NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, March 6, 2025, and our friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are back with us. Welcome back.

RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here.

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NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started, Michael, with the article in the Financial Times in which it says that three European countries, France, England, and Germany, had announced that they will make any agreement reached between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin inoperative. What does that mean, Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it means two things. For one thing, they want to re-arm the Eurozone, basically.

You had a few days ago, Starmer in England coming out and saying, we’ve got to grab as much of the $300 billion that the EU has seized from Russia and spend it on arms. And Starmer said, this can be a revival of English, British industry. He says, we’re going to send a big chunk of it to Belfast to the British military industrial complex to begin making arms.

Macron now has said, well, we’re going to send it to France. The Germans say, we’re going to send it to Mertz, who said, we’re going to spend it in Germany.

And the Germans and Europeans have made military spending exempt from the Eurozone restriction that running a budget deficit be limited to just 5% or less of GDP. They say, all limits are off. We’re going to have a militarized economy.

And the article you cite is a very bellicose article by Ganesh saying, Europe must trim welfare to fund warfare. Well, the Europeans today, just after he wrote the article, which already was posted yesterday, said, No, no, we don’t have to cut welfare. We can do it both. Military is our new welfare. It’s going to be employing Europeans that will lead to a revival.

And the result is that today the bond market in Germany crashed by about 5%. When the bond prices go down, that means interest rates are going way up because the bondholders say, this is going to be very inflationary.

If Germany announced it’s going to increase its military spending from under 2% to 3.5%, the economy itself is going to be shrinking 1% a year. This means that the non-military part of the economy is going to shrink very rapidly by about 5%. It means unemployment. It means cutbacks.

And the Financial Times put a happy face on all of this in its editorial page. There are editorials all over the place on this saying, No, the reason that interest rates are going up is European executives and industrialists are so happy that we’re now going to have a military revival, that they’re all borrowing money to invest in the new prosperity that we’re going to make by providing the arms to give to Ukraine. And they say the virtue of this is that it makes any agreement that Trump may make with President Putin of Russia inoperable. Because the whole idea of what Trump was trying to do,his fantasy was that somehow Putin and Lavrov and the Russians will say, all right, we’ll do, we’ll make the same mistake now that we made last time when we had an agreement that there will be disarmament and will stop the hostilities while you move in all of your military forces to make sure that you can attack us and just pretend to actually have peace while you’re actually planning to attack us.

And the Europeans say that’s just exactly what we’re going to do. And we’re announcing that we’re going to do it so that there will be no chance that Russia can ever say, yes, we agree to a cessation of hostilities.

Well, that means that Trump will not get the public relations push that he’d been promising. And it’s as if, if you look at the last 200 years, you’ve had three bellicose European countries attack Russia. You had Napoleon in 1812, he lost in the Battle of Borodino. You had England in the Crimean War. It lost in 1853. The 500s rode into the guns and gloriously died for their country. And then you had Hitler in Germany in 1945. You know, that failed.

But the Europeans together with the European Union leader, von der Leyen, and the crazy Estonian lady [Kaja Kallas] said, it’s true that all three of us lost to Russia. But if we all do it together, we can win. And we can win without the United States.

And so the question is, how are they going to get the money to do it? And there’s some of the countries are blocking the loosening of the limitation on how large a budget deficit can be. Hungary and other countries are doing it.

And so there’s renewed pressure from the United States to grab the $300 billion that the European Union has sequestered from Russia.

Now, one of the discussions between [Trump] and Putin that have been openly discussed is that any agreement that, you know, we’re going to talk about the settlement, that you have to drop the sanctions against Russia, you have to give us back the act of war that Europe and the United States have done by confiscating the $300 billion in foreign reserves we have.

And the French especially are arguing, with the English. The French are saying, well, it’s a really, really, it’s, this breaks all of the international laws, and nobody’s going to agree to keep their foreign reserves in euros anymore, if they see that we can do it.

