Global Shakedown

By Michael Saturday, August 8, 2026 Interviews Middle East, Nima Permalink

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi everybody, today is Thursday, July 23rd, 2026, and our dear friend Michael Hudson is here with us. Welcome back, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let me start with the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. The strait is closed. Bab el-Mandeb is closed. Yemen put a siege and a blockade on Saudi Arabia. And this is one side. And your main point today is, we know how the price of oil has been increasing and is increasing right now—more than 98, if I’m not mistaken, right now. But Michael, your point is, which sees the big picture of what’s going on.

You remember recently Donald Trump came out with an idea, talking about a 20% toll on the Strait of Hormuz. Then he said later on, he said, no, I’m not going to charge them with 20%. I’m going to accept their investment—GCC countries’ investment—in the United States as time goes by and the United States continues fighting Iran in West Asia. So, they’re going to pay us back because we’re there for them. Not for us, because we don’t need the Strait of Hormuz. They need it. We’re fighting for them. They have to pay back. But your point is that what Donald Trump is doing is totally different. Nobody’s talking about it. What is that, in your opinion?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Trump has a long-term plan. Ever since 2018, in his first administration, he said that he wanted to be a peace president. And by being a peace president, he meant—I’m going to free the American balance of payments in the American economy from having to pay for its foreign wars. I’m going to have our allies pay for it. I’m going to have the countries that we’re protecting pay for it. And in 2018, he said, well, first of all, the NATO countries. We want to withdraw from NATO. Let them pay the costs of their defending themselves against Russia. And then he said, look at the OPEC countries. They’re very rich. They have the money. And we’re protecting these countries. And it costs us a lot of money. They should be paying for it.

His [Trump’s] plan he announced already in 2018 was to make OPEC pay the cost of all of the U.S. military spending in West Asia—in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, all of the fighting against Iran. Well, the question was, how to do this? And the Iran war inspired Trump for a way of basically extorting money from the OPEC countries.

Once, Iran said it wanted to impose tolls once the 60-day waiting period of the Memorandum of Understanding was over. It wanted to use the 60 days to put in place its administration of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to have companies register: what’s the value of your cargo? What is your company that owns the ship? Where is your cargo going, and what is your path? And you’re going to have to turn off your transponders so we can follow your path. All of the paperwork, so that beginning when the 60-day period was over, Iran was going to begin charging for this.

Well, finally, Trump was inspired. The first U.S. reaction to what Iran’s plan was: well, that’s against the law of the sea. The law of the sea says you can’t impose tolls on international waters—except if you’re Turkey with the Bosporus, or Egypt with the Nile and Suez, and Panama. They were all grandfathered into the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. But Iran never signed; nor did the United States for that. So the U.S. claimed, well, Iran’s claim for money is illegal. We can’t do it. But then Trump said, well, we’re going to collect all of this, all the tolls for itself.

Trump said, from this moment, the USA will be, from this point forward, known as the guardian of the Hormuz Strait. But as such, as a matter of fairness, we will be reimbursed at the rate of 20% of all cargo shipped for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security for this very volatile section of the world.

And immediately, Iran’s foreign minister said: We’re so glad that Trump has come out with this statement. Because what he’s saying is, the law of the sea doesn’t apply to countries in a war zone. We’re at war. We’re at war not only with the United States, but Oman has joined—has acted as a host for the United States military to have bases there. So we’re at war with this, so, of course, we can charge the law of the sea. But when Trump wants 20%, we’re not going to charge anywhere near that. We want—we calculate—about one-seventh of the cost that Trump wants.

About $40 billion a year is what Iran expected to charge for the tolls. And that’s because it says: we’re at war with the United States. The United States has lost this war. It did not achieve its objectives. So, we won. And having defeated the U.S. attempt to defeat us, we want to charge reparations. But we know that the United States and its allies are going to tie up any claim for reparations in court year after year, so we’re going to begin charging tolls as soon as the Memorandum of Understanding expires.

Well, as soon as Trump made his statement, Secretary Rubio got very worried about what the Iranians said. And [Rubio] said, oh dear, Trump has just imposed the principle of being able to charge tolls. We don’t want it [Iran] to do that. So, he had a talk with Trump. And Trump the next day had another statement to make. Trump said, I’ve decided to replace the 20% U.S. reimbursement fee with trade and investment deals that the various Gulf states will be making into the United States.

