz, that’s not the solution for Germany. That makes Germany’s problems worse.

So we may be talking about something much more powerful, globally speaking, than what happens in South Korea and Syria and soon.

NIMA: It seems to me, Michael, it seems to me what has happened in Syria was a product of what’s going on in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Because the United States, the Biden administration was not successful in its fight against Russia in Ukraine.

On the other hand, Israel was not successful in Gaza and in southern Lebanon. That’s why they went after that temporary peace.

And what was the latest attempt on the part of the Biden administration? Let’s do something big in Syria and let’s show the world that we are strong. We can do something big in that region. We can defeat Russia and Iran at the same time in Syria.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this brings up the point that Richard had said about military superiority. What is military superiority?

Well, NATO already had no infantry superiority.

It had no troops. There are no troops to invade a country. So there’s no ability to invade any country, not even Syria.

NATO didn’t have the arms superiority anymore. It has no arms. It used them all up in Ukraine. And the only kind of arms that NATO has left is the atom bombs.

So people think of that as the limit of military superiority.

But the United States has one kind of military superiority that’s very strong that the BRICS doesn’t have. And that’s terrorism. That’s chaos. They control terrorism.

It’s hard to say what would have happened, but remember the Astana conference that settled Syria’s carve up a few years ago.

The non-NATO countries had everything seemingly stabilized. And they had all of ISIS, the terrorists, holed up in Idlib.

And then American and England said, the one thing we don’t want you to do, just let it– a teeny little 99% of all of Syria. You know, you have it under your control. Let us keep the 1%. That 1% was a cancer. And cancer spreads pretty quickly.

The Americans have enormous superiority in terrorism. It was enough to conquer Syria. It’s the terrorism that has been used in Russia’s Islamic neighboring republics to destabilize there.

The BRICS does not have a terrorist arm. And that’s certainly not their strategy.

What can your strategy be against terrorism, you know, except really wiping it out?

They should have said, okay, America is going to– and England are going to bomb us if we wipe out Idlib. The fact is, Idlib then took over.

You’re going to have a war in every– in any case. And once you– as I said before, if there’s going to be a war in any case, where, and at what point, are you going to fight it?

Russia keeps saying one red line after another, after another. There is dissension within Russia to say, wait a minute. When are you going to respond to these red lines? Because if you don’t know, each time that there’s a red line that NATO expands, Russia has less maneuverability.

Iran now has much less maneuverability. What if, when Iran sent the missiles to Israel that did not have bombs, just to say, look, you see, we can get to their defenses. What if Iran had actually bombed Israel and stopped the expansion there? Would it be in a stronger position or a worse position?

I don’t know enough about the military concerns to say, but at some point it’s going to have to use its arms or else lose them. What is the point of waiting? What is the timing that we’re talking about?

Do they have a time plan when they’re talking to each other? Here’s what we’re going to do when. And if so, when are the key dates that they’re moving on and how will they move? I don’t see any indication. I certainly can’t guess and I don’t even know whether they are recognizing the fact that there is going to be an all-out war.

We’re probably going to avoid atomic war.

But without being able to constrain the chaos and the terrorism, the Americans say, well, ultimately chaos is it. And we have the sanctions. It was the sanctions that destabilized Syria and impoverished it all and let the army not to fight and the population to oppose Assad.

And America still has the monetary domination now. There’s not really any agreement among the BRICS for what to do monetarily. So I wouldn’t write off the American empire so quickly. It’s not yet a paper tiger.

NIMA: Richard.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, you know, you may be right, Michael. I’m not, you know, I’m not convinced one way or the other about the timing.

I do know that the Chinese have accelerated the development of their military far beyond what they used to do, even when they were already becoming a global power.

They seem to have understood your point and that they need to now develop the military capability, if nothing else, to push the United States away from their border there in Taiwan and the South China Sea and so on. But I think they have resources.

If you exclude nuclear war on the grounds that it’s self-defeating, then let’s remember, you know, the G7 have maybe 10% of the world’s population and the BRICS have 60%. It’s not even close.

Who’s going to fight a conventional war with troops and bodies and people? I mean, it’s horrible to contemplate. And I don’t want to go into the details. And I’m no military expert and I don’t claim to be.

But there is a disparity here, which the United States ignores at its own peril.