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Well, today, as I said, the Financial Times, not only Ganesha’s article, but the American advisor, Philip Gordon, to the Biden administration, the National Security Administrator, said, you know, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not the case at all. Of course, we can, we have the right to do it. And we can tie it up in international law, we can say that international law, this is a response to, to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

So we’re back with this whole false narrative that’s underlying, the European policy and the European press, the Guardian in England, and I’m sure the French and the German press are also behind all of this revival.

So giving this money to Ukraine means giving it to the European and American military industrial complex to essentially rearm.

Well, what’s goofy here is that how long, how long is it going to take to produce these arms to give to Ukraine, we’re talking about a three to four-year period of actually turning this money into actual arms. Well, obviously, it can’t be done.

And well, President Trump is pressing for a very fast resolution. He wants to arrange to go to Russia to meet with Putin as quick as possible so that he can say, we have a win. And maybe people will look at that instead of looking at Israel and Gaza. We have a win.

He will hear from Russia saying, well, I know you want it quickly, don’t worry. We are going to make an agreement very quickly. There’s almost universal agreement in the European and American press that the fighting in Ukraine cannot go more than two to four months longer without the Ukrainian army being totally defeated and Russia going right up to the Dnieper River in Ukraine and along the sea-coast to Odessa.

Well, you can see how Trump has already said, well, we’ve just made what we call a rare earth agreement with Ukraine. Well, it’s not about rare earth at all. It’s about the ports, and there’s one port in particular, Odessa, which would be turned over to the United States. And it’s about the gas pipelines and the infrastructure.

The reason that Trump and the American press call it rare earth is because that’s not what’s really important. What’s really important is the very things that are going to be a deal breaker with Russia. If President Trump meets with President Putin and says, well, we’ve just made a deal, you know, we’re going to have peace, but we’ve made a deal with Zelensky that he’s giving the ports to us. So we really can’t let you take Odessa. And Putin will say, well, we’ve just had to send a big Iskander missile, two missiles, to blow up the arms delivery to Ukraine that somehow got into the Black Sea, carrying all sorts of arms that were loaded up in Turkey from the NATO countries into Ukraine. We’re not going to let Ukraine and the neo-Nazis there have control of the port that they can use to destabilize and bomb our ships throughout the Black Sea, as we’ve been doing. So that’s a deal breaker.

So I think it’s as if the European belligerent countries, England, France, and Germany, have gotten together and say, what can we do? What are the pressure points to completely prevent any kind of an agreement between Trump and Putin from coming forth? And I think that Trump is going to try to then blame, either he’ll blame Europe or Putin, he’ll always find somebody to blame, but the fact is that his whole fantasy is inoperable.

And I think there’s one argument that I think Russia can put, and I’m sure it’s going to put it explicitly, and say, well, there is a way that hostilities can stop and stop very soon. You know, Mr. Trump, it’ll take two months, maybe three or four. And that is to ask everybody, look at where all of this fighting is leading. Every military analyst, especially the ones that Nima has on his show, have said that the Ukrainian army is collapsing, the recruits are running away, the army is retreating, they don’t have control of the air power anymore to stop things, they’ve run out of munitions, and they’ve run out of missiles to shoot, they’re exhausted, and we’re in the very final stage now of the fighting.

So yes, there can be a ceasefire on the following terms, let’s say, sit down and say, let’s look at where all this is leading, let’s look forward four months, let’s look at what things are going to look like in August and September. And by August and September, there won’t be a Ukrainian army anymore, we’ll be in control of Ukraine, and we’ll be cleaning up the Nazis there.

So let’s have the ceasefire based on the assumption that indeed, we’re going to have all the land up to the Dnieper and all of the land along the southern coast of Ukraine, the northern boundary of the Black Sea, and accept that reality as a fait accompli. And in that sense, you know, we’re willing to, if you will accept where the dynamics of the situation are leading, then we can have a ceasefire, because you’ll retreat, you’ll withdraw all of your forces, you’ll disarm.

Well, Zelensky’s being told, well, you don’t have to disarm. And even if you disarm, we’re going to be there supplying you with troops. Macron wants to send troops. Starmer wants to send troops and weapons that they really don’t have. So the discussion dissolves into fantasy at that point.

