Trump has promoted a number of plans to make America strong – at other countries’ expense. Given his “we win; you lose� motto, some of his plans would produce the opposite effect of what he imagines.

That would not be much of a change in U.S. policy. But I suggest that Hudson’s Law may be peaking under Trump: Every U.S. action attacking other countries tends to backfire and end up costing American policy at least twice as much.

We have seen it become normal for foreign countries to be the beneficiaries of U.S. policy aggression. This is most obviously the case for America’s trade sanctions against Russia. If the United States is not itself the loser (as in cutting the Nord Stream pipeline led to its soaring LNG exports), then its allies will bear the cost. The cost in a few years may be that the United States has lost Europe and NATO as a result of the pressure by European countries to declare their independence from U.S. policy.

To speed the parting European guest, NATO leaders are demanding sanctions against Russia and China, saying that “imports equal dependency.� What follows will be Russian and Chinese counter-sanctions blocking other raw-materials from sale to the EU.

In past shows we’ve discussed Trump’s plan to raise U.S. tariffs, and to use them much like imposing against countries that seek to act in ways that don’t dovetail into U.S. foreign policy. There is a lot of pushback on this proposal from vested Republican interests, and ultimately it is Congress that must approve his proposals. So Trump probably threatens too many vested interests to make this a big fight early on in his administration. He’ll be busy fighting to clean up the FBI, CIA and the military that have been opposing him since 2016.

Will Trump’s attempt to weaponize the dollar succeed any better than the U.S. trade sanctions?

The real wild card may turn out to be Trump’s threats weaponize the dollar. At least that foreign-policy sphere is more under control of his Executive Branch. Along with his drive to control the world’s oil trade and key media platforms, Trump wants to be able to hurt other countries. That is his idea of a negotiation and being transactional.

In the weekend edition of the Financial Times, Gillian Tett’s article on Trump’s proposed “Maganomics� quotes Stanford professor Matteo Maggiori pointing out that national power “touches not just goods, but money too. We estimate that the US geoeconomic power relies on financial services, while Chinese power relies on manufacturing.�[1]

So, along with aiming to control the world’s oil and LNG supply, Trump wants to base US power on its financial system. He recently threatened to punish BRICS countries to seek an alternative to the dollar.

That strategy is based on countries needing access to U.S. dollars and financial markets, just as they need oil and information technology under U.S. commercial control. The US tried blocking Russia and other countries from the SWIFT bank-clearing system, but as usually happens with sanctions, Russia and China have created their own fallback system, so that plan didn’t work.

The United States got the Bank of England to confiscate Venezuela’s gold supply and offer it to the right-wing opposition. That worked. And the EU and United States together confiscated Russia’s $300 billion of foreign dollar holdings. That worked, and the EU just gave the interest (about $50 billion that had accumulated) to Ukraine to help fight Russia.

But first, the United States seized all of Ukraine’s monetary reserves as safe keeping, ostensibly to help it pay back the debts it has been running up. I don’t think this gold will be made available for Ukraine’s rebuilding. It simply reflects a U.S. pattern of asset grabs. The U.S. military grabbed Libya’s gold supply when Gaddafi tried to use it to create an African gold-based alternative to the dollar for central banks to hold. And the US also grabbed Syria’s gold supply on its way out, leaving only the oil exports as a U.S. trophy of its conquest. It did the same with Afghanistan’s gold reserves on the way out. So obviously the United States anticipates gold returning to a major role in the world’s monetary system. (To add insult to injury, when U.S. officials finally gave back Iran money that it had seized from its reserves, it called this a gift and Congress attacked the act.)

The big question is how aggressive U.S. financial policy can work over the long run? Will it drive other countries away? Will it become as self-defeating as other U.S. international game-playing?

Let’s talk about how the world’s monetary system is likely to evolve in response to American attempt to gain financial control.

To me, any such attempt seems impossible to achieve. How can America or any other nation imagine that it can base its international power on finance alone? All countries can create finance and money. But not all countries can industrialize – or in the case of the United States and Germany, to re-industrialize.