These investments will be massive—but at the same time, extraordinarily good for them and their future.

Well, Trump essentially set out making a set of voluntary deals. And the idea was that the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other countries would co-invest or would turn over money to American information technology companies and automatic intelligence companies for their data platforms that they would be building and already have been building in Bahrain, in the Emirates. And as a matter of fact, the Iranians saw this. The Iranians a week ago bombed Amazon’s facilities in Bahrain for its information policies.

Iran’s position now is as follows. First, it said, we have two aims. The first, obviously, is to get the United States military out of the region. And it’s now pretty much achieved its aim. It’s bombed the U.S. military bases away. But now it realizes that, well, we have to end not only the American military presence in West Asia, in these neighboring Arab OPEC countries, but we have to stop the whole economic symbiosis between Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the Emirates, and these countries with the United States—because their hearts and policy are going to go with where their hopes for money is.

If they have a host—the U.S. information technology and all sorts of supplying their oil to U.S. companies there to fuel all the electricity that [those companies] need to achieve their automatic intelligence plans that they can’t achieve in the United States because there isn’t enough electricity here and it takes a long time to build new electricity sources. And the individual states in America are blocking all of this because they say, if the AI uses the electricity that it plans to do, electricity prices for everyone—for homeowners, for businesses, for plants to light and heat their factories—all this is going to go way, way up. And you’ll make the whole economy high-price.

So, the United States needs a symbiosis with the American companies, to say, well, if we’re going to have an international monopoly in information technology and automatic intelligence, then we’re going to have to have a symbiosis. We’re going to have to move to where the energy is outside of the United States—that’s the Arab OPEC countries.

And so, if this happens, then you’re essentially going to keep them [the Arab OPEC countries] completely in the U.S. orbit by having power over these countries by holding their money and investment in the United States—just as the United States confiscated the $100 billion of Iranian savings in the West, from South Korea that was transferred to Bahrain and the Emirates to all these other countries. The Memorandum of Understanding said the United States was supposed to put the whole agreement in play by making at least a $12 billion reimbursement.

Trump’s statements in the last week have shown that he never had any intention of giving any of the Memorandum of Understanding commitments that he’d signed to Iran. He certainly wasn’t going to obey Paragraph One of these commitments to bring pressure on Israel not to attack Lebanon—that’s not done. He immediately stopped any promise to give $12 billion to the Emirates and Bahrain and other countries to begin returning to Iran the savings that they have in your country because Trump said—and Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury said—well, we’re not really going to give this money to Iran. We’ll give it into an account controlled by Treasury officials that are going to sit there and make sure that every dollar of this money is spent on the United States—for United States exports and other money in the United States. Iran will never get a penny of any of this money that the Memorandum of Understanding said.

And Trump, obviously, is never going to let Iran have any say in administering trade through the [Strait] of Hormuz—because if it had a say, then the United States wouldn’t. So immediately upon signing the [Memorandum] of Understanding on June 17th, the U.S. Navy—already the previous month—had been accompanying ships, to guide them, saying: stay close to the coast of Oman. This is Oman’s territorial waters. And Iran has no authority at all over the territorial waters.

Well, that’s not what the Memorandum of Understanding said at all. It said: all of the trade from the beginning and the end of the Persian Gulf, all of this, is to be administered by Iran. All of this was violated.

We’re now seeing in the last few days what Trump’s plan is. He said, well, the Emirates have to invest in the United States. Well, you can imagine what Saudi Arabia and the other countries said. Saudi Arabia said: well, you know, we want to control all of our money. What is this demand you’re making that we pay for war? We’ve already—under the Petrodollar Agreements of 1974-75—the whole petrodollar idea was that the OPEC countries would recycle their oil export earnings to the United States financial markets—the stock market, the bond market, and especially U.S. government securities.

But now Trump wants this money recycled also to U.S. companies, especially the companies who happen to be his largest political campaign contributors, apart from Israel. And that is the information technology companies, the seven companies that are into computer chips, information technology: Amazon, Facebook—the whole slew of companies that have gone up—Google, all of these.
Well, you had yesterday the talk of the United States saying: well, look, Saudi Arabia, if you agree to pay the equivalent of 20% of everything that you obtain in oil exports to the United States, we’re going to let you have your own control—not only of your military, but over the enrichment of uranium.

