There are many examples of how the United States acts as a rogue state.

The US government is waging a full-frontal assault on international law, aggressively attacking multilateral institutions.

US unilateralism has been a bipartisan phenomenon, going back decades, but it has reached its extreme zenith under Donald Trump, who has formally withdrawn the US from most international organizations.

Trump openly gloated, “I don’t need international law”.

The international community saw a transparent example of US rogue state status this September, when Washington voted against the entire world at the United Nations General Assembly.

The vote was 164 to 1.

The resolution, which was promoted by the African Union, called on the UN to adopt a more accurate world map in its official documents and activities — to “correct the map”, as the measure stated.

Previously, the UN had been using the Mercator projection of the world map. This is a colonial-era representation that was introduced in year 1569, by the European geographer Gerardus Mercator.

The problem with the Mercator projection is that it grossly distorts the parts of the map that are far away from the equator.

Consequently, it makes North America, Europe, and Russia much larger than they actually are.

At the same time, the Mercator projection misleadingly makes the Global South, and especially Africa, look relatively smaller.

The United Nations has now adopted the Equal Earth projection of the world map, which is much more accurate.

This resolution should not have been controversial; it is simply about accuracy, ensuring that the true size of continents is portrayed.

This is why 164 countries supported the resolution in the UN General Assembly.

Just six member states abstained, which were primarily US allies in Central and Eastern Europe: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine.

However, the US government strongly opposed the measure.

The US representative claimed that the more accurate world map is part of a “radical ideological project”.

US government erases history

Washington’s aggressive opposition to this common-sense resolution reflects a larger ulterior motive.

The US government is adamantly opposed to decolonization, and seeks to stamp out any sign of it, no matter how small.

The Global South hopes to decolonize these international institutions, which are still heavily dominated by the West.

Adopting a map that shows the true size of the Global South is a very small step in that direction.

Nevertheless, although this measure was small and mostly symbolic (and it does not undo the extreme damage that Western countries did to the Global South through centuries of colonial exploitation), it was still too much for the US empire.

What this incident demonstrated is that it is actually the US government that is engaged in a radical ideological project.

Washington is actively pushing to erase, and rewrite, the history of Western colonial crimes.

The Donald Trump administration has removed historical information about the slaves that were held by the US “founding fathers”, such as George Washington.

The head of the Smithsonian museums was pressured to resign, as the Trump administration has demanded the removal of critical references to slavery, racism, and colonialism in any discussion of US history.

Trump himself demonized Global South nations as “shithole countries”.

US government seeks to revive colonialism

Meanwhile, the US government is openly glorifying imperialism.

On the first day of his second presidential term, 20 January 2025, Trump signed an executive order that honored the arch-imperialist former US President William McKinley, heroizing him for overseeing “an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation”.

McKinley colonized numerous foreign territories, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. These had previously been colonies of the Spanish empire, and the US empire took them over after winning an inter-imperialist war with Madrid in 1898.

That same year, McKinley also annexed Hawai’i, in another blatant act of colonialism.

Trump hopes to do the same. He has repeatedly promised that he will physically expand the territory of the US empire.

Trump is threatening to colonize numerous parts of the western hemisphere.

In fact, just three days after the US voted against the UN resolution that called for adopting a more accurate world map, Trump posted his own extreme map on his website Truth Social, which showed an expanded US empire.

Trump depicted the United States annexing Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and several other Caribbean countries, as well as Iceland.

This comes at a time when Trump is waging a trade war against Canada and discussing plans for an illegal military intervention in Mexico.

Trump has also repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland, while polls show that 85% of Greenlanders oppose becoming part of the US.

At the same time, the US government has adopted an explicitly colonialist strategy in Latin America.

The White House proudly calls it the “Donroe Doctrine”, and has depicted Trump as the emperor of the western hemisphere.

Trump has vowed to forcibly take over the Panama Canal, and he has boasted of exploiting Venezuela’s oil, after he invaded the South American nation in January and kidnapped its internationally recognized president, Nicolás Maduro.

The US government is also imposing a medieval-style naval blockade of Cuba, starving the Cuban people of oil, in an attempt to collapse their economy and overthrow their government.

The United States has always been imperialist (and that imperialism has been bipartisan), but Trump has taken this to a whole new, extreme level.

Washington seeks to drag the world back to the 19th century, and to revive colonialism.

This was made as clear as day this February, when Marco Rubio — the second-most powerful person in the US government, who serves simultaneously as both secretary of state and national security advisor — delivered an explicitly pro-colonialist speech at the Munich Security Conference.

Rubio heaped praise on Western colonialists, glorifying them for “settl[ing] new continents, build[ing] vast empires extending out across the globe”.

The US foreign-policy chief condemned the “godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings” that took place in the Global South in the latter half of the 20th century, and he pledged that Washington would bring back the “West’s age of dominance”.

Rubio vowed to “renew the greatest civilization in human history” and to “build a new Western century”.

When one considers this explicitly pro-colonialist diatribe in the larger context, the US government’s votes at the United Nations make much more sense.

Washington’s opposition to the UN adopting a more accurate representation of the Global South is not just about a world map; it is about the US empire’s war on decolonization and international law; it is about the US empire’s attempt to revive Western supremacy and colonialism.

When the US government accused the rest of the world of engaging in a “radical ideological project”, it was psychological projection of what Washington itself is doing.

Latin America has been rocked by a major scandal that says everything about how politics works in the 21st century.

It demonstrates how some powerful right-wing groups, with wealthy corporate backers and close links to the US government, have created a sophisticated machine of election manipulation.

They weaponize social media, with armies of bots that spread nonstop disinformation, deceiving voters to put in power ultra-conservative leaders who will promote the interests of Washington and US corporations.

At the center of this campaign of election meddling is a criminal named Fernando Cerimedo.

He is one of the most important political operatives you probably haven’t heard of.

The criminal scandal surrounding him connects virtually all of the right-wing leaders in Latin America, and goes directly to the White House.

Top right-wing specialist in election meddling in Latin America tries to assassinate his pregnant ex-girlfriend

Fernando Cerimedo is originally from Argentina, but he has worked with the leaders of most right-wing governments in Latin America, and he is closely linked to the Donald Trump administration and far-right US politicians in Florida.

Cerimedo is a multi-millionaire specialist in election engineering. He has taken credit for putting multiple ultra-conservative presidents in power in Latin America — and he has made a fortune doing so.

None of this is organic. In fact, Cerimedo publicly thanked the man who served as the campaign manager for Trump in the 2020 presidential race, Brad Parscale, for giving him the technology he has used to manipulate elections all across the region.

This August, Cerimedo was arrested by Bolivian police after he hired hitmen to assassinate his pregnant ex-girlfriend, the well-known political activist and lawyer Nadia Beller.

Beller survived the assassination attempt, although she was injured. From her hospital bed, she did interviews with multiple media outlets, exposing the skeletons in Cerimedo’s closet.

The Bolivian government is now also investigating Cerimedo for drug trafficking, in addition to its investigations into the attempted assassination and his financial crimes.

When he was interrogated by the Bolivian authorities, the published transcript shows that Cerimedo disclosed that he makes $1 million USD per month from his work as a "political consultant" for politicians in various countries. He also refused to answer dozens of questions, and claimed he was supposedly being politically persecuted.

Cerimedo’s work for Latin American right-wing leaders

Beller revealed that the right-wing president of Argentina, Javier Milei, paid Cerimedo $800,000 USD per month — nearly $10 million per year — to run online disinformation operations on behalf of Milei.

According to Beller, Cerimedo also privately admitted that Milei is “crazy”, and that his sister Karina, who is Milei’s all-powerful chief of staff, is deeply involved in corruption. (Karina Milei has been investigated for stealing government funds that are supposed to be used to buy medicine for people with disabilities.)

When he was arrested, Cerimedo was also working as an official assistant to the right-wing president of Bolivia, Rodrigo Paz.

Paz has since tried to distance himself from Cerimedo, with little success.

Cerimedo was so influential in Bolivia’s conservative administration that he had his own office next to that of the president.

He was much more than just an advisor to Paz; in fact, Cerimedo helped Bolivia’s right-wing government run its daily affairs. A video report of a visit by Chile’s far-right President José Antonio Kast to Bolivia shows Cerimedo welcoming the Chilean leader, casually chatting with him, and bringing him to meet with Paz. Later in the video, Cerimedo can be seen giving orders to other government officials.

Cerimedo was so important that he joined Paz on international trips.

The Bolivian president visited the United States this March, when the Trump administration launched a new right-wing alliance called the Shield of the Americas.

At the inaugural event in Florida, Paz met with Trump and the second most powerful person in the US government, Marco Rubio, a neoconservative hawk who is simultaneously serving as both secretary of state and national security advisor.

When Paz sat down for talks with Rubio, an official US State Department photo shows that he was joined by Cerimedo, who was seated right next to the Bolivian president.

Cerimedo regularly met with US government officials.

When the US embassy held its 4th of July celebration this year, Cerimedo was one of the influential political operatives who was invited to attend.

The US embassy even posted a photo on Facebook showing Cerimedo smiling with the top US diplomat in the country, Charge d’Affaires Erik Martini. (The US does not currently have an ambassador in Bolivia, so Martini is the highest ranking official there.)

This scandal is very inconvenient for Bolivia’s President Paz, a right-wing US ally who has strongly supported Trump. But because the victim of Cerimedo’s assassination attempt, Beller, is a well-known Bolivian national, the government has been forced to act.

Nevertheless, Cerimedo’s work in Argentina and Bolivia barely scratches the surface of the controversy. Cerimedo advised virtually all of the prominent right-wing leaders in Latin America today.

Cerimedo and his associates have deep ties to Ecuador’s right-wing dictator Daniel Noboa (a dual US citizen), Colombia’s ultra-conservative leader Abelardo de la Espriella (another dual US citizen), and Chile’s far-right President José Antonio Kast.

Cerimedo also played an integral role in electoral fraud in Honduras, and even a coup attempt in Brazil.

US-backed electoral fraud in Honduras

In 2025, Cerimedo oversaw the presidential campaigns of Honduras’ far-right President Nasry “Tito” Asfura, another key US ally who is closely linked to drug cartels.

A former electoral counselor in Honduras, Marlon Ochoa, published leaked recordings proving his country’s 2025 election was stolen. In the audio, Cerimedo can clearly be heard discussing blatant electoral theft: Asfura’s campaign added votes for itself in certain districts, while taking away votes for the other left-wing candidates.

Trump himself personally interfered in Honduras’ election. He pardoned and released from prison the country’s former US-backed dictator, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), who had been incarcerated for trafficking tons of cocaine and machine guns.

JOH is from Asfura’s right-wing National Party, which is run by drug lords. These traffickers are once again governing Honduras, with Washington’s full support.

The 2025 election in Honduras was held on 30 November. However, the official result was not announced until nearly a month later, on 24 December, amid weeks of extreme irregularities and widespread accusations of fraud.

After Asfura was declared the winner, the website owned by Cerimedo gave him credit for the victory, proudly stating, “Fernando Cerimedo was one of the main leaders of winning campaign of Tito Asfura in Honduras, which brought a new right-wing president to power in a Latin American country”.

But Cerimedo’s role in the electoral fraud in Honduras is just one example of a much larger anti-democratic operation in the region.

Cerimedo ran huge bot farms to spread right-wing disinformation on social media

In addition to overseeing electoral fraud, Cerimedo specialized in spreading right-wing disinformation on social media.

Bolivian authorities raided Cerimedo’s multiple luxury properties and found large sums of cash, in multiple currencies.

They also found the computer equipment used to run huge bot farms.

Cerimedo and his associates operated many thousands of fake accounts on social media, in which they promoted fake news in order to destabilize left-wing governments and candidates in Latin America.

In fact, Cerimedo publicly threatened to target all of the left-wing leaders in Latin America, including Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro.

One of the most powerful tools in Cerimedo’s arsenal was a far-right propaganda outlet called La Derecha Diario.

Cerimedo was the co-founder and owner of La Derecha Diario, and the domain name of the website was registered under his name.

The platform is very influential in Latin America, and had more than 600,000 followers on Twitter (X) as of this August.

At a right-wing conference in 2025, Argentina’s US-backed President Milei heaped praise on La Derecha Diario, calling it “the most widely read newspaper in all of Latin America”.

Cerimedo ran the website with an ultra-conservative Spanish activist named Javier Negre. (Cerimedo sold his ownership stake in La Derecha Diario to Negre amid his detention in Bolivia, making the latter now the full owner of the platform.)

Negre and Cerimedo are close friends. This December, Negre posted on Twitter (X) a photo of the two, writing, “[I am] celebrating with my colleague Fernando Cerimedo a year of electoral victories and brutal growth of La Derecha Diario”.

“You all already know that Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Honduras, and Chile were conquered by the right, and the role of the media was fundamental”, Negre emphasized.

A right-wing Mexican activist named Jean Carlo Portillo, who previously worked with La Derecha Diario, admitted that Cerimedo and Negre ran large bot farms.

“When Javier Negre asked me for money to set up La Derecha Diario in Mexico”, Portillo explained in an interview, “he told me that he and his colleague, Cerimedo, had the secret to blow up the algorithm on social media: a euphemism to refer to many things, among them, bot farms”.

“He [Negre] never denied it”, Portillo continued. “He used it and boasted about it if it was necessary to get money. Those of us who know him, we know how he operates”.

Portillo said La Derecha Diario was not only tainted by bot farms, but also by making fake news, fabricating interviews, trafficking influence, and “scamming people”.

“It’s just a matter of time before Negre goes to jail”, Portillo warned.

Since Cerimedo’s arrest, some of the bots that he helped to run have started to malfunction.

On Twitter (X), many fake accounts have published automated messages repeating common right-wing propaganda talking points in Spanish, but all preceded with the English term “Reply2", “Reply6”, “Reply9”, etc.

It appears that Cerimedo’s imprisonment has disrupted his massive disinformation campaigns on social media.

Cerimedo received an award at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago a few months before his arrest

Cerimedo and his associates were not only active in Latin America; they have links directly to the Trump administration.

This February, Cerimedo was honored at the “Hispanic Prosperity Gala”, a private, invitation-only event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The event was organized by a right-wing US-based group called Latino Wall Street. Its co-founders, the married couple Gabriela Berrospi and Tony Delgado, are Republicans who work closely with the Trump administration, and met with the president at the conservative conference CPAC.

Berrospi uses the name Gaby Wall Street on social media, where she has built a large following promoting right-wing, pro-Trump propaganda. She is also a regular commentator on Fox News.

Gaby Wall Street pinned a video to her Instagram profile boasting that she organized the meeting of the “Latin elite at Mar-a-Lago: luxury, power, and influence”.

The keynote speech at Latino Wall Street’s 2026 Hispanic Prosperity Gala this February was delivered by Argentine President Milei.

Milei also spoke at a separate Latino Wall Street event in Washington, DC this October.

Another guest of honor at the Hispanic Prosperity Gala at Mar-a-Lago was Keiko Fujimori, the far-right leader of Peru.

The Latino Wall Street co-founders Berrospi and Delgado also attended the Trump administration’s launch of the right-wing Shield of the Americas alliance in Florida this March.

Berrospi (Gaby Wall Street) published a photo on Instagram showing her and Delgado meeting with Argentine President Milei. Standing next to Milei was none other than Javier Negre, the far-right propagandist and bot expert who ran La Derecha Diario with Fernando Cerimedo.

Gaby Wall Street also posted a photo meeting with Negre and Marco Rubio, the powerful secretary of state and national security advisor. She and her right-wing followers fantasized about Rubio becoming the next US president.

Negre, the close associate of Cerimedo who helped run La Derecha Diario, was not just a random person who posed in these photos. He worked closely with Latino Wall Street in order to organize the Hispanic Prosperity Gala at Mar-a-Lago this February.

In Instagram posts showing Negre with Berrospi and Delgado, Negre wrote that it was “three months of work against the clock”, adding, “I had the honor of organizing [it] with my friends Gabriela Berrospi y Tony Delgado [of] Latino Wall Street”. (Berrospi replied, “an honor to work with you”.)

At the Hispanic Prosperity Gala, Latino Wall Street honored Cerimedo with the award for “Hispanic political consultant of the year”. He was praised for his work overseeing the presidential campaigns of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia and Nasry Asfura in Honduras.

The man who was standing on stage next to Cerimedo when Latino Wall Street gave him this award was another important figure in far-right Latin American politics: Eduardo Bolsonaro.

Cerimedo assisted Jair Bolsonaro’s failed coup attempt in Brazil in 2022

Eduardo Bolsonaro is the son of Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. Eduardo was a lawmaker in Brazil, although he has lived in the United States for several years.

Jair Bolsonaro has revealed that Eduardo is seeking US citizenship. Eduardo is deeply involved with far-right groups in the US, and the Trump administration already gave him a green card (while denying visas to people who criticize Trump and his allies).

The reason that Eduardo Bolsonaro is in the US is that he fled there as a fugitive from justice, after he assisted his father in a failed coup attempt.

Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept that he lost Brazil’s 2022 election to leftist Lula da Silva. So he tried to carry out a coup.

Bolsonaro later admitted in court that he asked military officials to help him hold on to power.

Brazil’s supreme court found Bolsonaro guilty of a coup attempt, and he was sentenced to 27 years in prison. However, he has thus far only been placed under house arrest.

Fernando Cerimedo, the far-right propagandist who tried to assassinate his pregnant ex-girlfriend, is closely linked to the Bolsonaro family. He reportedly assisted Jair Bolsonaro in his presidential campaigns.

In fact, Cerimedo was formally accused by Brazilian police of helping Jair Bolsonaro organize the coup attempt in 2022.

Another son of Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio, is the far-right presidential candidate in Brazil’s 2026 election, and the Trump administration is strongly supporting him.

Cerimedo’s close links to the Trump administration and Florida politicians

Fernando Cerimedo constantly visited the United States, and was closely associated with US far-right networks.

The Mexican newspaper La Jornada and Cubadebate published an investigation detailing Cerimedo’s close links to the Trump administration.

They found that Cerimedo had registered a company in Florida, called NUMEN Advisors LLC.

They also showed how Cerimedo is linked to Trump’s top advisor on Latin American affairs, Mauricio Claver-Carone, as well as far-right Congress members from Florida, including Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart.

In fact, when Congressman Díaz-Balart met with Bolivia’s right-wing President Rodrigo Paz in Florida this March, they were joined by Cerimedo, who attended the meeting as a senior advisor to Paz.

But once again, the links go even deeper.

Because one of the figures who helped to shape Cerimedo and train him in electoral engineering was a top Trump ally, Brad Parscale.

Parscale served as Trump’s powerful campaign manager in the 2020 presidential race. He was previously digital media director for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Parscale has mastered the art of using social media to spread disinformation, paying for targeted advertisements to win voters in swing states. He praised Facebook’s ad policy as a “gift”.

Today, Parscale is promoting AI as a powerful tool that will supercharge election engineering. (Parscale also had a scandalous shirtless standoff with police outside his home in Florida in 2020.)

Parscale has been referred to as “the boss of Cerimedo”. He taught the far-right Argentine political operative much of what he knows.

In fact, when Cerimedo gave a speech after receiving an award at the Hispanic Prosperity Gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago this February, he personally thanked Parscale for helping shape his career.

“I want to say something in English”, Cerimedo said, interrupting his Spanish-language remarks.

Cerimedo stressed, “Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing in me all the time, and giving me your technology”.

Donald Trump has restarted his trade war with Canada, and it is likely that it will blow back on the US economy.

This August, Washington and Ottawa participated in talks to negotiate a new trade deal, but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney revealed that the US government made last-minute demands for control over Canada’s trade deals, critical minerals, and French language policies.

“The US introduced at the last hours, in the last hours, efforts to restrict our ability to have other trade deals”, Carney explained in a press conference. “We’re the partner of choice in many respects for countries around the world and the Americans wanted to restrict that. They had language that what they wanted to restrict that. Unacceptable”.

Moreover, Carney noted that Washington demanded that Ottawa terminate its “subsidies, the support for our culture and the French language, and even the information [in French] that is on Canadian products”.

There are also reports that the US government insisted on the right of first refusal over the sale of Canada’s critical minerals.

Carney said these US demands were completely “unacceptable” and violated Canada’s sovereignty. He called it a US “power play”.

Top officials in multiple Canadian provinces agreed, warning that Washington was attacking their country’s sovereignty and using coercion to try to “reduce us to the economic equivalent of the 51st [US] state”.

The Trump administration has repeatedly floated the idea of annexing and colonizing Canada.

A poll in 2025 found that nearly 60% of Canadians agree that the US is the “greatest threat” to their country.

On 22 August, Ottawa rejected the US ultimatum. So Trump immediately announced that he would put 50% tariffs on major Canadian goods.

Trump has threatened high tariffs against many countries. Most (especially the European Union and Japan) simply took the blows, fearing a fight with Washington (China was a rare exception). However, what was unique about Canada’s response is that it defended itself.

Ottawa hit back. Carney vowed to match US tariffs “dollar for dollar”.

“We were attacked”, the Canadian leader said. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked”.

The US thinks it can push Canada around

The United States already had a trade deal with Canada. It was called the USMCA, and it was negotiated in 2018 by none other than Donald Trump, during his first term as president.

Trump had initially called the USMCA “the best and most important trade deal ever”. But when he returned for his second term in 2025, he decided it wasn’t enough.

This July, the US government informed Canada and Mexico that it would refuse to renew the USMCA. Trump demanded new trade deals, and threatened to hit his country’s neighbors (and top two trading partners) with sky-high tariffs if they didn’t give in to aggressive US demands.

Prime Minister Carney alluded to the unreliability of the US, when he stated in a press conference this August:

Our government understood, before many, that America would transform all its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies and use economic integration as a weapon, that its signature was written in pencil.

Washington is overconfident. It believes it can coerce Canada without suffering significant consequences.

Trump declared on social media, “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S.”

It is true that Canada is dependent on the US market, but Trump greatly exaggerated.

64% of Canada’s exports go to the US, as of the first quarter of 2026. This figure is indeed high, but it also represents a marked drop from the early 2000s, when roughly 80% of its exports went to its southern neighbor.

The reality is that Canada has been gradually diversifying its trade relations.

This is why Carney took a historic trip this January to Beijing, where he announced that “Canada and China are forging a new strategic partnership”. It was the first visit by a Canadian prime minister since 2017.

Canada has leverage: the US needs its crude oil

There is no doubt that this trade war will hurt the Canadian economy, but it will also likely backfire and harm the US economy as well.

The reality is that Ottawa has some significant leverage it can use in its hardball with Washington.

First and foremost is the fact that the United States is dependent on some crucial Canadian commodities.

Trump often complains that Canada runs a chronic trade surplus with the US. What he never mentions is that this is because Canada is the number one exporter of crude oil to the US.

If oil is excluded from Canada’s trade, it is actually the US that runs a chronic surplus.

The majority (60%) of US crude imports came from Canada, as of 2023.

The Canadian government is well aware that this represents a US vulnerability.

In his speech announcing his retaliation to the US economic attacks, Prime Minister Carney stated:

Canada fuels American growth: supplying 99% of their natural gas imports, 85% of electricity imports, and 60% of crude oil imports. I don’t think they want us to stop sending it.

The United States is NOT “energy independent”

It is sometimes claimed that the United States is “energy independent”. This is a myth.

It is true that the US is the top oil producer on Earth, by far. And it is a net exporter of petroleum products. But it is not energy independent.

