NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi everybody, today’s Thursday, July 31st, 2025, and our friend Michael Hudson is back with us. We don’t know if Richard is going to join us yet because it seems that there is a problem in New York City with the energy and the internet. And let’s see if he can join us today. Michael, welcome back.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you for having me.
There’s been power outages all over New York as buildings turn on their air conditioning at 8 or 9 in the morning. There’s a power surge in our neighborhood. The transformer from ConEd burned out, caught on fire. It took them a day to fix that. That was Tuesday.
Yesterday on Wednesday, the buildings turned on the power again after they fixed it overnight. And the feeder cables to the transformers burned out. So in front of my house now, ConEd sent a diesel generator, just like into Ukraine. When the transformers are blown, they have a diesel generator supplying electricity. That’s what’s powering my computer right now with you. And I suspect that Richard has a similar problem with the power outages in New York.
This is happening all over the country, apparently. It’s 102 degrees for the last two days here. And in my apartment, the temperature went up to 84 degrees all night long, all day long, without lights, without electricity, without being able to use the stove. Many people have had to throw out what’s in the refrigerator. That’s life in New York City for the last few days.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let’s get started with what’s going on. The United States and European Union, we know that Ursula von der Leyen was meeting Donald Trump. We had Starmer meeting Donald Trump and the New Deal between the United States and Europeans. You feel that it is a disaster. What’s your take and why do you feel that it would be a disaster?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s an economic disaster, but it’s even more of a military disaster. And I think the only U.S. paper that’s really explained what’s happening is, I hate to say it, the New York Times, which is the paper for the deep state. It’s the neocon paper for the Democratic Party and the Deep State.
Yesterday they quoted Maroš Šefčovič, the European Union Trade Commissioner, who explained what the deal is all about. He said it’s not only about trade, it’s about national security, it’s about Ukraine, it’s about geopolitical volatility. In other words, the explanation for why Europe surrendered to all of Donald Trump’s economic demands was, that was the price for what Europe believes is locking the United States into a much more intensive war of NATO and specifically Germany, France, and Britain against Russia.
The war in Ukraine is only a battlefield. The war is between Western Europe and Russia, and von der Leyen made this very clear. She felt that a surrender economically was necessary.
Obviously, the Europeans are aware that the United States has increased its tariffs sixfold on Europe from 2.5% to 15%, while Europe abolishes all tariffs on the United States. Europe has agreed to pay for U.S. energy six times what it’s paying now. This is physically impossible, you’d think, on the surface, because there’s not even that port capacity.
And Europe has, when I say Europe, I mean one person, von der Leyen. This is not an agreement, really, not a trade agreement. It’s not an agreement by the European countries to go along with Trump’s trade deal. It’s an agreement of really one person, the head of the European Commission, von der Leyen, has negotiated it. And she is single-mindedly, along with Merz in Germany aiming for a build-up of a much more serious war with Russia.
But I want to talk about the economic deal that’s triggered all this, and here’s really what the situation is. I’ve known a number of European professors/PhDs who’ve gone to take a vacation in Marrakesh. What’s happened with Trump saying, I want everything, the whole world, when presenting his asking price to Europe – it was much like an Arab dealer in one of the stalls selling clothes or other things to the European buyer. That’s what I’m told is the typical arrangement or practice of the Arab dealers, just like Trump. They like to begin setting a ridiculously high price and if you’re the usual Arab customer then you say “that’s ridiculous, it’s really only worth 10% of all that” and there’s a negotiation.
Well, my German friends who went, didn’t know they were supposed to negotiate. They think it’s like going into a German department store or a restaurant or any other transaction, and here’s the price, you pay the price. You don’t bargain, you go into a department store and say, “Can you lower the price?” It’s not the mentality. So they essentially didn’t bargain.
I suspect that the Arab stall seller will sort of figure there’s going to be a back and forth. And if the European buyer is the usual inexperienced buyer, they will think, oh, we’ve made such a victory. We’ve got him down 50%. Look what we’ve done. We say 50% on this nice blouse, dress that we bought. And the seller thinks, well, that wasn’t much fun negotiating. It’s taking candy from a baby. I would have gone down to 10%. But they think they won when they’ve got 50%.
That’s exactly how Ms. Von der Leyen is depicting the great victory that Europe has got by having Trump reduce his asking price for the European tariff from 30% to just 15%. And this is presented somehow as if Von der Leyen has acted on behalf of the Europeans to get the best deal she could with the United States.