Well, you can imagine what happened—that Israel protested and the Zionists in Congress protested. So just today, or this morning, I think, Trump came out and said: well, yes, we will let Saudi Arabia invest in the enrichment of uranium, but it can control it. And as a condition, for any of the deals we’re making with Saudi Arabia—and by extension, the Emirates—they’re going to have to join the Abraham Accords. They’re going to have to recognize Israel. Well, essentially, this makes the Arab OPEC countries not only a political and military satellite of the United States, but of Israel as well under the Abraham Accords.

And Iran now—and you’re going to see this in the next few days of the military unfolding—Iran is forcing the Arab countries to choose. It’s saying: well, there’s been a war. We’re going to recover the damage that the attacks from the United States, Israel—and Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, and Bahrain, and the Arab countries—have caused in attacking us. Now, the question is: the United States wants an equivalent and even more money for itself than we [Iran] want. What is your future going to be?

Are you going to continue to be economic and military and political satellites of the United States—as you have been since 1974-75, with the petrodollar? Or are you going to see that the United States cannot protect you from us? It says it’s your guardian angel protecting you. But you’ve seen that the arms that you’ve bought from the United States are not protecting you. The U.S. military bases were unable to protect you. The United States from its military bases in the Indian Ocean and now planning to relocate in Italy and other places, even flying from Britain now—they can’t protect you.

So, who are you really going to ally your future with? If you think that you can make money by making economic deals with the United States by investing in its stock and bond markets, then these markets are going to crash because now you’re seeing oil going up, and we’re on the way to a world depression. And if you think you can make money by co-investing with American companies that want to invest in having you supply oil to their automatic intelligence data processing plants in your country, well, then you don’t know what Hollywood accounting is (U.S. accounting). There are not going to be any profits, especially when the profits that these companies make are going to include a charge for the U.S. military expenditures of so-called protecting you—meaning all of the costs of fighting us in war.

Protecting you means waging war on us. Do you really want to be liable for everything that the United States is doing? This is going to absolutely exhaust you. What is your choice? The U.S. economy is going to be shrinking. The Chinese economy, the Asian economies, these other economies that we want to export our oil to are going to go up.

So, we Iranians, what we’re advocating is free trade in oil—the principle of free trade that the United States was supposed to create at the end of World War II, back in 1945 (free trade, essentially, to break up the British Empire and the French Empire, and to have all of their colonies be free to spend their wartime savings on American exports, basically). All of this free trade has now been put in abeyance by the U.S. National Security Strategy that was announced in December of last year.

The United States wants to use the world oil trade as a choke point on the world. It wants to use its information technology monopoly as a choke point on the world. It wants to force the oil, as Bessent and Trump have said—all the OPEC oil, just like Venezuelan oil—we’re going to do to Iran, if we conquer it—and to OPEC—what we’ve done to Venezuela after January when we kidnapped President Maduro and took over its oil industry. All of the oil now that Venezuela exports is going to have to be priced in dollars. And all of these dollars that it earns—the earnings must be recycled into the United States. That’s just exactly what we’re going to do if we conquer Iran.

And that’s exactly what Bessent had said on June 11th. The day that the Memorandum of Understanding was signed, Bessent was trying to bluster Iran and said, look, if you don’t sign the Memorandum of Understanding, we’re going to invade you and we’re going to take over your oil, and we’re going to use all of the oil export earnings that you have by putting it in an account run by the U.S. Treasury to make sure that the Treasury is in charge of your oil export earnings, not you.

This is the attempt of the United States for controlling oil everywhere. And it wants to do the effect of taking this—recycling the money from the Arab OPEC countries—to do the same thing. It’s not going to say, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, you have to have the Treasury tell you what to do. But the U.S. negotiators under Trump are going to say: well, here’s the amount of money that you have to recycle [to] the United States. You know, you can take your choice.

