War on Iran Could Crash the Global Economy: Yanis Varoufakis Explains

0:00Hello, everyone. I'm Ranya Kalik, and this is a live episode of Dispatches on Breakthrough News. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is threatening the global economy. Iran sits at the center of critical energy and shipping routes, and even a short disruption can send shockwaves through oil markets, food systems, inflation, debt, and supply chains worldwide. We're already seeing fuel shortages rationing and fears over the state of her moves. One of the most important trade chokepoints on Earth. This war is exposing just how fragile and crisis-written the global economic order already was before the bomb started falling. So what is that exactly is that stake and who will pay the price? To discuss that, I'm joined by economist former Greek finance minister NDM25 co-founder Janis Verifakis. Janis, it is a pleasure to have you back on the show.

1:00It's always a pleasure to be talking to you, Ranya. Thank you. Well, a lot has happened in just the last, what, are we even two weeks into this? I've kind of lost track of time. And there's so much I want to talk to you about, but before I get to what I do want to remind our audience that we are an independent media outlet. So we are able to keep going and growing because of your support. So if you are able to, consider becoming a member of breakthrough news by going to patreon.com slash breakthrough news. And also the easiest thing you can do to support breakthrough news is you can like this episode smash the like button. It helps boost us in the algorithm, engage with the content. Now that that's out of the way, Janis. Okay, so much has happened. Like I said, the US and Israel launched this war on Iran. Now we're on the precipice of what could become this much wider regional, even global war. And of course, I'm speaking to you from Lebanon, where Israel is currently carrying out mass bombings. And you know, there's a real sense that the region could just spiral out of control if it hasn't already. So I just before I get to more specific

2:01questions, I kind of wanted to get your perspective watching this unfold. You know, what are your general thoughts about what we witnessed over the past couple of weeks and where it's headed? Ranga, the thought, the one thought that dominated my thinking immediately after hearing that these hideous bombs were falling out of the sky and up all the people of Iran was they got him. They are of course the neocons and him is Donald Trump. There's one good thing about Donald Trump. There isn't much good about Donald Trump. But the one good thing about him was that he was elected on a no-war platform. And in particular on a no-war in Iran platform. In his first term, he avoided going to war on Iran. There was enormous pressure on him by John Bolton, by the neocons that he had in his cabinet, by Netanyahu, to unleash a war against Iran and he resisted it.

3:03And I have to say that when I was looking at that awful presidential campaign in 2024, between the genocidal Biden Kamala duo on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other, I was thinking, well, the only thing that really distinguishes them is that Trump doesn't want to start another war in the Middle East or anywhere else. And now they got him. I don't know what Netanyahu has on him, what the neocons have on him. I don't give a damn actually. What that matters is that now he's become a fully paid up member of the regime change in the neocon paranoia and the madness of it all because he has entered the war from which he cannot extricate himself now. He's damned if he gets out or he's damned if he doesn't. And nevertheless, one clear victor in all this is Netanyahu,

4:06who's a project, 30-year-old project, after the murder of Yichak Rabin and he's taking the baton on, you know, over from Ariel Sharon of ethnically glazing Gaza while bombing, sorry, that was a mistake, let me say it again, ethnically glazing the West Bank while starving the and periodically bombing them. That was the Ariel Sharon playbook, that's why he moved the settlers and the army out of Gaza, you know, to turn Gaza into a concentration camp, keep bombarding it, keep the people in there starving, the children and malnutrition to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. And, you know, Netanyahu has taken this logic, put it, you know, give it that inappropriate term, to its conclusion. And he's succeeding because, you know, Netanyahu is all about the reason why

5:06he's bombing you in Lebanon. The reason why he's bombing and annexing a third of Syria, maybe no more. The reason why he's not going to stop extending his war mongering and warring the menor around the region is one. He knows that, you know, that's the only way of continuing the colonization and annexation of the West Bank, slowly, steadily, but surely, you know, the settlers with the help of the IDF are expanding Palestinian life from the West Bank and now, of course, Gaza. And, you know, as long as the rest of the world talk about Iran or South Lebanon or Maduro for that matter in Venezuela, you know, Netanyahu's hideous, misathropic project is continuing. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about the West Bank, I saw there's all this, all these horrors that are taking place and, of course, it's getting no attention and the Israelis never miss an opportunity