The US still imports roughly 8 million barrels of oil per day. Much of that consists of crude oil, which US refineries process into other petroleum products like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, chemicals, lubricants, and asphalt.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the largest regional provider of oil to the US was the Persian Gulf. However, since then, Canada has massively increased its exports to its southern neighbor, to approximately 4 million barrels per day.

The US primarily produces light crude. But many US refineries were built to process heavy crude. So the US must import it.

The majority (more than 60%) of US imports of crude oil consist of heavy crude.

There is a complex web of pipelines integrating North America, bringing crude oil from Canada to US refineries.

Trump’s trade war with Canada is already hurting US refineries.

On 21 August — a day before Canada announced that it would not surrender to the US demands and would retaliate with reciprocal tariffs of its own — Bloomberg reported that “US refiners are facing a looming supply drop from their biggest foreign crude supplier [ie, Canada] at a time when they need the oil the most”.

US refineries are currently the most active they have been in eight years, Bloomberg noted.

“Particularly vulnerable to a Canadian supply squeeze are refineries in the US Midwest, which rely on the country’s oil for about 70% of their supply”, the media outlet added.

Trump’s trade war with Canada will exacerbate the global energy crisis

Trump’s trade war with Canada comes at the worst possible time for global energy security. It is only exacerbating an already existing oil crisis.

The unprovoked war of aggression that the United States launched against Iran in late February unleashed what the International Energy Agency (IEA) called the largest oil disruption in history.

Before Trump started this war of choice, roughly 20% of globally traded oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.

In self-defense, Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing world energy markets.

Canada’s oil industry had helped to make up for the loss of output from the Persian Gulf.

But Canada could now restrict crude exports to the US, in response to Trump’s trade war.

This also comes at a moment when US oil reserves are at the lowest level in four decades.

Americans have already felt the impact of this energy crisis at the pump.

Gasoline prices have soared in response to the US war against Iran.

This is also taking place just a few months before US midterm elections will be held in early November.

This is precisely why some major US media outlets have warned that Trump’s trade war with Canada will likely backfire.

Semafor noted that the trade war could fuel further inflation, angering voters just before the midterms.

Fortune magazine, a business publication that is often sympathetic to Trump’s pro-corporate policies, pilloried his economic attack on Canada as a “dumb trade war”.

The executive editorial director of Fortune, Diane Brady, cautioned that Trump will likely lose the trade war.

“The Iran war has increased demand for Canada’s oil, aluminum and fertilizer; Saskatchewan is known as the Saudi Arabia of potash, with more than a third of global supply”, she wrote.

Fortune added that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s defense of his country’s sovereignty has caused his approval rating to rise, to roughly 60%. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating has hit a new low of 33%.

Trump already lost his trade war with China. Canada may surprise him as well.

The US government quietly bailed out Japan this August.

The US Treasury intervened in the foreign exchange market to prop up Japan’s currency, the yen. It was the first time that Washington had done this since 1998, when much of East and Southeast Asia was facing a deep financial crisis.

This incident is symptomatic of a new, slow-motion crisis that is unfolding today not only in Japan, but in the international financial system centered around the US dollar.

It reflects the growing cracks in the dollar system, and the gradual decline of global dollar dominance.

US Treasury intervenes to prop up Japan’s yen

Bloomberg noted that the US Treasury’s foreign exchange (FX) intervention was an “unusual operation”.

The superficial, facile explanation for why Washington acted was simply that Japan is a close US ally, and its currency has been depreciating very significantly against the US dollar, which has Tokyo concerned.

In January 2021, one US dollar could buy roughly 100 yen; in July 2026, a dollar could buy more than 160 yen.

However, that is not the main reason for this FX intervention.

In reference to Japan, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared, “We will do whatever it takes to support them in a way that helps the American economy, the American taxpayer, stabilizes the global economy”.

When Bessent said the “global economy”, he really meant the dollar-based international financial system, which he is dedicated to uphold.

It is worth emphasizing that Bessent is a former hedge fund manager from Wall Street. He worked for years with billionaire oligarch George Soros, specializing in currency speculation. Together they “broke the Bank of England”, shorting the British pound in a trade that made Soros more than $1 billion.

Bessent is part of a class of extremely rich plutocrats. Just how much wealth he has is not clear. He has been widely reported to be a billionaire, although this has been disputed. At the very least, he has hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth.

Regardless, the point is that Bessent has a vested economic interest in propping up the dollar-based financial system that has enriched oligarchs like him. And Japan has helped to maintain this system.

Japan’s special role in the US empire

Japan plays a special role in the US empire.

First and foremost, Japan hosts more US bases than any other country.

The US has approximately 750 military bases and other installations all around the world.

Japan alone hosts 120, where more than 50,000 US troops are permanently stationed.

Japan has been occupied by the US empire for more than 80 years, since the end of World War Two.

The imperial arrangement has continued because Japanese corporate elites benefit from the US occupation. Japan has been essentially a one-party state since 1955, ruled almost exclusively by the right-wing, pro-corporate, pro-US Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in what is known as the 1955 System.

The perfect symbol of Japan’s subordination came this July, when the country celebrated the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, with a drone show featuring Donald Trump alongside Japan’s ultra-conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Japan’s status as a close US military and political ally is widely known.

What is less commonly known is the central role that Japan plays in upholding the global dollar system.

Japan’s special role in the global dollar system

Japan provides another crucial service for the US empire: it acts as the largest foreign holder of Treasury securities (ie, US bonds, US government debt).

In other words, Japan lends more money to the US than any other country.

For decades, Japan has maintained a massive current account surplus. Following an investment-led, export-oriented model, it established itself as a manufacturing powerhouse, specializing in advanced technologies, selling high-quality products to customers all around the world.

What has Japan done with the gargantuan surplus generated by its high-tech manufacturing sector? It has recycled much of it into US dollar assets — especially Treasury securities.

Japan even continued to buy US government debt in the 2010s, when yields were extremely low, and real returns were often negative (as US interest rates were basically zero, below inflation, and the Federal Reserve engaged in quantitative easing).

Tokyo kept converting its surplus into Treasuries not only because it faced political pressure from Washington (which was certainly a factor), but also because its manufacturing sector benefits from an undervalued yen, which makes its exports more competitive (particularly at a time when it fears growing competition from China).

As of February 2026, Japan owned about $1.24 trillion ($1,239,300,000,000) in Treasuries.

It is striking to contrast Japan’s Treasury holdings with those of mainland China.

Beijing has been steadily reducing its net investment in US government debt for more than a decade. Its Treasury holdings peaked at more than $1.3 trillion in 2014.

As of 2026, China now owns less than $700 billion, and its holdings shrink year by year, as Beijing steadily dedollarizes — due to Washington’s weaponization of its currency.

US Treasury market dysfunction and Iran War energy crisis

Japan has remained the number one holder of US Treasuries for years. However, in recent months, the country has reduced its holdings.

Why was this? At the end of February, the Donald Trump administration launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran. This unleashed a global energy crisis that has severely harmed East and Southeast Asian economies.

Japan relies almost entirely on importing its oil, and it gets 95% of its crude from West Asia (the so-called Middle East), roughly 70% of which passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed in response to the US war of aggression.

Skyrocketing energy prices put further downward pressure on the yen, forcing the Bank of Japan to intervene.

In the following months, Tokyo trimmed some of its Treasury holdings, intervening in the foreign exchange market (by selling Treasuries to get dollars, and using those dollars to buy back its own currency).

By July, Japan’s holdings had fallen to less than $1.12 trillion ($1,116,700,000,000). This means Tokyo’s net holdings dropped by more than $100 billion in just four months. Japan was clearly selling a lot of US Treasuries.

This has troubled Washington, because the yields on US Treasury securities have been steadily rising for six years, since the inflation crisis that followed the supply-chain disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The US government is particularly worried about the stubbornly high 10-year Treasury yield, which is used as a benchmark for other interest rates in the economy (such as corporate bonds, mortgages, car loans, student loans, etc.).

This is why, just a few weeks after the unusual FX intervention to support the yen, the US Treasury announced that it “is increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector)”.

In other words, the US Treasury is issuing shorter-term debt in order to buy back its own longer-term debt, in an attempt to keep the long end of the yield curve under control.

This is quite ironic, given that Scott Bessent harshly criticized Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, because she issued mostly short-term debt securities (known as bills). The idea was that, by reducing the supply of longer-term securities, the Treasury could relieve the upward pressure on yields.

But since Bessent replaced Yellen, he has done exactly the same, issuing overwhelmingly on the short end of the curve.

This July, the Treasury issued $2.57 trillion in bills (short-term securities of up to one year in duration), compared to $310.3 billion of notes (securities of two to 10 years in duration) and just $37.3 billion of bonds (20 to 30 years in duration).

That means 86.4% of the nearly $3 trillion in securities issued this July were bills (short-term securities), compared to 10.4% for notes (medium-term), and a mere 1.3% for bonds (long-term).

From the petrodollar to the hedge fund dollar

Foreign governments held $3.78 trillion in US Treasuries as of this June. The vast majority of that (more than 90%) consists of notes and bonds — that is, longer-dated securities, ranging from one to 30 years.

Washington wants foreign governments to keep buying long-dated US securities, but it does not want them to be sold, because that would increase the upward pressure on Treasury yields, at a time when they remain stubbornly high.

The problem is that foreign governments are less and less interested in holding US Treasuries — precisely at the moment when Treasury issuance is exploding, because US debt is rising so quickly, with federal deficits consistently at roughly 6% of GDP.

The share of Treasuries held by foreigners has hovered around 32-33% since the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a stark decline from more than 45% in the early 2010s.

Meanwhile, foreign official (ie, government) holdings of US Treasuries have remained static over the past few years, even as issuance has increased significantly.

A big reason for this is growing fear of weaponization of the US dollar. Many foreign central banks are afraid their Treasuries could be seized if their governments do something that Washington doesn’t like.

The 2022 decision by the US and European countries to seize Russia’s holdings of approximately $300 billion in dollar- and euro-denominated assets was a wake-up call, and global central banks have instead piled into gold.

So the supply of US Treasuries has steadily risen, while foreign government demand has steadily fallen.

What has filled the gap? Foreign private investors, especially hedge funds and other firms registered in financial centers like the City of London or tax shelters in Caribbean islands.

Like Japan, these private firms are also holding up the global dollar system. This is why Adam Tooze has argued the arrangement should be called the “hedge fund dollar”, or the “billionaire dollar”.

After the US government delinked the dollar from gold in the 1971 Nixon shock, Washington pressured major oil producers like Saudi Arabia to recycle their surpluses into US assets, primarily Treasuries, in order to prop up the dollar. The petrodollar still remains a significant pillar of the global dollar system, but the hedge fund dollar has become even more important in recent decades, given the rapid financialization of Western economies.

This is one reason why the Donald Trump administration has further deregulated the financial sector, while strongly promoting stablecoins — because issuers often use Treasury securities to back their stablecoins (or at least claim to do so).

This explains how stablecoin-issuing corporations, such as Tether and Circle, have in a short period of time become some of the world’s biggest holders of Treasuries, competing with major foreign governments.

However, even this rising foreign private demand has not been enough to keep US yields low.

This is why Washington is especially worried about foreign governments selling their Treasury holdings.

Crisis in the dollar system: The US doesn’t want other countries selling their Treasury holdings

What all of this demonstrates is that there is a growing crisis in the heart of the dollar-based international financial system.

This was precisely the conclusion reached by one of the world’s leading scholars of the dollar system, Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System.

In an article in the Financial Times, Eichengreen noted that the Trump administration’s intervention to prop up the yen “contains troubling information about the dollar”.

“The message is that US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent & Co worried that selling dollar securities to prop up the yen would put additional strain on the long end of the US Treasury market”, he wrote.

This concern was evidenced by Bessent’s decision to fund the FX intervention not with dollars, by rather with the euro that the Treasury held in its Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).

In other words, the US government sold euro to buy yen in the FX market, because it didn’t want to sell Treasuries, as that would increase the upward pressure on yields.

What was especially striking about this is that the US government sold its euro holdings in this intervention without consulting its ostensible “allies” in Europe. The FT reported that the European Central Bank (ECB) was only informed after the operation.

Eichengreen, the leading expert on the dollar system, came to the following conclusion in the FT:

[These] moves are an indication that the dollar’s status as a reserve currency is not what it used to be. Central banks are accustomed to holding foreign reserves in dollars because markets in US Treasury securities are liquid. Central banks hold US Treasuries because they can be freely bought and sold and used in interventions. But not now, at least not in unlimited quantities.

…

The bottom line is that Washington, fearing the consequences for US financial markets, is reluctant to see foreign central banks use their dollar reserves. This is telling us that the dollar is not the attractive reserve currency it once was. When this message sinks in, other countries will redouble their search for more attractive, readily usable alternatives. Reserve diversification is apt to gather steam.

This is the most important message to take away from the US government’s bailout of Japan: The cracks in the structure of the dollar system are growing, as the global dedollarization movement picks up steam.

Wall Street benefits from the yen carry trade

There is one other significant point to make about the US government’s historic bailout of Japan. That is that it is not only Washington that benefits from the subordination of Japan, but also Wall Street.

This is because Wall Street financial firms, investors in the US and across the West more generally, profit from the depreciating yen through something known as the carry trade.

What exactly is the carry trade? The idea behind it is very simple: it is when an investor borrows money in one currency, which has a low interest rate, in order to buy an asset in a different currency, which has a higher interest rate, to benefit from the spread (the differential).

For decades, Japan had extremely low interest rates, including sometimes even negative rates. So what investors would do is take out debt denominated in yen, convert that money into US dollars, and then buy Treasury securities that had higher yields, or US corporate stocks (thereby helping to inflate the enormous bubble in the US equity market).

The yen carry trade has been hugely profitable for Wall Street. And the trade has gone on for years, driven not only by financial markets — it’s not the “invisible hand” — but also because the US and Japanese governments have a kind of unspoken agreement in which they facilitate the trade.

US financial assets, especially the stocks of Big Tech corporations, have seen a big boost from the yen carry trade. Japanese exporters have also benefited, because as the yen steadily depreciates against the dollar, it makes their products more competitive internationally.

This is a much-needed boost at a time when Japan is having trouble competing with China, as the latter has rapidly moved up the global value chain and advanced into higher value-added industries, eating away at the profit margins of Japanese corporations.

The editorial board of The Guardian has gotten many things wrong, and is normally pro-imperialist, pro-US, and pro-Atlanticist. But because the leading British newspaper is anti-Trump, its critical analysis of the Trump admin’s bailout of Japan hit the nail on the head, explaining the real motivation behind the FX intervention:

this is less a rescue of the yen than an attempt by Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, to preserve a cash spigot that benefits the US. Japan’s ultra-cheap money has become a global funding utility: bankers borrow yen, sell them for dollars and buy higher-returning US assets, notably tech shares. Rising American stock markets support collateral and investment. Japan’s “carry trade” is one of the reasons Wall Street can lever hundreds of billions into AI. Research suggests AI sucks up more than 1% of US GDP.

Washington wants to keep this tap open, but not at the cost of a collapsing yen or US treasury sales.

This crucial role that the yen plays as a “cash spigot” for Wall Street also benefits Washington, upholding its global power by reinforcing the dollar system.

However, the cracks in the foundations of this system are growing, and the slow-motion financial crisis unfolding in Japan is a symptom of the deep rot of the structure built upon it.

The United States has a long history of meddling in the internal affairs of Latin America. But in recent years, US interference has become even more extreme and explicit.

And it is not just the US that is meddling in Latin American politics, but also Israel.

A case study of this foreign interference is the political situation today in Colombia.

Colombia has a new, multimillionaire, far-right president named Abelardo de la Espriella. He is a US citizen who voted for Donald Trump, and worked for years as a lawyer in Miami, Florida, defending drug traffickers.

De la Espriella has outsourced Colombia’s foreign policy to Washington, and he strongly supports Israel, while vowing to limit ties with China.

De la Espriella promotes US military bases in Colombia, and he announced, “I want Plan Colombia Two”.

He also called to “dollarize” the Colombian economy and adopt the US dollar as the country’s official currency.

Colombia’s former president accuses the US and Israel of stealing the election

The left-wing former president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, formally accused the US and Israel of meddling in his country’s run-off election, which was held in June.

De la Espriella was declared the winner by a tiny margin of less than 1 percent, amid widespread allegations of sabotage and extreme regularities.

Petro said the Colombian government had collected evidence proving that US and Israeli technology companies interfered in Colombia’s election in order to put De la Espriella in power.

Petro specifically named the Israeli firm BlackCore, which has been accused of meddling in elections in numerous countries.

Even the French government has said it gathered evidence proving that Israel’s BlackCore undermined elections in France, Scotland, and New York.

De la Espriella did not hide the fact that he was conspiring with the US government in the lead-up to the 2026 elections.

In March, just a few months before the first round of the vote was held in May, De la Espriella traveled to Miami to meet with top US officials.

De la Espriella posted on Twitter a photo with US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and María Elvira Salazar, a far-right Congress member from Florida who has openly called for the US to overthrow the government of Cuba.

De la Espriella vowed that, when he became president, he would wholeheartedly embrace the US.

Colombia’s new US citizen president voted for Trump

Abelardo de la Espriella was naturalized as a US citizen in 2023.

In February of that year, De la Espriella published a post on Instagram writing:

After years of residing in the United States, I decided to become a citizen of this great nation.

Here my four children were born, and I have been very happy in these lands.

In the 2024 US presidential election, De la Espriella boasted that he voted for Trump.

After Trump was declared the winner, De la Espriella posted a celebration video on TikTok, in which he and his children danced to the song “YMCA”, which Trump often uses in his rallies. They waved US flags and moved their fists up and down, emulating the US president.

De la Espriella wrote, “Make America great again. Make Colombia great again”.

De la Espriella is a multi-millionaire. He earned much of his wealth by working as a lawyer in Miami, Florida.

He also earned notoriety for defending drug traffickers.

The New York Times acknowledged De la Espriella’s work for drug lords in a report in July, writing:

In Miami, Abelardo De La Espriella moved in the murky world of “white powder” lawyers — high-priced defense lawyers who help accused Latin American drug traffickers and others avoid harsh sentences by turning them into U.S. government informants or witnesses.

He employed a former trafficker from Colombia who, court records show, helped South Florida lawyers find such business.

In addition to the fortune that he made defending drug lords, the new Colombian president has a business that he modestly named after himself, called De la Espriella Style.

The company’s website is plastered with images of De la Espriella. He sells expensive men’s clothing, along with his books, music, poems, and even his own personal lines of rum, wine, and coffee.

De la Espriella is notorious in Colombia for his extreme narcissism and superficiality. He is first and foremost a social media influencer and celebrity, and has no political experience.

De la Espriella has done ads for Botox clinics, in which he bragged about his own face treatments. He was also lampooned for childishly sending out kisses to his supporters as hundreds of Colombians died in a devastating earthquake.

On a TV show, De la Espriella even demonstrated sociopathic tendencies when he recalled how, as a young man, he entertained himself by blowing up cats with explosives.

Colombia invites in the US military

Abelardo de la Espriella supports the US military hosting military bases in Colombian territory.

He has called for what he calls Plan Colombia Two, referring to the billions of dollars the US government gave to Colombia in the 2000s to wage a brutal war of extermination against left-wing armed groups. Many thousands of people were killed during Plan Colombia, including not only militants but also many peasants, Indigenous leaders, and labor organizers who were targeted by far-right paramilitaries and death squads sponsored by the Colombian government — and sometimes by US corporations.

When De la Espriella worked as a lawyer, he defended not only drug traffickers, but also far-right paramilitary groups and death squads.

Mere days after De la Espriella’s inauguration this August, Colombia signed an agreement with the Pentagon, allowing the US military to enter its territory.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth boasted, “Colombia is officially joining the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C)”.

The idea that De la Espriella is dedicated to fighting cartels is outlandish, given he made a career for himself as a lawyer who defended drug traffickers.

US supports drug traffickers in Latin America

This is one of many examples of how the US government supports some of the worst drug lords in Latin America, while cynically claiming it is fighting cartels.

US government intelligence agencies have acknowledged that Álvaro Uribe, the right-wing former president of Colombia, was a drug trafficker.

A declassified DIA cable recognized that Uribe was a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels”.

The US government strongly supported Uribe when he led Colombia between 2002 and 2010. This was the height of Plan Colombia, and the George W. Bush administration considered the drug trafficker Uribe to be a key ally in its so-called “War on Drugs”.

US government support for right-wing drug-trafficking leaders in Latin America has remained consistent and bipartisan over decades, but it has intensified under Trump — and particularly under Marco Rubio, a neoconservative hawk who serves as both secretary of state and national security advisor.

In 2025, the US government blatantly meddled in Honduras to put in power another far-right, pro-US, pro-Israel, anti-China leader, Nasry “Tito” Asfura.

As part of the US electoral interference operation, Trump officially pardoned and released from prison one of the worst drug traffickers in modern history, the right-wing former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH).

JOH had been imprisoned for trafficking tons of cocaine and machine guns. His conservative National Party used drug money to rig elections in Honduras.

Today, Honduras is governed by the same National Party. Asfura is a close ally of the cocaine kingpin JOH. The US government supports all of it.

The same thing is happening in Ecuador, which is run by a right-wing dictator, Daniel Noboa.

Noboa has banned the main opposition party, of the leftist Correísta movement, so he can run in elections with no effective political opposition.

Noboa is the son of the richest billionaire oligarch in Ecuador, and his family is deeply involved in drug trafficking. The president’s family firm, Noboa Trading Co., ships cocaine in banana crates from its private ports.

Noboa is likely the most powerful drug trafficker alive today. And he has the full, unflinching support of the US government.

Like De la Espriella, Noboa has given the US military carte blanche to carry out operations in Ecuadorian territory. The Pentagon has launched armed raids in Ecuador, in the name of supposedly fighting “drug trafficking” — while the country is led by a drug trafficker.

Also like De la Espriella, Noboa is a US citizen. The dictator of Ecuador was born in Miami, Florida and educated in the United States.

Just a few weeks after his inauguration in late 2023, Noboa traveled to Miami, Florida so his wife could give birth to his third child on US soil. Like the children of De la Espriella, those of Noboa are also US citizens.

This is deeply ironic, given that Trump has boasted that he is trying to abolish birthright citizenship in the US. The Trump White House vowed to end what it calls “birth tourism”.

But when right-wing leaders from Latin America fly to Florida so their wives can give birth in the US, guaranteeing citizenship to their children, the Trump administration strongly supports it.

Colombia recognizes Israel’s occupation of Golan Heights and Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara

Another factor that unites these far-right US-backed leaders in Latin America is that they all are closely allied with Israel.

They stand in stark contrast with the left-wing presidents in Latin America, who strongly support Palestine.

Colombia’s left-wing former President Gustavo Petro condemned Israel for committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Under Petro, Colombia broke off formal diplomatic relations with Israel. His government also joined a case in the International Court of Justice, which was introduced by South Africa, which charges Israel with genocide.

De la Espriella has done the exact opposite. He has been as pro-Israel as possible.

A day before his inauguration, De la Espriella met with the foreign minister of the Israeli regime, Gideon Sa’ar.

The Israeli official praised De la Espriella as his “friend”, and a “determined and inspiring leader”.

“The golden age in relations between Colombia and Israel begins today”, declared Israel’s foreign minister.