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But I think Trump’s dream, he’s going to get very angry. He did not discuss a word of any of this. It is a boring State of the Union speech. I thought there was talk that he was going to announce the withdrawal from NATO. Nothing like that. He basically prepared the ground for saying that by saying, I’m the greatest president since George Washington. Well, maybe George was second best to me. And I’m going to protect America and make it strong again to sort of prepare his Republican constituency for believing that somehow, OK, he’s going to prepare us. He’s not going to be losing the war with Russia. But somehow he’s hoping that he can receive the Nobel Peace Prize for arranging the peace with Russia.

I mean, the irony is he may receive it in jail as a war criminal for supporting what he’s doing in Gaza and Israel. But that’s the irony of history.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, just before going on what you want to talk about, let me add something to what Michael said, the German government spokesman said that Germany doesn’t plan to reestablish natural gas supplies from Russia or restore the Nord Stream to gas pipeline. Unbelievable. Go ahead, Richard.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think the way to understand this is, let me come at it from a slightly different angle.

I think that the leaders of France, Germany and England are in very, very deep difficulty at home as political leaders, all of them, the newly elected Mertz in Germany. But likewise, the long ago elected by a fluke, let’s remember Mr. Macron, and by another kind of fluke, the wholesale withdrawal of British voters from the Conservative Party, which allowed Mr. Starmer to get in there, they are all in deep trouble.

According to public polling, Mr. Mertz is taking over a government that is basically the continuation of the Schultz government with Mr. Schultz’s party, his partner, as he was Schultz’s partner before. This is the same old, same old.

These are politicians whose entire political career has been as junior partners, I’m being polite here, a synonym would be lackey of the United States, right? And they have discovered that the United States, their backer, their liaison, their supporter, is abandoning them, and therefore they are due for a political collapse. They have no support anymore. Their own people don’t want them, and the United States is less and less interested.

I mean, the absurd visits of Macron and Starmer to Washington last week, when they were spoken to as if they were visiting cousins who you couldn’t reschedule for a later time, everything they hoped for, not given to them, culminating in the Zelensky theater at the end of the week. I mean, these were demonstrations of absurdity.

And what you’re getting here is the behavior of desperate politicians. That’s really all this is, snatching those 300 billion from the Russians, every major financial advisor has told them the obvious, you will pay a long-term price because no shaky government in the world will leave its money in Europe ever again because of what the Europeans are prepared to do with it. This is a bigger blow to the importance of Europe than anything having to do with Ukraine. Why would you do, you know, keep going, a losing war? You have to be desperate to do that.

And reaching across the political divide in this country to do something together with the Democrats? Notice that the Financial Times carries an article by a Kamala Harris advisor in the same spirit as what these three Europeans, that’s going to solidify that the United States government now and government for the next four years will look upon the Europeans as traitors, people dealing with the Democratic Party, coming across with notions about protecting Ukraine was bad enough before, but now it’s out in the open, and Mr. Trump has no reason not to make a big deal of this bizarre evolution.

So these are not different from, they’re additional to the points that Michael is making.

Now, let me take it a step further. NATO always was an arrangement peculiar to its moment in history. At the end of World War II, you formed NATO for two reasons. Number one, Western capitalism was more threatened by our socialist and communist movements from below than it had ever been.The leaders of the resistance to the Nazis in Europe were communists and socialists from Norway in the north to Italy in the south.

So the first thing NATO had to do was deal with that problem. And if you go back and you read Churchill’s speech in Missouri, he put that first. NATO’s first brief was to hold back communism. And the second one was to make an enemy out of the Soviet Union because it was necessary for the Europeans to see the communism that had come up in their own countries as if it were a foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Very useful.

On that basis, you could go at a joint attack on both of them. Attack anti-communism at home, and we know that that’s what they all did to their varying degrees of success, and an enormous block against Russia.