The United States has deindustrialized, and its neoliberal privatization policies have loaded down the economy with an enormous overhead of debt service, health insurance costs and real estate costs. the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estates) has increased its share of reported GDP, but its income is not really for a “product� at all. It is a transfer payment from the production and consumption economy to the rentier sector. That makes America’s GDP much “emptier� than that of China and its socialized market economy. When the cost of credit and rents go up, so does GDP.

Money today is created on the computer. Any strong and self-sufficient nation or regional grouping can create its own money. They no longer need to base their money and debt on silver and gold bullion.

So I think that Trump is living in a past world – especially given the right-wing Republican “hard money� crowd pining for the old gold-exchange standard, insisting that government money creation is inherently inflationary (as if bank credit is not at all). I guess that’s what makes him a genius: He’s able to hold two opposing views at the same time, each with its own logic that contradicts his other view.

The United States was very strong in the bygone world when gold was the major asset of central banks. In the wake of World War II the U.S. Treasury was able to monopolize 80% of the monetary gold of the world’s central banks by 1950, when the Korean War broke out. Other countries needed dollars after World War II to buy U.S. exports, and to pay debts denominated in dollars, and they sold their gold to get these dollars.

But by 1971, U.S. foreign military spending had dissipated that control. The statistics that I compiled for Arthur Andersen in 1967 showed that the entire U.S. balance-of-payments deficit – the deficit that was draining U.S. gold – was U.S. military spending abroad. So the monetary reserves of central banks came to consist mainly of U.S. Treasury debt that they spent their dollar glut on. That was the change that my book Super Imperialism described in 1972. But U.S. attempts to weaponize finance has led countries not only to try to avoid holding more dollars, but to avoid leaving their gold in storage in the United States or Britain. Even Germany has asked for its gold reserves to be sent back to it from the New York Federal Reserve bank where much of Europe’s central bank gold holdings have been held since the 1930s saw a flood of flight capital to the United States as World War II was looming.

Video Link

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today’s Thursday, January 2nd, 2025, and our friend Michael Hudson is back with us. Welcome back, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let’s get started with the economic key to 2025. What would that be, in your opinion?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I’ve been thinking what a good title for the show should be, and I think it should be, “Today’s world economy is as good as it gets.â€� I think the United States, Europe, and the Near Eastern economic and political situation is, obviously, it’s unstable. And almost any specific forecast we make is likely to be wrong because there are so many variables at work and competing interests at play. But actually, this is what mathematicians call an optimum position. That may sound optimistic, and I’m never one to be optimistic, but an optimum position is technically one that, wherever you move, it’s going to be worse.

This is mathematically as good as it is. And that’s pretty much the situation you have today. You could say we’re now in the best of all possible worlds, given the policies that have led to the conflicts that we’re seeing: the conflict of national interest, the conflict of domestic interest, the conflict between the United States and Europe, and the United States against all the rest of the world. And I think that this year is going to be more than just change. I think that chaos is now official US policy. And that’s what you do when you’re trying to stop the world from moving in a direction that’s not in your interest.

All that the America can do is have chaos from the Near East to Europe and to the rest of the economy to stop the BRICS countries from trying to pursue their own national self-interest. So I think there’s going to be a number of clashes, and I can tell you what the clashes will be, but there’s no way of telling you now how they’re going to be resolved. First of all, you have Trump’s war against Europe is going to collapse the European economy further. There’s a clash between Turkey and the Near East. Who’s going to control the Near East? Is it going to be a new Ottoman Empire? And what’s the relationship between Turkey and Israel going to be? And at home here, right now, all of the newspapers are about the clash between President Trump and Congress regarding America’s military policy against the rest of the world.

Congress is dead set on continuing the war against Russia, and not letting President Trump make any kind of a deal that will slow the antagonism that is driving U.S. interests against Europe, against the global South countries, debtors that are affecting the dollar’s exchange rate and the domestic inflation here. So that’s what optimum means. And the basic aim of the U.S. policy is to keep an optimum position from changing by creating such chaos that there’s not going to be an alternative. So we’re back with what Margaret Thatcher said, “there is no alternativeâ€� as far as the U.S. policy is concerned. And the attempt not to create an alternative is driving other countries to force some kind of an alternative that really doesn’t have a roadmap at present. So I think there are two areas that we have to concentrate on.