One of the first things that De la Espriella did after he came to power, just three days into his term, was to officially recognize Syria’s Golan Heights as supposed Israeli territory.

This decision blatantly violated international law. Israel has illegally occupied Syria’s Golan Heights since 1967.

Former President Petro publicly condemned the announcement, saying the Colombian people do not support Israel’s illegal occupation.

Only one other country on Earth recognizes the Golan Heights as Israeli territory: the United States.

The US made the decision to do so in 2019, during Trump’s first term as president. The Israeli regime responded by honoring the far-right US president, opening a new colonial settlement in occupied Syrian territory, in flagrant violation of international law, called Trump Heights.

That was not all. On the day of De la Espriella’s inauguration on 7 August, the very first thing that Colombia’s Foreign Ministry announced was that it recognized Morocco’s control over the occupied Western Sahara.

Western Sahara is territory that has been illegally occupied by the Moroccan monarchy for decades, in blatant violation of international law.

The indigenous inhabitants of Western Sahara are the Sahrawi people, and they have established their own government, called the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), under the leadership of a revolutionary, anti-colonialist, left-wing political party called the Polisario Front.

The SADR is a member of the African Union, and it is recognized by dozens of UN member states.

However, the US has put significant pressure on countries to end their diplomatic recognition of the SADR.

Under De la Espriella, Colombia has declared that it no longer recognizes the SADR.

Colombia very likely made this decision at the request of the US and Israel.

In 2020, the first Trump administration successfully pressured the Moroccan monarchy to normalize relations with the Israeli regime.

In return for Morocco recognizing Israel, the Trump White House announced in 2020 that the US would formally recognize Morocco’s supposed sovereignty over the illegally occupied Western Sahara.

Colombia vows to reduce ties with China and withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative

Under the leadership of the US citizen De la Espriella, Colombia has also vowed to reduce its ties with China.

China is the top trading partner of South America, and it even overtook the United States as the number one trading partner of Colombia. But like the other right-wing leaders of Latin America, De la Espriella has reassured Washington that he will rebuke Beijing.

Under the previous left-wing President Petro, Colombia had moved much closer to China. Petro traveled to Beijing and announced that his country would join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure project.

The new administration in Colombia has done precisely the opposite.

This August, the US Senate held a hearing for the Trump administration’s new ambassador to Colombia, Nate Morris.

Morris revealed that De la Espriella had promised the Trump administration that he will withdraw Colombia from China’s BRI.

A US senator asked Morris about the memorandum of understanding (MoU) that Colombia had signed under Petro, to join the BRI, and this is what he said in the hearing:

I’ve been very encouraged by the president-elect (De la Espriella) and his commitment to withdraw from that MoU.

And I believe, obviously, that I think all nations have to make a decision, that it’s either the United States or China.

The message coming from Washington reflects Cold War logic: All the countries around the world have to pick a side, you’re either with the US, or you’re with China; you cannot have good relations with both.

The new right-wing leaders in countries like Colombia, Ecuador, and Honduras have made it clear where their true loyalty lies.

It is often said that the United States is the richest country on Earth. This is a myth.

It is certainly true that, in the United States, there are some very, very rich people, including the wealthiest billionaires on Earth, and the first ever trillionaire (Elon Musk).

However, when you look at the country as a whole, you see that the US is not a relatively prosperous nation.

This article will analyze a broad set of data, including several different indicators, that show how Americans are not wealthy compared to people in other advanced economies.

Americans are NOT wealthier than Europeans

US media outlets constantly promote a pernicious narrative, claiming that, supposedly, the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest US state.

This misleading idea is especially common on the US right. Trump’s MAGA supporters often disparagingly refer to Europeans as “Europoors”.

Even some European media outlets have published articles claiming that “American families are so much richer than us”.

This is completely ridiculous — and, frankly, false.

UBS, the major Swiss bank, publishes an annual Global Wealth Report. The document is written primarily for rich investors, but it includes some interesting data that can be relevant to everyday people.

In the 2026 report, UBS calculated the wealth per adult in the 30 richest economies in the world. What was especially useful about this report was that it included both average wealth and median wealth.

It is true that, if you look at average wealth per adult, the United States is in second place, after Switzerland.

This is the data point that most Western media outlets highlighted. The Wall Street Journal pointed to it to conclude that “Europeans get wealthier, but lag behind Americans”.

However, the Wall Street Journal ignored the median wealth per adult, which was also reported in UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2026.

If you look at median wealth, the picture suddenly changes — and dramatically, at that.

The US drops from being in second place in average wealth way down to 28th place in median wealth.

The median wealth per adult in the US is lower than that of Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Israel, Sweden, Finland, Qatar, etc.

The median (middle) American is not wealthy.

If you say Americans are wealthy, you have to say Austrians are wealthy, Portuguese are wealthy, and Slovenians are wealthy, because the median person in those countries has more wealth than the median American.

In reality, the US is such an unequal country, with a small handful of extremely wealthy billionaires, that it makes the average American look wealthy, but that average is extremely skewed by the rich.

Confusing mean (average) and median (middle)

A big reason for this confusion is that many people simply do not understand the difference between the mean (the average) and the median (the middle).

There is a lot of wealth in the US, but that wealth is concentrated in a few hands.

In fact, the US has one of the highest rates of wealth inequality in the world.

The following infographic illustrates the difference between average wealth and median wealth.

Think about it this way: If you have a room with 10 people, and each person has $1000 of wealth, the average wealth is $1000 per person, and the median wealth is $1000. (The median is the middle value.) In this case, and the mean and the median are the same.

However, if you have a room with 10 people, but one of those is a billionaire, and the other nine only have $1000 of wealth, suddenly the average wealth shoots up to more than $100,000,000 ($100 million) per person.

That doesn’t mean that the other nine people are somehow rich. They don’t have $100 million of wealth; only one person has $1 billion of wealth. The other people are still poor; they only have $1000 of wealth.

This is why it is more important to look at median wealth. The median wealth in the second room is still $1000. But that single billionaire massively skews the average.

This is a crucial difference that is not understood by the US propagandists who make fun of the supposed “Europoors”.

To be fair, it’s not just Trump supporters who fall for this. Even major US media outlets keep publishing articles claiming that Europeans are supposedly lagging behind Americans in wealth.

The Wall Street Journal did exactly this in its article on the UBS Global Wealth Report. Its reporter overlooked the median wealth and instead focused on the average.

The UK is NOT poorer than Mississippi

This is why the claim, promoted by US media outlets, that the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi is utterly false. It is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between average and median.

It is also based on a misunderstanding on the difference between median wealth and GDP per capita.

GDP is not a measurement of wealth. GDP is a measurement of economic output, of the market value of all of the goods and services produced in a country in one year.

The fact is that, despite the many, many economic problems in Britain, the median wealth per adult in the UK is more than $125,000 USD. Median wealth in the US is roughly half of that, at just $69,000.

Moreover, conservative Americans, especially Trump supporters, love to make fun of Canada. They claim that the country is supposedly the “51st state”, calling to annex their northern neighbor. They often argue that Canadians are supposedly poorer than Americans.

Once again, this is based on an ignorant misunderstanding of the difference between average and median.

The median wealth per adult in Canada is nearly $148,000 USD, more than double the US median wealth of $69,000.

The US is one of the most unequal countries on Earth

The reason the United States appears to be rich, on the surface, is because it is one of the most unequal countries on Earth, and its high-profile elites often flaunt their wealth.

UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2026 also looked at wealth inequality in dozens of major economies.

The Swiss bank measured wealth inequality with the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient is a spectrum from zero to one. A Gini coefficient of one is the most extreme, hypothetical, example of inequality, in which all of the wealth in the country is held by one person. A Gini coefficient of zero is the utopian notion of perfect equality, in which all of the wealth is equally held by everyone in the country.

The higher the Gini coefficient is, the closer to one it is, the more inequality; and vice versa: the lower the Gini coefficient is, the closer it is to zero, the lower the inequality.

UBS found that the US is the sixth-most unequal country on the planet, with a Gini coefficient of 0.77.

Wealth inequality in the US is roughly at the same level as that of Saudi Arabia, which is an authoritarian absolute monarchy run by a royal family, which treats the domestic oil industry as its personal piggy bank and controls an estimated $1.4 trillion in wealth.

This is the perfect symbol of how the United States is not actually a democracy, but rather an oligarchy, dominated by a small handful of billionaires (and now the first ever trillionaire).

In fact, the only countries that have higher wealth inequality than the US are:

• Brazil (the fourth-most unequal), a formerly colonized nation in the Global South, which (like the US) has been plagued by systemic racism and extreme inequality between European-descended elites on one hand and Indigenous peoples and Brazilians of African descent on the other;

• South Africa (the third-most unequal), a country that for decades was run by a colonialist, white-supremacist apartheid regime, which systematically denied rights to the Black majority;

• Russia (the second-most unequal), which had capitalist shock therapy imposed upon it by US neoliberal economists in the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, when Washington mandated mass privatizations, which allowed a small handful of oligarchs to buy up formerly nationalized industries and other state assets for pennies on the dollar;

• the United Arab Emirates, or UAE (the most unequal), an absolute monarchy built upon horrendous exploitation of migrant workers, where modern-day slavery is widespread, and where just 13% of the population has citizenship and full rights.

In terms of its distribution of wealth, the United States is similar to these countries.

In fact, the US is more unequal than even some formerly colonized countries in the Global South, such as India and Mexico.

The only European nation that comes close to the level of US wealth inequality is Sweden.

Many European governments have been rightfully criticized for serving the interests of a small handful of wealthy elites.

France’s leader Emmanuel Macron is a multi-millionaire neoliberal banker who has often been referred to as “the president of the rich”. He has implemented many policies to benefit the rich, such as eliminating the wealth tax.

However, despite all of this, wealth inequality in France is nowhere near the level of the US. France is the 43rd-most unequal country.

Despite the many problems with other European governments, which are also frequently led by rich elites, their level of wealth inequality is much lower than that of the US.

The UK is the 40th-most unequal country. Italy is the 49th-most unequal country.

Similarly, Western propaganda often criticizes China for having “harsh inequality”, but the UBS data shows that mainland China (the 36th-most unequal country) has relatively the same level of wealth inequality as most European countries. It is more equal than Portugal (the 33rd-most unequal), and close to the level of the United Kingdom (the 40th-most unequal).

This is not to dispute that people in these countries still struggle with inequality. But the point is that the problem in the United States is exponentially worse.

The French economist Gabriel Zucman has done important research on wealth inequality. He found that the wealth of the 19 richest households in the US (the richest 0.00001% of the country) makes up nearly 14% of national income.

The US has never seen this extreme level of wealth concentration in its history.

US wealth inequality today is significantly worse than it was even during the Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, when the nation was dominated by the infamous “robber barons”, oligarchs like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan.

Today’s oligarchs — such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison — are significantly richer. And they have enormous influence over the political and economic system.

Extreme income inequality in the US

Another reason why the myth that Americans are wealthy is so widespread is because mainstream economists and Western media outlets conflate GDP, income, and wealth. All three are different metrics.

Wealth inequality is the most important form of inequality, given that rich people are rich because they own assets, not because of their income. In fact, many US billionaires claim to have little to no income, in order to avoid paying taxes.

Wealth inequality in the US is especially extreme. But if you look at income inequality, you can see that that it is also very high.

The economist Gabriel Zucman demonstrated that the richest 10% of Americans received about half of all growth in income in the past three decades, whereas the bottom 50% of Americans only earned 15% to 20% of the growth in income.

In fact, the richest 10% of Americans by income bracket make up roughly half of all of the consumer spending in the economy.

If you look at the bottom 60% of Americans, their share of consumption has fallen consistently over time.

This is particularly relevant, because consumption is the most important part of the US economy, which has been deindustrialized. And that consumption is being driven more and more by a small handful of rich elites.

GDP is NOT a measurement of wealth

One of the biggest problems with the corporate media’s economic discourse is the perception that GDP is a measurement of wealth. It is decidedly not.

The BBC claimed this June that “the US economy keeps defying the odds” and “the American economy continued to outperform so many of its peers”.

The narrative promoted in the Western media is that the US economy is supposedly healthier, because it has higher GDP growth. Therefore, the average American supposedly has rising living standards.

But this is not true. GDP is simply a measurement of economic output. It is the market value of all of the goods and services produced in a country every year.

GDP per capita is not a measurement of wealth, and it’s not a measurement of well-being.

A country’s GDP per capita can rise even as living standards for the average and/or median person fall, if the benefits of economic growth accrue to a small handful of elites (which is precisely what has happened in the US for decades).

Moreover, US GDP often looks misleadingly higher in relation to other countries because other nations’ GDP figures, which are initially reported in their local currencies, are skewed by being converted into US dollars at market exchange rates.

When you account for purchasing power parity (PPP), it is true that GDP per capita in the US is higher than that of Germany, Canada, France, and the UK. (Although median wealth in the US is lower.)

However, there are also several European countries that have significantly higher GDP per capita than the US, when measured at PPP. These include Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland.

Some Western mainstream economists don’t use PPP, instead preferring to measure GDP at market exchange rates. This makes the US economy look bigger than it actually is in relation to other countries, because the US dollar is so overvalued compared to most major currencies.

Ironically, Donald Trump himself constantly complains about how overvalued the US dollar is. And it is true. It’s because the US economy has deindustrialized, and it is based largely on inflating financial bubbles in the capital markets and real estate market. A stronger dollar encourages foreign investors to pile into US assets, keeping the bubbles inflated.

Trump says he wants a weaker dollar, in order to increase the competitiveness of US exports and encourage reshoring of manufacturing production.

So, in other words, the US is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The US wants an overvalued dollar to continue inflating asset prices, but it also wants a weaker dollar to make manufacturing more competitive.

Trump constantly boasts when stock market indices like the S&P 500 and Dow Jones break new records. But to keep juicing share prices, the US needs an overvalued dollar. If the dollar depreciates significantly against other major currencies, many foreign investors will sell their US holdings, causing a crash in the price of equities.

And with all of that said, there are still more problems with GDP data.

Ireland is a textbook example of why GDP per capita can be very misleading.

In 2014, Ireland’s GDP per capita (PPP) was $57,730 USD. Just one year later, it shot up 25% to $71,900. By 2025, it rocketed to $152,630. That means Ireland’s GDP per capita nearly tripled in a decade.

Throughout the 2000s, the US and Ireland had virtually identical GDP per capita. However, as of 2026, Ireland’s GDP per capita is now 69% higher than than of the US.

Does this mean that Ireland saw a massive economic boom in the past decade, of world-historic character? Did Irish people suddenly became much wealthier? Did living standards rapidly rise?

No. Ireland’s enormous GDP growth was largely a product of accounting and tax jurisdictions.

In reality, what happened is that major US corporations like Apple registered their intellectual property in Ireland, to take advantage of its low-tax status.

These US companies simply wanted to avoid taxes, so they changed their accounting practices. They did not suddenly build factories in Ireland that generated local employment and raised living standards.

Forbes reported on the controversy in 2016 and cautioned that, while GDP “is an interesting and useful number, it’s simply not the be all and end all of trying to measure the economy”.

Ireland’s supposed growth miracle came to be known as a case of “leprechaun economics”.

However, many Western economists and media outlets have forgotten this lesson. They are still fixated on GDP.

Another major problem with GDP is that it is an aggregate figure, based on the market value of the goods and services produced in all industries. However, some industries are more important than others.

Geopolitical Economy Report analyzed data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), separating US GDP by industry, to compare how much each sector of the economy adds value.

This clearly illustrates how the US economy has been deindustrialized and financialized in recent decades.

In the 1950s, manufacturing made up roughly 25% of US GDP. Today, manufacturing represents just a bit more than 10%.

At the same time, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector (known popularly as Wall Street) has massively increased its share of US GDP from just over 10% in 1947 to roughly 21% today.

Wall Street now represents the largest single sector of the US economy.

The second-biggest sector is professional and business services, which consist primarily of lawyers, managers, and consultants — in other words, bureaucratic overhead, not innovation and entrepreneurship.

The growth of these sectors does not contribute to rising living standards for Americans. On the contrary, a larger share of the economy represented by finance and professional services often translates into lower standards of living for the median worker.

This is why US GDP per capita can continue to rise, while living standards fall.

Another clear example of the problem with GDP data is imputed rent. A growing portion of US GDP consists of a fictitious part of the economy, which is called “imputed rents to owner-occupied housing”.

This means that, if you’re an American and you own your house, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis wants to include your home ownership in GDP data, so it does an imputation. It calculates market rates for the rent you would be charged by an imaginary landlord, if you didn’t own your house. But you do own your house, so it’s not real.

For decades, imputed rent represented a rounding error, at less than 1%. However, since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, imputed rent has become an increasingly important part of US GDP data.

In 2022, imputed rental of owner-occupied housing made up 9.2% of US GDP, up from 1.2% in 1970.

This means that nearly a tenth of US GDP is entirely fictitious. It does not exist. It is simply a matter of accounting.

All of these issues demonstrate why GDP is not a good measurement. GDP has a very specific use, to measure the economic output of the entire economy. But GDP per capita does not measure wealth, and it does not measure well-being.

This explains why it is utterly preposterous to look at GDP per capita, measured in dollars at market exchange rates, and to conclude that the UK is supposedly poorer than Mississippi. But the Western media corporate media continues to do so.

US public-health outcomes are among the worst of the developed world

Thus far, this article has focused on economic indicators. It is also important to analyze public health indicators, to demonstrate why the United States is in fact not a wealthy country, and how Americans have some of the worst living standards of the developed world.

Perhaps the most important indicator of all is life expectancy.

Even though GDP per capita is higher in the US than France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK (although US median wealth is lower), life expectancy is much higher in Europe.

Life expectancy in the US is just 79, compared to 84 in Spain, 83 in France, 82 in the Netherlands, and 81 in the UK.

The infant mortality rates shows a similar story.

In this area, once again, the US is doing much worse than countries at similar levels of development in Europe.

The US infant mortality rate is six per 1000 live births. In France it is half of that, at three. In the UK, it’s four.

An even more revealing indicator is the homicide rate.

The US is an extreme outlier when it comes to violence, with an average of six murders for every 100,000 people. In France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK, the figure is just one.

You see even more striking outliers when you look at healthcare indicators in the US.

The US health system is so bad that it even hurts rich Americans, who benefit most from the US oligarchic system.

This is according to peer-reviewed academic research published in 2025 by scientists at Brown University. The university summarized their findings in a press release (emphasis added):

The results revealed that people with more wealth tend to live longer than those with less wealth, especially in the U.S., where the gap between the rich and poor is much larger than in Europe.

Comparison data also showed that at every wealth level in the U.S., mortality rates were higher than those in the parts of Europe the researchers studied. The nation’s wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans; in some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.

In other words, the average American (not the median American) may have more wealth than most Europeans — because of the extreme wealth inequality in the US — but even many rich Americans live shorter lives than poor Europeans.

Why is that? Because the US healthcare system is so awful.

This is reflected in the data published by the OECD, in its annual report called Health at a Glance. The 2025 report is extremely revealing.

OECD data is useful, because it compares apples to apples, looking at advanced economies at similar levels of development (not apples to oranges, which would be comparing imperialist countries that developed through colonialism to underdeveloped, formerly colonized nations in the Global South).

The OECD found that the US is an outlier when it comes to health expenditure as a share of GDP. No other advanced economy comes close to the level of health spending of the US.

US healthcare spending is 17.2% of GDP. That is nearly double the OECD average of 9.3%.

This is another reason why US GDP looks higher, because the costs of its privatized health system are so exorbitant and inflated by the corporate sector.

Nevertheless, while the US spends nearly double the OECD average on healthcare, it has some of the worst public-health outcomes.

The data on health expenditure per capita is even more shocking.

Every year in the US, the health industry spends nearly $15,000 per person. And the share of out-of-pocket expenses in the US is higher than almost every other OECD country.

The average OECD health expenditure per capita is just under $6000 USD. (It should be noted that this is measured at purchasing power parity, PPP.)

This means the US spends nearly three times the OECD average per person on healthcare, with some of the worst results.

OECD researchers also studied the relationship between health spending and health outcomes.

Once again, they found that the US is an outlier.

The same trend is evident in the data analyzing the correlation between health spending and access to quality healthcare.

The data makes it clear: the US is a plutocracy. If you are rich, you can get good healthcare; if you are poor, you do not get good healthcare.

One of the reasons for this is simply because the US is, once again, a major outlier when it comes to population coverage for health care.

If you look at the dozens of countries in the OECD, you can see that the vast majority have 99% or 100% healthcare coverage for their population, and almost all of them have 99% or 100% public coverage.

There are only three countries in the OECD where the majority of the population gets healthcare from private companies: Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the US.

The average of the 38 economies in the OECD is that 98% of the population has health coverage.

In the US, it’s just 92% -- one of the worst levels in the OECD. The US has a lower level of health coverage than Costa Rica, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Chile, and Poland.

The only countries in the OECD that have a lower rate of health coverage than the US are Romania and Mexico.

But unlike the US, Mexico is solving this problem. In fact, Mexico’s left-wing government announced this year that it is creating a system of free universal healthcare. (This is one of the reasons why progressive President Claudia Sheinbaum is one of the most popular leaders on Earth, with a consistent approval rating of between 70% and 80%.)

US oligarchs are very wealthy, but the median American is not

All of these indicators, together, demonstrate that the US is not truly a wealthy country. Rather, it is a country that has a small handful of wealthy people.

When you exclude the oligarchs who skew the data, you can see that Americans actually have quite a low standard of living, compared to people in other advanced economies.

Nevertheless, the Western corporate media — which even in Europe is overwhelmingly owned by pro-US, Atlanticist billionaire oligarchs — bombards people with propaganda claiming that the US neoliberal capitalist model is responsible for widespread prosperity, and that this is supposedly why Britain is poorer than Mississippi.

These people are utterly out of touch with reality. They ignore how many Americans are living in brutal conditions, are homeless, are impoverished, are struggling with extreme levels of debt, and are living paycheck to paycheck, with horrible health outcomes and a low life expectancy.

The propaganda claiming otherwise is spread by the same oligarchs who benefit from this extremely unequal US system, which is based on financial bubbles, rampant scams, and exploitation of working people, many of whom are barely making ends meet and are on the verge of being homeless.

That is the reality for the median American. For them, the American Dream is a myth. That’s why, as George Carlin said, “you have to be asleep to believe it”.

A comprehensive global study that surveyed tens of thousands of people in nearly 100 countries found that the vast majority see the United States as the biggest threat to the world.

At the same time, more and more nations say they prefer China over the US. China’s approval rating has risen dramatically in the Global South, in particular, where support for the US has plummeted.

These were the results of the 2026 Democracy Perception Index, an annual study conducted by a group called the Alliance of Democracies.

The Alliance of Democracies cannot in any way be accused of being “pro-China” or “anti-US”. The organization was founded by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of NATO and right-wing ex-prime minister of Denmark.

It is also funded by a Who’s Who of European governmental bodies, major US corporations, US government-linked groups, and even Taiwan.

Some of the organizations that finance the Alliance of Democracies include Palantir, Microsoft, the EU’s European Endowment for Democracy, the right-wing Atlas Network, the US government-sponsored Freedom House, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.

Despite these links, the group’s 2026 Democracy Perception Index came to some conclusions that will doubtless infuriate hawks and cold warriors in Washington.

The survey asked 23,968 respondents in 84 countries which nation they consider to be “the biggest threat to the world”.

Most people in 65 out of the 84 countries said the United States is the largest danger.