Do you want to buy U.S. stocks or bonds in a market that’s going to crash and it’ll be worth much less? Or do you want to let U.S. companies come in, and you’ll be selling your oil to the U.S. companies—to Amazon, to Google, to Facebook, for all of their data processing plants? You won’t have to export it. No problem about—forget Hormuz. You’ll just be supplying it to them instead, to work off all the money that you owe us for protecting you. That’s basically the long-term plan, and it’s a plan.

For the United States, this fight with Iran is as existential as it is for Iran. A lot of people think that, well, why was Iran able to defeat the U.S. attempts to conquer it? Well, for Iran, it’s existential because of all of the threats. The United States wanted a regime change—wanted to put in another client dictator like the Shah or some domestic Iranian equivalent of Boris Yeltsin to privatize the economy. That was one plan.

But it’s also existential for the United States, this fight with Iran. Because how can the United States survive and maintain its prosperity if it doesn’t somehow get tribute from other countries?

The United States is no longer what it was in 1945. That was how the National Security Strategy report last December started out. We’re in a different world now. America is deindustrialized. It’s not a great industrial innovator and exporter. And it’s no longer the creditor nation that it was in 1945 when it had three quarters of the world’s monetary gold. The U.S. is now a debtor country—internationally and domestically. The U.S. economy is debt-ridden. How on earth is it going to be able to maintain the standard of living and still pay the $1.5 trillion military budget that I think the Congress has passed in the last few days? It’s up to the Senate now to do.

How on earth is the United States going to maintain its affluence? The word affluence means “a flowing in.” How will the U.S. get this “flowing in” from abroad when it’s running a trade deficit? It’s deindustrialized. It’s offshored its industry. It’s a debtor nation.

The only way is to find choke points in the international economy. Oil is a major choke point. And the U.S. dollar system is a choke point. Sea trade—international sea trade—is a choke point. That’s why the United States—that’s why the first belligerent statement that Trump made upon taking office in 2025 was: we want to conquer Greenland.

We need to conquer Greenland to prevent the Atlantic Ocean access to the Arctic Ocean as the Arctic route around for trade—now that global warming is melting the Arctic, there can be trade there. We have to control Greenland. And there was immediately talk also: well, once we control Greenland, if we control the seas between Greenland and Iceland—and then already there’s a link between Iceland and Britain—then we can block all the sea trade from the Atlantic to the Asian side, the Pacific. And if they did that—then if that was open, then countries wouldn’t need the Panama Canal. And we can’t use the Panama Canal any longer as a choke point, which we’ve done by essentially excluding China from its investment in ports on the Panama Canal.

This is part of the whole U.S. long-term plan for war against China and the war against Russia. So it needs the choke point of oil to make sure that America’s allies and countries in the U.S. dollar financial orbit cannot trade with countries whose oil production is independent of the United States—Russia, and Iran, and before that, Venezuela. The U.S. will not permit countries to export oil [or other countries] to import oil from countries that don’t price their oil in dollars and recycle these dollars to the United States.

In other words, the United States will make sure that the whole oil industry is subject to its control. That’s what the fight against Iran is all about. And the U.S. now includes the Strait of Hormuz and access to the Red Sea and to Egypt as part of its control of the seas.

The whole idea of the United Nations law of the control of the seas is out the window. The United States has superseded it with its own demands. And when you link this to its information technology and automatic intelligence demands, you have three choke points that, along with the financial system, the United States is imposing on the other countries.

These choke points are the only way in which the United States can maintain its affluence. And that’s why the National Security [Strategy] report said, basically: we cannot have the national security of maintaining our own living standards if other countries have their national security. They cannot have their own sovereignty and their own ability to trade freely and to invest freely throughout the world. All of this must be centered on the United States.

That’s the demand that the United States is making. And it’s Iran that has led the fight against this, that has fought back much more than Russia or any other country, saying: no, we want, number one, free trade in oil. You can’t control our oil production. You can’t do to us what you did to Venezuela, or isolate us in the way that you’ve isolated Russian oil.