We’re not talking about comparable entities. We’re talking about a very small part of the human community on one side and a very large part of the human community on the other. And that carries implications we cannot forget. What even would a victory by the United States mean? If it makes an enemy out of 60% of the people, what kind of a victory have you established?

You may destroy the buildings, you may destroy the economy, but you’ve got all those people who hate you, who see you as the worst thing there is on Earth.

We have been commenting that the Israelis are undertaking a program of dominating the Middle East that will produce an entire century of people who have lost their family members to the Israelis and will not forget this. Is that worth it? Do you realize how much you’re going to pay for all of this? I don’t think so.

And I think it’s going to surprise a lot of these societies on both sides, countries on both sides, how this plays out. I don’t see that the cards are that well-aligned in the West.

I would even argue that part of the reason you have a Trump phenomenon is that, without being explicit, it is a recognition that what they’ve been doing doesn’t work.

When Trump rails against, you know, endless war, that the Democrats are the party of endless war, it’s a little bit of the recognition that this is not working.

They wouldn’t oppose endless war if endless war looked like it was the solution.

And they can do all the skullduggery they want, all of the nasty secret— and they do all that, I understand what Michael is saying.

But that is much easier for Russia and China to replicate, because partly they already do, and they can ramp all of that up. That’s pretty easy, because it all happens below the radar.

And then again, I want to remind people. The G7 is 10% of the world’s people. The BRICS is 60% of the world’s people. Now. And that is an enormous disparity.

You do not want to undertake a war under those circumstances. You’re not talking about the old colonial days when you have a gun and those people don’t. That’s over. And now the numerical disparity begins to have its meaning.

It’s over for the West. They don’t get it yet. They want to act. They want us all to believe. But it’s over. And there’s a relentlessness that’s going on here. And I still would argue that the disintegration of Syria, whatever happens there, is at least as big a problem for the West as it is for the East.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I don’t know if it’s a matter of guns.

Certainly the West does not have an advantage of guns. But, so it says, how can we have a different arena from the military arena? And I said, terrorism is not exactly a gun, but it’s a tactic or a weapon that only the West has because it’s only strategy, precisely because it’s losing, the only strategy it has is chaos to prevent the process of losing to continue.

It says, well, we are going to lose. We’re deindustrialized. We don’t have the military power, the population, the infantry. What we can do is just chaos and try to have other arenas than the military arena.

Otherwise, we’ll lose just as we did in Ukraine. Again, terrorism is one part. Finance is another. Sanctions and trade is another. Corruption is another‚ The national endowment for democracy. The United States is looking at different ways.

And you’ve seen the two big political events of the last two weeks besides Syria. The elections in Romania and in Georgia.

The NATO countries say, we will only let an election be democratic. Democratic means supporting the United States. If it’s a policy that does not support the United States, but supports peace, to support non-fighting, to support not fighting Russia, that’s not democratic by definition.

That’s supporting autocracies. And we’ve nullified elections. You’ve seen that happen twice. The West has suspended elections, basically. You’re having NATO extend its power over countries.

It lost in [South] Korea, but I don’t really know what’s going to happen in [South] Korea. What is going to replace the U.S. puppet leader that was there?

All the leaders of Korea, in one way or another, have always felt dependence on the United States. And after all, the United States still has a huge military garrison there.

So we’re in for a new kind of asymmetrical war, precisely because NATO and the U.S. realizes what Richard says: that it can’t fight in the way that it used to, so it’s being innovative.

RICHARD WOLFF: I don’t disagree with anything. I would only say that the United States has been doing that for a long— it has been using terrorism and covert actions. Periodically, they are exposed here in the United States, and we get to see the extent of it, which is remarkable. And there’s no reason to presume that that hasn’t continued and, if anything, become a more generalized approach.

But again, I understand it. I can’t foresee the future.

The BRICS, for all of the heterogeneous nature of the BRICS, the odd countries that are getting together. That very oddness tells you that there’s something bigger going on that these people are being carried along, even though they don’t fit together very well.

And yet they are becoming de facto allies of Russia and China.

The war in Ukraine, as Defense Secretary Austin said at the outset, early in 2022, was designed to weaken and hopefully break up Russia. That is a colossal failure.

I mean, that is a failure epic in terms of what it has done, in my judgment, in terms of bringing Russia, China, India, and the whole BRICS forward by several orders of magnitude in a much condensed period of historical time.