Another 10 countries (almost all in Europe) said Russia is the biggest threat. Seven (in West Asia and North Africa) said Israel. Israel said Iran. Japan said China.

The Democracy Perception Index likewise surveyed people in 97 nations and asked if they think the US should “have military bases in your country”.

Most people in 86 countries said no.

There was only clear support for US military bases in four out of the 97 surveyed nations: Israel, Poland, Puerto Rico, and South Korea.

Popular opinion of the United States has also declined precipitously, according to the survey.

The Democracy Perception Index found that the US has a net negative perception in 74% of the surveyed countries.

The US was only popular in a small handful of nations, like Israel, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, and Nigeria.

The US is most disliked in Europe, West Asia and North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.

In contrast, the survey found that China is increasingly popular around the world.

Most people in 63 of the 83 surveyed countries said they prefer China over the US.

The report noted that the US has the highest level of support in Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine — but it noted that these are “exceptions”.

China was especially popular in West Asia, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Moreover, the study asked people in 98 countries what they think about the US war against Iran. (The survey was conducted from 19 March to 21 April 2026, and the US unilaterally launched a war of aggression against Iran on 28 February.)

A plurality of nations, 41 of the 98, supported Iran. Only 28 said they side with the US. (The other 29 were divided or not clear.)

The Democracy Perception Index also asked people in 98 countries if they support Israel or Palestine.

A slightly majority, 51 of the 98, said they back Palestine. Just 17 countries prefer Israel.

Israel has its highest level of support in Ukraine, the US, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, and Panama.

Another question that the survey asked was if people think their country is “heading in the right direction”.

The number one nation, with the highest level of optimism, was China.

The only countries in the western hemisphere where a majority of people said yes were El Salvador and Nicaragua (which is governed by the revolutionary Sandinista Front).

Some of the lowest levels of optimism were in France, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Germany, and Nigeria.

It is now widely acknowledged that the United States is losing the war against Iran, which Washington itself started.

Even some neoconservative hawks — who were architects of the wars on Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and who for years advocated for an attack on Iran — have now reluctantly acknowledged that Tehran is winning this war, and that Washington’s loss will have massive geopolitical repercussions.

“There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done”, wrote the prominent neocon Robert Kagan in The Atlantic. “With control of the strait [of Hormuz], Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished”.

Western media outlets report that the US is losing the war with Iran

Just a few weeks after the United States and Israel launched this war of aggression on 28 February, British newspaper The Independent acknowledged that “Iran is the clear winner, as Trump’s desperate bid for peace shows he wants out of the war”.

Soon after, the US corporate media began to concede the same.

In mid-April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed observing that “the Iran War seems to be failing”. This was written by Gerard Baker, the conservative former editor-in-chief of the newspaper, and an erstwhile Trump supporter.

Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies have been feeding information to US media outlets, disclosing that the war has been going very badly.

The New York Times reported in May, citing US intelligence sources, that Iran still has access to the vast majority of its missile capabilities.

Tehran can still use 30 of its 33 missile sites on the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, through which roughly 20% of globally traded crude passed on a daily basis before the war.

Trump declared a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, to try to choke off Iran’s oil exports.

However, US intelligence officials acknowledged in an article in the Washington Post that Iran is able to withstand this US military blockade for many months.

Moreover, US intelligence officials told numerous media outlets — including CNN, NBC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — that Iran has succeeded in destroying or at least heavily damaging the majority of the US military’s bases and other assets in West Asia.

At the same time, Fortune magazine reported that the US military has been quickly using up its stockpile of missiles.

Fortune cited Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Linda Bilmes, who estimated that the US war on Iran will likely cost more than $1 trillion.

Trump has denied all of this publicly, instead adamantly claiming victory.

“They’re militarily defeated. In their own minds, maybe they don’t know that”, Trump said of Iran.

Nevertheless, these constant leaks by US intelligence officials, to a multitude of media outlets, tell a very different story. They show that this war is going very badly.

Neoconservative hawks admit Iran is winning the war

In fact, the war is going so badly that some of the most prominent neoconservative ideologues in the United States have publicly conceded that Iran is winning.

This was the conclusion of an article published in the pro-war mouthpiece of Atlanticism, The Atlantic. The piece was titled “Checkmate in Iran”, and it bore the subtitle “Washington can’t reverse or control the consequences of losing this war”.

The author of this essay was none other than Robert Kagan, perhaps the most influential neoconservative intellectual.

Kagan was one of the original advocates for the US invasion of Iraq, and he long pushed for a similar war on Iran.

Kagan co-founded the influential think tank the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was the closest thing that existed to being the Church of Neoconservatism.

PNAC promoted a hyper-aggressive foreign policy. Its neoconservative adherents were proud of the fact that the United States runs a global empire. They believed that the US military should wage war everywhere in order to overthrow independent governments that resisted Washington’s hegemony.

Founding members of PNAC included several top officials in the George W. Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney (vice president) and Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense and former president of the World Bank).

Another founding signatory of the PNAC statement of principles was John Bolton, a hard-line hawk who served in the Bush administration and was brought back by Donald Trump, in his first administration, to serve as national security advisor (and to oversee Washington’s coup attempt in Venezuela).

In the 2016 election, the original alliance of PNAC neoconservatives split. About half supported Trump, while the rest backed Hillary Clinton.

Kagan was among the prominent neocons who became a “never Trump” Republican.

Kagan is also married to another influential neocon, Victoria Nuland, who served as US ambassador to NATO in the George W. Bush administration and later filled top roles in the State Department under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Nuland was deeply involved in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, which set off a proxy war that has dragged on for more than a decade.

Given all of this context, one can see how incredible it is to read Kagan’s article in The Atlantic, admitting that Iran is defeating the United States. It is kind of like the Pope coming out and saying he was wrong and will convert to Islam.

Kagan is one of the most staunchly pro-war voices in US politics. This is why the following passage that he wrote is especially significant (emphasis added):

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [compared to the US loss in the wars in Vietnam Afghanistan]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Moreover, Kagan is not the only prominent neocon who has come to this conclusion.

The other co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, Bill Kristol, has reluctantly acknowledged the same.

Kristol is an editor of the neoconservative website The Bulwark, where he lamented that the United States has been “humiliated” by Trump’s failed war against Iran.

US war against Iran is extremely unpopular among Americans

What explains the sudden opposition of these notorious neoconservative hawks, who spent decades pushing for war on Iran?

They can apparently see the writing on the wall. The war has gone horribly, and it is extremely unpopular at home.

60% of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of the war on Iran, while just 33% support it, according to a May survey published by NPR, PBS News, and Marist Poll.

Similarly, a YouGov poll in May found that only 13% of Americans think the US is winning the war against Iran, while 39% say it is not and will not.

Prominent neocons are simply jumping off the sinking ship. They recognize that Trump and the Republican Party are extremely unpopular, and that this war is blowing back, hard.

Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this May marked the first time a sitting US president traveled to China since 2017.

To understand this trip, it is important to emphasize that it was the United States that requested the meeting. Beijing did not initiate it.

This begs the question: Why was Trump so desperate to sit down with China’s President Xi Jinping?

The short answer is the US economy is in dire straits.

The aggressive trade war that the US launched against China during Trump’s first term, which he then heavily escalated in 2025, has backfired spectacularly.

Inflation is rising fast in the US, and Trump’s tariffs have only poured fuel on the inflationary fire, while also accelerating deindustrialization and supply-chain dysfunction.

Washington is operating from a position of distinct vulnerability. Even major US think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations now openly acknowledge that Beijing has “the upper hand”, and Washington “has lost its leverage over China”.

Trump invited the CEOs of a dozen US corporations to travel to China with him

Trump has never been one for subtlety. He constantly “says the quiet part loud”.

On his website Truth Social, Trump boasted about the corporate entourage accompanying him to China. The US delegation consisted of many of the most powerful billionaire oligarchs in the country:

• Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, the world’s richest billionaire oligarch, who spent $288 million to get Trump and his Republican allies elected;

• Jensen Huang of Nvidia, which is now the world’s most valuable corporation, with a $5.5 trillion market capitalization, driven by the AI bubble;

• Tim Cook of Apple, whom Trump calls “Tim Apple”;

• Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager;

• Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, the biggest alternative asset manager, and Schwarzman was a major funder of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign;

• Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg;

• Cargill CEO Brian Sikes;

• Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser;

• GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp;

• Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon;

• Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra; and

• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.

In fact, when Trump flew to China, he was physically joined on Air Force One by the billionaires Musk and Huang.

When the US president met with the Chinese leadership, he was flanked by these corporate oligarchs.

The symbolism was unmistakable: these CEOs were effectively being treated as shadow government officials.

It was the clearest demonstration that US government policy is made by and for large corporations, and the rich elites who run and invest in them.

Only further confirming this is the fact that the US ambassador in China, David Perdue, was previously the president of Reebok and CEO of Dollar General.

US trade war backfired: Nvidia’s market share in China went from 95% to 0%

Why were these US corporate executives so eager to travel to China with Trump? The answer is simple: They are desperate to secure access to the world’s largest market.

China has a population of 1.4 billion people, including the largest middle class on Earth. Brookings Institution researchers estimated that there will be 1.2 billion Chinese in the middle class in 2027, which is a quarter of the entire world’s middle class.

“China already makes up the largest middle-class consumption market segment in the world and is a priority market for major multinational firms”, the researchers wrote.

US corporations have always been desperate to penetrate China’s enormous market. After Deng Xiaoping initiated the Reform and Opening Up in 1978, he allowed some to do so under the condition that they share their technology and establish joint ventures with Chinese firms. The slogan was “market (access) for technology (transfer)”: 市场换技术 (shìchǎng huàn jìshù).

When Trump launched the US trade war against China in 2018, he put the two countries on the gradual path toward economic “decoupling”. This is a slow process, but trade and investment between the US and China have fallen significantly in the past decade.

Some major US corporations have been very negatively impacted by this trade war.

In particular, the prominent presence of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Trump’s trip to China highlighted the stark failure of Washington’s tech containment strategy.

In an effort to sabotage China’s AI development, both the Biden and Trump administrations restricted the export of advanced chips.

This campaign of tech warfare — known as the “chip war” — blew back hard on Nvidia. Huang lamented that the US corporation previously controlled 95% of the Chinese market for advanced AI chips, but its market share has fallen to zero.

Instead of allowing the US to monopolize AI and other advanced technologies, Beijing responded by pouring billions of dollars into industrial policy measures, to develop its own domestic semiconductor industry.

China has made rapid progress. It is now dominating the global market for legacy chips, and will likely catch up to US Big Tech companies very soon.

Some US corporate executives have clearly asked Trump to reconsider his strategy. The scorched-earth campaign of economic war and tech war against China has backfired, and they hoped for some kind of grand bargain.

Trump’s trip was a failure: China wasn’t interested

However, Beijing was apparently not nearly as interested as Washington was.

Many Western media outlets acknowledged that very little came out of the trip. Some even called it a failure. Trump returned home mostly empty-handed.

Trump boasted that China will order 200 planes from Boeing, but the US corporation’s stock price actually fell 4% in response to this news, because analysts had expected that it would purchase 500.

The US government did give Nvidia the green light to sell its second-most advanced AI chip, the H200, to 10 Chinese tech companies, but Reuters pointed out that “not ​a single delivery has been made so far”.

Reuters concluded, “U.S. President Donald Trump left China on [15 May] with no major breakthroughs on trade or tangible help from Beijing to end the Iran war”.

It was easy to predict this outcome. The US government has spent nearly a decade now waging a trade and tech war, aiming to prevent China from developing, seeking to isolate the country.

Why Trump thought he could suddenly play nice, and get China to make concessions to benefit the US at its expense, is a mystery.

Moreover, the US started a war of aggression against Iran, which has disrupted the global economy and caused the largest oil crisis in history, but Trump now expects China to bail him out. It is clearly absurd.

In other words, after years of punching China in the face, Trump hopes Beijing will help to save the US economy. It is obvious why China was not interested.

China holds the cards, not the US

When Trump unilaterally escalated the trade war against China in April 2025, threatening tariffs as high as 145%, Beijing surprised Washington by hitting back, putting proportional levies on US exports.

Trump fumed, “We have much bigger and better cards than they do”. The US president claimed that he could “destroy China” with his “incredible cards”.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was enraged. He went on CNBC and declared, “I think it was a big mistake, this Chinese escalation, because they’re playing with a pair of twos”.

“What do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us?” asked Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager from Wall Street. “We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us, so that is a losing hand for them”.

In reality, the opposite was true: China holds significantly more valuable cards.

The clearest example of this was how Beijing responded to Washington’s unilateral tariffs and tech export restrictions by cutting off US access to rare-earth elements.

This caused a political earthquake in Washington, because US corporations cannot manufacture their products without Chinese rare earths. The US military-industrial complex cannot make its weapons systems without them either.

China dominates the global supply chain for many critical minerals.

Recognizing this vulnerability, the US government has sought to develop a new supply chain. Under Marco Rubio, the State Department launched a “Pax Silica” initiative, and invited dozens of countries this February to participate in its Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington.

However, building these parallel networks will take years, meaning the US has no option but to play nice with China if it wants critical minerals.

In terms of Chinese leverage, the presence of Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook on Trump’s trip was especially telling.

For nearly a decade, Washington has pressured US companies to “de-risk” by moving production lines out of China, “friendshoring” factories to countries like India.

However, shifting these supply chains has proven to be nearly impossible, given the complexity of China’s domestic manufacturing ecosystem.

Apple has tried to make its iPhones in India, but has faced many problems.

Tesla serves as the ultimate case study. More than half of the company’s electric vehicles (EVs) are manufactured at its “gigafactory” in Shanghai.

This is despite the fact that, in 2024, Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked for domestic trade barriers, warning that his Chinese competitors would “demolish” US EV manufacturers. Soon after, the US government (then under Joe Biden) put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.

All of this demonstrates the extreme hypocrisy of US policy toward China. Washington wants Beijing to sacrifice its own interests to serve those of US corporations. Some comprador elites in other countries may be willing to do so, to enrich themselves at their nation’s expense; but not China’s leadership, which is dedicated to developing its country.

The United States is learning the hard way that it can no longer push around China.

It’s not often that the leader of a country boasts that he and other government officials act as pirates. But that is exactly what happened this May.

Donald Trump gave a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida in which he bragged about the blockade that the US military has imposed in the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran.

Trump proudly stated that the US military is seizing cargo ships full of Iranian oil.

“We took over the cargo, took over the oil”, Trump gloated. “It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates!”

This is how the US president described the operation:

We have such a great military and great navy. And they were going straight through, and they said, “Turn your ship around!”. And there was no response. “Turn your ship around! Evacuate your engine room immediately!” And you see all these guys running out of there.

Now, they’re five miles away — in one shot, into the engine room, blew up the engine room; the ship stopped, and they used tugboats. And then we landed on top of it — on top of everything else — we then land on top of it.

And we took over the ship; we took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business.

Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates. But we’re not playing games.

Iran had initially condemned these US attacks as “acts of armed piracy”. Al Jazeera debated whether or not they constituted piracy. But then Trump came out and admitted it.

Previous acts of US government piracy targeting Iran and Venezuela

This US government piracy is not new, either. Washington has engaged in these acts for many years, and not just under Donald Trump.

In fact, in 2023, the Joe Biden administration confirmed that it seized another cargo ship, full of nearly 1 million barrels of Iranian oil.

Moreover, in 2020, during Trump’s first term, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) boasted that it commandeered a “multimillion dollar fuel shipment by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)”, which “was bound for Venezuela”.

“These actions represent the government’s largest-ever seizure of fuel shipments from Iran”, the DOJ wrote at the time.

The fact that this previous US seizure impacted not only Iran but also Venezuela is important, because Caracas has also been a target of Washington’s piracy.

In late December 2025 — just a few days before the US government invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its internationally recognized President Nicolas Maduro — Trump proudly stated that the US military was taking control of ships full of Venezuelan oil, and that Washington would steal both the crude and the vessels themselves.

At a press conference, a reporter asked Trump what the US government would do with the Venezuelan oil seized in previous acts of piracy.

“We’re going to keep it”, the US president chirped. He added, “We’re keeping the ships also”.

Critics on social media made AI memes depicting Trump and his top cabinet officials as “pirates of the Caribbean”.

Iran’s embassy in South Africa also dubbed US officials the “miserable pirates of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz”.

US war unleashes energy, economic, and food crises

Trump’s war of aggression against Iran has caused serious geopolitical repercussions for the global economy.

The Strait of Hormuz, which is blockaded by the US military, was described by the US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) as “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint”.

Approximately 20% of globally traded oil transited the narrow strait on a daily basis before the US and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran on 28 February.

This US-Israeli war has unleashed the largest oil crisis in history, according to the International Energy Agency.

This is threatening not only economic crisis, but also a food crisis, because many of the chemicals used in fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf region, and farmers around the world now find it difficult to purchase fertilizer.

China orders domestic companies to ignore US sanctions

In addition to that, the Trump administration has targeted China as part of its war on Iran.

China is the largest trading partner of Iran. China is also the number one importer of oil on Earth, and it buys more than 80% of Iranian oil exports.

The US Treasury announced on 24 April that it was imposing sanctions on Chinese companies that purchase Iranian oil, as part of what it called Operation “Economic Fury” (a reference to the Pentagon’s name for its war on Iran: Operation Epic Fury).

Then, on 1 May, the US State Department said it had also levied sanctions against Chinese firms.

“U.S. Sanctions Tighten Grip on Iran-China Oil Trade”, the State Department declared in a press release.

Washington wrote that it is “taking decisive action to disrupt Iran’s illicit oil trade”.

In reality, Iran’s oil trade is not “illicit”. Iran is allowed to sell oil to whomever it wants.

The US sanctions against Iran are illegal, according to international law. They are known as unilateral coercive measures, as they do not have the approval of the UN Security Council.

This means it is actually the US government that it is engaged in illicit activity (like piracy).

But what was important about the press releases from the Treasury and State Department was that they identified several different Chinese companies that were being hit by US sanctions.

In particular, the US government sanctioned Hengli Group, a Chinese petrochemical giant.

Washington targeted Hengli’s massive petrochemical plant in Dalian, which refines 20 million tons of crude oil every year.

This facility is very important for the Chinese economy. Dalian is a coastal city in the northeast. It plays a crucial role in the petrochemical industry.

Therefore, China was compelled to defend itself against these unilateral US sanctions.

In response, Beijing ordered all Chinese companies not to comply with US sanctions.

This was a very significant geopolitical development.

The Chinese government has always opposed unilateral US sanctions, and Beijing has never abided by them. However, in this case, the Chinese government went a step further.

Henry Gao, a professor of law at Singapore Management University (and a critic of the Chinese government who is often quoted favorably by US corporate media outlets), explained the significance of Beijing’s decision.

China’s Ministry of Commerce “just invoked the blocking statute for the first time, ordering all firms not to recognise, enforce, or comply with US sanctions”, he wrote.

Gao argued that this is an example of how an economic “decoupling is coming”.

While the Chinese government had never recognized US sanctions, many Chinese companies would still abide by such sanctions, because they were afraid of being hit by US secondary sanctions.

The Chinese government has now told domestic firms that this is illegal. It is legally mandating that US sanctions be ignored.

In April, the US Treasury sent letters to Chinese banks, threatening to hit them with secondary sanctions for facilitating financial transactions with Iran.

However, with the Trump administration’s sanctions on the petrochemical giant Hengli Group, the US government crossed a red line.

Chinese analyst TP Huang noted, “Hengli is a huge deal. China is entirely willing to fight economic war over this from what I can see”.

The “Trump admin stepped over the line” on this issue, he wrote.

Huang explained:

Dalian Changxing island is the end point and export terminal for northeast provinces’ entire green hydrogen strategy, where green chemicals get shipped here for shipping, bunkering, and chemical production.

Hengli is a huge deal here, other Chinese companies can’t avoid working with them.

Western sanctions kill half a million people per year on average

China’s response is very significant, and demonstrates how the US government’s constant abuse of sanctions has increasingly backfired, while fueling even more geopolitical conflict.

The US government has imposed sanctions on approximately one-third of the countries on Earth, including more than 60% of low-income nations, according to a 2024 report in the Washington Post.

Washington’s incessant global economic warfare has caused tens of millions of deaths.

A peer-reviewed academic article published in 2025 in the leading medical journal The Lancet concluded “that sanctions do kill: economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths … annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106,000 deaths)”.

That means Western sanctions killed roughly 38 million people over 50 years.

I wrote an article on the topic of food security in China in 2022. The main rationale for that prior essay was that there had been warnings of a global food crisis as the result of the war in Ukraine.

Indeed, prices of staple commodities like corn, wheat, and soybeans nearly doubled in price in the first year of the conflict, and millions were pushed into hunger worldwide.

In the United States, this was one of the leading causes of rapid grocery inflation in 2022, contributing to an 11.4% increase in grocery prices, per the USDA.

China however largely remained unscathed, with changes in grocery prices remaining much lower than those in the United States over the same period of time.

A food crisis came, and although it hit the Global South much harder than the imperial core, hit the imperial core it did.

However, China was noticeably insulated from this previous food crisis.

Over time, some attention was drawn to Chinese food policy. Economists like Isabella Weber highlighted that Chinese strategic food reserves helped to ensure that grocery prices didn’t skyrocket for China, like they did elsewhere else in the world, amid one of the worst food crises to hit the international community in decades.

Amusingly enough, even normal Westerners who left the popular app Tiktok during the temporary ban in January 2025 saw firsthand on the Chinese app Rednote (小红书) how much more affordable groceries were in China for the average person.

A new global food crisis

Today, the world is facing another global food and energy crisis, caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran and the disruption of supply chains in the Persian Gulf.

Given this new crisis, revisiting the topic of China’s food security seems prudent, to assess its strengths and see what could be learned from these methods.

If reporting is to be believed, this present conflict in West Asia could push as many as 45 million people into hunger, in addition to making the hundreds of millions already in hunger face even more dire circumstances, as a direct result of the US’s imperial war of aggression against Iran.

Food prices in countries that are much more insulated will also increase, likely as much as, if not even more than, they did in 2022.

In China, however, the government has state control over the commanding heights of the economy. In practice, this means that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) place strategically important industries under government control, and operate them as businesses that serve socially beneficial purposes, as opposed to existing for quarterly profit maximization on behalf of shareholders.

China’s strategic food reserves

In my prior article, I examined the role of cooperatives in alleviation of poverty and food security.

In this present essay, I will expand upon the role of the Chinese state in safeguarding food security, as well as the interplay between the state and cooperatives.

The largest and most directly relevant SOEs in China that oversee this strategy are China Grain Reserves Group (中储粮集团), also known by the name Sinograin; and the China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (中国粮油食品集团), known simply as COFCO.

Sinograin is the main company that handles reserves of grains, oils, meats, sugars, and other agricultural commodities. COFCO oversees processing, warehousing, planting, transportation, and shipping of foodstuffs.

Sinograin can be thought of as the SOE that handles the actual reserved quantities of foodstuffs, while COFCO processes, transports, warehouses, and distributes foodstuffs to various retailers at controlled prices.

In late 2022, these entities formed a joint venture called the China Enterprise United Grain Reserve Company (中企联合粮食储备有限公司), combining their efforts into a streamlined strategic grocery network, covering everything from sourcing and planting. Through this system, the process of reserving foodstuffs and then processing and wholesaling them is managed efficiently.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a private sector in China; indeed, cooperative farms also exist, and there are plenty of private, for-profit, non-cooperative business enterprises working in foodstuffs. However, a state sector serves as a check on these entities.