And the whole thing would allow the United States, the only country that came out of World War II economically, to pay for it. With the game, we’re going to pay for it because we’re the only ones who can sell what it is we’re going to buy. So “we’ll protect Europe” is a fancy way of saying we’re going to give money to our defense apparatus, the likes of which no one had ever seen, which was a tall order. Because normally after a world war, you would demobilize your military. We didn’t. We jacked it up. So it worked beautifully. We got the right-wing governments in Europe. We, you know, look at what happened in Greece, where we literally cut a deal with Stalin about the Greece and the rest of the Balkans, on, and it was very obvious what was going on in hindsight.

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All of that is over. Russia is no longer the Soviet Union, and the left has been defeated. It’s still there, but it is disoriented, and it is poorly organized. That will change. That is already changing. But it is for the moment true. So what do you need a NATO for? Answer, nothing. NATO is nothing. Those three countries, when you quoted earlier, I believe Michael did, that one of the leaders said we are more, you know, we are unified now. No, you’re not. You’re not unified at all. If you pursue this policy, you will fracture.

And I’m not even talking about all the things the United States can and will do. If you declare war on the United States, they will declare war back on you. And I don’t mean military war. I mean now, okay, here’s the single largest problem of Europe, just so people get it. Europe is a disunified place. It’s got lots and lots of countries, big and small. Every one of them worries about the loyalty of the other ones. When Mr. Trump comes and offers good deals to one of them, and then another of them, he won’t get any of them? Don’t be silly. Of course he will. And the suspicion in Paris about what the Germans might be negotiating, and in both of those places, what the British might be doing, and the Italians, and oh my goodness, that’s what makes Europe poor as a player.

And the last thing blows my mind. “We are unified.” Yeah, but the Russia you’re thinking of opposing is now part of the BRICS as the ally of China. Are you kidding? You really want to develop your military with the Americans hostile towards you on one side and the Russia-China BRICS? You’re crazy. This is the behavior and the mentality of people who are desperate. And if they take their steps, which I think they will, because it will certainly please the people they’ve always pleased, the industrialists, the financiers, the people who run Europe. But they are going to pay a price. They cut the welfare. That has been the uniform gift to the European masses for the last 75 years. You start really taking that away. I don’t mean nibbling. They’ve been nibbling. But I mean really taking it away. You’re going to see a swing to the far right and the far left that make what you’ve already seen look like nothing in comparison.

Only desperate politicians, especially in the history of Europe, would do this. They really are seeing. And you can see, look in the eyes of von der Leyen or any of the others. You look closely, you see desperation and anxiety. These are people heaving Hail Mary passes down the field, and they don’t care anymore because they know it’s over.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think it’s more like resolute hatred. I think you’re right when you commented at the beginning that the European leaders seem to be weak relative to what the population wants.

We know that the population wants exactly what you’re talking about. They want social welfare. They don’t want a war in Ukraine to interfere with their cost of living through the higher electricity and gas prices, through cutting back of the social welfare programs, especially housing, which is going way up.

And yet the leaders are ensconced in their position. You just had the election in Germany where you had Mertz, the candidate from BlackRock, where he used to work, looking forward to BlackRock taking over much of Ukraine on the deal that is being arranged by Trump. Just like BlackRock has just taken over the Chinese holdings of the Panama Canal in the last few days. China realized that the U.S. was about to attack it or do something very unpleasant to it with the Panama Canal. So it sold the port development that was initially thought of as being part of its Belt and Road initiative.

The Europeans are trying to figure out, well, what’s their cover story going to be? And certainly you get it from Starmer’s speeches in the last few days. “Well, we wanted to continue to fight and bleed Russia, but Trump and the U.S. let us down. It’s not our fault. We did our best.”

But that excuse that they’re using assumes or pretends that the voters actually wanted Europe to defeat Ukraine instead of avoiding it. Richard pointed out the fact that even if the sanctions are lifted against trade with Russia, it doesn’t matter that Germany has already said, well, we’d already stopped importing gas and oil before the sanctions were on. We don’t need sanctions to prevent us from buying gas.

Essentially, Mertz came out and said the last 100 years of international trade theory are obsolete. For 100 years, 200 years in England, people have said, talked about the gains from trade. The idea is that country’s trade with each other so that you can buy something less expensive abroad. And everybody produces what they’re best at producing at. And so countries gain by obtaining an international specialization of labor to produce and consume many more goods than they would have had if they each had to be independent and autonomous and self-reliant.