In my mind, and in the mind of the press a month ago, Europe didn’t have to make a deal. Europe had put together a very good response. And the response was: if you really try to make that demand, then we’re going to make symmetrical counter demands. We’re going to begin to tax America’s internet firms and information technology at the minimum global rate of taxation. So you’re now going to no longer be able to avoid having to pay an income tax. You’re going to have to pay the minimum tax that we’ve done. We’re going to stop importing American products, American bourbon.
In addition, the EU should have said: we’re going to realize that if we can’t trade with the United States as a market, then we’re going to have to turn somewhere else. And there’s only one place we can really turn to: China/Russia, to turn eastwards. And do you really want to drive us out of the U.S. orbit and eastwards?
The EU should have said: and if we do trade with them, then we can no longer afford the military confrontation with them that all of this is about. We’re going to have to think of disarming and really withdrawing from NATO. Again, if there’s going to be a break between the U.S. and European economies, the break has to include a break from our buying the military equipment from the United States.
And the enormous amount of military equipment that Europe has promised to buy – arms that we’ve just seen for the last two years – don’t work. They’re supposed to buy American missiles and missile defense systems. You’ve seen Russia’s ability to have its hypersonic missiles just go right through the European defense. You’ve seen the European military tactics of NATO, all based on tanks. Well, tanks were very important in World War II. They were very important when America went into Iraq. And against countries that are not very militarily prepared, tanks work. But now that you have the new weaponry in the form of drones that have been blowing up tanks, those tanks are no longer the means of warfare.
So what Europe is committed to do is spend an enormous amount of money cutting back its social budgets in order to afford a war budget to buy arms that don’t work for a fight with Russia that looks like it could be really disastrous.
And you’ve already had Merz in Germany saying, we want to restore the power of the Wehrmacht. Well, President Putin has responded, along with Foreign Secretary Lavrov yesterday, that this is not really a war between Russia and Ukraine anymore. This is a war between Russia and Western Europe. Ukraine is only a battlefield in this war. It’s one front of this war, along with Kaliningrad, the Baltic, and all the other fronts that Europe is opening up.
And therefore, if Germany is going to send one of its missiles to Ukraine, that’s able to hit Russia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, or any serious Russian city or other site, then we’re not going to fight against Ukraine which is only the battlefield. We’re going to retaliate against the country that is supplying the missiles, in this case, Germany. And we’re going to retaliate against the arms manufacturers in Germany, against where the missiles come from, the military installations, the power companies that supply the power to these installations the whole bit. That is what all of this agreement is basically about.
What you’re seeing is the Ukrainianization of the European Union. Just as America has had a coup d’état that installed Zelensky’s regime willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, the United States has helped shape the political structure of the European Union, taking negotiating power away from the individual nations that are members of the European Union, taking away the power of European voters to vote for their national parliaments that will have a voice in this, and turned it over to the European Commission, which in effect acts as the public relations arm and negotiating arms of NATO.
So, somehow, what is supposed to be the European Union acting on behalf of the European population has been taken over by neocon cold warriors and advocates of NATO and leaders who really imagine that somehow they can pick up where World War II left off. This time, according to Mr. Merz, this time we will make the Wehrmacht more powerful. Well, President Putin said, the Wehrmacht fought against us in World War II. How did that turn out? And World War I. Germany’s about to become a three-time loser. And Europe has said, well, it’s all about security. Now, by knuckling under to President Trump’s demands, at least we’ve got the United States to support us.
And the amazing thing is at the end of the conference on Sunday, von der Leyen said: one thing that this agreement has created is stability. We now have fixed an agreement that is going to last throughout the balance of Trump’s presidency. He’s never going to change the terms that he’s negotiated on.
This is what’s so crazy. That’s exactly what Trump does again and again and again: change the terms. And Trump has made it clear that, well, this agreement that I’ve dictated to Europe has cut me down to 15%. Well, that’s what we’ve done now. But if Europe gets me angry, if Europe begins to import more electric automobiles in China, or trade with China, or somehow evades the sanctions that I’m going to impose on Russia, then I’m going to have to impose new conditions, conditionalities on Europe.
So there’s no security at all for Europe as what’s going to happen. And yeah, the practice is going to be just the opposite. Once Trump beats an opponent, he squeezes and squeezes and squeezes.
And to give an example of how he’s treated Europe, look at what he’s done in the last week vis-à-vis Russia. He said, I’m very disappointed that Russia’s defeating the Ukrainian army so much. I’m giving Putin 15 days to stop his fight to have a ceasefire so that Germany, France, and Britain can rearm Ukraine, put the missiles there, and build up their defenses so we can really kill more Russians if they try to fight against.