If people believe that the private sector is overcharging them for essentials, they have a state-run option to source foodstuffs from.

Moreover, if there are shortages or supply chain problems, the government can open up reserves to auction, and allow various wholesalers and distributors to have grains at a price guaranteed to ensure farmers are adequately compensated, but not so high as to ensure that ordinary consumers are price gouged.

In terms of the interplay between the state sector and cooperative sector, the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives (ACFSMC) stands as a means by which the state organizes and supports cooperatives.

This can look like technical support for cooperatives, research, development of local cooperative business models, or study of new agronomic innovations for cooperatives, among many other responsibilities.

The cooperative sector is itself not state-owned definitionally, but the government does guide and develop the creation of cooperative industries as part of socialist construction.

In turn, the Chinese state uses this infrastructure to enable other goals of socialist construction, including strategic partnerships between entities like COFCO and the ACFSMC.

State-run entities like COFCO and Sinograin can sell directly to cooperatives and have cooperatives be the front-end of the distribution chain to consumers whenever prices need to be stabilized. This enables lower costs to be guaranteed to the people.

In terms of scale, there is not another strategic food reserve at any point in human history that comes close to how large China’s reserve is.

In terms of grain alone, in 2024 the strategic reserve was at 700 million metric tons of grain as of 2024. This is enough to feed the domestic population for a year.

With reserves at that scale, China can guarantee that, when crises unfold, its population will not go hungry.

Grain reserves are one element of the way that Chinese socialism has been able to anticipate and prepare for the current crisis the world is in.

China’s fertilizer reserves

China also has a large fertilizer reserve.

In fact, the second-biggest exporter of fertilizer in the world is China, and its largest producers are the SOEs Sinochem and the China National Agricultural Means of Production Group Corporation.

Sinochem also maintains supply chains for other components in the production chain of fertilizers, and can draw on reserves from other state sectors like the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) or the strategic reserve of sulphur to ensure that fertilizer production is ramped up, in the case of crises like the one we face today.

As a result, China is in a position where it can release fertilizer reserves to extend the shelf life of its grain reserves and attempt to bolster domestic production, such that its grain reserves can last even longer.

These policies require an immense amount of planning, which market logic would simply not find tolerable.

Indeed, in October 2025, The Economist lamented that China was betting on non-market forces in managing its reserves, buying up grains, fuel, chemical components, and minerals when times were good.

The Economist wrote:

Since many analysts expect a barrel of crude to be $10-20 cheaper next year, China may be wasting billions of yuan a month. Its refiners are also securing copper at an enormous loss: the “treatment” fee they usually charge miners to process ores has turned deeply negative—a feat enabled, traders suspect, by cheap state loans. Brazil has been selling soyabeans to China at a hefty premium.

Retrospectively, this logic is laughable. Today, the prices of basic necessities are skyrocketing. To have bought them at a “hefty premium” in 2025 will look like a bargain compared to the sky-high prices in 2026.

For a long time, the stockpiling policies of China were described as either incompetent mismanagement by the state or as a nefarious policy to prepare to wage aggressive war. Not once did Western pundits consider that these policies were strategic choices by China to prepare for crises that could be caused by a myriad of causes, such as climate change, or the militarism of the United States.

Rational socialist planning was never seen for what it actually is: a state-directed plan to anticipate needs and shape the economy in a direction that actually benefits the population, as opposed to allowing market forces to enrich a small handful of wealthy elites.

China’s five-year plans and strategic planning

Indeed, we can look at the most recent five-year plans to see how this is playing out in terms of China’s food security policy.

A priority of the 14th five-year plan (from 2021 to 2025) was to develop into a leader in agricultural modernization.

Even the neoliberal publication The Economist has acknowledged that China has become the leading country in agricultural sciences, with output into leading scientific journals being spearheaded by research in Chinese agricultural science.

China uses drone technology more than any other country, deploying more than 300,000 agricultural drones — more than half of the world’s total — to enable efficient transportation, fertilization, and seeding of crops.

China plans to lead on adaptable crop biotechnologies and novel protein sources.

China integrates AI systems like Deepseek into pest-identification programs, to reduce the use of chemical pesticides.

In terms of physical infrastructure, during its 14th five-year plan, China invested $757 billion USD in water conservation efforts, such as agricultural irrigation and hydroelectric power, among others.

These same priorities are reflected in the 15th five-year plan, which seeks to further integrate agricultural biosciences and artificial intelligence into existing agricultural networks.

These state directives are not only rational, they’re humane. China has secured resources necessary for the flourishing of 1.4 billion people.

As millions in the world will experience hunger and further impoverishment, China has taken adequate steps to ensure that its domestic population will not bear the weight of damage from choices undertaken by others.

Indeed, as other countries in East and Southeast Asia face the prospect of shortages, China has taken steps to ensure that it can export critical materials for industrial production.

China is beginning to allow export of jet fuel, as the airlines of several neighboring Asian countries experience severe shortages.

As shortages of fuel impact critical chemical industrial processes in countries like Japan, China steps in to fill gaps in these supply chains, to prevent critical industrial sectors from collapsing.

Because of sound environmental initiatives, China is in a prime position to export clean energy alternatives to countries suffering from the current energy crisis, as it is the largest producer of solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles.

Not only has China’s long-term strategic stockpiling secured the well-being of its own population; it is also securing the well-being of other countries facing this crisis as well.

As the world plunges deeper into a generation-defining crisis, happening at the tail-end of yet another generation-defining crisis, we can see that alternative systems are capable of actually addressing these problems effectively and rationally.

State planning and the socialist mode of production, in the form of state-owned enterprises and cooperatives under the guidance of a communist party, are capable of addressing fundamental needs.

As the crises of the modern era are increasingly showing us, a better world is possible. China is providing an example of how.

There are growing signs that the United States may be on the verge of another major financial crisis, one that could start in the $3 trillion private credit market, which is already seeing significant turmoil, before spreading to other sectors.

Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to discuss the serious problems on Wall Street. Hudson warned that the US economy is built on a Ponzi scheme that depends on continuing to pour money into a bloated, bubbly financial system based on unsustainable speculation, not industrial production.

Video

Podcast

Transcript

(Introduction)

BEN NORTON: There are more and more signs that we may be on the precipice of another major financial crisis.

The former CEO of the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs warned in an interview on Bloomberg that he can smell another financial crisis on the horizon.

Where exactly could this crisis come from? Well, some financial analysts are worried about the private credit industry in the US.

This has exploded in recent years, because after the 2008 crash, banks were more heavily regulated. So more and more firms on Wall Street began to lend to private companies, and the private credit industry ballooned.

It is now a $3 trillion industry, yet it is not regulated. And many of these private credit firms have given bad loans to bad companies that are now defaulting.

We published a short video explaining the issue with the private credit industry and the fears of a new financial crisis. However, that video is just a brief introduction to the problem.

I thought it would be important to go into further detail explaining the very real danger here. And I thought the perfect guest to interview to help us understand this would be the economist Michael Hudson.

Michael is the author of many books, including Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy.

So here we’re going to play some highlights of our interview, and then we’ll go straight to the discussion.

(Highlights)

MICHAEL HUDSON: You then begin to have private capital take over companies and make money by essentially looting them.

Thames Water in England is typical how you loot a company. Hospitals, for instance, were a target of these private equity companies.

Private equity proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy. And, new word was added to the English language: enshittification — just cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime.

…

So the financial system has been turned into a predatory system. And all of this enormous growth in financial wealth since 2009 has accrued to the financial and real-estate sector, dominated by the wealthiest 10% of the population.

40% of the American population doesn’t have any savings at all. They’re living on the brink.

And now the costs are going up. They’re having to fall further and further behind on their credit-card debt, their personal debt, their automobile debt, student loans especially.

…

But as long as the credit-card companies will lend the consumers the money, the credit, to remain current on their obligations, and not have to pay penalty fees, then you’re going to be able to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

A Ponzi scheme is you need more and more money paid into it to keep the exponential growth rate growing.

(Interview)

BEN NORTON: Michael, thanks for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure having you.

Let’s talk about the real possibility of a new financial crisis. If you read financial media outlets like Bloomberg and the Financial Times, they have been warning a lot recently of the possibility of a new financial crisis.

It could potentially start in the private credit industry, which is seeing all of these problems and rising default rates. And it could spread; this could be contagion that spreads through the banking sector and other industries.

Then you also have the AI bubble, and the war in Iran, and the energy shock. There is so much we’re going to talk about today.

But let’s just start by talking about this crisis. Do you think we could be on the verge of another major financial crash?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, the whole problem stems exactly from 2008 or more particularly, 2009, when President Obama took office.

His solution to the junk mortgage crisis, the bank fraud crisis, was to turn the economy into a Ponzi scheme.

He needed to bail out the banks. The banks had made so many fraudulent and bad loans, that exceeded the ability of these banks to collect on their high-interest, junk mortgages that had been given, that the major banking companies were in negative equity.

What was the solution? The solution was a zero interest-rate policy, ZIRP.

Then the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates from the high crisis levels in 2008 and 2009 way down to 0.1%, which is what banks could borrow for.

The Federal Reserve was able to create electronic money on its computers to lend to the banks at a very low interest rates and said, “Well, banks, you have as much money as you want, at 0.1%, that we are providing you to lend out to the economy, to support the price of real estate, stocks, and bonds, so that we will restore the negative equity that the reckless banking sector has created”.

Well, the result is that the banks did two things.

One, they could simply leave the 0. 1% money they borrowed with the Federal Reserve, and make a few percentage points for nothing, in their sleep, by just leaving it with the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve said, “Our job is to transfer money from the private economy into the banking sector, to rescue the financial sector, because that’s what central banks do; we represent the commercial banks”.

“So we’re going to begin paying interest on the bank reserves”, which the Fed hadn’t done before. “But, all the rest of the money, we want you to lend out to the economy, to make as much interest rate margin, the increase in what you charge to borrowers over what you can borrow, the cost of your borrowing from us, which is almost nothing”.

Well, the banks weren’t set up to evaluate loans to particular companies, specifically. They the banks usually make money on collateral being pledged for their loans.

Bank credit isn’t extended, in the United States or Britain, to finance industrial capital investment. That’s the job of the stock market, if anything, or of companies to reinvest their earnings.

Banks lend money for assets, real estate, stocks, and bonds, already issued, already in existence.

So they lent money out to intermediaries, saying, “You do the job; you find the companies to take over”.

You then begin to have private capital take over companies and make money by essentially looting them.

Thames Water in England is typical of how you loot a company. Hospitals, for instance, were a target of these private equity companies.

They would go to a hospital saying, “We’ll sell off your real estate, to a separate entity. Then you agree to use the capital gain, the money that you make selling the real estate, to pay a special dividend. And now, instead of owning the real estate, you will now be paying rent on a long-term lease for the real estate. And we’ll lend you the money for this, and you’ll be paying us credit, management fees, late fee penalties”.

And the result is that a lot of hospitals went bankrupt. Private equity proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy.

A new word was added to the English language: enshittification — just cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime, cutting.

When there was an attrition of the labor force, when workers left, you let the remaining workers pick up all of the slack. Productivity went up.

So you had an extractive, predatory financial system in the United States.

Well, meanwhile, this predatory financial system was making so many gains for the companies that were financialized and using their profits not to invest in new capital formation and new factories and means of production; all of that was done abroad; it was sent to China and other Asian countries.

94%, 92-94%, of corporate cash flow profits and all the surplus they had was spent either on dividend payouts or buying their own stocks.

So you had companies creating the stock market boom by buying their own stocks back, to push up the price, so that the earnings they had would be spread over a shrinking and shrinking number of shares, making the illusion of increasing earnings per share. The earnings weren’t really earned.

When you make money in your sleep, it’s not earned; it’s economic rent, meaning unearned capital that you make in predatory ways.

So the financial system has been turned into a predatory system. And all of this enormous growth in financial wealth since 2009 has accrued to the financial and real estate sector, dominated by the wealthiest 10% of the population.

40% of the American population doesn’t have any savings at all. They’re living on the brink.

And now the costs are going up. They’re having to fall further and further behind on their credit card debt, their personal debt, their automobile debt, student loans especially. So they’re not able to pay.

And the bottom 60-80% finds itself hardly increased at all. What used to be the middle class isn’t really in the middle anymore.

It turns out the middle-class people are wage earners, just like the blue-collar earners.

They all have to pay rising costs for either for rent or for their mortgages to buy homes, whose price is inflated by the low interest rates that enable a larger and larger debt to be created on the basis of these low interest rates.

Well, now that interest rates are going up, you can imagine the cost squeeze.

There’s a huge wave of defaults happening all the way from consumers — that’s polite word for wage earners, in America — to corporations that are being squeezed.

So, this is all part of the backwash that — being a Ponzi scheme, essentially, the way that you enable the economy to keep paying its debts if you lend the debtor the money to pay the interest.

That’s what credit card holders do. They will send in the payment, a monthly payment due on their credit cards, and their credit card debt is going to go up and up and up, and with it their monthly payments.

But as long as the credit card companies will lend to the consumers the money, the credit, to remain current on their obligations and not have to pay penalty fees, then you’re going to be able to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

A Ponzi scheme is you need more and more money paid into it to keep the exponential growth rate growing.

The same thing happens for corporations. As corporate sales fall off, as labor squeezed — if, in the United States, wage earners have to spend more money on gasoline, on electricity prices that are going up, partly as a result of gas prices, on all of these monopolized expenses, then they’re going to have less and less money to spend on the goods that they produce.

And that means that companies that produce goods and services for sale in the United States are going to have lower sales, and lower profits out of which to pay the rising debt and the interest on their carrying charges that they are mounting up, and that are being increased as the economy is pushed into financial crisis, as a result of the move to a war economy.

It means that there are going to be layoffs, that companies are going to be closing down.

Farmers cannot afford to do farming anymore. Chemical companies cannot afford to produce what they were producing before.

Electric companies cannot afford to pay the higher prices for their gas, or oil, without regulatory agencies increasing their electric rates. And that means that firms using electricity are going to have to close down their offices.

We’re in for the equivalent of what was the Great Depression. And depressions are not inflationary. They’re deflationary. That’s what nobody seems to get.

They think, “Oh, if interest rates go up, then a wealthy people who have a bond are not going to be able to buy as many goods and services as they could. And we have to stabilize the purchasing power of their credit by lowering the purchasing power of labor”.

The economy is to be sacrificed to the financial sector. That’s what neoliberalism is all about. That’s what finance capitalism is all about, and what makes it so different from industrial capitalism.

We’re in a post-industrial society, and that’s a financial society run by the banks, through their control of the central banks, which are controlled by the government, [which is run by politicians] whose campaigns are financed by contributors from the finance and the real estate sector.

So it’s all sort of a self-feeding circular flow. And Ponzi schemes always end in a crash.

That’s what’s leading other investors to try to withdraw from the American and European economies. But where can they withdraw to? That’s the problem. What can they do?

BEN NORTON: Yeah, I’d like to talk about the US government’s response, or lack of response to all of this.

Because we’ve seen that the Trump administration has been completely in bed with the finance industry.

One of the biggest donors to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was the highest paid corporate executive on Wall Street, Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, which is the largest alternative asset manager in the world. And Blackstone has a massive private equity arm.

And Trump’s friends and donors on Wall Street pressured him to sign an executive order in August 2025 that is so cynical. It is titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors”.

And it makes it seem like this is something that is helping average workers who are saving for their retirement and their 401(K) plan.

But in reality, what this was was an attempt by Wall Street to provide exit liquidity, and dump these horrible, toxic assets on average people.

Because it was very clear on Wall Street, you know, in the months leading up to this crisis, everyone could see that there was there were so many bad loans that had been made by these private credit and private equity funds, and they were looking for someone to hold the bag.

So Trump comes in and says, “Oh, we’re going to ‘democratize’ access”.

And there are reports that some of these financial firms are actually paying wealth managers, and they’re paying financial advisors, to pressure average people to invest in some private credit fund, saying, “Look, you can get 10% per year on this fund”. And supposedly it’s not risky.

I mean, there are so many similarities to what happened with the collateralized debt obligations, the CDOs, that just bundled together all of these mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Back then, credit rating agencies said these MBS and CDOs were great, they were risk free, they were AAA rated. And obviously it was all junk.

And what we see today with the widespread use of some of these apps, like for instance Robinhood, there are a lot of average people, especially young men, who are basically just gambling their savings away and trying to engage in risky derivatives. Some of them have been buying up ETFs of some of these private credit funds.

Basically, the more sophisticated financial analysts and firms on Wall Street are just trying to dump all of this stuff on average people.

And what’s so disgusting is that the white House was facilitating this in the lead-up to this crisis that a lot of people could see coming.

How do you how do you see it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s exactly what has been happening, Ben.

When an investment firm deals with an investor — primarily what you call average people are largely pension funds.

We’re having pension-fund capitalism being used to bail out the Ponzi scheme.

In other words, when a company sees an investor or a fund manager come in, what do they think? “How can I make money off these people?”

Well, right now, the wealthiest funds, like Blackstone, think, “It’s now how can we make money; we know that we’re entering a depression period where we can’t make money, really. There’s not going to be much more to be made. The market has gone as high as it can be”.

“But what we can do is minimize the losses. What we want to do is avoid making a loss. But there are going to be losses. What do we do? Let’s make labor pay for them. Let’s turn the economy of pension-fund managers and the average people into suckers — the suckers who bought Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency [coin] and the Melania [coin], you know, that went up to a huge amount, and then collapsed 95%.

Donald Trump had a company that made Donald Trump watches — and, you know, you talked about lowering the consumer prices, which he promised to do — the watches that were sold, at huge prices, like maybe $10,000, the price for Donald Trump watches has fallen 95%.

Talk about lowering prices for consumers!

All of these were con games. The financial system has been turned into a confidence game, of how do you get American consumers to have the confidence to be willing to risk their money in a Wall Street casino where the casino always wins, and the players lose on balance, because that’s why they created the casinos in the first place. That’s the game.

Well, Wall Street is that kind of a consumer game.

If you can convince people, “Look at the high interest you’re making”, you’ll ignore the fact that you’re going to lose your capital.

Yes, you’ll make 10% interest, and then lose all of the money that you’ve [invested].

When I was in Russia in 1994, you know, taking the subway, I’d say all of these advertisements along the subway, saying, “You can make 33% on your savings by putting the money in such and such a bank”. It was all a huge scam.

Albania had, I think, the leading type scam. The whole economy, the consumers, the largest single investment by consumers and savers were in basically a Ponzi scheme. That was all wiped out.

So what we’re seeing is the Albanian-ization of the American economy. It’ll sort of look like Russia under Yeltsin.

You’re guaranteed to lose your capital, but if you can only think, tunnel vision for the short term, then you’ll think, “Well, I made 10% for a while”. That’s the policy.

Pension-fund capitalism was always an attempt to withhold wages to provide to the financial sector, the financialized pension systems, instead of a pay-as-you-go system, or instead of a public pension system.

So the whole way in which the American pensions have been financialized, and American savings have been financialized, by predatory private capital firms is exploitative from the beginning.

That’s the model. Create a bubble, sell it the top, and then sell all of the assets, and stocks, and bonds, and other financial claims, that were your assets, sell them to labor, sell them to the pension funds.

Tell them that this is the way to save the economy, and to get rich themselves, to get rich in the short run, by losing all your money in the medium term. That’s what happens in a crisis.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, very well said, Michael.

I want to talk about the situation overall in the US economy, because, we’re seeing the energy crisis due to this US war of aggression in Iran causing oil prices to skyrocket. And now we’re seeing this crisis in private credit.

Well, we’ve also seen several other major problems with the US economy recently.

You may have seen this chart going around that shows that now the richest 10% of Americans make up half of the spending in the economy. And of course, the US economy is deindustrialized, and driven largely by consumption.

Bloomberg published an article back in October warning of charts that are “haunting Wall Street”.

One of these charts shows the famous “K-shaped economy” — where, in 2020, you have a recession, due to the pandemic; and since then, the S&P 500, the most important stock market index, has skyrocketed.

And 90% of stocks held in the US are owned by the richest 10% of the population. So the rich have gotten much, much richer.

Meanwhile, the expected financial situation of average people has gotten worse and worse.

So the rich have gotten much richer, and they’re driving economic growth and they think things are going well. But the vast majority of people are suffering.

There is another incredible chart, using data from the Federal Reserve, that looks at the share of the US population in economic expansion.

You can see that, as of the end of 2025, only about 20% of the US population is living in a local economy that actually is growing.

That is to say that, if we take out the small minority of places like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the US is in a recession — the vast majority of the population [is in a recession].

But of course, most of this growth — the so-called growth — is being driven by the AI bubble.

This economist at Harvard, [Jason Furman], found that, in the first half of 2025, 92% of GDP growth came from investment in information processing equipment and software, which is largely AI.

And we know that a lot of this is being driven by this crazy circular investment scheme where these AI companies like OpenAI, that are not making money, that have trillions of dollars in obligations they have to pay, despite the fact that they’re not making money, and yet they’re all investing in each other.

Nvidia is the only company that is really profiting, because Nvidia is selling the digital shovels in this digital gold rush, if you will.

Nvidia needs these AI companies to keep buying its chips. But many of these AI companies are not making money. And if they stop buying Nvidia chips, then Nvidia stops breaking records with its net income, which means that Nvidia’s stock will fall, which will pop the AI bubble.

And the AI bubble is the only thing that’s actually keeping the US economy “growing”, in scare quotes, because the vast majority of the population is in recession.

So then you can throw in the war in Iran, the energy crisis, the oil shock, the private credit crisis.

I mean, to me, it seems like this is the perfect storm. There are so many cascading crises, and I’m really worried about where this could all lead.

How do you see it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: There are two dynamics that you mentioned. The immediate dynamic is Nvidia, whose chips are made in Taiwan, using liquefied helium, to make them — you have to have liquefied helium at a very low temperature, to solidify the silicon, so that the ultraviolet ray doesn’t just sort of diffuse and spread out, because the chip is too warm.

So there’s going to be a problem in chip supply, now that Qatar is no longer able to supply Taiwan with the helium.

But on the larger basis, all of this projected increase in automatic intelligence — I prefer that term to artificial [intelligence]. It’s really an automatic, mechanized system, electronically mechanized.

All of this requires huge super-computing complexes run by electricity.

But the electricity is limited by the amount that can be generated by America’s electric utilities.

And there’s been hardly any increase in America’s capacity to produce electricity, so that, as new demand for electricity is added, the price of electricity has gone up for everybody.

Already, [US] states are trying to block new AI investments in systems in their territories, because they know that this would force all of the electric price, and gas price, and oil prices for their voters way up.

So almost all of the big,AI companies have been investing in the Arab OPEC countries, because that’s where the oil has been produced.

Well, Iran has been focusing on bombing, specifically, these American AI investments in the OPEC countries in the Middle East, saying, “In order to defend ourselves against the fact that the Sunni Arab countries are in a symbiotic relationship with the United States, and back the United States in wanting to attack us, we’re demanding that they end their economic linkages with the United States, specifically with America’s AI industry. But also they have to begin selling off their bonds and their dollar holdings in the United States”.

So you’re having that. You’re having the fact that — where on Earth is the electricity going to come from to enable these AI companies to expand their activities to make the profits that will justify their stock prices going up?