Well, all of that’s out of the ordinary. Mertz and the other German people say foreign trade is a dependency. It’s a hostage. If you import from any country, you are hostage to blackmail that they may not export to you. And why would we want to buy Russian gas when it can hold us as a hostage and stop the gas to us and turn off our spigots if we don’t do what it wants?

And underlying this is, what does Russia want? The Germans say Russia wants to march through Belarus to Poland and Germany right to France. And we’re going to have to fight them in France if we don’t fight them here.

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Well, obviously, Russia has zero interest in losing 10 million soldiers or however many it takes to march through. I think Russia has realized that what you’ve just been discussing, Richard, has turned it into a dead zone economically. And it will remain a dead zone until there is a left-wing revival. But as you pointed out quite correctly, there doesn’t seem to be that on the horizon.

I was very disappointed, as we discussed last week, when the Sarah Wagenknecht party just missed getting the 5% limit. It had over 4.9% of the vote, but not quite 5%. So this was the single left-wing party in Germany that was very strong. The Die Linke party, the old left party that Sarah left, is not that left-wing anymore. The more termed neoliberal, the American policy ever since Gladio in Italy, has indeed ended up destroying most of the left.

We can only hope that President [Trump] stopping of [US]AID, meaning essentially the League for Economic Democracy , is going to stop all of that subsidy of right-wing journalism. But for the time being, there isn’t really a left, and I’m not sure how it will really develop, but I think Russia is not going to have the faith that Europe is going to have a realistic policy that meets its material interests of raising living standards and re-industrializing. It seems to act as if it had a death wish, economically.

So that is why Russia is turning eastward, turning to China, Asia, Central Asia, the Near East, Africa, and the global south.

So it strains credulity for Macron and his colleagues to say, well, Russia somehow wants to invade us and is a threat. All they can do is the old Goebbels argument. You can always get a population behind you if you say we’re threatened. Well, the voters, as you’ve pointed out, Richard, don’t feel threatened, but the media are trying to whoop them up, and they actually believe what they’re saying.

And I don’t think von der Leyen is really frightened. She and the Estonian [Kaja Kallas] are so motivated by hatred. These are people who have a Nazi background. These are people who really, really hate any thought of the left wing. Now, so you no longer have the situation that you had in 1945.

I must say that’s partly because it’s Stalin’s fault. When at Yalta, when the British prime minister passed a piece of paper across the table to Stalin saying, here is how we’re going to divide up the country, Stalin accepted what Churchill said. And Stalin agreed to assign Greece to the British sphere of influence because Britain wanted to control the Mediterranean as the route to the Near East. And Stalin let the Communist Party of Greece, which is one of the strongest Communist Party in the world, be destroyed. That was the horror of Stalin’s betrayal of the international revolution as what led Tito to create a really genuine workers’ state in Yugoslavia, and led to the break of Yugoslavia away from the Soviet Union. That was the only hope.

There’s no thought today of a Titoist type of workers’ control and workers’ structure, and that’s why in this fight against socialism that you’ve described, the number one enemy for which they assigned Jeffrey Sachs to destroy was Yugoslavia. They had to break it up because it was Yugoslavia that provided the most efficient and workable model of workers’ control and labor control and integration, and that’s why the IMF and Sachs was sent in to smash it up. I know that he’s made amends by making very good speeches now, but the history is unfolding pretty much just as you described.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add, if I may, Nima, I think that the French, the Germans, and the British are lining up behind a war scare. The articles in the Financial Times, the very titles, warfare instead of welfare, that’s it, that’s the only card they have to play. The support of the welfare state they don’t do, they never have done it, it wouldn’t look genuine if they tried it now. So they’re going to go down that road.

And let me tell you why, in one last way of doing this, why this is crazy.

They are going to be lined up against two major alternative powers, the United States on one hand, and China, Russia combined on the other. Those two parts of the world are already many years ahead of Europe in the level of military technology, in the level of military production they can undertake, and they are working night and day to get in their struggle with each other to get even further ahead.