6:09to miss an opportunity. And I will point out, I mean, they want to take parts of South Lebanon for their greater Israel project as well. You mentioned Syria. I mean, this is just an expansion of state that will never stop. All that said, though, I do want to move this a bit into the sort of ricochets of all of this. You have this really good, you know, sort of tweet explanation up of what you call these, the techno-feudal wars are upon us. And, of course, you've written a book about techno-feudalism. And this war does seem to be intersecting with that reality in quite a striking way. You know, we've seen reports that AI systems were used to assist with planning aspects of this attack on Iran. We've, of course, seen similar systems also used in Gaza, so that was, I think, a test run for a lot of this. And then interestingly enough, we've seen Iran, you know, targeting digital infrastructure in its retaliation, including, you know, Amazon cloud, an Amazon cloud data center, I believe, in Dubai. And then, you know, just this morning, you had

7:09reports of, you know, the IRGC through a linked media organization releasing this list of offices and infrastructure run by top US companies with Israeli links, whose technology has been used for military applications. The companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Navidia, and Oracle, and the listed offices and infrastructure for these cloud-based services that are also located in multiple Israeli cities as well as some Gulf countries. That was the warning from the Iranians. If these kinds of facilities are disrupted, it doesn't just affect the tech sector. I think it can affect, you know, and maybe everything from banking to aviation to communications. We also saw the Iranians threaten banking infrastructure in the Gulf states because the Israelis and Americans hit a bank in Iran and killed several employees. All that's to say, are we entering a new phase of conflict more generally where wars simultaneously target energy infrastructure and digital infrastructure? And what do you make out of all that when you talk about the era of

8:11techno-feudal wars? Well, exactly. We have a new form of warfare, which I call techno-feudal, and it includes everything that you said and more. It was very interesting that, as you mentioned, the Iranians targeted successfully Amazon wire services data centers, not so much attacking Amazon per se, but attacking the programs, the artificial intelligence programs that we're running on those servers by Anthropic because Anthropics AI was utilized from what we read in the American press. It was utilized in order to select targets in Iran. So you have Anthropic running its programs on Amazon servers and these servers are located, interestingly, or at least some of them in Bahrain, in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, some of them in Saudi Arabia and Iran is attacking them, which shows that firstly they are fully cognizant of the engagement,

9:19the involvement of AI in targeting them. Secondly, they know how to get them, which is very interesting because we couldn't take this for granted. I did say, didn't I, that what you said is spun on, but there is more as well. So allow me to cover two areas that need, I believe, to be covered in this context. The first one is, this is something I've said in Qatar recently, when I was there just before the war started. I was sitting next to a palantir scientist, engineer, whatever you might call him, during the endina and the conversation with other people around the table was about Gaza and this is for this gentleman next to me. Suddenly started experiencing a kind of excitement having heard the word Gaza. He listened to what the conversation

10:19was, he was talking to somebody else and he said, oh, Gaza, the Gaza was fantastic for us. He meant palantir and said, yeah, well, tens of thousands of children being named and killed was fantastic. You know, he said, no, no, no, that was terrible, but he pointed at my phone, which was sitting on the table. Of course, I do. And he said, your phone now is useless to me because it's not moving. It's not going anywhere. If it's stationary, it doesn't produce data. But if you bombard a densely populated area, people, their phones run around a lot. They produce a lot of data. They pick up a phone, they call their relatives to try to find out if their loved ones are named or dead or alive or whatever. And we train, that's what he said, we train our AI programs on this wealth of data that came out of Gaza. In circumstances that create panic and I said, yeah, okay, can you explain to me what did you get out of that? He said, well, we just sold a program,

11:21an AI program to the British National Health Service for one billion pounds. And then I found that it was done through the Tony Blair Institute involving Tony Blair's son. The National Health Service, and what they are going to be using this program was trained on the death and destruction of people in Gaza. What is trained to do is to help organize British hospitals in cases of emergencies when nurses and doctors and so on panic. So you can see, this is the first time in human history. You don't simply have the arms straight where arms dealers make a lot of money from selling weapons that kill people. No, here's the actual killing of the people. The people running around injured without buying anything. Their movements, their screams, their agony, their pain, is training AI, which then allows people who like the general most next to me through the Tony Blair Institute to sell to a national public health service software. So that's one dimension,