One is gas, and the other is debt. And the most immediate problem is gas right now, because that’s the political key as well as the economic key. The United States foreign policy for the last century has been to try to control Near Eastern oil and gas production, because energy is the key to economic production. And the reason the U.S. wants to control it is to prevent other countries from having it if these countries act in a way that the United States opposes.

So the whole purpose of controlling Near Eastern gas, people are saying, why is it in America’s interest to be in the Near East? What do Iraq and Syria and even Iran have to do with affecting U.S. interests? Well, the reason is the U.S. interest wants to block off the Near East from other countries being able to get gas, just as the United States now is trying to block other countries from getting Russian gas. And that’s why oil has been the center of U.S. foreign policy and its attempt to dominate the world. And I think that’s the only reason why the U.S. has such an interest in the Near East. Well, the big problem, of course, even more immediate, is the new sanctions that are planned against Russian oil. Poland’s President Sikorski just said that, “What’s been happening is wonderful. The European Union has succeeded in preventing Russia from using its oil and gas exports to blackmail European economies by threatening to cut off energy exports.â€� Those are his words. And it’s as if selling oil and gas to Europe has been a form of Russian warfare by threatening to stop exporting it. Well, why on earth would Russia want to stop exporting its oil and gas? That’s been the mainstay of Russia’s balance of payments. Well, it’s the oil and gas exports that have enabled Russia to have the foreign exchange, to buy U.S. technology, Chinese technology, and to buy the manufactured goods and until now the food that Western economies were selling to Russia before the sanctions forced Russia to produce its food and manufacturers and consumer goods itself. So it’s the United States that’s using sanctions as blackmail against the European Union.

It’s using sanctions saying, well, it hurts Russia, and even if the cost of hurting Russia to the United States is worth destroying the core of German industry, destroying the European cost structure, forcing higher prices for energy, oil and gas, fertilizer, steel, and anything that’s made with energy. All of that is worth it. It’s very much like when Madeleine Albright was asked, “Is it really worth killing those millions of babies just to support U.S. policy against Iraq?â€� She said, “Yes, it’s worth it.â€� That’s basically the policy that the American Congress says when it comes to U.S. sanctions against Russia destroying the European economy.

Yes, it’s worth it. That’s collateral damage. There is no attempt to have any sense of mathematical proportion in the gains to the U.S. in hurting Russia, and by hurting Russia, presumably hurting China as Russia’s ally, hurting Iran. All of this is part of a kind of crazy U.S. attempt to block the whole world’s access to energy. Well, you can just imagine what’s going to happen. You’re seeing the rise in nationalistic parties in Europe. You’ve seen a backlash occurring, and the Czech Republic, Moldova, Romania, and Austria have just been cut off by Ukraine. It’s Ukraine that’s cut off Russian gas, not Russia, and yet today’s Wall Street Journal headline says Russia stops exporting gas to Europe. The whole mass media in the United States are so anti-Russian that it’s as if Russia is causing Europe’s problem of gas, not Ukraine, which isn’t even an EU member. So the amazing thing is that the European Union’s leaders, not the elected leaders, but the EU leaders, Von Der Leyen and the crazy Estonian NATO lady, are saying, “Well, it doesn’t matter what the European voters want. Our key is to protect Europe from Russia having the power to just march right through Poland and Germany right to the Atlantic Ocean.â€�

Video Link

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody, today is Wednesday, November 27th, and Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff are here with us. Welcome back, Michael and Richard.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Glad to be back.

RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started with what’s going on between Russia and the United States in Ukraine. We had a new hypersonic missile hitting Ukraine. And I talked with Professor Ted Postol. I talked with Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson, all of these military analysts. They’re thinking this is a new weapon. This is a new – it has the impact of a nuclear bomb, but it doesn’t have a nuclear warhead. This is the importance of these new weapons that they’ve used to send the message to the West.