You know who’s far behind? The Europeans, and they’re not going to catch up, they don’t have the money for it, they don’t have the political support for it. This is a desperate way for a few leaders with a short future to try to hold on for as long as they can. That’s it. That’s why I call it a Hail Mary pass. This is not a thought through. This is desperate. They came back, Starmer and Macron, came back and told the Germans that they got absolutely nothing in their visit to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Zelensky even less.

In the days since the Zelensky visit, the United States has announced a reduction in the intelligence that they provide to Ukrainians. They’re leaving. And if you think the Russians were able to win as much as they have when they were facing the combined US and Europe, then what do you think is going to happen when it’s Europe all by itself?

This is a joke. This is a desperate effort. That’s why they have to resuscitate the danger that Russia will come. And they have to give it a five year, it’s going to happen in five years.

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Normal human beings are able to understand that absolutely nobody knows what’s going to happen in five years and never did. Nobody understood where we would be now six months ago. So this notion, we have to take away welfare from you in order to build up a military in a world where our two potential adversaries are light years ahead of us.

Remember, Europe has not developed its own military for 50 years. It is a trivial military. It’s got to start— this is a joke what you are doing. And by the way, to give the joke the ominous edge it ought to have. Right now in Beijing, in Moscow, and in Washington, the calculations are beginning. Okay, we have the Europeans opting out. Now we have an agreed enemy. The three of us, Moscow, Beijing and Washington, can get together and agree to live together while they all consume Europe.

And the Europeans being weak economically, weak politically, weak militarily, they’re the obvious choice. And to then be the loud mouse that roared, gets you stepped on. Very, very dangerous. You’re seeing desperate leaders risking everything in what they are doing. And it will come back and haunt them for a long, long time.

On the other hand, I don’t think they’ll be in power very much longer anyway.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there’s one very serious problem that— I guess I should escalate the problem.

You were right that the whole fight by NATO after World War II was against socialism and the threat of socialism.

But the fight is much more serious now. It’s a fight against government itself. You have Trump and the right-wing libertarian policies in Europe, the Alternative for Deutschland and the Italian corporate state, opposing the whole idea of government.

And you had, in the last few days, you’ve had Trump’s proposal by his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, on Sunday, saying that we’ve got to get rid of the government itself. That’s what Musk is doing, to essentially disband all of the government.

And that’s because libertarianism in free markets is a concept of centralized economy, centralized planning. But the centralized planning by libertarians and Hayek and the free marketers is decentralized planning in the hands of Wall Street and the financial sector.

You take planning out of the hands of government and, hence, elected officials and put it in the hands of the people who you’ve seen around Trump in his speeches and ever since being elected president. It’s the billionaires who are in charge of planning.

And when Musk goes to Germany and says, “We want you to vote for Alternative for Deutschland,” he’s not saying, “Vote for Sarah Wagenknecht on the left for a peace instead of war in Ukraine. Vote for the party that wants to get rid of all social welfare spending.”

And indeed, you had the so-called Social Democratic parties of Germany was the big loser in the election a few weeks ago.

So what you’re fighting now is not only against socialism, but against social democracy, Keynesianism, the whole idea of a mixed economy with government having certain social functions and providing services to the population, healthcare, education, so that employers do not have to pay labor high enough wages so that they do not have to pay these things out of the wages.

You’re having an attack on government itself, and that’s what leads the United States to throw its political support behind the right-wing parties that were described.

And the Commerce Secretary in America says, “We want to have a new measure of GDP without government. The real economy is without government because the government doesn’t produce services that people want. These services can be done by privatization. Margaret Thatcher was right. We’ve got to make Europe and America just what happened in England under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.”

And you have the Social Democratic parties joining in this privatization anti-government fuse, which indeed is why the Social Democrats lost in Germany and why the Labor Party looks like Starmer will be thrown out of office.

But with essentially only the right-wing anti-Social Democrats, really the corporate economy.