There’s no way that you can see that they can create enough of a supply to have the growing market that is projected.

So, if you have GDP falling and the stock market going up, something has to give at some point.

The stock market has been decoupled from industrial investment, from AI investment, from capital investment in general.

That’s the difference between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.

The financial sector has a life and dynamics of its own. And these dynamics are purely mathematical, independent of productivity, with no linkage with the ability to produce and the ability of the population to buy the products that it produces. It’s decoupled.

The illusion is that somehow, with the stock market going up, that the interest — what is pushing GDP up in America recently?

Well, when home prices increase, that is counted as an increase. 5% of GDP is the rise of what homeowners believe their apartments would rent for [known as the imputed rent of owner-occupied housing].

Interest payments to the banks that are going way up are treated as GDP. When credit card companies impose penalty fees, raising the charge to 30%, 31%, per year. All of that is called “providing a financial service”, as part of GDP.

What counts as American GDP is largely a financial illusion, as if all of this financial sector is actually a product, and part of the productive economy, instead of predatory overhead that is reducing the economy’s productive capacity, and hence its consumption capacity, and hence the real economy.

So you have finance as a fictitious economy, a purely mathematical gamed economy, a casino, a Ponzi scheme; and you have the real, productive economy, that is shrinking.

That’s what the K-shaped economy is. It’s a good term for it. And that’s exactly what we’re in.

But there’s no economic theory, mainstream theory, that has acknowledged all of this.

Although, in a way, this is what classical economics warned against. It’s what David Ricardo warned against. It’s what other classical economists of the 19th century, right down through Marx, warned against.

All of what the 19th century saw, initially, saying the problem was land rent, is now the problem of money rent, you could say, of privatizing the monetary and financial system in a predatory way in the century since World War One ended.

BEN NORTON: Well, I think that’s a great note to end on, Michael.

Of course, as we see more developments on Wall Street, and potentially more crises, we definitely will have you back to help us understand everything that’s happening.

It’s always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, thanks. I think it’s going to be evolving rapidly, month by month, and almost week by week, from here on in.

More than a month has passed since the United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran on February 28.

It is now clear that Iran is winning this war.

The Donald Trump administration has failed to carry out regime change or state collapse. The Iranian government has proven to be resilient.

Tehran has used asymmetric tactics to defend itself, targeting the weak points of the US empire and exacting a heavy price on its military, economy, and allies.

In fact, Iran has successfully destroyed the US military bases in West Asia, forcing many American troops out of the region. The Pentagon is primarily waging this war from bases in Europe.

Western media admits Iran is winning the war

The fact that Iran is winning the war is even being admitted by major Western media outlets.

The British newspaper The Independent printed an article titled “Iran is the clear winner as Trump’s desperate bid for peace shows he wants out of the war”.

Politico published an op-ed arguing that the “war against Iran is a far bigger strategic error” than the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ironically, this article was written by the former US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, who had previously supported the war on Iraq.

Most US media outlets helped to promote the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, which blatantly violated international law. In fact, the corporate press has supported every major US war for decades, including the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the list goes on and on.

This is the first major US war in decades that the Western media is criticizing from the very beginning.

So the writing is on the wall. It is clear to everyone that this conflict is a disaster, and Iran is winning.

Foreign Affairs is the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose members are a veritable Who’s Who of the US ruling class. Yet even Foreign Affairs published an article acknowledging that Iran is winning this war.

The author of the essay, Narges Bajoghli, is a professor at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, which is a significant recruiting ground for the US State Department.

Bajoghli wrote the following in Foreign Affairs (all emphasis added):

Judging by the metrics of conventional conflict, Iran is not faring well against the United States and Israel. Its adversaries are destroying crucial targets in Iran, killing its commanders and degrading its military assets. But these are the wrong measures for assessing Iran’s position in the war. The right measure is not even an assessment of whether Iran is absorbing punishment well—which it is. The question that will matter when the fighting ends is whether Tehran is achieving its strategic objectives. And on that count, Iran is winning.

This outcome is not accidental. Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades, since the new revolutionary government faced its first major military test in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. And it is now executing a strategy that has managed to neutralize key U.S. and Israeli air defense batteries, severely damage U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, inflict substantial economic pain, and drive a wedge between the United States and its Gulf allies. The Iranian regime, in other words, is not just surviving the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The serious economic and political problems it is creating for its adversaries are, on a strategic level, giving Iran the upper hand.

Iran’s strategic objectives in the war

To assess if Iran is winning the war, it is necessary to analyze Tehran’s goals.

The first and most obvious strategic objective of Iran has been to prevent regime change and state collapse.

The Trump administration initially thought it could overthrow the Iranian government by carrying out so-called decapitation strikes, assassinating its senior political and military leaders.

Nevertheless, Washington has failed to orchestrate regime change. In fact, the Iranian government has not only shown that it is resilient; it has probably become even stronger now, because it has more popular legitimacy.

Many Iranians who were critical of the Islamic Republic have rallied behind the flag and are supporting the state, to prevent the US from taking control of their country (and exploiting its oil, natural resources, and other lucrative natural resources).

More than 850 public demonstrations were held in Iran in support of the government in the first month of the US-Israeli war.

Iran destroyed US military bases

A longtime strategic goal of Iran has been to expel the US military from West Asia.

The US surrounded Iran with roughly two dozen military bases, which were developed over decades.

In response to the US-Israeli war of aggression, Iran has pummeled most of these bases in the Persian Gulf.

Iran launched at least 5,471 missile and drone attacks against the US and its allies in the first month of the war, according to official data compiled by Turkish state media outlet the Anadolu Agency.

These Iranian attacks have been remarkably successful.

In fact, the New York Times reported that the US military has essentially been pushed out of West Asia (a more accurate term for the Middle East).

“Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable”, the Times wrote in an article titled “Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely”.

Among the US facilities that have been severely damaged is the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which is the biggest US base in West Asia; as well as the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

The major US newspaper reported the following:

Iran has bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli war, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces throughout the region, according to military personnel and American officials.

So now much of the land-based military is, in essence, fighting the war while working remotely, with the exception of fighter pilots and crews operating and maintaining warplanes and conducting strikes.

Before Trump launched this war of aggression on February 28, the US had approximately 40,000 troops in the region. In the first month of the war, thousands of these US forces were sent to Europe.

The American troops that remain in West Asia have been relocated to “makeshift” and “alternative” sites, off base, the Times reported.

Critics have pointed out that, given that US soldiers are waging war on Iran from hotels and office spaces, this means the Pentagon is essentially using civilians in these areas as human shields.

US military is waging war on Iran from bases in Europe

In short, Iran has largely succeeded in expelling the US military occupiers from West Asia.

This fact was further confirmed by an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Europe Is Quietly Playing a Crucial Role in the Iran War”.

The newspaper reported:

While many European leaders have publicly decried the U.S. attacks on Iran, behind the scenes their military bases are facilitating one of the most logistically complex operations the U.S. military has been involved in for decades.

In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.

Attack drones are being directed from a sprawling U.S. base at Ramstein in Germany, the nerve center of America’s operations against Iran, according to German and U.S. officials. Heavy B-1 bombers have been photographed loading munitions and fuel at RAF Fairford in the U.K. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is currently docked at a naval base in Crete to undergo repairs after suffering damage from a fire.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military commander, said in recent Senate testimony that most European allies “have been extremely supportive.”

The continent, which is home to around 40 U.S. military bases and 80,000 U.S. service personnel, is a launchpad for U.S. operations in both the Middle East and Africa. “The distances are shorter, it’s less expensive, and it’s much easier to project power with our network of bases and allies,” he said.

There are two major takeaways from this report.

Firstly, some European governments have publicly criticized the US war on Iran, acknowledging that it violated international law and constitutes an illegal war of aggression. However, behind the scenes, most EU states and the UK are helping Washington wage this war, allowing the Pentagon to use their territory to attack Tehran. Europe is therefore a party to the conflict.

Secondly, Iran has succeeded in destroying the major US military bases in West Asia and expelling most American troops from the region.

This is one of several reasons why it is clear that Tehran is winning this war.

You can find more information in the following video:

Topics
0:00 Iran is winning the war
2:32 Iran's strategic goals
2:47 Failure of regime change
3:34 US military bases
4:25 Iran destroyed US bases
7:32 USA wages war from Europe
8:53 Bases used by USA in Europe
9:30 Iran's objectives
10:05 Gulf monarchies (GCC)
13:46 Normalization with Israel
14:54 Threats to Gulf regimes
16:40 Lifting of US sanctions
19:10 Oil and Strait of Hormuz
22:34 Escalation dominance
23:33 Costs of the war
25:34 USA running out of missiles
26:59 Deterrence
29:17 US and Israel are losing
29:42 Multipolar world
31:34 Outro

The US-Israeli war on Iran is transforming the geopolitical order, and could even unleash a global economic crisis. The conflict has caused the largest oil shock in history, disrupting global markets and driving up fuel and food prices.

To better understand the implications for the world, Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson, who discussed how Iran is challenging US dollar dominance and undermining Washington’s control over the global oil market, which has been a key pillar of US foreign policy.

Video

Podcast

Transcript

(Intro)

BEN NORTON: The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran is having a massive impact on the global economy.

Every country on Earth is being affected, because this US-Israeli war has caused the largest oil shock in history — larger than the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979.

The effects are especially pronounced in Asia, which gets the majority of its oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

The Philippines has declared a national emergency, and it is now rationing energy, because it does not have enough oil, due to this war.

Japan also imports much of its oil from the Middle East, or West Asia. And this is why Tokyo has carried out the largest ever release of oil from its reserves.

Moreover, the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency, the IEA, unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves.

However, this is only a short term band-aid measure. It’s not a long-term solution.

This is why the global price of oil only went down a little bit in response to the news of countries releasing oil from their reserves. And since then, the oil price has continued rising, because as long as this US-Israeli war on Iran continues, there are going to be massive disruptions in the energy market.

Given that oil is the most important commodity on Earth — and it’s used in many other products, and it’s used in all aspects of society in order to transport food and other goods — world leaders are now warning this could cause a global recession.

The head of the International Energy Agency said it very clearly. He warned that the US Israeli war on Iran has been a “major, major threat” to the global economy.

This war is causing not just gasoline prices to go up, but also food prices to go up, because so many fertilizers and chemicals used in fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf region.

It is also likely going to lead to higher interest rates, which will lead to increases in mortgage rates, and other rates on loans that are taken by average people. So this is going to hurt the poorest people the most.

So to make sense of how this war is going to impact the global economy, today we will be speaking with the renowned economist Michael Hudson, who is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.

Michael Hudson has been writing articles and doing interviews explaining how this war is going to reshape the world economically and geopolitically.

In particular, Michael has argued that this war has meant that “multipolar oil markets are now a reality”.

This is because Iran is directly challenging the global dominance of the US dollar, and in particular the petrodollar system — the fact that, for decades, the vast majority of oil in the global market was priced and sold in dollars. Iran is now challenging that

In response to this US-Israeli war of aggression, Tehran close down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the single most important oil transit chokepoint on Earth.

Every day, about 20% of the globally traded oil passes through this narrow strait — or at least 20% of global oil did pass through, before the US and Israel started this war.

Now Iran is telling countries that, if they want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, they have to agree to sell oil not in US dollars, but rather in China’s currency, the yuan.

This is why some media outlets, such as the South China Morning Post, are now saying that this “Iran war could boost China’s ‘petroyuan’ and weaken US dollar dominance”.

Given the massive geopolitical and economic consequences of this war, I thought Michael Hudson would be the perfect guest.

So without further ado, we are going to play some highlights of what Michael said, and then we will go straight to the interview.

(Highlights)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Iran has said this is a phase change: we are now forever going to control the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and we are going to control the oil trade.

That means that, instead of the United States’ plans to use oil as a chokepoint on other countries to enforce their compliance with American foreign policy, it is now Iran that is in control of this chokepoint, and it can impose sanctions on the US and its allies, sanctions on Israel, sanctions on the Europeans, or any other allies of the United States.

So it has turned the tables on the whole US attempt to use oil as a means of control. Now what is at issue is Iran being able to achieve what the United States has based all of its foreign policy on: control of the international revenues from oil exports.

…

The American philosophy is, number one, you bomb civilians, you break all the rules of international law which are against that. You bomb civilians to demoralize them.

And if you concentrate, as Trump did, along with Israel, a few weeks ago, you bomb the schools, you bomb the hospitals. That’s American policy in foreign countries.

It’s most visible in the case of Israeli policy, in Gaza, and now the West Bank as well. And it is the same policy that the United States has followed in Iran.

Well, the idea was that this would demoralize the population, and the Iranian population would want to get rid of the ayatollahs and say, “We don’t want to be bombed anymore; we want to save the children; let’s make a deal and appoint a leader favorable to the United States so that it will stop bombing us”.

Well, this was nonsense from the beginning, but it was the guiding spirit of American foreign policy: bomb a country, and that will lead to a regime change, and a collapse.

…

This is a conflict, in Iran, to determine what will the shape of the international economy be? Is it going to restore American control of the oil trade and give it the chokepoint over the international economy that it is looking for? Or are we going to be independent of the United States?

That’s what this war is all about.

(Interview)

BEN NORTON: Michael, it’s always a real pleasure; thanks for joining us today.

Now, you have been talking about some of these issues that the world is now discussing due to the war in Iran — especially dollar dominance and the petrodollar system — you have been writing about this for decades, going back to the 1970s.

And in fact, the US government has also been planning a potential war on Iran for decades. This is not something new.

Now, Donald Trump is the first president who is actually crazy enough to try it. But I remember going back to the George W. Bush administration, after the US invaded Iraq, there was a lot of discussion of a potential invasion of Iran.

So, Michael, explain to us how you see this war. What is the bigger picture here, and how will this impact the world?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you mentioned that it’s for the last few years or decades; it has actually gone back half a century.

Already in the mid-1970s, when I was working for the Hudson Institute, on contracts with the Treasury, and the White House, and the Defense Department, I sat in on meetings, and they were discussing all along how ultimately the United States was going to have to take control of all of the Middle Eastern oil, and that entailed conquering Iran.

And in the mid-1970s, at one military meeting, for instance, Herman Kahn was explaining how probably Balochistan was the main opportunity to begin carving up Iran into subject ethnic constituencies. And Balochistan, in between Pakistan and Iran, was probably the best place to start a separatist movement. There were military plans.

My field, in the mid-1970s, was oil and the balance of payments. I had that position at Chase Manhattan Bank for many years. I actually was the only — I was so low on the totem pole, being a technician and in my mid-20s, that I was the only person who was allowed to see all of the operating details and statistics of the US oil companies, the major companies, so that I could make a calculation as to the role that oil played in the balance of payments, supporting the dollar.

This was right after the United States was forced off gold, in 1971, because of the Vietnam War.

So, the United States all along has realized that what you’re seeing today was going to be the endgame of consolidating, they hoped, American control over the Middle Eastern oil; and they wanted their because the central point, the strongest lever that American foreign policy has had for the last century, is control of the world’s oil trade.

Because it’s so immensely profitable for the American oil companies themselves — it has given the oil companies major control over US policy — and also the US economy’s potential control over other countries, by the ability to turn off the supply of oil to other countries, thereby stopping their electricity production, stopping their chemical production, their fertilizer production with natural gas.

The oil industry includes the gas industry, because they’re so closely interconnected. All of this has been thought out. And every year, the military has been upgrading the long-term plans for — well, if we really, have to use force to entail our control over the Near East, the Middle East; if, for any reason, the OPEC oil countries want to become independent of the United States, and begin investing their oil profits outside of the United States, instead of sending all of their oil earnings to the United States, to invest in Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, US bank deposits, and stock holdings; well, if any of them should want to exert their own sovereignty and go their own way, we’re going to have to take over; and no matter what, we’re going to have to take over Iran, because that is the most powerful, final locking point of US control.

And, as we have discussed before, in 2003, General Wesley Clark came right out and said, well, we’re going to conquer seven countries in five years, culminating with Iran.

So all of this has been completely open. This is not simply Donald Trump’s war. It’s a war which he decided at this time, because America has steadily been losing its position of economic strength, military strength, and arms supply, and missiles, and aircraft, and bombs, as a result of the war, first in Ukraine, and then supplying Israel.

So there will never be a less bad time to go to war than at the present. And of course, it is a bad time, but it’s not as bad as it’s going to be. And the military, the neocons behind the military and behind the Central Intelligence Agency, are not going to give up.

They say, “Well, what do we have to lose? If we don’t conquer the Middle Eastern oil now, then we’re going to be losing what has become the major lever of American foreign policy”.

Donald Trump believed that he could conquer Iran, within two to four weeks. He actually believe that.

And his hope was that, by that time he went on his scheduled trip to China, he could confront China, saying, “Well, we’ve just caused a regime change in Iran. We’ve appointed an Iranian client oligarch, client dictator to take over and become sort of Iran’s version of Boris Yeltsin, administering Iranian oil in the interests of the United States”.

“So, we now have the power to impose sanctions on you, China. We can cut off your oil. But, you know, we don’t want to do that. If you begin to export the raw materials, the gallium, the tungsten, and all the other things that we need for our military that you’ve put an export control on, then we will give you the oil”.

Trump had hoped to be able to present China with that victory. Well, obviously that’s gone. The military miscalculated, because they could not think of an alternative that would threaten this grand plan.

Remember all of the American military attacks, for the last 50 years, ever since Vietnam — all of the wars that the US had, from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela.

It has always been the United States and its allies, the coalition of the willing, against single countries. This is the first war that America has fought since World War Two where other countries that it’s fighting against are allied with each other.

It’s not just fighting against Iran now. It’s fighting against Iran, supported by Russia and China, because they all realize that this is a fight to the end, to decide: Is the United States going to be able to reassert its control over the world economy using monopolies? The oil monopoly, the information technology monopoly that it’s trying to do, the computer chip monopoly, the technology monopoly, also its ability to supply food to other countries, its exports and control of grain.

This is the last chance that it has. And there’s a feeling of desperation that has led the US planners to bet at all.

And that I think that it’s not going to work. All of the generals have told them that it’s not going to work. The generals who have been pessimistic have pretty much been forced out of the military, and the State Department, because, “If you’re pessimistic, well, why aren’t you on board? You know, why aren’t you on the team? Or are you Putin’s puppet? You know, you’ve just gotta have faith”.

America believed that it could not lose any war because its policy of bombing other countries was always going to work.

The American philosophy is, number one, you bomb civilians; you break all the rules of international law which are against that. You bomb civilians to demoralize them.

And if you concentrate, as Trump did along with Israel, a few weeks ago, you bomb the schools; you bomb the hospitals. That’s American policy in foreign countries.

It’s most visible in the case of Israeli policy, in Gaza, and now the West Bank as well. And it is the same policy that the United States has followed in Iran.

Well, the idea was that this would demoralize the population, and the Iranian population would want to get rid of the ayatollahs and say, “We don’t want to be bombed anymore; we want to save the children; let’s make a deal and appoint a leader favorable to the United States so that it will stop bombing us”.

Well, this was nonsense from the beginning, but it was the guiding spirit of American foreign policy: bomb a country, and that will lead to a regime change, and a collapse.

That was what America expected in Russia.

But Iran essentially has the same spirit that Patrick Henry had in America’s revolution against Britain in 1776. He said, “Give me liberty or give me death!”. And that’s exactly what Iran is saying.

For them, this is existential, because they know what the US plans are, since the United States has been so open about what its plans are.

Yes, they want a regime change; they want to break up Iran into parts; they want to take control of Iranian oil and use the oil export revenues to support the US dollar, and to support basically the US economy, and to give American foreign policy the option of turning off the oil to other countries, to say, “We can close down your industry, your chemical industry, all your industries that need electric power, oil, gas; we can do all that, if you take an independent policy, following your own sovereignty. And we in the United States reject the United Nations principle that every nation has its own sovereignty”.

This is the basic principle of Western civilization for the last half century, the basic principle of the United Nations Charter. All of that is being rejected by the United States.

And what it has done is galvanize other countries to recognize that, well, yes, this really is the final conflict.

This is a conflict, in Iran, to determine what will the shape of the international economy be? Is it going to restore American control of the oil trade, and give it the chokepoint over the international economy that it’s looking for? Or are we going to be independent of the United States?

That’s what this this war is all about.

BEN NORTON: Well said, Michael. You raised so many important points there. It’s hard to know where to start.

I wanted to just make a brief comment about this idea that the US has been preparing for war in Iran for decades and, as you said, was waiting for the least worst moment.

I think this is absolutely right, because there also were two major developments in the past two years that led to this war in Iran.

One was the overthrow of the Syrian government — which goes back to 2011, the beginning of the regime-change war that ultimately succeeded at the end of 2024, which was a major step toward war in Iran.

And then also Israel killed the leadership of the Lebanese resistance, which basically, they thought at least, would remove Lebanon from the equation.

So by removing Lebanon and Syria — at least they thought they removed Lebanon — then the US and Israel could attack Iran, by isolating Tehran from its allies.

Now we have seen that there has still been some resistance in Lebanon. Although Israel has invaded Lebanon and is trying to colonize the south.

Anyway, I want to talk about more about this issue of the dollar system. I think this is so critical to understand this war.

You talked about how the US wants to use control of the global oil market in order to undergird the dollar.

You know, the petrodollar system really goes back to 1974, when the Richard Nixon administration, after delinking the dollar from gold, made an agreement with Saudi Arabia, which at that time was the leading oil producer in the world, to make sure that oil was traded exclusively in the dollar, which ensures global demand for the dollar.

It seems that Iran clearly understands the importance of this for US hegemony, the importance of the dollar system and the petrodollar, because Iran has targeted it directly.

Iran closed down the Strait of Hormuz and is demanding that countries that pass through trade oil in Chinese yuan.

Also, there have been reports that the Iranian military is targeting not only US military bases in the region, but also the offices of major US corporations, including US financial institutions and Big Tech companies, which have been building big AI data centers in places like the UAE.

So I think Iran understands how critical the economic element is to this war. Do you want to talk more about that?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, the United States’ plans to militarily control the Middle East were based not on its own fighting, because the United States had been exhausted by the Vietnam War — remember, in the mid-1970s.

The US has had two client armies fighting in the Middle East.

First of all, Israel is a client army. Already in the early 1970s, a deal was made — and Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute played a big role in this. A deal was made with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, one of the leading pro-military senators in America, that he would agree to use Israel as America’s proxy army.

BEN NORTON: This was famously spelled out by Joe Biden, when he was a senator. Biden gave a speech in which he said “Israel is the best investment we make”.

JOE BIDEN: (In 1986) Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.

(In 2022) I have often said, Mr. President, if this were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.

(In 2023) I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, this was very open at that time.

Well, later, after 9/11, and after President Carter backed the [Mujahideen] in Afghanistan, as the alternative to secular rule in Afghanistan, you had Al-Qaeda emerge as a Wahhabi terrorist army.

And the Wahhabis are the second force that America has used.

You mentioned Syria. And of course Syria has the ISIS leadership there, the terrorists. And they’re busy murdering everyone who is not a Sunni. They’re killing the Alawites; they’re killing the Christians. They’re the head-choppers, basically.

So these are the two proxy armies of the United States [Israel and the Wahhabis].

Well, what has made all of this urgent right now? It was number one, you had the Wahhabis working, for the last 10 years, hand in hand with Israel. The one non-Sunni group that they have not attacked is Israel. They have been working hand in hand, together.