Putin didn’t even respond to that. Obviously, this is just an idle threat. It’s a fantasy. Putin is not going to say, gee, President Trump has asked us to stop winning the war in Ukraine and ending the whole war and finally rolling back the attacks on us. He’s already announced what his plans are again and again. So he’s ignoring them.
The question is: why didn’t Europe simply ignore Trump’s plans and said, well, what are you asking us to do? You’re asking us essentially to impoverish our industry, to offshore our automobile manufacture and our other industries to the United States and to vastly increase our imports from you. This is so one-sided that you would expect Europe to do more than just give verbal protests. Francois Bayrou has said it’s a dark day for Europe. But they’re not doing…
What are they going to do to say that tomorrow on Friday, August 1st, they’re supposed to put everything in writing – so at least we’re going to have, for the first time, spelled out what is expected to result from the agreement. And usually when this happens, there are two versions. There’s the American version of what’s agreed upon, and there’s the version that other countries have of what they think was agreed upon. And in between the time that there was a meeting and the write-up of the summary of the meeting, the Americans have almost always increased their demands on the counterparties. That seems to be the surprise that I expect Europe and the world are going to see on August 1st when they begin to talk about this.
Is this really an agreement or not? It seems to be impossible on the surface that this agreement can actually be followed without not only injuring the European economy, but threatening to break the whole way in which the European Union is organized apart, to break up Europe because of the demands that von der Leyen gave into without any voice of an opposition.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, when it comes to Europe, we know that Europe doesn’t have the money to give it to the United States, after all, increasing from 2% to 5% of their GDP, it’s not, it’s something so big. And with the current situation of the European economy, that is not likely to happen, in my opinion. How Europe is not able to pay the United States? The United States is not able to provide Europe with weapons that they’re asking for. What is that all about? It seems that Russia feels somehow so what would come out of the deal between the two?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I’ve been reading the European press, and what they say is, well, we can fiddle with the 5%. For instance, we promised to pay 5% on national security. But we can say that fighting global warming is national security, because after all, this bad weather is affecting all of Europe. It’s causing a disaster. It’s causing a drought that is interrupting our agricultural production. So we can say for national security in fighting against global warming, all the money we do that is part of it. It doesn’t have to be armaments to fight against Russia.
But this brings up the whole idea of Europe considering the global warming drama to be national security. Certainly makes sense, it should be national security.
But look at the contrast between what the European voters and governments want. They want to stop global warming. They want to prevent the use of coal and they want to stop the dynamic. This is the opposite of what the United States wants. The fighting, the war against Russia, the American military activity in the world has been calculated to be that if the military were a country contributing to global warming, the military effect is equal to that of the 29th largest country in the world. So a big contributor to global warming is the war that Europe has agreed to.
Even more, you have Trump withdrawing from all of the global environmental agreements in the United States. Yesterday, he ended the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules against emissions from coal-burning plants, power plants, and other coal-burning companies. He’s abolished all of the environmental rules and just cut them back.
So the American activities against global warming are diametrically opposed to what Europe considers to be its national security, just like the thought of providing weapons to Germany, missiles to be used against Russia, is not securing security at all, but just the opposite.
Trump has already said, America is not going to be involved in Europe’s war against Russia. We are focusing all of our attention on the coming war with China that we are trying to promote between China and Taiwan in the China strikes, the war in the Pacific. And Trump is trying to convince NATO that NATO’s future fighting is not even going to be about the Atlantic anymore. It’s to be about the Pacific. As if Europe has some interest, national interest for any of its countries in fighting between China and Taiwan, given the fact that the whole growth and the promise of European trade and investment expansion is with East Asia, with China and Taiwan, and the allied countries. All of this is thrown up.
I wanted to add something about the agreements that were made. Think, go back two months to Liberation Day when Trump announced his tariffs. America then followed up Trump’s tariffs with exactly what it had done in 1944/45 with Britain and Europe.
America shaped the post-war order for the World Bank and the IMF with the British loan of 1944. It got Britain to capitulate to U.S. terms for free trade to block other countries from protective tariffs, from protecting their industry, from capital controls. It blocked all of that. And then it went to the continental Europe and said, here’s the agreement that England has already made, and it used that as the model for what it imposed in Europe.