And Mussolini said, “We shouldn’t call it fascism. We should call it the corporate state because it’s a state run for big business because that’s what makes the profits and that’s what the economy is all about, not social welfare.”

So if that’s the case, then Europe is going to essentially fight to the last member of the working class. I don’t know how you’d make the parallel with fighting to the last Ukrainian, but the situation of the Trump administration’s backing this anti-government feeling to dismantle government. So even if there is a revived left-wing movement such as you and I would like to see, Richard, there won’t be the institutional apparatus surviving to become a vehicle to provide the welfare.

That’s what’s really making Europe going way down and losing. That’s the European death wish very well subsidized by the United States and it’s the death wish of the Republican libertarians under Trump as well.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, just before going to make your point, can I ask a question? Then you go and may add something to what Michael said.

And the question is, why does Europe need Russia to be their enemy, the enemy of Europe? Are they really afraid of themselves? If there is no enemy out there, they’re going to fight with each other? That’s the reason? How do you see this? Well, let me try to get at it a little bit indirectly and maybe a little bit disagree with Michael.

RICHARD WOLFF: I agree with him that this libertarian ideology, which it’s very hard for me to take seriously, the notion that the government is the bad guy without ever asking the question, why exactly would the government be the bad guy since it’s a government owned and operated by the very people who are giving you the argument that it is a bad guy?

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If it’s a bad guy, if it’s because of what they make it do, who the hell else? I mean, it’s very strange to get angry at the servant rather than at the master who’s telling the servant what to do. It’s the same mistake as, you know, blaming the messenger because you don’t like the message. It’s very strange. But put it aside.

I think you have desperation to make Russia evil because it’s the closest you can get to making government evil. You remember, you always have this problem for the libertarian. He demonizes what he is. He’s the government. But he has to act in this bizarre way.

Like Mr. Lutnick. He has to be in the government, which he declares is the total evil. And so he’s going to go out by self-destructing his government. Very odd kind of thing. But we’ve seen it. Thatcher, Cameron, the whole period of many years of the dominance of the conservative party in England, which ended up self-destroying because it doesn’t work in modern capitalism.

The most successful capitalism of the last 25 years is the Chinese, who have a very powerful government. They’ve worked this out. They have a private sector, big and important. They have a government sector. They have a Communist Party and the government. And they’ve made it work. You don’t like them. You may. That’s a different matter. But they’ve gotten the economic growth that dwarfs Europe and the United States by comparison. Not even close. Chinese growth year after year is two to three times what it is in the West. And there’s no end of that in sight this year as well. Okay.

So what is the leadership going to do? They’re going to hype their old ideology. It’s the government. We get rid of the government. Everything will get better. They’ve tried that. They’ve tried that in England. They’ve tried it elsewhere. There’s no sign that that works.

And there’s nothing comparable to what the Chinese have accomplished, who are at the other end of the private state spectrum. We don’t have the Soviet Union, which went further. We have the hybrid of the Chinese, but they’re the dominant player.

So this is a game. We’re going to get rid of the government. Okay, let’s suppose they do that. There is no reason for anyone to believe that this is going to somehow vote them over what’s going on in China and Russia, where the government plays a much larger role.

Nothing has happened in the West over the last half-century that has dissuaded the Chinese or the Russians from a big, powerful role from the government. You know why? Are they stuck in an ideology? Well, more or less so than we are. They would have adjusted. In fact, the Chinese did. And part of the reason the Chinese have a big private sector is they wanted certain benefits to come from that, which they have achieved while holding on to their hybrid.

So for me, again, I don’t want to beat the dead horse. Very quick. You have politicians whose situation is impossible. They hitched their entire careers to the United States as the umbrella that they were the partners. And they went to their people and said, we are partnered with the great power. We are therefore safe. We may be a little Estonia or a little Slovenia, but we are partnered with the United States with, look, it brought the Soviet Union to its knees. It’s gone. Whoa. Wow.

And now their protector is telling them, I’m not going to protect you anymore. They’re stuck. They made a pact with the devil who has now betrayed them. They have nowhere to go politically. So they have to either hype the old libertarian song again or revive the anti-Soviet in now in an anti-Russia hysteria.