And right now, just as the United States has been attacking Iranian oil production, the U.S. has been attacking—has been bombing—Russian refineries through NATO. The U.S. guidance has been guiding the NATO missiles from Ukraine into Russia—hitting, concentrating oil refinery and gas production and foreign trade facilities in Russia. Because the United States officials have said: now that we’re fighting Iran and the prices of oil have gone up—and now they’re over $100 just today, Nima—the United States says, well, we don’t want Russia to be the beneficiary of the oil crisis that is making oil prices soar—$100 now, $200 maybe in August, maybe $250 by September. We don’t want Russia to [benefit]. We have to bomb its oil facilities. And the war against Russian oil—bombing it—is simultaneous with Trump’s bombing of Iranian facilities here.

So all of this is part of the same U.S. attempt to somehow reestablish its control of the oil trade that has been a centerpiece of American foreign policy for the last century. And that was why it and Britain’s MI6 overthrew Mossadegh already in the 1950s. That’s why it backed the Shah. That’s why it imposed a dictatorship to maintain this oil strategy [of] control. That’s what the fight against Iran is about. It has nothing to do with Iran wanting an atom bomb. Iran was not—all of the U.S. agencies together agreed Iran has not been making any attempt to build an atom bomb for the last two decades. All of this is a pretense.

It’s about Iran. It’s about Iran and many countries’ attempt to control their own oil supply—to price their oil supply in currencies other than the dollar. To keep these oil export receipts in financial markets in other countries, not recycling them into the United States. To leave the United States isolated.

And that’s what the United States sanctions have done—that Europe has followed, and America’s satellites in Asia have followed—by trying to isolate Iran, Russia, and before that, Venezuela. [The U.S. has] ended up isolating itself by forcing the rest of the world to make a choice. Are you going to let the United States control all of the major monopolies that the United States has put in place—oil, information technology, transportation through the seas, the dollarized financial markets? Or are you going to follow what Iran is trying to do with the support of Russia and China now?

This is the great world division that is happening and it’s existential for the entire world. And that’s what makes this World War III, in effect. And like all wars, I think we’re going to see that the result of this World War III as it winds down—if it ever does—will be very much like the end of World War I, in Europe. At the end of [World War I, in Europe], you had the European monarchies ended. You had a political transformation. Unfortunately, you had the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I between France and Britain [which] enabled the British to impose client oligarchies—client sheikhdoms—throughout West Asia.

Well, now that one of the results of this war in Iran—you can call it World War III, you can call it the Oil War. I like to call it the Oil War because that’s what it’s all about. One of the consequences is going to be the same political shake-up that you had after World War I. The monarchies of the Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia itself, cannot exist in their present form as satellites of the United States. Well, the fact that the sheikhs and leading families of these countries already have their savings in the United States essentially locks them into a position of being held hostage by the United States. They [the U.S.] say, well, we have your savings. You know, I think you should do what we want, or we’re going to debit—we’re going to seize your assets and reimburse the United States for the cost of protecting you.

Of course, this protection is a shakedown. It’s extractive. It’s predatory. It’s making them satellites. So my guess is that there will be an arrangement between the United States, the sheikhdoms, and Iran, saying: alright, the sheikhs can keep the money that they already have in the United States. Whatever the United States and the sheikhs agree is their money is open. But now we’re going to replace [them]. [We’re going to] create independent governments throughout West Asia that are going to be like Iran and like Yemen, who are supporting this new international economic order that is replacing the old U.S. extractive economic order. That’s what this war is all about economically.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, that somehow is in line with what [the] Financial Times reported. It estimates that the United States, the U.S. Treasury, has sold about $13 billion in Venezuelan oil since it got control over Venezuela. And so far, the Venezuelan people, they received something like $300 million, something like 2.5% of what they have sold. It’s just amazing what is happening in the case of Venezuela, because that could be the understanding for Iran. Go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, that’s the front-page headline on today’s Financial Times, and that’s very interesting. They’ve done their own investigative reporting on this, and it’s wonderful. And the Congress has been asking the United States—the Trump administration—“What have you done with the money?” And the Financial Times points out, they haven’t got an answer. And the website [where] the Venezuelans have to make a [statement], say, how much have we actually received? $300 million—that’s 2.5% of all of the export, the $13 billion that Venezuela is estimated to have actually charged and received for its exports in the accounts that Donald Trump has said he is personally managing and directing.

So here you have Venezuela suffering the worst earthquake in its history. You have it desperate to get support, and it’s not able to use its own oil earnings to recover and to rescue its economy. And the United States is saying, “You see, socialism doesn’t work.”