Well, what has forced the hand of the military in Israel is Israel’s attack on Gaza, and the fightback from Lebanon, the civil war of resistance that has spread throughout the Middle East; and the worldwide criticism of the [Gaza] genocide that you’ve seen from the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

So all of this has forced the hands of [the US and Israel], saying, “Well, are we going to have a take over?”

Israel now is trying to take over Lebanon. I guess the Israelis are going to need somewhere to move, if Iran is successful in sort of destroying the economic foundations of the Israeli state.

This is the military setting for all of this, and it’s the financial setting.

I want to mention again the control of the petrodollars that you mentioned.

It wasn’t just pricing oil in dollars. Everybody, all countries, were pricing the exports of copper, everything in dollars, because that was still the main currency.

Almost seamlessly, instead of countries, keeping their international reserves in the form of gold, and US dollars that were as good as gold, even when the dollar wasn’t as good as gold anymore, they continued to trade in the US dollar.

Well, the issue was, where were these dollars going to be invested?

Under the rules of Kissinger — and all this was explained to me by the Treasury and the State Department, in 1974 and 1975 — the US military told Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, “You can charge whatever you want for oil, but you have to use the surplus have to invest in the United States. We’re not going to let you buy control of any major American firms. You can’t buy American companies; only we can buy control of foreign economies. You’ll buy bonds. You can finance American industry and American companies. You can buy stocks in the companies. You can make money by just depositing your money in banks”.

These were the petrodollars. The petrodollars were the savings of OPEC countries invested in banks.

Well, this recycling of OPEC surpluses now is not as important as it was in the 1970s. In the 1970s, these petrodollars came into US banks. And what were they going to do with it? They lent it to Global South countries, to finance their trade deficits, their balance of payments deficits.

And this ended up in a collapse of the Latin American foreign dollar debts, and other debts. And later it led to the Asian crisis of 1998, which I think is going to be a paradigm model for what’s going to happen the rest of this year.

But now Saudi Arabia and the other countries have, for the last 10 or 20 years, they’ve used their export earnings to build up their own economies in sort of crazy ways, building huge luxury real estate in the desert, with huge desalinization plants to supply the water for all of this domestically.

But they still have enormous savings of bonds, stocks, and financial savings in the United States.

Now that the OPEC countries are blocked from having export earnings, they’ve announced, “Well, we’ve actually debt-leveraged our own economy. Rich as we are, our real estate projects and our investments are financed by debt, and we have to begin selling off our holdings of US securities, and gold, in order to keep our domestic budgets and the balance of payments in balance”.

So all of this now is leading to a sell-off of dollars. And this has reversed what was the whole petrodollar, the whole inflow of OPEC money, into the currency, of oil into dollars. Now, this is becoming a drain on dollars.

So that is another threat.

Iran has said, “This is a phase change. We are now forever going to control the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. That’s why it’s called the Persian Gulf, because it’s ours. And we are going to control the oil trade”.

And that means that, instead of the United States plans’ to use oil as a chokepoint on other countries to enforce their compliance with American foreign policy, it’s now Iran that is in control of this chokepoint, and it can impose sanctions on the US and its allies, sanctions on Israel, sanctions on the Europeans, or any other allies of the United States.

So it has turned the tables on the whole US attempt to use oil as a means of control.

Now what is at issue is Iran being able to achieve what the United States has based all of its foreign policy on, control of the international revenues from oil exports.

And the determination of who will be able to buy this oil, and natural gas, and helium — these three things — and also by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, it controls the inward shipping of food and other materials to the OPEC countries, so it has a chokepoint over OPEC countries, as well as over foreign oil users.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, I want to talk more about the energy element here.

The International Energy Agency referred to the energy crisis that we’re seeing now as the largest oil supply shock in world history.

It’s larger than the oil crisis that was caused by the 1973 OPEC embargo, which was also related to an Israeli war of aggression.

And then in 1979, with the Iranian revolution, there was another oil crisis.

But today we’re seeing the biggest oil crisis in history.

The price of crude has skyrocketed, and this is going to fuel inflation all around the world, because, of course, oil is a crucial input in many other products, and oil is needed to transport most goods, especially food.

Moreover, a lot of fertilizers and chemicals that go into fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf. So this could likely create a food crisis, which is especially going to hurt the Global South.

Of course oil-exporting countries could potentially benefit from higher revenue — although in the Gulf, a lot of the oil and gas infrastructure has been damaged by this war. So some of these Gulf regimes might not see some of the benefits from increased export revenue.

But the majority of Global South countries import oil, energy, and other commodities. And as the price of those commodities increases, it’s going to also be a significant drag on their economies.

It’s likely going to lead to current account deficits. And that means that, in the Global South, a lot of their currencies are going to start falling against the dollar, which will likely lead to capital outflows — you know, the so-called hot money, as foreign investors just sell all of their holdings in emerging markets.

So we could see currency crises, economic crises, energy crises, food crises.

This this war of choice, this war of aggression, that Trump and Netanyahu started, could cause a massive economic crisis that will especially hurt the Global South.

Do you see it the same way?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, and all of this was anticipated.

First of all, if you want to see a paradigm, a model of what will happen, look at what happened to German industry after the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on buying Russian gas and oil.

German industry collapsed, and Europe and Germany are now suffering a depression. They’re in for a great depression.

What happened in Germany destroyed its economy, and led its chemical industry to close.

Oil is not only for energy. Oil is for chemistry, as you pointed out. It’s the glass-making industry, and fertilizer.

Well, fertilizer especially right now is important, because it’s made out of natural gas. And when Iran bombed Qatar, Qatar was the major exporter of liquefied natural gas.

This natural gas is what was providing fertilizer to in other countries, especially to America’s allies: Japan, Korea, the Philippines. They’re all in crisis.

And helium, along with the natural gas — the fact that helium now is not available to, let’s say, Taiwan, and its semiconductor industry, and electricity. The oil is not available to Taiwan.

How is Taiwan going to make the semiconductors that are supposed to be the key to America’s information technology control, to all of the computer chips and monopolies that it had hoped to have? So this is far reaching.

Also, we’re about to be, in the northern hemisphere, entering the planting season. And the planting season requires fertilizer.

Well, already the price of fertilizer, made out of gas largely, is rising in the United States. That’s putting a squeeze on farms. And the farmers in America, are claiming, what I’m sure farmers all over Europe and the Global South countries are experiencing, “We cannot make a profit, selling our crops at today’s prices, if we have to pay so much for fertilizer, and farm equipment that Trump has imposed tariffs on, that we lose money by producing crops”.

So what are they going to do?

This is causing an agricultural crisis. And obviously the countries that are going to be left out most of all are the countries that can least afford to pay the higher prices for fertilizer, gas, and oil. These are the Global South countries.

Because, in addition to having to pay for oil and gas, and its byproducts, they have to pay their foreign dollar debts, which are falling due. Something has to give.

There are going to be financial defaults. Other countries are going to say, “What are we going to do? Are we going to do what Europe has done, saying, well, there’s a budget crisis, our prices are going up for oil. We’ve got to subsidize the homeowners, so they can heat their apartments with gas or with oil. Our labor is already living on the brink, running up, increasing debt. We will lose the elections in Europe, just like in America, if consumers have to spend so much more money on oil, gas, heating their apartments, their electricity rates, if they default. So we’re going to have to cut back all other social spending, while we increase our military spending”.

So this is going to lead to a political crisis, of pro-war vs anti-war, pro-US vs anti-US feelings, all the way from Europe to the Global South countries, and the Asian countries that are America’s allies.

How can Korea and Japan pay the $350 billion that the Korean parliament has said it has just passed, saying, “We’re going to pay Donald Trump $350 billion for him to use, at his discretion, so that we will not lose the US export market for our products”.

And Japan has promised $650 billion. How can they possibly do this if they don’t have the gas and oil that they need to make the exports to the United States?

Somebody there must be thinking, “Well, if we don’t have oil and gas, we’re not going to have exports to the United States. So we don’t have to give the United States the $350 billion from Korea and $650 billion from Japan”.

All these deals that Trump has made will be unwinding.

BEN NORTON: Well, Michael, I think that’s a perfect note to end on. Thank you for joining me.

Unfortunately it looks like this war is going to continue, but I’m sure I’ll bring you back soon to talk more about the global implications of this conflict. Thanks a lot.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I look forward to it. Thanks for having me.

The United Nations General Assembly held a vote on a resolution denouncing the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”.

The countries of the political West refused to formally condemn the mass enslavement and trafficking of Africans.

The vast majority of UN member states, which are in the Global South, supported the resolution, with 123 votes in favor.

All of Europe abstained, except for Serbia. There were 52 abstentions in total.

Just three countries voted against the resolution: the United States, Israel, and Argentina’s right-wing regime of Javier Milei.

Paraguay’s conservative, pro-US government abstained. The right-wing, Trump-allied regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador did not vote. (Venezuela lost its right to vote, because it is unable to pay UN membership fees, due to the illegal US sanctions against it.)

Even Ireland and Spain — which in the past have broken with the pro-Israel European Union and supported Palestine — abstained in the vote.

The resolution stated:

The trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans [was] the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.

The capitalist nations of the West developed their economies through the enslavement and extreme exploitation of Africans.

The UN News agency wrote:

For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip.

Denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.

The resolution was sponsored by Ghana, whose President John Mahama said Africa wanted “reparative justice”.

West opposes reparations for Africans, arguing slavery was supposedly not a crime when it was committed

What especially angered the West about the UN General Assembly resolution was its call for reparations for the African descendants of the victims of slavery.

Western governments argued that they do not owe reparations, because international law did not exist during the mass enslavement and trafficking of Africans, therefore it was supposedly not a crime.

The US representative, Dan Negrea, claimed that the resolution was “highly problematic in countless respects”, the UN News agency reported.

The US government stressed that it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”.

The representative of the European Union made the same argument on the floor of the UN.

The EU criticized the resolution for implying “suggestions of a retroactive application of international rules which was non-existent at the time and claims for reparations, which is incompatible with established principles of international law”.

“References to claims for reparations also lack a sound legal basis”, the EU argued, stressing that the “principle of non-retroactivity, a fundamental cornerstone of the international legal order, must be strictly upheld”.

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said the same, in a statement explaining its decision to abstain.

The British representative argued that there is “no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law”.

The UK insisted “that the prohibitions on slavery, the slave trade, and what are now considered crimes against humanity had not yet been established in international law at the time of the transatlantic slave trade”.

Iran has responded to the war of aggression that the United States and Israel launched against it on February 28 by using unconventional tactics.

As the US and Israel systematically assassinate Iranian officials and bomb schools, hospitals, and residential areas, Tehran has defended its sovereignty by engaging in a campaign of asymmetric economic warfare, not only hitting US military bases in West Asia, but also targeting major US corporations, and even challenging dollar dominance.

After closing the Strait of Hormuz, the most important oil transit chokepoint on Earth, Iran has disrupted global energy markets and directly confronted the petrodollar system, demanding that ships that want to pass through the strait must sell their oil in China’s currency, the renminbi (also known as yuan), not dollars.

In this way, Iran has demonstrated that it is possible for a medium-sized country in the Global South to resist the US empire.

Iran’s asymmetric warfare

The United States has the most powerful military on Earth. It spends approximately $1 trillion on its armed forces every year, whereas Iran’s defense budget is less than $10 billion — that is, just 1% of that of the US.

Given the clear disparity in conventional military force, Iran recognized that it needed to engage in asymmetric warfare.

Iranian military strategists identified the weak points of the US empire, and they have cleverly targeted these vulnerabilities.

Immediately after the Donald Trump administration started this war of aggression, Iran retaliated, hitting the roughly two dozen US military bases hosted by the neighboring countries of West Asia.

Tehran also struck a major CIA station located inside the US embassy in Saudi Arabia, as well as crucial radar systems and several US Air Force refueling planes.

Iran is allowed to respond to the US-Israeli aggression, according to international law. Article 51 of the UN Charter guarantees the right of a state to self-defense.

Largest oil supply crisis in history

This was only the beginning of Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare, nevertheless.

In response to the US-Israeli war of aggression, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which the US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has described as “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint”.

Before this war, roughly 20% of the oil traded in the global market passed through this narrow strait on a daily basis.

Since the Trump administration launched this war of choice, traffic has ground to a halt.

A spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said they will not allow “a liter of oil” to pass through the strait, until the US and Israel end their war of aggression.

“You will not be able to artificially lower the price of oil. Expect oil at $200 per barrel”, the spokesperson said, according to Al Jazeera.

“The price of oil depends on regional security, and you are the main source of insecurity in the region”, the IRGC added.

This US-Israeli war has created what the International Energy Agency (EIA) describes as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.

The price of oil has skyrocketed from just around $60 per barrel in January 2026 to well over $100.

Iran challenges petrodollar system, demanding oil payments in Chinese yuan

However, while Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, it made an important exception.

Tehran has said that Chinese tankers are allowed to pass through the oil transit chokepoint, unimpeded.

This has led to some ships claiming to have commercial links to China, even if it is not always true.

Moreover, an Iranian government official told CNN that tankers can have permission to travel through the Strait of Hormuz if they agree to sell oil in China’s currency, the renminbi (or yuan), not US dollars.

This is what CNN reported on March 14 (emphasis added):

Iran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, provided that the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official tells CNN.

This is an extremely important geopolitical development. It is a direct challenge to the global dominance of the US dollar.

The dollar is the most powerful weapon that the US empire has — much more powerful than its military.

The fact that the dollar is the global reserve currency, and that the US is the only country with the ability to print it, gives it what is known as an “exorbitant privilege”.

The US can run gargantuan deficits with the rest of the world — chronic current account deficits of more than $1 trillion per year — sucking in the goods and services produced by foreign workers, and it does not face the currency depreciation and inflationary pressures that other countries would suffer from, because there is artificial demand for the dollar, given its reserve currency status.

This exorbitant privilege also helps the US keep borrowing costs relatively low, as the dollars it sends abroad to pay for imports are often recycled by foreign investors into US Treasury securities and corporate bonds, thereby reducing yields and interest rates for both the public and private sectors.

Foreign investors similarly use these excess dollars to help inflate enormous bubbles in the US stock market, further enriching wealthy shareholders. (Around 90% of the stocks held by US investors are owned by the richest 10% of the population.)

One of the pillars of dollar dominance is the petrodollar system. Since the US made a historic agreement with top oil producer Saudi Arabia in 1974, the vast majority of global crude has been sold in dollars.

In other words, soon after US President Richard Nixon de-linked the dollar from gold in 1971, the gold standard was replaced with a de facto oil standard.

Almost all countries on Earth have to import oil, and this means that they need access to dollars to do so. And because oil is the most important global commodity, most other commodity markets are also priced in dollars.

This ensures an artificial global demand that strengthens the dollar, granting the US its exorbitant privilege.

Dedollarization

The United States has taken advantage of this exorbitant privilege to weaponize the dollar system, through the use of illegal unilateral sanctions.

The US has imposed unilateral sanctions on one-third of all countries on Earth, including 60% of low-income nations.

This increasing weaponization of the global reserve currency has incentivized more and more countries to seek financial alternatives.

In response to Washington’s illegal sanctions, Tehran has pushed for dedollarization for years.

China purchases the vast majority of Iran’s oil exports, and the BBC reported back in 2012 that Beijing has been paying in yuan.

Iran was admitted into BRICS in 2024, and it has advocated for a new currency for international trade. (Although some other BRICS members, namely India and the UAE, lean pro-Western and have opposed such efforts.)

Western sanctions have also motivated Russia, which is consistently among the world’s top three oil producers, to push for dedollarization.

About 20% of the global oil trade was done in other currencies, as of 2023. This was a marked shift compared to recent years, but it meant that 80% was still conducted in dollars.

Iran is now forthrightly confronting this system, using its geopolitical leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the global oil trade to challenge the petrodollar.

Fears of global economic crisis

The Western financial press has warned that this war that the US and Israel started in West Asia could unleash a “global economic crisis”.

This is because oil is the most important commodity on Earth. Every country relies heavily on petroleum, and practically everything in a modern economy depends on it. The trucks, ships, and planes that are used to transport food and other goods use a lot of oil.

Therefore, as the cost of crude goes up and up, the prices of other products will rise as well, fueling inflation.

The Persian Gulf region is likewise a significant producer of fertilizers and the chemicals used in fertilizers, meaning this US-Israeli war of aggression could cause a global food crisis as well.

All of this was totally avoidable and unnecessary. But Donald Trump has defended his decision to start this war of choice. The US president insisted on his website Truth Social that the oil price shock is “a very small price to pay”.

Rising gasoline prices and inflation just a few months before the November midterm election are really going to hurt Trump and the Republican Party.

This is why Trump is so worried, and so desperate to find a way to forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump sent 2,500 more Marines and three more warships to West Asia, the New York Times reported on March 13. This was in addition to the more than 50,000 US troops already in the region.

Trump has also threatened multiple countries and demanded that they send their own warships to the Persian Gulf, to try to force open the strait. They have quietly declined, however, as they are afraid of getting further involved in the war.

Asymmetric economic warfare: Iran targets major US corporations in West Asia

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare against Iran aimed to “collapse” the country’s economy by cutting off oil exports, denying it hard currency, and fueling inflation.

Bessent even took credit for the extremely violent protests and riots that destabilized Iran in the weeks leading up the US-Israeli war of aggression.

Tehran has sought revenge for all of this by engaging in its own kind of guerrilla economic warfare, thereby giving the US empire a taste of its own medicine.

After hitting US military bases in West Asia and closing down the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian military announced that it will target the offices of major US corporations in the region.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) published a warning with the addresses of these corporate offices, Drop Site News reported.

“We warn the American regime to evacuate all American industries in the region”, the IRGC said.

Among the corporations on the list were Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are top Pentagon contractors and key parts of the military-industrial complex.

Also named were Silicon Valley Big Tech monopolies, like Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.

Furthermore, the IRGC mentioned US oil corporations like ExxonMobil, and financial firms such as Citigroup, KKR, and Bain & Company.

New Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei spells out Iran’s strategy to expel the US empire

The Iranian government has been quite clear about its goal: it wants to push the US empire out of West Asia.

This was spelled out by the new supreme leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed by the US and Israel on the first day that they launched this war of aggression, February 28.

In a speech on March 13, Mojtaba Khamenei said, “I advise the leaders of regional countries to shut down those [US] bases as soon as possible, for they must surely have realized by now that the US’s claims of ensuring security and peace have been nothing but lies”.

“Shutting down US bases in the region will enable those governments to strengthen their ties with their own people, who are generally dissatisfied with the humiliating behavior associated with those bases”, he added.

It is not just US military bases that Iran is targeting, but also what Khamenei called “financial bases”.

He noted that, “for years, the enemy has been establishing military & financial bases in some of these countries to secure its dominance over the region”.

This was apparently a reference to the offices of major US corporations, which were told to evacuate by the IRGC.

“In any case, we will obtain compensation from the enemy”, Khamenei said. “If they refuse, we will take it from their assets to the extent we deem appropriate. If that wasn’t possible, we will destroy an equivalent amount of their assets”.

The supreme leader likewise vowed that his country will take “revenge” for the more than 175 children and teachers who were killed in a US military double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab in southern Iran on February 28.

Khamenei similarly promised to get revenge for his family members that died at the hands of Washington and Tel Aviv.

In his March 13 speech, Mojtaba Khamenei noted that, in addition to his father, the US and Israel killed his wife, his sister and her child, and the husband of another sister.

In order to seek revenge, Tehran will use all of the tools at its disposal, Khamenei insisted.

“The leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be employed”, he declared.

“Studies have been conducted regarding opening other fronts where the enemy has minimal experience and where it would be highly vulnerable”, he added. “Should the war continue, activation of such fronts will be carried out based on certain interests”.

Khamenei did not identify what those “other fronts” are specifically, because Iran does not want to lose the element of surprise.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that one potential front would be Yemen.

The northern part of Yemen, where the majority of the population lives, is governed by Ansarallah, also known as the Houthi movement.

Ansarallah is an indigenous Yemeni resistance group that is allied with Iran and strongly supports the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide.

Drop Site News reported that Ansarallah is prepared to join a “coordinated campaign of military operations” with Iran, if Tehran deems it necessary.

The Ansrallah-led government in northern Yemen would likely seek to halt oil traffic in the Red Sea.

Given the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has rerouted some of its oil exports via pipeline to its western Yanbu port on the Red Sea.

Yemen has the ability to shut down another important chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where close to 10% of global seaborne-traded oil transits every day.

This is not just hypothetical. Starting in late 2023, Ansarallah used its leverage to threaten to attack ships in the Red Sea, declaring that it would only stop when the US and Israel ended their genocide in Gaza.

In 2025, the Trump administration launched another war against Yemen, in an attempt to forcibly open the Red Sea.

In May 2025, the US was forced to sign a ceasefire with the Ansarallah-led government in nothern Yemen.

Yemen is the poorest country in West Asia. However, it was able to use unconventional tactics to fight the US empire, which boasts the most powerful military force on Earth and a $1 trillion annual budget.

What all of this demonstrates is that Iran and Yemen have mastered the art of asymmetric warfare, borrowing the tactics of Global South anti-colonial movements in the 20th century, to successfully resist the aggressive US empire.

Video

Topics:

0:00 Iran war causes energy crisis

0:29 Oil price skyrockets

0:56 Fears of economic crisis

2:07 Strait of Hormuz

3:21 Iran permits Chinese oil tankers

4:17 Iran: sell oil in RMB, not USD

4:43 Dollar dominance & petrodollar

6:28 Asymmetric warfare

6:59 US military bases in Middle East

7:47 Iran strikes CIA stations

8:46 Iran hits US refueling planes

9:10 US empire underestimated Iran

10:32 Iran targets US corporations

12:03 Economic warfare

13:07 CLIP Scott Bessent on Iran

14:05 New leader Mojtaba Khamenei

15:21 Iran strategy spelled out

17:08 Tehran wants revenge

18:51 Yemen, Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab

22:16 US war on Yemen in 2025

23:23 Anti-colonial wars

24:16 Trump sends more US troops

25:21 Iran’s Kharg Island

26:21 Global energy crisis

27:24 Trump wants military coalition

29:02 Iran allows Chinese ships

29:59 US dollar dominance

30:37 US current account deficit

31:20 Exorbitant privilege of dollar

32:19 Dedollarization

32:52 West seized Russia’s reserves

33:49 Central banks buy gold

34:16 US Treasury securities

34:47 Oil sales in dollars

36:26 Trump threatened BRICS

37:16 Iran promotes dedollarization

37:42 China & Russia de-dollarize

38:33 India

39:34 UAE

40:18 Saudi Arabia

41:04 Iran & Indonesia join BRICS

42:14 Iran proposes BRICS currency

42:31 Divisions within BRICS

43:12 Struggle against imperialism

45:12 Outro

The United States and Israel are intentionally devastating civilian areas in Iran, brutally bombing schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods, in an attempt not only to destroy the state but also to collapse Iranian society itself.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described the scorched-earth strategy in a Pentagon press briefing on March 4.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”, Hegseth boasted.

He added with pride that the US and Israel are raining upon Iran “death and destruction from the sky, all day long”.

Hegseth noted that, in the first four days of the war on Iran (named Operation Epic Fury), the US military employed “twice the air power” that it had used in the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In another press briefing on March 2, the US secretary of war condemned international organizations like the United Nations and proclaimed, “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history”.