Well, after Trump’s Liberation Day, he made a deal with Britain setting a 10% tariff rate on British exports to the United States. And the response in the European press, if you remember, was, well, we can certainly get a much better deal than the European Union made with Britain.
But they didn’t have a better deal at all. Von der Leyen presented her victory of getting Trump to reduce his tariffs that didn’t exist at that time from 30% to 15% and said, look what we won. But she didn’t really win any reduction in tariffs because there wasn’t any 30% tariff rate. It was in Trump’s imagination. The tariff rate, as I said, was 2.5%, one-sixth of that, and one-quarter of the 10% that America levied on England. A vast increase in tariffs was presented somehow as a victory.
Obviously, the European public and voters are not falling for this, according to the polls that have taken place. And even some of the leaders ostensibly are opposing all of this.
But there doesn’t seem to be any thought of saying, wait a minute, Europe had an alternative. It didn’t have to be this way. Europe had a very well thought-out program of taxing America’s exports, taxing American firms there, and dismantling its military spending.
I remember 50 years ago, the Danish political leader said, We’ve figured out a way to cut our military budget. We’re going to have an automatic telephone answering service with the message, we surrender. That’s all we need. There’s no way that we in Denmark are going to be able to fight against Russia. Why try? Why not say, you’re really going to invade us? Because Denmark knew that Russia was not going to invade. Russia would have to send an army of 20 million soldiers to march westward and invade Europe. And 10 million, 15 million would probably die. In that case certainly the Russian government would fall.
No, neither Russia nor any other country whose rulers depend on their voters and has some semblance of public electoral politics can afford an old-fashioned military war of infantry, of tanks, a land war. The only kind of war that any country can afford, Russia or the United States or Europe, is a war of missiles and drones. Those are the only weapons in which any future war can be fought.
No country in the West or in Asia, no large industrial country can afford the disruption of any kind of war except a missile war. That’s what has been lost in this myth that somehow Europe has won something by winning American defense against a fictitious attack that will never occur in the form of invasion. It would only occur in missiles.
And why on earth would Russia or China or Iran have any interest in blowing up Europe? What does it gain? By not blowing up Europe, maybe someday, President Putin said, perhaps in 30 years, we can begin trading and investing and having a civilized relationship with Europe again. But for the time being, we’re turning our back on it. There’s a break, and we’re turning ourselves eastward. That’s the result of American policy to drive us into harmony not only with China, but with all of Eurasia, the global majority, BRICS, the global south, all together.
That’s what is emerging from all of this. And it’s going to leave Europe isolated, dependent on the United States, but without really having much of an access to the U.S. market.
The U.S. market itself is shrinking because the United States has reached the end of its financial expansion that’s occurred since 1945. It’s the end of an 80-year expansion that’s indebted the country more and more and more to the point that the wage earners, the 50% or 90% of the population, cannot afford to increase their consumption anymore. If automobile loans and the hope of automobile sales is what this agreement is all about, the rate of default in the United States on auto loans has been rising so much that companies are now withdrawing credit for new cars.
There’s no way in which American consumers are going to pay cash for the new cars that Europe might possibly be able to try to market in the United States after paying the 15% tariff. And there’s no conceivable way that a European company can offshore Volkswagen or BMW production here to produce cars here when the American tariff is 50% on aluminum, steel, and other basic inputs. The whole future, the depiction of the future that’s being painted is impossible to achieve in practice.
So it’s not simply that Europe has lost. You could say, well, Europe is really not going to lose because all of this is a fiction. It’s a pipe dream. It can’t possibly turn out the way it’s happened. So what we’re faced with is some degree of anarchy and chaos.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, in terms of the deadline that Donald Trump was talking about to put on Russia, he said on July 29th (two days ago) that the deadline is 10 days. And he added he’s not sure if the tariffs would work against Russia, but after all, he’s going to follow the policy of tariffs.
And it seems that we know that the tariffs on Brazil are getting to 50%. On India, they’re talking about 25%. I don’t know how capable the United States would be to go after China after that sort of chaos with the tariffs.
But how do you see this scene? How do you see the way that Donald Trump, the capabilities of the U.S. government to go after India and Brazil? They’re not talking about Russia when it comes to Brazil, but I would assume the final goal would be Russia and then China. You’re taking that.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, as you know, Brazil has been reorienting its trade towards China, to sell its soybeans to China. It can provide China with the exports that China hitherto was buying from the United States. Last year, China bought zero soybeans from the United States. Chinese imports from the United States have been cut back drastically.