12:27which I think is really important. You realize that war and peace are now one thing. And profit is not simply made by those who actually make the bullets. Profit is made by the techno-futal companies, these cloud capital firms, which tap into the actual pain of people and extract value for themselves, separate value, that invariably involves something really very benign, like a national health service in Britain. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is that if you take Gaza, Iran and Ukraine and put them all together, what you find is that you have two different dimensions of war that we didn't have them so far. Especially from Ukraine, we know that tanks and airplanes are becoming increasingly redundant. We can see this in the war in Iran. You know, you have a cheap drone that costs the Iranians

13:29what, $5,000 to make. And it takes you one and a half million American dollars at a period of time, taking down. So the economic, the political economy of the conflict is definitely not on the side of the Donald at the moment. That we've known for a while. So we know that it's drone technology. We know that drones, whether they succeed or fail, depends on having developed a capacity to run without being constantly in communication with some handlers. We've seen that both in Iran and in Ukraine, which means that very soon all these drones are going to be autonomous. In other words, you will have programmed them a mission and they will go and carry it out on their own. And as we know from AI, we know this very well. I mean, I was also talking to somebody from Cisco who's telling me that in the last few months, they created a network where AI bots talked to one another, like drones do in a world setting. They made two AI bots talking to one another and let them

14:36on their own. And within five minutes, they were discussing these AI bots how they will stop humans from switching them off. So if you consider that we have now going, we're moving in a direction of warfare through AI-drone empowered drones very soon, not only are we not going to be controlling them as human beings, that is, you will not have the moral responsibility for whom they kill, but they will have a life of their own. They're not sentient. I'm not saying that they have consciousness. I'm sure that, you know, it will be centuries before machines have consciousness. And certainly not the conscience. But already, they are going to be completely autonomous from even the generalists that deployed them. And the last I mentioned, and I'll shut up after that, is the fact that, you know, once upon a time, it took a president in the United States to declare war. Once upon a time, you had a general or a human being that would have to approve the kickstarting

15:38of hostilities, the triggering of hostilities. Now, very soon, with these machines, I think the humans are going to be completely out of the loop. And, you know, we are already seeing this now in Gaza. We're seeing it Ukraine. We see it in Iran. You know, Donald Trump doesn't even understand the kind of tragedy that he is triggered off. Yeah, I mean, it's what you described as so unbelievably dystopian. There's like so many horrific things to be concerned about right now. And so I'm going to put that one to the side, because we're going to have to come back to that at some point and really dig in deeper, because all of these wars that you mentioned really have been testing grounds for everything you talked about. I want to go ask you about something that is, I think, the major news item at the moment. And that is what's happening with the Strait of Parmuz, which is, you know, a lot of people like hear about this Strait and think purely in terms of oil prices. And that is a big part of it, right? But this Strait is really one of the central arteries of the global economy,

16:43which is why the U.S. had refrained for so long from going to war like this with Iran, because there was a likelihood that Iran would respond by shutting down the Strait. So, you know, I'm wondering if you could maybe talk a bit about why disruption there isn't just an energy issue, though we can get to the oil shock as well, but something that can ripple across, you know, shipping, insurance markets, inflation, supply chains, like just from an economist perspective, what is the potential here that the U.S. really doesn't seem to be prepared for or taking very seriously? Well, I think they are taking it seriously now, right? I think they're panicking. As we speak, they're panicking. They started something that they didn't realize will effectively consume them. And now it's consuming them, because as you said, it's not so much the quantity of oil. This is not 979. Now, the United States, Europe, China, in particular, are far less dependent today on the actual crude oil than they were in 979.

17:47Machines are far more, you know, the far more efficient than they used to be. A lot more electricity is produced by other means, not by oil, but financial markets in capitalism operate on the basis of expectations. So even if oil was not particularly distrapped, the oil supply by what's happening in the state of humus, the fact that in the stock exchanges, in the commodity markets, all it takes for a serious escalation of the price of oil is not at the actual disruption of oil. It is an equilibrium of belief, as we call them, say. So if enough traders believe that enough traders believe that enough traders believe that enough traders believe that at some point in the future, there is going to be an oil shortage and the price of oil will go up. The price will go up even if nobody believes that there's going to be a shortage of oil. Together, you then

18:51see the price of oil going through the roof. All you need is the I believe that you believe that I believe that somebody will believe that it will go through the roof. Even if we don't believe it, we are going to push the price of the roof through the roof. Why? Because this is how we make money. So, you know, this kind of multiplier accelerator effects of expectations, on expectations, on expectations, on the price of oil. This is why Donald Trump and his various many idiots in the White House are panicking because they realize that, you know, it doesn't matter. Even if, you know, the seventh fleet, the sixth fleet of the United States, travels next to every single tanker that comes in and out of the state of foremost, this game of expectations and the commodities markets is enough to destroy the political career of Donald Trump. Because let's face it, in the United States, if you are a magas supporter, you know, a blue collar worker, and this is, you know, it's the working class, the proletarians, the proletarians that elected him.