And the United States can’t get out of this war, that’s its problem now, because it is so counterproductive to what it’s trying to do. It’s shown the whole world that the Russians had military capability no one would have ascribed to them before, not even them, let alone anybody else.

You’d have to really bend yourself into a pretzel to make this a success of the West. And yet they have invested enormously into it.

And the weakening of NATO strikes me as, I mean, I have family in France. I’ve never heard them talk the way I hear them talk now.

They are against their own country’s leadership and its foreign policy on a scale. There’s a reason why the Yellow Vests happened there. There’s a reason why the left parties got together and are now the biggest block in the National Assembly. Mr. Macron is a lame duck leader. He’s got the same political power that Mr. Biden now has. That is, next to none.

And Mr. Schultz is right there behind them. And those are the two powerhouses. England is a joke, you know, a bad joke. And they are all squeezing their working class, which is only making their situation worse.

The Germans. VW is out on strike. VW has proposed a 10% cut in the wages of its workers. That’s its proposal. Of course, they’re out on strike. They have horrible inflation and they’re being told their money wages are going down by 10%. And the way VW goes is the way the rest of Germany goes. They’re a dominant force in that country. And on and on.

You know, the government fell last week in Paris because their budget had service cuts to the mass of people. Which they don’t want. They won’t tolerate.

The right wing and the left wing together are the overwhelming majority and they voted the government out. And they’re not going to let another one like it in.

So the West has extraordinary problems of its own that it is not in this strong position.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what Richard’s comment is leading to is what we haven’t discussed yet. Who really is the greatest enemy of NATO and the United States empire? Well, it’s the United States. It’s going to be the Trump administration.

All the empires have always fallen from within. And it’s the self-destructive character of both the United States and NATO being torn apart by the fact of Americans’ demands that NATO bear the costs of America’s new Cold War.

That’s going to be what really throws its weight in the equation, I think, much more than the Chinese and Russian and British response right now.

It’s the United States that’s self-destructing and Europe that’s self-destructing and is leading to elections that we just mentioned a few minutes ago where populations elected people who do not support NATO.

And NATO and the government are strong enough to say, we control the dictatorships in Europe so strongly that, as Angelina Baerbach said, it doesn’t matter what the voters wanted, we’re running the show.

So the question is, is this going to weaken NATO and be a sign of political falling apart, as Richard’s described as happening in France, but is also happening in Germany and elsewhere? Or is NATO going to win and say, we are now a totalitarian state? That’s what a democracy is. A democracy means you don’t have a vote because that’s instability, as opposed to the autocracies that are supporting policies that the population wants. That’s the real question before us. Who will conquer the American plan for world domination? America or the BRICS?

Listen, I like what Michael just did.

I think it is correct, once you survey the international, to have the very process of what we just did, looking at the international, take us back where it should take us. To that point that Michael correctly makes that the empires of the world, large and small, usually implode. They are not usually conquered.

And remember, the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989, not because the United States did this or that. I mean, the United States’ behavior had a role to play, of course. It’s not that the external plays no role. That’s not what Michael is saying. But he’s saying that the focus, where we should look for the key elements emerging, is domestic.

I would like to take that another step and talk about something that happened here in New York City last week. And I think it’s directly relevant. So, if the press can be believed, and I always say that, I’m not sure it can, but if it can, they have arrested a young man.

And the young man they have arrested, they arrested, or they will charge him with shooting the CEO of the United Healthcare Corporation, which is a medical insurance giant, the biggest of the medical insurance corporations. He shot him on a New York street and killed him. Okay.

This killing could have been dealt with in the way Americans deal with killings, which is to say, our thoughts and prayers go to the victim’s family. Because of their tragedy and their suffering.

However, the overwhelming majority of comments, and we’re talking now about millions, because we’re talking social media. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, X, all of them. The overwhelming comments were not about the victim or the act of murder. They were expressions of unmistakable sympathy with what was explained as the likely motivation of the murder. Because of the words delay and deny and so forth on the casings of the bullets that were used. Okay.

What did the people say? The people of America said they are outraged. I am now interpreting, but I don’t think there’s much dispute here. They are outraged at the suffering imposed on the American people by the insurance companies that take their money and then deny or delay covering their medical needs when they have an injury or an illness.

Well, I remember enough about my reading of guerrilla warfare and social change. What we just saw in the United States was a population whose sympathy is on the side of Robin Hood and not against the people that Robin Hood has stuck an arrow into. And that is a sign.