Hegseth bragged that the US is fighting with “no stupid rules of engagement”. By his admission, the Pentagon is purposefully targeting civilian areas, and does not care about the rules of war.

US and Israel bomb 20 schools and 13 hospitals in Iran in one week

According to the World Health Organization, the US and Israel bombed at least 13 hospitals and health facilities in Iran in the first five days of the war, which Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched on February 28.

Washington and Tel Aviv bombed at least 20 Iranian schools in the first week of the war, according to UNICEF.

They also destroyed a desalination plant, depriving dozens of Iranian villages of water.

The US and Israel killed more than 1,300 Iranians in the first week. Children made up 30% of the victims.

CNN and the New York Times both independently confirmed that the US military bombed an elementary school in the city of Minab in southern Iran on the first day of the war.

The US bombed the school twice, 40 minutes apart, to make sure there were no survivors.

The US military killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers.

War Secretary Hegseth published a map of the areas in Iran that were bombed by the US, and the Minab primary school was clearly in the strike zone.

This is what Hegseth meant when he bragged that the US empire is “punching them while they’re down”, with “no stupid rules of engagement”.

The US-Israeli slaughter is so extreme that even some right-wing media outlets in the West, like the UK’s conservative newspaper The Telegraph, were forced to admit that “Tehran [is] an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble”, as the US and Israel intentionally bomb civilian areas.

US and Israel want a failed state and societal collapse in Iran

What Washington and Tel Aviv want to unleash in Iran is not just regime change; it is the destruction of the state and the collapse of Iranian society.

This was openly admitted by some Israeli officials, in a report in the Financial Times.

The FT cited Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who declared that “every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime . . . will be an unequivocal target for elimination”.

Tel Aviv’s plan is to kill all Iranian leaders, so the country cannot be governed and simply falls into chaos.

This was further confirmed by a former top Israeli intelligence official.

The Financial Times interviewed Danny Citrinowicz, who worked for 25 years in Israel Defense Intelligence (IDI) and was the chief of the Research and Analysis Division’s Iran branch.

Citrinowicz told the FT that what Israel wants is the “total destruction of this regime, of the pillars of this regime, of everything that holds it together”.

The former head of Israeli military intelligence’s Iran analysis said this is how Tel Aviv sees the war (emphasis added):

If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.

In other words, the US and Israel want to repeat in Iran the same kind of war of extermination that they carried out in Gaza, which a UN commission determined to be a campaign of genocide.

US-Israeli war on Iran blatantly violates international law

It goes without saying that the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran flagrantly violates international law.

The United Nations education agency, UNESCO, emphasized that the bombing of Iranian schools by the US and Israel “constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law”.

Legal experts have clearly stated that the US-Israeli war violates international law. They also noted that Washington was engaged in supposed “negotiations” with Tehran, and Iran was willing to make significant concessions for a deal, when Trump launched this surprise war of aggression, sabotaging the talks.

Stanford University’s elite law school published an interview with an expert on international law, Professor Allen Weiner, who stated, “From an international law perspective, my judgment is that the attack was quite clearly illegal”.

States do have a right to self-defense under international law, Weiner noted. Iran has exercised this right.

The US and Israeli regimes claimed they launched “preemptive” attacks on Iran, but Weiner stressed that this is not valid under international law.

In order to claim self-defense, states may only strike when they have evidence that “they face an imminent threat of attack”, he argued.

This does not apply in this situation, Weiner emphasized. The Stanford law professor explained:

The notion that Iran presents a general security threat to U.S. interests does not constitute a threat of imminent attack. Nor does the possibility that Iran might at some point in the future acquire either nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S. homeland amount to a threat of an imminent attack.

US-Israeli war on Iran is based on lies

All of the talking points that the Trump administration has used to try to justify this illegal war have fallen apart.

The Pentagon admitted in a closed-door briefing to Congress that Iran was not going to attack the US and Israel first, and that it only had plans to retaliate in self-defense.

Similarly, the Trump administration claimed that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. This was false as well.

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said clearly in an interview on CNN that Iran was not on the verge of having nuclear weapons.

This was another lie promoted by the US government to justify an illegal war.

“Were the Iranians days or weeks away from building a [nuclear] bomb, from having a bomb?”, CNN host Becky Anderson asked Grossi.

“No”, he replied, bluntly.

The IAEA chief explained, “We never had information indicating that there was a structured, systematic [Iranian] program to build, to construct, a nuclear weapon”.

The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran is expanding. Washington and Tel Aviv are attacking more and more countries.

The CIA is arming Kurdish proxy forces in northern Iraq, with plans to launch an invasion of Iran.

Meanwhile, Israel has invaded Lebanon, and has reimposed its siege of Gaza.

Donald Trump is now even threatening Spain, because it refuses to support his illegal war of aggression against Iran.

Iran hits US military bases across West Asia

In response to the US-Israeli attacks, Iran has retaliated in self-defense, which it is allowed to do under international law.

Tehran has hit US military bases in the countries surrounding it in West Asia.

Oil prices skyrocket

This conflict has caused the global price of oil to skyrocket, as energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf has been damaged.

Tehran has vowed to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) described as “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint”.

Every day, crude representing roughly 20% of global oil consumption travels through this very narrow strait, which is right off the coast of Iran.

Tehran has essentially closed the geostrategic chokepoint, by announcing that it will strike any vessels that travel through the strait.

US State Department recommends evacuation of West Asia

At the same time, the State Department has told US citizens to evacuate all of the countries of the region, issuing “serious safety risks” for Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, occupied Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

However, the State Department is not providing support for Americans who are trying to flee these countries.

CIA arms Kurdish proxies

Instead of trying to stabilize the situation, Trump is pouring fuel on the fire.

CNN reported that the CIA is arming Kurdish mercenaries in northeastern Iraq. Washington wants them to act as US proxies, invade Iran, and destabilize the Iranian government.

This policy is likely to worry Türkiye, a NATO member, and could lead Istanbul to militarily intervene as well. Türkiye has the second-largest military in NATO, after the US.

Multiple media outlets, including Axios and Rudaw, confirmed that Trump is calling leaders of Kurdish armed groups in Iraq and asking for them to help the US attack Iran.

All of this is deeply ironic, because Trump was elected on the promise that he would be a “peace president”, and that he would end wars, not wage them.

Trump said his war of aggression against Iran will likely continue for “four to five weeks”, although he added that it could “go far longer than that”.

Israel invades Lebanon and besieges Gaza

In the meantime, the regional war in West Asia is getting larger and larger.

Israel took advantage of the chaos to launch an invasion of Lebanon.

Tel Aviv hopes to reoccupy southern Lebanon. Israel occupied this region for nearly two decades, following another invasion in 1982, although indigenous resistance groups forced it out in 2000.

At the same time, Israel has reimposed its siege of Gaza.

The food supply in Gaza is very limited, and two million Palestinians may soon starve, The Guardian warned.

US military shoots protesters in Pakistan and launches operations in Ecuador

People in dozens of countries around the world have filled the streets, protesting the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

US soldiers have shot protesters in the Pakistani city of Karachi, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched more military operations in Latin America.

Southern Command announced that US military forces are fighting in Ecuador. It claimed they are combating “narco-terrorism”.

However, Ecuador’s US-backed government is very closely linked to drug trafficking.

Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa is a dual US citizen and a close ally of Trump.

Noboa is the son of Ecuador’s richest billionaire oligarch. His family is notorious, because numerous investigations have found that the Noboa company is deeply involved in drug trafficking, and it regularly smuggles cocaine in banana crates from its private ports.

Trump admin imposes suffocating oil blockade on Cuba

While the US government is waging multiple wars in West Asia and Ecuador, it is also essentially waging war on Cuba.

The New York Times admitted that the US military is carrying out a naval blockade of Cuba.

The Trump administration is strangling the small island nation, preventing it from importing oil, in an attempt to collapse Cuba’s economy and overthrow its revolutionary government.

This naval blockade of Cuba is continuing even as the US military is busy bombing Iran.

Bloomberg reported that Russia tried to send a tanker of oil to Cuba in late February, but the US forced the vessel to turn away, starving the country of fuel.

Trump has the record for bombing more countries (10) than any other US president

Trump, the self-declared “peace president”, has bombed 10 countries — more than any other US leader.

In his two terms as president, Trump has bombed Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

In 2025 alone, the first year of his second term, Trump bombed seven countries.

In fact, Trump initiated his war of aggression against Iran just a few weeks after he launched an organization he calls the “Board of Peace”, which amounts to an attempt to replace the United Nations with a privatized group controlled by the US and Trump himself.

Trump threatens trade embargo against Spain

While all this is happening, Trump is also threatening Spain.

Madrid has been a thorn in Washington’s side. Its left-wing government has supported Palestine and has deepened its ties with China.

Now Spain is the only state in the European Union that has openly opposed the US war on Iran.

Spain condemned the war as an “unjustified and dangerous military intervention” and a clear “violation of international law”. Madrid has forcefully called for peace.

Trump has demanded that countries in Europe let the US military use their bases in order to attack Iran.

The UK has obediently given the US access to British military bases.

Spain, on the other hand, has refused. US aircraft were forced to leave Spanish bases.

This has infuriated Trump. In a press briefing at the White House on 3 March, Trump excoriated Madrid.

The US president threatened to impose a trade embargo on Spain. He said he ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off trade with the European nation.

If Spain continues to deny Washington access to its bases, Trump vowed to use military force to take over the facilities.

“Spain said that we can’t use their base. And that’s all right. We don’t need to. We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it”, Trump said.

As he threatened Spain, Trump was sitting next to the right-wing chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, a multimillionaire who owns two private jets and previously led the German arm of Wall Street giant BlackRock.

A reporter at the White House press briefing asked Merz if he supports the US president’s proposal to punish Spain. Merz said he agreed. He openly sided with Washington against a fellow EU member.

The German government has strongly supported the US-Israeli war on Iran. In fact, Merz argued that Iran should not be protected by international law.

The West’s so-called “rules-based order” apparently only applies to certain countries.

(Leer en español aquí)

The United States and Israel are waging a war of aggression against Iran. This is not about nuclear weapons; it's about imperialism.

Trump published a video on social media early on the morning of February 28, announcing, “The United States military began major combat operations in Iran”.

As the US and Israel brutally bombed Tehran, Donald Trump admitted that they want regime change.

Trump ordered members of Iran’s military to “lay down your weapons”, or “face certain death”.

The US president then called on Iranian opposition supporters to “take over your government”, claiming, “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war would overthrow the government in Tehran, to "cast off the yoke of tyranny and bring freedom and peace-loving values to Iran”. (Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces an ongoing arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, due to the genocidal crimes against humanity he committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with steadfast US support.)

Iran immediately retaliated, launching strikes in self-defense against multiple US military bases in Qatar, Bahran, Kuwait, and the UAE. The Pentagon’s largest base in the region, Al-Udeid in Qatar, was hit.

The absurd narrative that Washington and Tel Aviv are promoting is that they had to carry out “preemptive” attacks (which are illegal under international law), because Tehran supposedly seeks nuclear weapons.

This is nonsense. Iran signed the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2015, in which it agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons in return for the US and European countries lifting their illegal unilateral sanctions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) admitted that Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal. Nevertheless, Trump unilaterally tore it up in 2018, during his first term as US president, in flagrant violation of international law (given that the JCPOA had been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which even the US had voted for, under Obama).

Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is ironically a reformist who sought to negotiate another deal with the same US aggressors who sabotaged the previous one just a few years before.

When Trump entered office for his second term, in 2025, he oversaw several rounds of bad-faith “negotiations” with Iran. Then, during those talks, the US and Israel suddenly bombed Iran in June 2025. The Wall Street Journal admitted: “In Twist, U.S. Diplomacy Served as Cover for Israeli Surprise Attack”.

The same thing happened in February 2026. The Trump administration participated in fake “negotiations” with Iran.

On February 27, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who moderated the talks, said they had made “substantial progress”, and a “peace deal is within our reach”.

Mere hours later, Trump and Netanyahu launched a massive bombing campaign in Iran.

The reality is that the US and Israel do not want peace.

The goal of this war of aggression is clear: Washington seeks to topple Iran’s independent government and finally overturn the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which removed one of the pillars of the US empire’s “twin pillars” strategy in West Asia.

The US empire, and more specifically the large US corporations that it represents, want to control the plentiful resources not only in Iran, but in the entire region, which is home to the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, as well as critical minerals and other important commodities.

Washington also hopes to cut off China’s access to its top energy providers.

Wesley Clark, a former top US general and NATO commander, revealed more than two decades ago that, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, imperial strategists at the Pentagon made plans to overthrow the governments of seven countries in West Asia and North Africa.

On the US empire’s target list was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

Washington succeeded in destabilizing governments in six of those seven. Iran is the last one standing.

With its war, the United States hopes to install in Tehran a puppet, like the son of the former shah, the murderous monarch who came to power following a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

A Fox News correspondent reported that the CIA-linked US state media outlet VOA Persian is broadcasting propaganda in Iran in support of the so-called “exiled crown prince”, Reza Pahlavi, who has spent much of his life living in the US, and whose dictatorial father terrorized Iran, with staunch US backing, until the 1979 revolution.

Top US officials have been secretly meeting with the so-called “exiled crown prince”, the former Israeli intelligence officer Barak Ravid reported in January. On Twitter, Reza Pahlavi heaped praise on Trump, claimed “the Islamic Republic is collapsing”, and called for the Iranian people to help put him in power.

US imperial strategists believe the Iranian government is weak at this moment, and they are going for the jugular.

In doing so, the billionaire supposed “populist” Trump is fulfilling the dreams of the most ardent neoconservative hawks — even as he calls himself a “peace president”.

In the following video, Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton explains the real reasons behind the US-Israeli war of aggression, and debunks the lies being spread by Washington:

Timecodes:

0:00 USA & Israel bomb Iran

1:21 (CLIP) Trump threatens Iran’s military

1:49 (CLIP) Trump calls for regime change

2:33 Iran retaliates, hitting US bases

3:26 Iran is not Venezuela, or Iraq

4:18 (CLIP) Trump fears US casualties

4:52 Israel’s PM Netanyahu

6:08 US empire’s plans for West Asia

7:39 (CLIP) Wesley Clark: 7 countries targeted

8:14 Nuclear weapons

9:15 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA)

10:31 Fake US “negotiations”

12:21 Oil & gas in Middle East (West Asia)

12:45 USA wants to cut off China’s oil supplies

13:55 Trump’s oil blockade of Cuba

14:25 Israel: US empire’s aircraft carrier

15:26 CIA coup in Iran in 1953

16:04 US-backed dictator, the shah

16:54 Iranian Revolution

17:20 Iran-Iraq War

17:52 US puppet, “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi

19:56 US-backed regime change in Syria

21:01 Imperialism

21:24 Outro

(Leer en español aquí)

The United States is waging a new cold war against China. This has been openly admitted in Washington for several years.

The First and Second Cold Wars are different in some significant ways. The ideological split is not exactly the same.

The United States is capitalist and constitutes the heart of the capitalist world-system, whereas China is socialist. However, the People’s Republic of China is not the Soviet Union; it does not lead a socialist bloc of countries, and Beijing has been clear that it does not seek to “export” revolution.

“We will not import other countries’ models, and will not export the China model”, President Xi Jinping asserted in 2017 — although he added, “We will provide more opportunities for the world through our development”.

With that established, it should be stressed that just because China is very different from the USSR does not mean that there is no ideological aspect of Cold War Two.

There are unambiguous ideological differences between the US and China, and each promotes a very different vision of international relations.

The Second Cold War, therefore, will still have an enormous impact on the new global order that is being shaped.

In short, the political model that Washington seeks to impose on the world is the exact opposite of the political model being advocated by Beijing.

The Donald Trump administration wants to return to the politics of the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Western empires carved up the world and treated other regions as their imperial “spheres of influence”, denying sovereignty to Global South countries.

In stark contrast, China — which was a victim of colonialism in the Century of Humiliation — opposes Western hegemony, and wants to lift up the Global South as the protagonist of a more equitable international order.

Beijing advocates for a multipolar system in which all countries, regardless of size, have a voice on the international stage and equal representation in multilateral institutions.

Beijing considers sovereignty to be a sacred principle that must be respected and guaranteed, in a firmly established system of international law that every country must abide by, whether or not it is a great power or a small nation.

Two speeches at one event illustrate the opposing visions of the US and China

These two opposing global visions were clearly articulated at the 2026 Munich Security Conference in February.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an overtly pro-colonialist speech in which he called to reverse the decolonization of the Global South, revive “the great Western empires”, and “build a new Western century”.

The top US foreign-policy official demonized Global South anti-colonial movements as a nefarious plot by “godless communists”. He also praised the colonization of the Americas by European conquistadores, while whitewashing and denying the genocidal crimes against humanity that they committed against indigenous peoples.

Rubio’s imperialist tirade could not have been any more different from the remarks delivered by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Wang denounced the “the law of the jungle and unilateralism” of the US, instead calling for a system of “international collaboration” based on “win-win cooperation”.

The top Chinese foreign-policy official declared (emphasis added):

The monopolization of global power by a small number of countries is unpopular. We live in a multipolar world and need to practice true multilateralism.

There needs to be greater democracy in international relations. Global affairs should be discussed by all and the future of the world should be decided by all.

We need to make sure that all countries abide by the same set of rules, i.e., the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. All countries should be equal in terms of rights, opportunities and rules, and all countries, in particular small and medium-sized ones, should be able to find their places and play their roles in international relations.

Compared back to back, these speeches succinctly demonstrate the ideological divisions of Cold War Two.

The multipolar model of international relations that China is promoting is the polar opposite of the unipolar one advocated by the United States.

Beijing defends decolonization and wants a global order based on multipolarity, multilateralism, and peace; while Washington uses military force and wages economic warfare in a desperate attempt to restore a unipolar system in which it can act unilaterally, anywhere on Earth, without consequences.

Washington wants an international system based on the law of the jungle

The extreme imperialist worldview of the US government was articulated by Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, the far-right white nationalist Stephen Miller.

In an interview on CNN in January, Miller defended the Trump administration’s illegal invasion of Venezuela, in which US troops killed more than 100 people and kidnapped internationally recognized President Nicolás Maduro.

Miller argued that the global political order is and should be based on the principle that might makes right. He stated the following in a segment with CNN host Jake Tapper:

STEPHEN MILLER: The United States — this is sort of foundational — the United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us; to hoard weapons from our adversaries; to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States, rather than on behalf of the United States.

JAKE TAPPER: Sovereign countries shouldn’t be able to do what they want to do?

STEPHEN MILLER: The Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine is all about securing the national interest of America.

…

The future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology.

These are not just the fringe views of one individual. This is the imperialist ideology that is openly promoted by top officials of the US government, including Trump and Marco Rubio.

Rubio’s pro-colonialist speech at the 2026 Munich Security Conference made it clear beyond a doubt that the goal of the US empire is to reverse the decolonization of the latter half of the 20th century and to drag the world back to the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

China’s vision of a multipolar world

The model of international relations that China is promoting is that of a multipolar world based on multilateralism, win-win cooperation, and respect for the sovereignty of all countries, including and especially small ones.

The People’s Republic of China is profoundly opposed to imperialism and hegemony, and not only for ideological reasons, but also due to its own history.

During the Century of Humiliation — from the start of the British Empire’s First Opium War in 1839 until the revolution of 1949 — China was partially colonized by numerous Western powers and Japan. The European empires, Japan, and the United States all invaded China, exploited its workers and resources, and even seized control of parts of its territory.

Since its foundation in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has done everything it can to defend its sovereignty and make sure the Century of Humiliation is never repeated.

This history very much informs the policies of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Beijing’s vision for the world was spelled out in the speech given by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the 2026 Munich Security Conference.

This was the antithesis of the remarks delivered by Rubio.

The following is an excerpt of Wang’s speech (all emphasis added):

Over the past year, the international landscape was marked by growing transformations and turbulence, and the law of the jungle and unilateralism went rampant. Humanity has come to a new crossroads for the cause of peace and development. At such a juncture, President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), and called for following the five principles of sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, the people-centered approach, and real actions, with a view to jointly building a more just and equitable global governance system. The GGI aligns with the progressive trend of the times, represents the biggest common ground of the world’s nations, and has thus received widespread response from the international community shortly after its announcement. It injects new impetus into the endeavor to build a community with a shared future for humanity, and offers a compass for the giant ship of history to navigate through storms toward a brighter future. Now that humanity has weathered wind and rain to come this far, pulling together should be the imperative choice. We should reform and improve global governance to set the ship of history on the right course.

In reforming and improving global governance, the priority is to revitalize the United Nations system.

The founding of the U.N. was an important outcome of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, a historic choice made by previous generations after painful reflection on past agonies, and the peace endeavor that nations have invested their greatest efforts in thus far. This edifice was jointly built by the people of the world. We have every responsibility to reinforce and renovate it, and no right to destroy it or tear it down.

The U.N. is not perfect, but it remains the most universal and authoritative intergovernmental organization in the world. On the U.N. platform, each country, regardless of its size or wealth, has a voice and a sacred vote as well as its due obligations and equal rights. Without the U.N., the world would revert to the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak, and many small and medium-sized countries would lose the multilateral foundation critical to their survival and development.

Therefore, what is imperative for us today is to recommit to the founding mission of the U.N., revitalize the leading role of the U.N., abide by the purposes of the U.N. Charter, and enhance the efficiency and efficacy of the U.N. system, so that the organization will be able to better adapt to the needs of the 21st century and unleash renewed vitality.

In reforming and improving global governance, the key lies in the collaboration and cooperation of all countries.

The reason why the international system is not functioning well enough lies not with the U.N. itself, but rather with certain country seeking to magnify differences and disagreements, put itself above everyone else, stoke bloc confrontation and even revive the Cold War mentality. All these have eroded the foundation of trust, worsened the atmosphere for cooperation, and impeded the functioning of international institutions.

To safeguard international collaboration and cooperation, it is important to seek common ground while shelving differences and pursue win-win cooperation. The world is a diverse place. It is only natural that countries differ in social system, history, culture, interests and demand. And it is precisely the differences that necessitate dialogue and cooperation. There is no reason why countries cannot respect each other and contribute to each other’s success. Just like the way gentlemen engage with one another, there could be harmony without uniformity.

A review of history shows, from the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, to overcoming the global financial crisis, from the climate response to fighting terrorism, none of such progress would have been possible without countries coming together for sincere cooperation despite their differences. Let us always bear in mind that unity brings strength, and only in unity can we find hope.

In reforming and improving global governance, multilateralism should be always upheld.

The monopolization of global power by a small number of countries is unpopular. We live in a multipolar world and need to practice true multilateralism. There needs to be greater democracy in international relations, global affairs should be discussed by all and the future of the world should be decided by all.

We need to make sure that all countries abide by the same set of rules, i.e., the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter. All countries should be equal in terms of rights, opportunities and rules, and all countries, in particular small and medium-sized ones, should be able to find their places and play their roles in international relations.

To practice multilateralism, major countries in particular should lead by example. They should take the lead in pursuing cooperation, instead of conflict or confrontation. They should take the lead in observing rules, instead of applying double standards. They should take the lead in promoting equality, instead of imposing their will onto others. They should take the lead in encouraging openness, instead of resorting to self-serving unilateralism.

The Global South is rising collectively. The global governance system should also stay up-to-date to give more prominence to their voices and representation. Time will prove that the more democratic international relations are, the more peaceful the world is; the stronger multilateralism gets, the more effective global governance becomes.