And what Trump has done seems to be something quite obvious. If Brazil and other global south countries – and, you’d think, Europe – are unable to export to the United States, they’re going to look for other markets.
What’s the other main other market? China and the rest of East Asia. So Brazil is already reorienting itself to Asia. And that’s why China, I understand, has been building a new port in Brazil just to facilitate Brazilian trade with China much more. Mexico has already been going down this path, and it’s already been reoriented much of its trade with China and other Asian countries. It’s looking across the Pacific for its trade deals. That is basically what’s happening.
Regarding India, Trump tells India you cannot buy your oil and gas from Russia anymore. You’re going to have this 25% tariff. That’s a huge tariff. And when you think of, well, what is India producing? Well, just in the last few months, India has replaced China as the main exporter of smartphones to the United States.
Well, what’s going to happen now? Is the price of smartphones going to be drastically raised? What is India going to do? It’s been supporting the value of the rupee by buying Russian oil, mixing it with other oil, and exporting it as Indian oil, largely to Europe. There’s been a kind of just pretend country of origin that the European oil importers have gone along with other countries. India has been, along with Turkey, the main beneficiaries of this charade. And Trump threatens to stop the charade.
I don’t see how he can possibly impose the penalties on India that he’s threatened to do without essentially driving India out of the Western orbit. And making it realise, despite its military antagonisms with China: well, there has to be some way in which we can make an accommodation there, we’ve lost the U.S. market.
So, I would think that Trump’s forecasts for the United States are completely fictitious. His forecast is that the trade between Europe and America, Japan and America, Britain and America is going to continue just as it was before, but foreign countries are going to be paying the tariffs, if not foreign countries, then American consumers.
Already, as I think I mentioned last week, steel prices in the United States were raised because of the 50% tariff that Trump has created, raising the umbrella for pricing for steel companies here to raise their prices to what’s available marginally for imports. Well, you’re finding this trade is just not going to occur. So, the tariff revenues that Trump has promised will not occur.
And without these imports, quite apart from if the imports had to be made, consumers would pay and prices would go up. The imports simply will not be available. Well, that’s going to increase U.S. prices also.
You can just imagine what’s going to happen by the end of this year. The U.S. inflation is going to take place. Trump has already threatened the Federal Reserve with a fight to lower the interest rates.
And, he’s brought pressure on Amazon, one country after another, on Walmart, don’t raise your prices. And Walmart and Amazon said, okay, we won’t. And then they’ve raised their prices. They said, well, we can’t afford to go out of business. If we can’t raise our prices, then we can’t afford to make the imports. So, prices will go up anyway.
This is the quandary into which Trump has pushed the United States economy.
He has such a group of bullies around him to browbeat the Republican senators and congressmen and women to support his laws, that nobody in the Republican Party is in a position to oppose him. And the Democrats are overjoyed. Not only can they condemn the Republicans, but Trump is doing what Biden and the Democrats and the deep state wanted to do all along, but were not able to do.
Trump has been the apotheosis of the Democrat-Republican joint mobilization for a military confrontation with Russia and China and for the economic increase in prices to push up corporate profits, the stock market, all over the short term. To be sure, at the cost of labor; but they really believe that, well, there’s no third party in the United States. There’s no American equivalent to the Alternativ für Deutschland or the nationalist parties in other countries, because they’re only the Republicans and the Democrats, and they’re pretty solidly behind what’s happening.
Well, just imagine what’s happening with the dollar falling 12% against the Euro since Trump took office. That means that the European investors in the United States, whether it’s a European company holding an American factory or producer, or the European government or private investors that have bought U.S. bonds or stocks or treasury securities, have been losing in their own currencies the equivalent valuation, because stocks and bonds and corporate corporations denominated in dollars are worth less and less.
So the balance sheets of European corporations are going to be showing a loss, while in the United States, U.S. multinational firms with affiliates in Europe and Asia and other countries are showing a huge capital increase in the dollar valuation of assets in countries whose currencies have risen instead of gone down. I know that’s sort of hard to balance in your mind, but this is how corporate accountants think and how the balance, how it’s really put the class war in business between finance and monopolies and the heavy industry on the one hand against the labor force on the other hand.
You’re having a real squeeze in the United States that’s going to be very much like the squeeze that Europe is going to be feeling. And this is going to spur even more nationalistic feeling in the United States, just as it’s spurring a nationalistic response in Europe.
But the nationalistic response in America doesn’t have a political vehicle for voters to express themselves, whereas Europe does have a vehicle unless you live in Romania, where they simply nullify the election of a nationalist, or in Germany if it succeeds in banning the right-wing parties.