19:55And it is them that on whom he relies in the midterms in November to maintain control of the House and the Senate. These people, they have shit jobs, bullshit jobs, BS jobs, and I'll if you'll ever call them, they are just managing to make ends meet. They drive a long way to go to work. There's no public transport. They have these gargantuan SUVs. They consume, they drink a lot of gas, as they call it, petrol. And as the price of petrol of gas goes through the roof, you know, he's going to lose them. But what does he do? He started this thing, I think, at the behest of Metanyahu and the Neocons in the Pentagon. He thought that he would have a quick victory like in four or five days. He said four or five days. That's right, four or five days, you know, you know, you know, kids came in and then the whole thing collapses.

20:57The Iranian regime has a much, much larger pain threshold than he does. And, you know, his own base, the MAGA base have. And now if he gets out without securing the state of almost, that will count as a major defeat from him. He cannot do what that which he did in Venezuela, that is to cut a deal with the successor of the supreme leader. There's no DLC, the vice president of Venezuela, that he can cut a deal with. Now there is a son of Hamene. He, you know, the Americans have kicked his father, his wife, his sister, his brother, his children, everyone. And, you know, the elevation of Hamene, Jr. to the position of supreme leadership of Iran is simply a signal to Trump. We're not going to have a peace deal with you. We're going to continue this. So Iran now

21:58is the regime is hell bent on continuing this war until until the final defeat of Donald Trump. Yeah, no, yeah. He thought it would be the opposite, right? And it's not only the opposite. Now in terms of the economic impact of this, because this is what you asked me to comment on, we can see what's happening with gas prices, with oil prices and so on. Now, Europe and the United States are quite resilient. They're not going to be so much harmed. I mean, Europe was far more harmed by the commencement of the war in Ukraine and the cessation of the natural gas supplies from Russia to Europe. That was a major shock. We're still not having the cover for not. We have the de-industrialization process in Germany as a result of that. You know, the spike in the oil prices is not going to affect Europe that much, right? Europe is in the doldrums anyway. You know, it's a basket case. It will be a bit more

23:00of a basket case as a result of the closure of the states of Hormuz, but it's not the great crisis of Europe. Europe is in crisis, but not because of that. The United States is also immune because of the fracking revolution of the horizontal drilling, which destroys, of course, the land and the environment in America, but they don't care. They drill, baby, drill kind of thing. They are subsufficient when it comes to oil and gas. And then you have China. And I heard a lot of people saying a lot of idiotic things about China being cornered now because it was receiving one-third of its oil from Iran, which is true. But China has a huge stock of oil. It's got three times the stock of oil stocked up compared to the United States and to the European Union. And the other thing, which is really important about China, firstly, they can get a lot more oil from Putin, from Russia. Putin is laughing all the way to the bank. I mean, he's looking at what

24:05Trump is doing in Iran. He says, thank you. Thank you, Donald. Can you please cut this? Because he solved all his fiscal problems. The oil prices gone through the roof. And, therefore, the shortfall that he had in Russia, the Russian government had over the last three, four months gone. As for China itself, China already has diversified away from oil. And away from fossil fuels. For the first time in the last year, it's actually used its carbon footprint because it has a massive expansion of green energy. And what's happening now in Iran is going to accelerate even further the green transition of the Chinese energy sector. And the result is that China is now totally, totally dominant in Africa, because Africa was a continent with regimes that never managed to generate, to generate, to build the electricity networks that the developed world has. But they didn't need it,

25:07because they have leapfrog. In the same way that they never needed standard conventional phones, because they went straight to the mobile phone. Now they have leapfrogged the industrial revolution based on networks of electricity that are nationwide or continent-wide, because now they have solar panels from China and ACTL or BYD batteries that are not very cheap. And you have whole villages in towns in Africa that are totally autonomous. They have plenty of electricity, free electricity. And this is all provided by China. So in the end, you're going to have, as a repercussion of the closure of the state's performance, the main victims of it will be the working classes of Europe and America, not because of the shortage of oil, but because for the reasons I explained earlier, the repliance of financial markets and commodities markets, they can't make ends meet. Most of