It’s not socialism that doesn’t work. American imperialism doesn’t work. The American sanctions that it strangled Cuba with and has now then strangled Venezuela with for decades has caused—has prevented socialism from working by essentially saying no country can have sovereignty when it has oil reserves or property or assets that the United States wants for itself.

This is America’s neocolonialism. And it’s a wonderful report in the Financial Times saying, you know, what has happened to this? And I’m so glad that it’s raised all of this.

And you can see now what this means for Iran’s statement. No wonder it’s fighting for its existence, not only to prevent being broken up by dividing into regions by the Baluchis coming from the east and the Kurds from the north. It’s fighting to control its own oil export capacity from being seized—as it was in Venezuela—and its ability to have somewhere where it can take payment for oil.

Control—owning your own oil itself—is only part of the picture. Once you have to export the oil, you have to price it in some currency. And if you price it in dollars, then you have to keep your currency in a U.S.-centered financial system that enables the United States to direct its allies: confiscate all of this money.

Just like the United States—you can see what it’s been doing in West Asia. Whatever happened to Iraq’s gold reserves? What has been happening to Iraq’s oil exports? The United States has been in charge of selling it, and keeping all of the export proceeds in its own accounts—mainly that it’s turned over to Israel, I understand.

This is how the United States treated Libya. It seized Libya’s gold reserves. Whatever happened to them? No statement. What happened to Libya’s oil exports? Well, there’s been no accounting of that.
You have what the United States has done for Venezuela should be looked at as the model for what the United States wants to impose on all countries: Libya, Iraq, Iran, now the Arab OPEC countries themselves, Russia. You can go right down the line. This is the plan by the United States for how it would run the world economy if it can somehow remain in charge of it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, in the chapter that you’ve sent…

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m going to be publishing that in a week or two in the Democracy Collaborative, and it’ll be on my website. I’ve been working on it. I’ve been putting it all together. But do you have any quotes from it? Anything you want to do?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: I want to read some part of it because I was reading it, and there is a point that is so important, which is related to the MoU between Iran and the United States. It’s, you see, the strategy, the U.S. strategy of using bait-and-switch and tactics you mentioned. And it means that you’re going to, they’re going to, you know, if they give you your money, if they give back your money, you have to use them the way that the United States wants you to use them. It means that you’re going to buy—as it was mentioned with the frozen Iranian assets, the United States said they’re going to buy wheat and seed oils. Yeah, the seed oil from us. They’re not going to be, you know, they’re not going to buy anything else.

This is the policy that you’ve mentioned, and you call it a bait-and-switch tactic: to agree terms only to later impose far, you know, somehow, conditions affecting all the spending on the part of the countries that you’re trying to help. You pretend that you’re trying to help them, but finally you’re trying to put pressure on them to buy whatever you want them to buy.

This is the policy that you’ve just mentioned. And when it comes to the MoU, Michael, do you think that is it possible for the two sides to come together again? Because what has happened so far, in the way that you’re describing, it’s all about oil. It’s not about the Iranian nuclear program, as Donald Trump keeps saying to us and keeps telling us that it’s all about the Iranian nuclear program. But as you’ve mentioned, it makes perfect sense to me that it’s all about Iranian oil and controlling. It’s not just about Iran. It’s about the big picture, then going after China.

MICHAEL HUDSON: There’s no possible meeting point of the “either we control you or you’re independent.” There’s no middle ground there. The whole reason that Trump begins every statement saying, “We’ve got to prevent Iran from having the atom bomb”—this is like George W. Bush and Cheney claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when it didn’t have any. It’s all a lie.

But why would Trump be saying this? He’s saying it because any attempt to actually reinstall U.S. and Israeli oversight over the Iranian facilities would be for someone like Mr. Grossi to continue to turn over everything. He [Grossi] said, well, let me see where the facilities are. Immediately sent them to Israeli intelligence. Let me talk to the scientists and ask them where they are. What’s your name? Where’s your address? What’s your phone number?