If I were a leader of the United States, this would worry me on a scale that makes Syria and South Korea irrelevant, unimportant. What you just saw was a statement. And by the way, it’s confirmed. I’ve done the statistics. The cost of medical care is out of control in the United States and has been only becoming more so.

We have a de facto monopoly here. It’s called or it should be called the medical industrial complex.

It is the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors and the medical insurance companies. Those four industries comprise a collective monopoly and they have achieved what no other medical system has in Europe or anywhere else.

It costs more to get medical care in the United States than anywhere in the world. The drugs cost more. The hospital stay costs more. The doctor fees are greater. You name it. We overpay for it.

Near 20% of GDP is going into the medical profession because they can demand it. They’ve got a monopoly.

And people are revolting. And you had the vanguard of the revolt in that young, young man from a wealthy family in Pennsylvania and Maryland. A graduate of University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League institution in this country. He knows what he’s doing. He understands what’s at stake. He knows he’s taking an advanced position.

And now that’s been confirmed by the mass reaction. That’s a sign of a system disintegrating from within. And it’s crystal clear that the people who run these institutions, this monopoly, are full speed ahead doing what they’ve been doing. They’re not stopping. They’re not slowing. Nothing.

And that’s true for all the other leaders of this society, political and economic, which means you’ve got a train heading towards a stone wall with no concept of what is about to happen.

MICHAEL HUDSON: So it’s not really out of control at all, is it, Richard? It’s thoroughly in control. It’s in control by the monopolies.

And it would be if people read the comments in support of the shooter, the most striking comments are by doctors.

And it’s the doctors who are complaining, not merely the patients. And part of this is because of the way in which private equity has taken over medical professions.

The doctor that I’d had for the last 20 years, his practice has just sold out to a private capital controller. And the doctor who took his place has 2,000 patients. Well, I don’t know how a doctor, if you have a one annual visit or things, 2,000 patients, I don’t think he’d have much time for me.

And I’ve had occasion to have some medical treatment at a hospital. And every doctor has limited the amount of time they can meet with me to 20 minutes. It turned out that way. I don’t know what they have in their schedule or what they’re billing for. But my experience is 20 minutes, including with the private physician that I used to have.

So the whole treatment of medical conditions has been changed quite a bit. And it’s disrupted the whole American medical associations fight against what it called socialized medicine. It’s the weighted socialism. And what it has is the horrors of privatized private capital medicine.

And it’s the privatization and control by the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies that have taken away the power that doctors thought that they were going to be able to avoid by fighting socialism.

It turns out that a public medical care, a single payer, where doctors were paid for actually keeping people healthy, would have been much more amenable, both to the doctors and their patients, than the system you have, where the doctor simply takes your blood tests and other tests they do.

They have a checklist and doctors are now part of the automatic intelligence. They say, do the tests. Here’s what it says to do. There’s no time for doctors to use judgment in the United States.

That’s what my retiring personal physician said. He said, it used to be that doctors knew the patients. They were able to take consideration of the whole body, not just here’s a heart problem. Here’s a weight problem. Here’s this. But now it’s just everything is cut in parts and it’s all following a schematic computer-driven automatic response to everything.

So, yes, that’s part of the medical care is certainly part of the collapsing within here, just as it is in Britain.

RICHARD WOLFF: I can give you another example, even though I understand we’re shifting the conversation.

But, you know, it used to be a kind of common sense that you can judge an economic system according to how well it provides food, clothing and shelter. And then you can add medical care and education and a few other things.

But we also have, right alongside our medical care crisis, a housing crisis. The cost of housing and rent is off the chart.

We used to have a rule of thumb that if you spend more than 25% of your income on housing, you’re being abusively treated in your economy. You can’t do it. Well, now the majority of Americans are spending more than 25% of their income on housing. I mean, it’s a failure. It’s like medical care. It’s a failure.

The system isn’t working. These things can be handled one by one. They can be disguised by a public, a mass media system that refuses to expose the reality. That’s like this terrorism that Michael talked about can be used to solve certain kinds of problems in the world. But in the end, you can’t do it all.

You can’t terrorize the world and terrorize your own people out of a standard of living that they were led to expect as their entitlement. The American people don’t have 300 years of abysmal poverty as their comparison. They have the middle of the 20th century when they had a really pretty good standard of living. That is being taken away from them.