26:12the income is going to go on transport. They will also face increases in necessities. Not so much because of the increase in the cost of producing these necessities food through fertilizers and so on. No, because these cartels that are running the show in the markets of the United States in the markets of Europe, see these crises as a fantastic opportunity to fix prices, to create what we call grid-flation. So even if let's say because of the closure of the states of Hormuz, there is a 3% increase in the cost of producing food through fertilizers and so on, the increase in the price of food will be 13%. And finally, countries that are not either still have managed to decouple from the fossil fuel industry. The global south yet again,

27:18just like in the pandemic, are going to suffer massively from this. Europe and the United States are going to have another class struggle in the sense that the rich are going to get richer and the poor will get poorer. And China is going to move further ahead into its technological prowess and technological dominance. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point, well, the many really good points, but I just wanted to note that, you know, according to shipping data reported by CNBC, Iran has sent more than 11 million barrels of oil through the state of Hormuz since the war began, most of it bound for China. And according to the Wall Street Journal today, Iran is actually exporting more oil through the state of Hormuz than before the Wall, of course, effectively restricting the passage of oil from other regional producers, which just goes to show you like they they came into this prepared. I am very curious how they're able to ship through the street. And you know, there's something about these like sort of shadow ships, but regardless, like they they have been preparing for this potential for decades because

28:23the US has been, you know, trying to destabilize Iran in many various ways and sort of promising war for decades as have the Israelis. So it's just really incredible that these guys, the Pete Hegsat, Donald Trump, like JD Vance, who's kind of like disappeared, you know, we got to put his face on a milk carton at this point because he hasn't been seen in like a week. Probably doesn't want to be anywhere near this war. Didn't seem prepared or really to think about this potential outcome. And then all of the things that you mentioned, I mean, I also saw, you know, this one IRGC leader said yesterday, like, oh, because Donald Trump had dismissed the rise in oil prices, especially when it came to gasoline. He sort of dismissed it as something we can absorb. But you know, you mentioned the Europeans and Americans are resilient in that in that space. But at the same time, you did have the Iranian, the IRGC spokesperson yesterday saying that, okay, if $100 the barrel is enough for you, let's see what you do when it goes up to $200.

29:24So, like, these guys aren't messing around. Like, they're in it for the long haul and they are going to use every economic leverage point they can. And it just seems to me, like, the US under this administration has no response for how to get out of it. And like you said, it will be considered a strategic defeat if they can't secure the state of her moves and control oil prices. That's more common to any sharing than a question. I don't know if you have anything you want to add. Well, I agree with everything you said. And I'm going to seem to be going to add that the kind of administration seem to be absolutely innocent of any understanding of history. You know, in 1980, a year after the Islamic Revolution established the regime in Iran, they decided to take it out by unleashing upon them their studs in the region, the studs, of course, being Saddam Hussein. They found a team through Kuwait through the Emirates. They weaponized him and they unleashed him against Iran with chemical weapons.

30:27More than 500,000 Iranians died. And the current administration hasn't learned the lesson that despite the fact that not all Iranian support regime, there is a very strong opposition to the regime. The moment you attack the country from outside, in order to, you know, essentially impose your own empire will upon them, that unites people behind the regime. This is exactly what happened when they unleashed Saddam Hussein against him. They thought that the regime would do a collapse. It didn't. If the regime in Iran is strong, it's because they've managed to copped to the national defense of Iran, even dissidents. I mean, the proportion of dissidents, of, you know, of the women and the men that demonstrated against the regime in 2022 after Amin is brutal killing by police. The percentage of them who are with that clown,

31:34Paklevi, the son of the Shah, is tiny. Most of the dissidents against the regime do not want Iran to fall into the orbit of the United States. You know, even Liberals, they remembered what happened in 1953 when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected secular government of Mohamed Mossadek. So, you know, if you really want it as an American president to unite people behind the Islamic Republic, you should do what he's doing. Yeah, because the rally around the flag is not a, yeah. I'm simply accusing Trump of not even being good at being selfish. It's really, it's really unbelievable. I want to, I want to ask you about, you know, your thoughts on sort of bricks and the limits of, of multiple air any year, because I think many people had hoped that institutions like bricks would maybe serve as counterweights to U.S. power. And