But the question right now is, is the message or has the message been perceived by the West, in your opinion? Richard, you can start.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, for me, as always, I try to look at these things through the lens of what we have learned from history. And what we have learned from history is, among other things, that the capitalist era of the last three or four centuries has been remarkable for its technological changes. That is, remember Marx had a famous line, “all that’s solid turns into air.â€� Everything you assumed, true, will not be soon. Everything you assumed necessary, won’t be soon.

So that it becomes crucial, in the life of every capitalist, but indeed of every worker, of all of us, that you cannot assume in your thinking and your planning that the way things will be next year are a simple projection of how they are, now. This is a misunderstanding of how the world has worked, particularly in recent times. And there’s a debate about whether in the past it was all that different either. But in any case, we’re clear that things change all the time. All right.

It should have, therefore, been part of the thinking of the United States that the kind of military dominance that it had at the end of World War II, that this might last a while, but that it would be superseded, and there would be absolutely no basis to presume that the only people that would make technological advances are Americans. I mean, that’s silly. Nobody in their right mind should hold such a notion. And yet, look at what happened. As best I can tell, and I’m listening and watching all the same people you just mentioned. We have here a new technological development. It’s either an altogether new kind of missile, or if I understand correctly, a new adaptation of a missile that was being used from underwater, a submarine-based missile. But it’s a new development, one way or the other. And it shows that the Russians have a certain capability. You know, the military part of the Soviet Union was very advanced.

And it’s clear that at least under Putin, they have made every effort to do after the Soviet Union the kind of commitment to military preparedness and military studies and technological advance that the Soviets felt they had to do under Stalin and those who came after. Which shouldn’t again surprise anyone.

I mean, the whole history of the Soviet Union was the history of a breakthrough that became the demonized enemy of everybody in the West. And they were constantly besieged and threatened, and World War II was heavily inflicted upon them, etc., etc., etc.

It’s not surprising that they would A, be committed to military development, and B, be able to develop their technology either on their own or with the help of China. I’m sure we’ll never know that story in its totality. So here’s what I find remarkable: that the West seems to have been surprised.

But why? Why are you surprised? What is it? I mean, even commentators in the West have made a parallel with 1957. Well I remember that, in 1957, you know, I’m a teenager, but I’m already alive and aware, and Russia sent the Sputnik, the little satellite up, and they were the first ones to do it. And everyone in the West was astonished.

What? What, what is this? Here’s my sense: that the American delusion that the position it acquired with the collapse of the British Empire and then World Wars I and II would last forever was some kind of sign from God that the United States would be the center of the universe indefinitely.

And so when they learn, no, not the case, they are traumatized with anxiety and fear. But it’s not because of the danger from outside. It’s because of the delusion that led you not to calculate that this was part of what, what you’re going to face. The West keeps escalating in Ukraine.

Remember, if you go back to the beginning of the war, they were never going to put troops on the ground. They were never going to give them the Abrams tank. They were never going to give them the F-16 fighter plane. They were never, they were never, they gave it all. As the war goes badly, they escalate what they’ll do.

And it didn’t dawn on them that the Russians will counter-escalate, which the Russians have done in the ways that they could. At first, numerically. Russia is a large country. Ukraine is a little one. So the Russians can field an army three or four times what the Ukrainians can do. If there is no other way, or if that’s the best or cheapest way, then the Russians will escalate that way, which they did. And that helped them be victorious, which they have been.

Okay, now they made that decision. And by the way, for me, that was the most astounding thing. That a lame duck president, who has only a few weeks left, who has the, who his own party decided that he was not competent to run for president anymore, would be allowed to make the decision to free up the Ukrainians to shoot those missiles. What in the world? That there wasn’t an outcry about that tells you much about American politics. Very little about anything else.