And that is a powerful stimulant to the kinds of activities we saw on the street in Manhattan last week. This is a society that is appearing.

And again, let me tell you about emails I get from Europe. They don’t want to visit here as tourists anymore, my family, for fear that they are going to be shot on the street by somebody for something. Now that’s an exaggeration. I tell them that.

But there’s a deeper meaning to their anxiety. That there is a shift going on. And there’s no end to that. That isn’t going to get better. That’s going to get worse. There’s nothing indicating that it’s going to get better.

If anything, the very mentality of Mr. Trump and of the people he’s bringing into power show you that they are upward and onward with more of this. They want less government and less social support. Okay, that’s going to make the rich richer. But that’s not the solution to this country’s problems. Quite the contrary.

MICHAEL HUDSON: So that when President Trump says make America great again, he doesn’t mean going back to what Richard has described the way it used to be, where everybody could afford a house and everybody could afford medical care. It’s, make America even less great by going down the same line.

It’s interesting that the three points that we’ve discussed are, I’ve brought up so often, the FIRE sector. Finance, insurance, and real estate. We started by talking about the health insurance and the shooter said, this is not terrorism. This is a revolution. A revolution is not terrorism. We’re trying to overthrow the system.

Richard just bought housing. Okay. Real estate, insurance, and then behind the whole system is finance. Because just two days ago, I think a combination of Blackstone and other companies have developed huge rental housing projects. Most of the construction in the United States now is not creating housing to sell to homeowners.

It’s creating housing to sell to financial organizations that are buying them as absentee landlords, realizing that now that President Obama has started the big downward slope to replace a home ownership society with a landlord society. Now, there are fewer and fewer homes available to be sold, and we, as landlords, can charge whatever we want.

We can do what landlords in the 19th century were trying to do.

And the whole purpose of classical economics is to take away their power.

The power that landlords used to have over Europe has now been taken over by the financial sector, and rent is for paying interest because the financial companies basically borrow cheaply, buy the rental housing, increase the costs.

And they now have computerized programs to sort of like a computerized conspiracy. The computers tell you exactly how much you can charge for what the market will bear at the absolute limit. So the proportion of housing charges relative to personal income in the United States is going up and up and up, much more than 25%.

In New York, I think there’s a big swath of the population that pays over half of their income for housing now. That’s why there’s so many vacancies in the office buildings. People cannot come to New York and accept a job where half of their income will be paying for rent.

So the office buildings are empty, causing the incipient real estate crisis of holding these zombie office buildings off the market. It’s “lend and pretend.” The banks are lending the money to pay the mortgage so they won’t have to suddenly recognize that the real estate for commercial buildings has been all hollowed out in the United States because of this.

And this hollowing out of housing has aggravated the health and insurance problem because the Center for Disease Control says, we cannot have people wear masks.

We cannot stop the COVID spread by having better air conditioning or by having people wear masks because if we do that, then they’ll stay home instead of going to the buildings. We need them to pretend that there’s no danger of COVID at all so that they can go back into the offices so that they can pay rents so that the owners of the building can pay the mortgages that they owe to the banks so that the banks won’t go bust because all of a sudden their mortgages have fallen drastically in value.

So the whole fire sector is interconnected. That’s the Achilles heel of the American economy and beyond it, the American empire.

RICHARD WOLFF: And that’s where, in my judgment, that’s where the relentless pressure begins that then takes the form of troubles abroad.

Because it really is your home situation that is constraining you. You can’t do this. You can’t do that. And so you can’t do abroad what you once were able to do when you were king of the hill. Coming out of World War II, the United States was king of the hill.

If the dollar is the global currency, you can do all kinds of things you can’t do if the dollar isn’t. I mean, it shows up as an inability to get the head of the central bank in Malaysia to do what you want. But it starts with the inability of you to hold on at home to the position you once were able to occupy.

That’s what happened to the Soviet Union. It could not wage an arms race with the United States and occupy Afghanistan. It couldn’t do it. It could have done one or the other. Maybe at a certain point it could have done them all. By the time we’re talking about it, it had too many demands, if you can allow me, on the surplus it produced.

It could not satisfy those demands. There wasn’t enough surplus to enable them to do it. And at that point, your system collapsed. You know, it can’t function.

I don’t know when that’s coming in this country, but I have a very strong sense that that’s where we are. That is what is happening.