Give them immediately to the United States, to give to Israeli [intelligence], to kill them, to assassinate them with motorcycle assassins. There’s no way that Iran is ever going to let what pretends to be a United Nations authority and is actually part of Israeli and U.S. Mossad there again. And there’s no need to be. When you say we’re not going to do a single thing until we solve the Iranian atom bomb program—well, that’s going to take five or ten years, to drag out for five or ten years. And it means we’re going to use this as a delaying tactic so that nothing will be done at all regarding Iran. So it’s a completely false detour from everything.

And you want to look at what the United States says it’s going to do. And American officials are remarkably straightforward in saying just what they want to do. And in my article, I think the most straightforward statement was by Treasury Secretary Bessent. On June 24th of this year, he did a television interview on Fox and Friends and said: it’s all about dollar dominance. Dollar dominance is essential. And to get dollar dominance, we have to control the oil trade and the currency in which oil is priced and where the oil is sent. And the only way we can do this is to conquer the country and put the U.S. Treasury in charge of all of the oil export trade.

I mean, it’s amazing how straightforward the United States has been in saying just what they want to do. Just as Trump is straightforward and saying, well, not only do we want to control oil, but we want to use all of the income that’s created by the world oil trade to finance America’s military spending throughout the rest of the world. So, we’re not going to pay for our military spending. We’re not a military power. All of this military spending is spent by other countries to defend themselves—they just love the way America is a democracy. And Europe is paying for its own defense against Russian invasion now. And OPEC is going to pay for its own defense against Iranian conquest of it.

This is the fictitious enabling pretense that all of this American financial grab on the world’s financial resources and its imposition of an American oil monopoly, sea trade monopoly, artificial intelligence monopoly, and financial monopoly of the dollar system, is being imposed. Is the world going to submit to a neo-colonial global monopoly under U.S. control? Or is it going to be [that] our country’s going to be sovereign—to trade with whomever they want, in whatever currency they want, and to spend the income from their oil trade on their own development or on investment along the lines that they want?

And of course, this is what the United States ultimately wants to do to China as well. So, China is well aware of this. And that’s why China and Russia are helping the Iranians with their satellite information on just where are you going to bomb. You know, for China and Russia, this war is as existential for them as it is for Iran and for the United States. And it’s existential over how is the world civilization going to be structured for the next generation and beyond?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. I assume that they fully understand what’s going on with the case of Iran. And because Venezuela was a huge sort of surprise, if we can call it a surprise, for the oil market in China, because they were receiving oil from Venezuela. They lost Venezuela. And with the case of Iran, if the United States could have done something in the Strait of Hormuz, just imagine—20% of the oil market is going to be in the hands of the United States. That would be a huge, huge problem and challenge for China.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. And don’t forget the 5% of the world trade that the Yemenis now challenge through the Red Sea. The Yemenis are preventing ships by Saudi Arabia to any country except China. Today, the Yemenis have permitted a tanker with 2 million barrels of oil right through the Red Sea choke point to go to China.

And the question is: what’s the United States going to do? Is the United States going to seize this tanker once it goes through the Indian Ocean on the way to China? Is it going to bomb the tanker? Is the United States going to permit this trade from Saudi Arabia to China? Or is it going to say, we’re not going to let Saudi Arabia trade with China. We’re only going to let it trade with U.S.-approved countries. This is the showdown, as this tanker makes its long slow boat to China.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, yeah, good point. Michael. Thank you. Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I’ve summarized things very briefly, and in the article that I’m coming out [with] in a few weeks, I’ll have all of the documentation of it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Great, great. You’re going to publish that on your website.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Then go to michael-hudson.com, and you can find all these articles there. And you’re going to put the link to your book as soon as it’s published, yeah? On your website.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And on my Patreon group, I’m giving preludes to all this, and I’m posting news on that, too.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Great. On Patreon, on his website, you can follow Michael [there]. Thank you so much, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me spend the whole hour on economic issues.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, exactly. Great, great. You’re going to publish that on your website.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Then go to michael-hudson.com, and you can find all these articles there. And you’re going to put the link to your book as soon as it’s published, yeah? On your website.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And on my Patreon group, I’m giving preludes to all this, and I’m posting news on that, too.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Great. On Patreon, on his website, you can follow Michael [there]. Thank you so much, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me spend the whole hour on economic issues.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, exactly.