Essentially, you’re having Europe dropping the democratic facade, the illusion of Europe as a democratic government reflecting the will of voters instead of following the plans handed to its politicians by NATO, with Ms. von der Leyen as the intermediary putting the demands into their hands.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, before wrapping up this session, when you look at the United States today under the Trump administration, they have tried with the war in Ukraine, somehow put pressure on Russia. They couldn’t do it. Militarily, they’re not capable of defeating Russia.
In the Middle East, with the case of Iran, we had the same CNN reported that in 12 days of war, the United States has spent 25% of tap missiles, the air defense system that they sent to Israel. 25%. Just imagine how was that.
Economically, you look at the way that they have treated China, they’re treating Brazil and Russia and India.
What is the current face of the American policy? Because if they go militarily, they’re going to lose. If they go economically, they’re going to lose. This sort of desperation, is that going to make the United States more dangerous? Is that going to make them somehow understand the situation or find a solution for what’s going on?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s more dangerous because Trump seems to be crazy.
I think you’ve had a lot of great guests on your show, and there’s a common denominator. They’ve all pointed to a seemingly obvious point. The United States has depleted its supply of missiles, tanks, and arms to supply Ukraine and to supply Israel. If there is a serious war, how is it going to fight a war without weapons? Europe and the United States will be in much the same condition of Ukraine: without weapons. It has manpower, but what can this be done without weapons?
So we’re back to the point that there’s only one way of any serious military war being fought. That’s by long-distance missiles.
And Russia does not need atomic missiles. It has developed such a lead in technology over the United States with its hypersonic missiles as we’ve seen demonstrated already in Ukraine, just as Iran has developed such a technology as we’ve seen in what it was able to do in Israel, that any kind of a military confrontation between the United States and Europe on the one hand and other countries is bound to lose.
And the question is: if the United States doesn’t have any defense against the Russian or Iranian or Chinese missiles, if it doesn’t have the ability to draft an army to try to invade foreign countries, if it doesn’t have any supply of tanks and weapons and artillery to supply, then all it has is atomic weapons.
Remember, we’re having somebody who’s had COVID quite a few times, and people are quite frankly worrying about his sanity. He seems, he’s acting like a crazy person.
Now, is this like President Nixon pretending to be crazy? Hey, you don’t know what he’s going to do, so you better surrender because you don’t know what he’s going to do. When actually, Nixon wasn’t crazy, he was very calculating. That was part of the strategy that people were talking about: act crazy, and other countries will back down because they don’t want a tectonic war.
But what if Trump really is crazy? What if it’s not just a very clever act, and he’s really very dumb, and he has ideological cold warriors telling him what to do, advising him, bringing peer pressure on him, and we may really be risking atomic war?
Presumably, the army in the United States is strong enough to say: well, if Russia retaliates against missiles sent by Germany, France, or Britain against these countries, this is their war. Thank God that Trump and America have pulled out of the war with Russia to concentrate on China.
America is not going to come to the aid of Europe, just as if the Baltics try to create some attack on Russia to close off the Baltic Sea from Russian tankers and Russian trade going to the West. Or what the American general in Europe has been threatening: we can take Kaliningrad in a single day. An attack on Kaliningrad is an attack on Russia just as much as an attack on the Kirsch Bridge and Crimea would be an attack on Russia.
This is really a red line. And Russia has not had any reason to really fight militarily against the red lines that are crossed, because by going slowly in Ukraine in the way it’s been doing, it’s actually been gaining an enormous advantage because this time it has not only depleted the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian military supply, but it’s depleted – I hope – Europe’s willingness to pursue what obviously is a losing venture. The Wehrmacht is not going to be able to win this time around.
I don’t know how to get this through to the United States, but if Merz is not replaced, much of Germany will, in Putin’s word, no longer exist.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, quite dangerous. Michael, when it comes to the nuclear bombs. What?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Your other guests have said the same thing, haven’t they?
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Actually, everybody’s afraid of a war with nuclear bombs because this sort of desperation that could bring that sort of war, which.. but in terms of what the United States would do and what Russia’s capacity is, and how Russia would respond.
Yeah. Russia doesn’t need atomic war to wipe out with this new hypersonic missile or whatever. They can have the same sort of impact and even greater than that without using nuclear bombs. Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I’m always happy to bring good news.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: See you soon, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you.
Transcription and Diarization: hudsearch
Editing: ton yeh
Review: ced
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