And bit by bit, person by person, country by country, weaker link, less weak link, you are uncovering signs of that.

The Europeans, look, the Europeans have enjoyed an extraordinary game.

Ever since the end of World War II, the United States told them, we will protect you against the Russians. And we will. And you have no other enemy. We will protect you. You don’t have to spend the money on the military. We will. And we’ll do it because our government, by supporting our military, can give the fiscal stimulus to our economy, without which we would go back into depression. So we’re going to do it. And you have an opportunity to provide services to your business community and to your working class without taxing them the money it would cost to have, in addition, a military. So you’ll be able to tax them less and yet provide what they need. It’s nirvana for you as a politician.

But the deal is, you’ve got to be the faithful agent of the United States as your military umbrella. That’s what the deal was. And that worked very well. It allowed the Germans to have their Wirtschaftswunder under Konrad Adenauer and everything that has come since.

It allowed the anti-communist leadership of Italy and France and Britain to come to the top. So they could deliver through the alliance of NATO with the United States. They could deliver more than anybody else. And they could. This was a very well-worked-out deal.

That is now over. That’s what Mr. Trump is trying to tell people. “I’m not paying for it. I’m not doing this anymore. Not because I don’t want to. Because I can’t. I’m not even going to maintain our military anymore. And I’m sure as hell not going to do it for you. I’ll do the military, but I’ll do—

Does he understand what that will do to the American economy? No. Will it do damage here? I guess so.

But first and foremost, it’s going to cripple the Europeans. Why? Because all of those faithful pro-Americans, the Baerbach in Germany. Or Starmer in England. Or Macron. Or Meloni even. These people in Europe. They can’t deliver what they were elected to deliver.

Because the United States is saying to them. You either develop your own military, which will cost you a fortune. Or you’re at our mercy. And we’re going to sacrifice you. And you know how? Well, look at what we’re doing to you now. We’re depriving you of cheap energy. And we’re doing nothing to help you penetrate the Chinese market.

Without the Chinese market on the one hand. And the cheap energy from Russia on the other. They’re finished. They’re dead. They’re gone. And the public in Europe is confronting that reality. What are we going to do in this situation where there is no exit? Where are we? What?

And they are being offered by their leadership nothing. Continued subordination to the United States, which is for them a road down. Or the scary prospect of breaking away from the United States, which is for them a frightening new development that they haven’t seriously considered for 75 years.

The left and the right want to go in the new direction. The middle is terrified. And that’s European politics right this minute. And nobody knows where that’s going to go.

But talk about the future. We might have NATO without Europe, which is back to the United States. And that’s not going to strengthen the United States. It’s going to weaken it.

NIMA: If you remember Donald Trump in his first term, he was talking about building a wall between the United States and Mexico. He said, I’m going to build a wall and Mexico going to pay for it. And right now with these tariffs, new tariffs, he’s going to put on Europeans.

And I do believe the way that he’s talking about China, the tariffs would be on the people in the United States. And they’re going to hit back. This policy is going to hit back.

NIMA: Yeah, of course. And it’s going to begin when Americans understand that the tariff is paid by Americans, not by these other countries, paid by Americans, first and foremost. And part of it may then be picked up by the foreigner to accommodate. But the tariff is going to be a burden on the American economy.

If you allow me, there’s something wonderful about a Republican conservative.

Let’s remember the Republican Party is the political party that for the last century has prided itself on being the party against taxes. That’s how it runs every election ever. For president, for senator, for representative, for mayor of the town, for governor of the state. I’m against taxes.

And what does Mr. Trump have as his number one economic program? Tariffs. Well, tariffs are a tax. Tariffs are just the name of a particular tax. Namely, a tax on imported goods and services that are produced in another country and come into your country for final sale.

In other words, the anti-tax party has become the pro-tax party. You know what that’s a sign of? That everything’s changing.

We are at a moment of enormous shift.

And by the way, this will be the name of that party from now on. It will be attacked by the Democrats for having hurt us with these tariffs.

You can see it coming. This kind of transformation, that’s a sign of social change, if ever you needed one. The old arrangements are finished. We are in a new place. And I understand that people are worried and frightened about it.

But it is as dramatically changing here as it is in Syria or South Korea or France or anywhere else where we see more headlines. Those headlines are coming here and they’re coming here soon.

NIMA: Thank you so much, Richard, for being with us today. We have to wrap it up right now.