That’ll work for a while. Their populations have been accustomed, but it’s a shrinking game. It doesn’t solve their problem. Europe each year falls further and further behind. No major technical breakthrough of the last 10 or 15 years comes from Europe. They don’t have their own telecommunications. They don’t have their own new military technology. Nothing. Putin sends a new missile. They don’t know what to do. They can’t possibly handle this. They can’t possibly replace the United States in Ukraine. That’s a bad joke.

Now, I may be wrong in the following. Maybe this will work. I’d like to know Michael’s opinion. Maybe this deal in which the Democratic Party here makes a common effort with those folks in Europe trying to manage to undo Mr. Trump’s trajectory. Maybe that’ll work. Maybe Mr. Trump will shift gears. Maybe he’ll be frightened. I don’t know.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think I can explain the dynamic that’s at work.

You said, why is the government bad? Why is Russia bad? The government is doing what privatizers would like to take over and turn into monopoly profits.

The government is indeed controlled by the billionaires, thanks to Citizens United and the fact that elections are a function of campaign donors. But the government still is charged and structured to provide many social services and the social services that government provides are in government hands because they’re natural monopolies.

And the social democrats beginning in the late 19th century kept them in government hands so that the economy wouldn’t have communications and transportation and other choke points that were basic needs turned into personal monopolies.

Well, the government’s the enemy and social democracy is the enemy because it’s not Russia as such, but the neocons and neoliberals need a convenient enemy around which to mount the libertarian takeover. You always need an enemy to do what you’re trying to do.

ORDER IT NOW

And the libertarian billionaires want to do to Europe and the United States just what the neoliberals did to Russia in the 1990s. They want to turn over all of the massive government property, national parks, government real estate, government agencies, all of these. They want to turn over to the financial managers to turn into monopolies that can be financialized and create wealth in the form of stock market gains and bond market gains. That’s what the game is.

It’s not so much geopolitical antagonism towards Russia. That’s the sort of superficial wrapping. It’s about a political anti-government fascist ideology. That’s what I think we’re dealing with.

RICHARD WOLFF: I see them going on together, using each other, shifting back and forth, whichever flies, whichever gets you the best polling results. Do you demonize Russia? Do you demonize your own government, mix them up, add them together, link them?

But again, I say, for Europe, the strategy of Europe catching up with either the United States or Russia, China, that’s not going to solve your problem. It’s just not. It’s going to cost you. The very turmoil as Michael began today’s conversation, the very turmoil of the next three or four or five years as you move your resources away from everything you’ve been doing to making a defense establishment is going to occasion all kinds of difficulties. They’re going to take them away from all of the things they need to be doing to try to catch up with the rest of the world. The decline of Europe is 100 years old. I don’t see this doing anything other than accelerating it even further.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Then we’re in full agreement. The Eurozone is a dead zone.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, very, very. And let’s be clear. It is shooting itself in the foot. It is very busy shooting— its notion.

Maybe this is a good way to end. You know, for 500 years, Europe could claim to be, and it did make the claim that it’s the center of the world. It’s where the Roman Empire, it’s where great medieval, that it was the great colonial takeover of the whole rest of the world organized in by and for Europe.

What we are watching is a late stage in the dismantling of the role in the world that Europe played. It is now less and less and less and less. And the lead is taken by England, which in a way is correct, because they took the lead the other way. They brought the European, you know, it went from a cold, wet offshore island of Europe to the great British Empire. And now it’s on its way back to what it was and the rest of Europe with it.

And all of these are ideologically mistaken notions of how in the world you’re going to cope with that decline, let alone reestablish a place. And maybe that’s the way empires always go. They rise, they are spectacular, they rule, and oh boy, do they look bad as they turn into the ruins that all of them before also ended up. Why not Europe too? But we’re watching it.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that’s correct. We’re in agreement. Yeah.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael for being with us today. Great pleasure as always. All right.

RICHARD WOLFF: I hope it was news focused enough.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: See you next week. Bye bye. Thank you.