Okay, the Russians then, having successfully escalated before, have now successfully escalated again with this new missile. And again, we see the United States. Oh, terrible. And by the way, things are being said over the last three or four days that show you how hysterical the British and the French have been making noises about putting their own troops into Ukraine. Are you crazy? Answer is yes. You’re crazy with fear and anxiety. The guy who’s the head of the Navy, the Naval forces, a Dutch admiral, makes comments about preemptive…

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bauer.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. Bauer. This is nuts. This is all nuts. This is, you know, hysteria. It tells you there must be unbelievable, frantic calls around the collective West trying to figure out what’s going on. But it’s unnecessary. There’s something very, very primitive going on here. I guess that’s what I want to get across. There’s this, there’s this problem of not having calculated that the Soviets might be really good at military. Because they were threatened in the entire 70 years of the Soviet… Let me remind everyone. 1917 is the Soviet Revolution. 1918, the troops of the United States, France, Britain, and Japan invaded the new Soviet Union. 10,000 American troops landed inside the Soviet Union and coordinated militarily with the white army in the civil war that racked Russia from 1918 to 1920. Japan, which was the fourth country whose troops landed in to put down the revolution, they didn’t leave Russia until 1922. So… and Lenin dies in 1923. So the whole beginning of the Soviet Union is characterized by military threat.

Video Link

DANNY HAIFONG: Welcome, everyone. It’s your host, Danny Haiphong, and I am here for another live stream this afternoon. I wanted to begin by saying that we are going to center the theme of today’s discussion on the decline and the fall of the U.S. empire and the economic roots of this as we see major developments, both militarily and economically, globally, just absolutely shake up the world order as we speak. So the two guests I am bringing on today are renowned economists, prolific authors, academics, and so much more.

I will introduce them now. We have first a returning guest, friend of the show, Professor Richard Wolff. Hello, Richard. How are you?

RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, Danny. Glad to be here.

DANNY HAIPHONG: And also returning again is renowned economist and prolific author, Michael Hudson. Michael, good to see you.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here.

DANNY HAIPHONG: Great. So everybody, as you come on the live stream, be sure to hit the like button. You can also find in the video description both Richard Wolff’s and Michael Hudson’s website where you can find all of their work, including their many books that you should support. Without further ado, let us get started.

So I wanted to start with you, Richard. And before I do, I’ll play what Lindsey Graham had to say about the Ukraine conflict recently on Fox News, because I think it gets to the economic roots of some of these major developments.

We just saw Russia launch the Oreshnik missile, which has the capability of hitting anywhere really in the world, in particular Europe, in a matter of minutes without nuclear fallout. And this has made and driven NATO crazy. But we’ve talked about a lot also the economic implications of this conflict.

And I’m just going to play now what Lindsey Graham had to say, because I think it is very instructive for what this is really all about for the United States and NATO. And I like your comment to help us understand this.

FOX NEWS: Ukraine is still standing. This war is about money. People don’t talk much about it. But you know, the richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine. Two to seven trillion dollars worth of minerals that are rare earth minerals, very relevant to the 21st century. Ukraine’s ready to do a deal with us, not the Russians. So it’s in our interest to make sure that Russia doesn’t take over the place.

It’s the breadbasket of really the developing world. 50 percent of all the food going to Africa comes out of Ukraine. We can make money and have an economic relationship with Ukraine to be very beneficial to us with peace. So Donald Trump’s going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals, a good deal for Ukraine and us. And it’s going to bring peace. And Biden’s been a disaster when it comes to containing bad guys. Ukraine is still…

DANNY HAIPHONG: So, Richard, I’ll start with you. How is this war going for, especially economically, for the United States and NATO, given what Lindsey Graham was just saying?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me begin by saying that Lindsey Graham is an embarrassment to all of us. When he opens his mouth about economics, all of us, and I’m talking about my colleagues on the right, on the left, and in the middle, get ready for something which, if an undergraduate said it in one of our classrooms, we’d shake our head in disbelief at how poorly we had been able to teach that young man or woman what we’re there to do. It’s extraordinary, really extraordinary.

The issues in the Ukraine war, as made clear by the Russians over and over again, and not disputed really by anybody except, of course, Lindsey Graham, the issue is that the Russians feel their security is threatened by having a NATO member in the Ukraine on their border.

They feel as though they have let a lot of that kind of thing go, as many of the countries of Eastern Europe have already joined NATO. Ukraine is the biggest among them, and if you look at the geography, pokes into Russia quite extensively.