32:38interestingly enough, of course, Iran is a member of bricks, right? And yet, you know, while some bricks countries have condemned the attacks on Iran, others have remained silent. So, you know, what does this moment tell us, I think about, you know, about the limits of this idea of multi-polarity? And it just seems like the global economy is just still so deeply tied to U.S. financial and military power that really even alternate blocks as much as there should be alternate blocks struggle to act collectively. Well, I've been adamant about this for some years now that the globalists of, you know, Washington, D.C. underestimate the bricks and progressives of our ilk. We overestimate bricks, okay? So the truth is somewhere in between. The bricks are a very important agglomeration of countries. They are united by one thing. The one thing that unites them

33:38is the urge, the thirst for decoupling from the exorbitant power of the dollar system of payments. Not so much the dollar itself as a currency, but the dollar system of payments. What they can't stand is firstly that, you know, when a Brazilian buys something from Argentina, you know, the American banking system gets a cut. They had nothing to do with the production of, you know, what the Argentina produced for the Brazilian to purchase. And you have to get a cut, you know, they like them, right? So, you know, the bricks together against them and also the sanctions. You know, the idea that if whoever happens to occupy the White House may not like you and freeze your account and you know, and freeze your assets, that is what brings together the bricks because think about it. In the bricks, I'm sure you know this, you have India and China. They are strategic opponents in many realms. They

34:44even fought a war recently. You know, there is tension between them. But what unites them is they do not want their savings, their incomes, their payments to be approved or disapproved by somebody sitting in the White House or in the Federal Reserve. So they got together and created an alternative to Swift. Swift is their international digital messaging program by program system by which money is transferred around the world. It's supposed to be European, but it's completely totally dominated by the United States. They can switch you off Swift whenever they feel like it. I was personally sanctioned because of my friendship with Julian Assange. My bank accounts were frozen. Now you have Nicoladi Giu, a French judge who was becoming one person in the financial world. He can't even in France, in his own country. As a judge of the French Republic, he cannot book a hotel because Mastercardi's various platforms for payment and Swift have locked him out at the behest

35:52of Don Rampe. So the Bricks have got together, they've created an alternative Swift, they call it Bricks Bay. It is a remarkable system based on blockchain. They have the Bricks bank and they in that sense is crucially important, but it is not the equivalent of the Warsaw Pact. That is an anti-NATO, anti-imperialist, anti-American, solid organization that is going to stand up for Cuba, for Iran, for Venezuela, for home ever. So let's not underestimate the importance of Bricks and let's not overestimate it at the same time. No, that's a really good way to put it. And I wanted to ask you about the contradictions in Europe. You kind of alluded to this earlier, but I think it's super interesting how Europe largely, I mean, not so surprisingly, backed Washington politically when they launched this war, but then economically, I know you said

36:54Europe is resilient, but it's also vulnerable to energy shocks. I mean, anybody else would be. I mean, I would imagine there, I don't know, you can tell me more about this, but I would imagine some European countries might be upset to see the U.S. suspending temporarily sanctions on Russian energy to kind of make up for what's being limited from the straight of her moves. But also, you know, European leaders supporting this U.S. strategy, but then also relying on these kind of emergency measures to avoid the economic consequences of them. On top of that, you have the Germans basically backing this, but then the second they realize it might cause a huge refugee crisis that would impact them, you saw German leadership being like, wait a second, no, and trying to soften their tone. But, you know, what does that say about Europe's position in the global system right now? And just, you know, what's your take? I mean, the one good, I guess, actor here is like Spain. Spain has been pretty good on pushing back pretty hard, but yeah, your thoughts on just the general European consensus behind this insanity. Ranya, as a European, I hang my head in shame.

38:04I look at our leaders and I think, how could we, the continent that produced the great philosophers, the great musicians, the great art, how could we have produced such an agglomeration of deeply idiotic leaders, of people who have lost the capacity to care that they are frauds and that they look like frauds. You know, they amass in the Oval Office in front of the Donald, who patches them on their head and says, good doggy, good doggy. And, you know, Merz and Ruta and Kirsta Amher and Macron say, yes, daddy, yes, tell us, you know, it's always to jump. How high, how high should we jump? And then they go home and they have a spasm of dignity and they give speeches, finally, speeches about the importance of European sovereignty and standing up to on the one hand Trump and on the other hand put him. And then, you know, Trump goes in and snatches