They didn’t want that, and they insisted that Ukraine could be an independent country, could have a government hostile to Russia, could do all kinds of things, and I’ll come back to that in a minute, but not be part of NATO, and not be, allow missiles that threaten Russia to be located on its territory.

Here’s one of the things they never asked for, and do not ask for now, to control with whom an independent Ukraine would make financial deals. The Ukraine produces a lot of food products. Russia understands that those are marketed by Ukraine around the world, and that generates income for Ukraine and is a crucial part of its economy, and Russia has no need for and no interest in doing much about that, or certainly not in ending it. And the same would be true if Ukraine has minerals and so forth. Maybe what Mr. Lindsey Graham means, because he’s not too clear in his own head about these things, which is obvious.

Maybe what he means is that the money that the United States is going to be asked to contribute to Ukraine when the war is over, to help rebuild the enormous parts of Ukraine that have been damaged in the war. Maybe what he means is that money going to Ukraine will immediately be turned around and sent right back to the United States, in the form of rare earths that the United States needs.

It wants those things. That’s nice. Normally, it would have to go and bid for them the way everybody normally does in international trade, and so the United States would be expected to do that, just like other countries bid for Ukrainian food products, and they would get those.

It’s really not germane at this point. Nobody has said that Ukraine would be limited into whom it could sell its rare earths. So Mr. Lindsey Graham is just, confused. I’m trying to be polite here. He’s confused. He can get access. You don’t need to have a war to get access, and you don’t need to persist in the war to get access. He just doesn’t understand what the hell is going on and once again embarrasses himself for those people who do.

And I’m sure he’s counting on those people being few and far between so that he can get the headline that makes it look somehow plausible for him to be supporting Mr. Trump now that he’s figured out that his career depends on it.

He’s made that mistake twice before being critical and then having to retract. So now he’s avoiding that mistake for a third time. It’s only a shame that it took him the repeated experience that touching a hot stove burns your finger.

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah, Michael, you can come in.

MICHAEL HUDSON: For the last few months, Richard and I both have been putting that issue in a broader perspective. We’ve used the Cold War, the fight against Russia, the fight against China, the military Cold War all over the world as being against American economic interests.

And we’ve discussed, how do we have a materialist approach to history saying that countries are going to act in their own self-interest when it seems to us that the United States is visibly not doing that. And how do we explain Europe’s behavior? How can Germany and Europe, which is being devastated by the war in Ukraine and all of the sanctions.

And how can all of these other countries somehow been backing this self-destructive American policy and say, well, we can fit that into the materialist approach to history by saying, well, it really is in America’s self-interest. Well, all of a sudden, here comes Lindsey Graham and seems to say, well, very simple, the war is in our self-interest.

Video Link

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, November 21st, and we have Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff with us here. Welcome back.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you, Nima. Glad to be here.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yep!

NIMA ALKHORSHID: And let’s get started with the breaking news about Netanyahu and Gallant. We’ve learned that ICC, we’ve learned about the ICC arrest warrant on Netanyahu and Gallant, the former defense minister of Israel. And here is what we heard from CNN.

CNN NEWS CLIP: “The criminal court has just issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza, and also for a top Hamas commander, also known as Mohammed Deef, who is believed to be dead.

The court says it found reasonable grounds to believe the prime minister bears criminal responsibility for war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare, and it rejected Israel’s challenge of the court’s jurisdiction over the matter. CNN’s Nick Robertson joins us now from Jerusalem. Nick, what more can you tell us?

Well, this is a very, very significant escalation. It was first announced by Kareem Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, back in May, that he was going to seek to request arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, who was the defense minister at the time, as well as three other senior Hamas officials, including Mohammed Deef, Ismail Hania, Yaya Sinwa, the other.

Those three are all dead. Deef believed to have been killed in July. So unclear why they’ve issued an arrest warrant now for him. But by overturning Israel’s rejection of the jurisdiction and the allegations by the court, this clears the way for something very, very significant, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel have never, ever faced before.

These are very, very serious charges and allegations, as you read them out there, that the court believes he has, they have grounds to believe that he bears criminal responsibility for war crimes, as you said, including starvation as a method of warfare and of crimes against humanity, of murder, persecution and of other crimes.