39:06Maduro and they keep quiet. And you have people like Macron and Stammer saying that it's not for us to pass judgment on what Trump did in Venezuela. Then he says he's going to want to England. Then they have a little tantrum about that. Then they forget about it. Then, you know, he bombs Iran and they have the audacity of criticizing Iran for defending itself. So, you know, if you add to, of course, to that, the complicity, the complete complicity of our European leaders to, you know, the genocide of the Palestinians. You end up with the despair that I feel whenever I look at all our leaders in that atmosphere of utter darkness, you know, you have the Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, saying a few things that are quite mildly rational. And suddenly he shines like the god of pureism. He's not the god of pureism. He went against the trade unions

40:10in Spain when they tried to organize a boycott of Israeli ships. But because he, you know, it's what I say, the one-eyed person is particularly insightful in a sea of blind people. So, this is what's going on. But, you know, more, you mentioned the reconnection with Russia. Now, I'll just give you an example. Because, you know, we're neighbors. You are in Lebanon, as we speak. I'm in Greece. We have Eastern Mediterranean. As we speak, the Greek are a part of a European Union project. Do you know what they're doing? To our agency, a beautiful agency, they're going to turn it into a huge pipeline. Connecting, connecting Greece through Bulgaria, up Romania, Moldova, and the Ukraine with a pipeline, with a pipeline. Now, what's going to go into this pipeline? Natural gas, liquefied natural gas that will come to the Aegean by sea from the Gulf,

41:13from Texas and New Mexico. They're going to be blinking, so they think they will be spending all this energy to liquefy natural gas that is fracked in New Mexico and in Texas. They will bring it across the Atlantic. They will take it through the Gibraltar state. They will go past Malta. They will go past Great, and then they will, you know, pump it into this pipeline to take it to Ukraine, where we know that next to Ukraine, there is huge quantities of rational gas. So, as to continue the war in Ukraine, so that Chevron and ExxonMobil can make a lot of money from, you know, fracked gas from New Mexico. Now, that is a European plan. I can think of no better example of complete subjugation to the interests of American capital and to Donald Trump. The very same people who keep waxing on litigal about the importance of European sovereignty from the United States. So, you know, these, I think these people will go down in history.

42:16Greatest idiots ever to have held any degree of power in any part of the world, whatever. I don't think that anyone can beat them, you know, in the Olympic Games of utter stupidity. Now, there is a lot of money that they will make, right? So, they are, you know, it's not that it's motivated stupidity because of everything I described now with the pipelines and all that. You know, the people who are engaged know this. We learn a huge amount of money at the expense of Europe, at the expense of our industry because you can think of, you know, how expensive that natural gas is going to be, right? So, the industry, the very industrialists who are going to be using it, they are going to be paying through the nose. That's why German is the industrializing, but they don't care because I was talking to people, CEOs and so on, of, you know, very successful German industries and industrial groups that you know of. I'm not going to mention names, but they are, and what they say to me is, wow, well, we don't care because, you know,

43:22we are already planning to shift almost all of our production to the United States. Wow. All of it. So, with the industrialized Germany. BASF, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen. I'm moving to the United States. Capital, no, no bounds. And they have no patriotism whatsoever. So, Europe is becoming a desert. We are entering at least 50 years, if not a century, of a new middle ages. You can see this ethically, morally, the money in which they're on citizens. The rise of fascism, the way in which, you know, we have journalists, we have activists who are being sanctioned in Europe. And then they have the audacity of referring to others in, you know, other parts of the world, from Russia to China, as totalitarians. It's truly incredible the time we're living in. And I know we have to wrap up here,

44:24but I do want to ask you, you know, back to this sort of economic fallout of all of this. I mean, at some point, you know, it does seem like Washington, you know, Washington presents this kind of war in wars like this, because like Trump is really on a rampage as, you know, this demonstration of strength. He calls it peace through strength, right? But I think to a lot of us who are watching, it looks more like the behavior of an empire that's just increasingly unstable and willing to take huge risks, like really, really big gambles without even thinking it through. And I'm just curious if you see this war on Iran as maybe part of a broader pattern where, you know, I don't want to talk about imperial declines. I actually don't think this is necessarily a decline, at least not in the short term, because the US is still a very powerful country, but it's kind of this imperial power that's sort of just deepening every crisis you can see, you can conceive of. And I don't know, like, what if I was a country following the US right now,