These are very, very serious allegations. These are not the sorts of allegations that the Prime Minister has faced before. When they, when the ICC first made these statements back in May, the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister’s office said that they were absurd, that they were false and that they were a distortion of reality.

It is something that back then the Prime Minister took very, very seriously, has been in meetings today with the U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein talking about the possibility of a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north. But this is absolutely now going to come front and center of the Prime Minister’s attention here.â€�

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, here is the reactions from the European Union. The EU considers, Joseph Burrell said that the EU considers the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant binding to be implemented.

And on the part of Israelis, we are hearing that Israeli Minister of National Security proposed extending the country’s sovereignty over the West Bank in response to international criminal code arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant. And your take, Michael, let’s get started.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, when I grew up, people were still discussing the Nuremberg trials, and I can just imagine what Netanyahu’s defense, if he were there, would be. He’d say that these bombs that were dropped on Gaza were not my bombs. They were America’s bombs. We didn’t target where to bomb. The Americans targeted it. I was only following orders.

Of course, that’s not what he said. What he said was, how can you accuse me of genocide when we’ve said that the Palestinians are not human beings? How can there be genocide against people who are not human? That is what he said. He said it’s anti-Semitic to claim that Palestinians are human and that we killed other human beings.

I think he’s just driven 99% of the world to say, if that…. is anti-Semitism, well, you can draw your conclusions.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, well, it seems to me that the slogan often attributed to the victims and opponents of Naziist Holocaust was the phrase, never again. But what this shows us is that the phrase should be amended.

Never again, unless we do it, then apparently the never again doesn’t apply. I want to stress one particular thing. The Israelis will mock and dismiss what just happened, as you can see. That is what they basically have been doing all along. But they are now, yet again, in one additional way, isolated in the world.

I want to hammer at the isolation. An isolation of Israel, now having its leader-in-chief be, you know, put under an arrest warrant for genocide. It’s extraordinary. Happens very rarely in the world. He’s getting that, and the only significant support that Israel has is the United States.

That’s why it’s important for you to have read Joseph Borrell’s statement from the EU, which at least verbally, I doubt they’ll do much, but verbally says we are not being taken down the road to isolation.

By contrast, the United States is being taken down the road to further and further isolation as the financial and military enabler of what has now been called genocide-warranting arrest. Under the normal notions of the law that I’m familiar with, the accomplice to the crime, is likewise subject.

What will prevent now, a prosecutor, especially when they get the response from Israel, and what I will expect to be the response from the United States? The demand will be made. We may not hear about it, but in the court, the demand will be made if Netanyahu behavior warrants an arrest.

Why would Biden be exempt? Biden has authorized the money and the weapons without which this genocide could not have been prosecuted. And the many opportunities the United States had to stop it were not utilized. Thereby, they have convicted themselves to be an accomplice, and therefore the question will arise.

But even if it doesn’t, even if they avoid the embarrassment, there it is. And I want to stress, not out of a defense – I’m no supporter or enthusiast for Vladimir Putin, Lord knows – but that war has been going on considerably longer, and no comparable bombing of hospitals and schools and children has been committed.

The ICC saw fit to issue an arrest warrant against Putin. That was for invading another country, and that’s an issue. But the difference is that no one is asserting, not even the Ukrainians are asserting genocide. Whereas here we have this situation that is so extraordinarily significant.

And I think the history, history will shake its head in wonderment for decades to come, how the Israelis and the Americans worked themselves into this horrific dead end.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard said that he doubts that anything is really going to come of this. So what could come of this? What should be? Number one, should Israel be excluded from the United Nations?

This is an Israeli policy. Netanyahu and the others who are charged are acting on behalf of Israel, which is a part of Israel’s population. Number two, should there be trade sanctions against Israel to prevent Turkey from supplying it with the oil that it’s supplied,

against the United States for supplying it with the bombs and armaments that Richard’s just mentioned? And in fact, should the United States be sanctioned against this, against its ability to vote in the Security Council to prevent any United Nations sanctions from being done?