45:25whether I'm in the Gulf States or whether I'm in Europe, like how do you not see this and what it means down the line if the US is willing to do something so dumb, like what they're doing across the Middle East right now, basically really doing a lot of damage to these Gulf economies that are supposed to be your allies, potentially collapsing the global economy depending on how long Trump wants to try to withstand this. And I'm just curious, your general thoughts about what this means about what the US is right now. You know, this paradox was described brilliantly by Karl Marx. Long, long time ago. Very guy, very smart guy. No, he defined the capitalist, somebody who'd sell you the rope by which you're going to hang him. So, you know, it's a long story. It's a long story. It's a very old story, I should say. Now, look, the paradox of the United States is that it is simultaneously getting stronger, more hegemonic, while getting more brittle. This is a paradox

46:27of the United States. It's been happening now since the early 70s, since the demise of the Bretton Woods system is 97-71 since Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon, deviled the dollar, created circumstances where the American economy became more and more embedded into the Reds, that is, became more of a deficit country. Its state deficit was expanding. Its budget deficit was expanding. And through this expansion of its debts and deficits, the United States was getting more hegemonic. Now, that is the, I think the most significant characteristic of the United States. It is the first empire in the history of empires, which got stronger the more into the Red it became. All previous empires, right? Whether it was the Roman Empire, you know, the Dutch Spanish Empire, the British Empire, every time they went from being a surplus country to being deficit country, once they slipped into the Red, they lost the power. The United States, since 1971, has getting stronger, the more in deficit it is. The more it industrialized,

47:30it used the dollar, and it used the military, and more recently, cloud capital, you know, big tech, in order to maintain its capacity to sponge off others, the rest of the world. What is very interesting is that the economic team of Donald Trump, Scott Besson, Steven Miran, these people, if you read what they were saying, at the time when Donald was winning his second term, they were making this point. They were making the point that, you know, we have to be very careful because we are getting more hegemonic, but at the same time, we're getting more brittle. And this is why they wanted tariffs. This is why they wanted to divide the dollar, again, to do what Nixon did in 1971. In order, their idea to put it figuratively, if I may, is that the dollar zone was gigantic and is gigantic compared to the industrial capacity of the United States. So the industrial capacity of the United States is shrinking. It is getting

48:33smaller. They cannot build a fast train between New York and Boston. You know, the Chinese have 50,000 kilometers of super fast trains. The Americans cannot build not even one kilo one mile of a fast train. They don't have the expertise anymore. They don't have the industrial capacity of all bankers or realtors, okay, or shrinks or something, but they are not making things anymore. Whatever they make, they make outside of the United States. You know, and Trump knew that, I think he said this is not all the Trump team. And the idea behind the tariffs on the one hand, the cryptocurrencies, the stable coins in particular, we have a long discussion about how that links to technology, and to technology, the power of the United States, that their plan was to create circumstances so that American, Germany can expand, and at the same time, they would bring through tariffs primarily, as we were saying before, German capital to invest in the United States. That plan was never one that I answered, but it had a logic. And it went hand in hand with

49:36a logic of no war. And that's why I'm saying that for me, this was not a war of choice by Trump. I don't think he chose this one. I think that somehow, Netanyahu had something on him. The deep state had something on him, and they managed to capture him, as I said, right at the beginning of our conversation. And now his whole plan to maintain the heat of the United States, despite its brutalness, is blown up by a war which he doesn't have the capacity to control once he started it. Wow, it'll be incredible to see where this goes. Just unbelievable what we're witnessing, very unprecedented times. And I'm really happy, honest, that we can have you want to help walk us through some aspects of it. I want to just give you an opportunity to, you know, plug anything you'd like to plug. I know that you are regularly appear on a YouTube channel. You probably would like to mention. No, plug in, no, plug in. What I would like to say right? We're not plugging. We're not plugging. We're all plugging. No, no, we're not plugging. We're not plugging.

50:39I'm not saying, I'm not in the business of selling them. Let me, let me say, know that you are in Lebanon. I just, I just want to say one thing. I want to send my solidarity and my good vibes to the people of Lebanon, to the people of South Lebanon, to the people of Gaza, to the people of his Jerusalem, to the people of the West Bank. This is the only thing that matters at the moment. If this was 1938, we would all have one duty to help preserve Jewish life in the face of the onslaught of the Nazis. Today, we have to all of us, independently of, you know, our party politics and so on. We have to preside for the people of South Lebanon. And now, of course, the people of Iran. Well, I couldn't agree more with you and I really appreciate your kind words, Janis. And I really appreciate you joining me and we will do it again for sure sometime soon. Absolutely.