Now, this is exactly what the United States said after the EEC was created throughout the 1960s. The United States kept trying to attack the European community because of its agricultural policy, saying we wanted Europe to be dependent on American agriculture. And now it’s not only independent, but its policy of agricultural protectionism is enabling it to become a food exporter. Well, you’re seeing the problem right now.

America is trying to dismantle the EEC’s attempt to achieve domestic self-sufficiency. To Trump on any country seeking self-sufficiency instead of reliance on dependency on the United States for food and agriculture, for oil, for high-technology good, is an attack on America’s attempt to control them, to control the world. And Trump says if we can’t make other countries dependent, then we won’t have the tool of being able to cut off the supply and starve them for food, starve them for energy, starve them for technology, or expel them from the swift bank clearing agency. Trump and the U.S. wants to impose the degrees of control. And Europe is not making any official defense of this, saying we don’t want to be in a position that we’re dependent.

What the European leaders are saying is, if we lower our costs by buying Russian energy at one quarter of the price of American liquefied natural gas or oil, that’s dependence on Russia weaponizing its trade. Russia has not at any point tried to weaponize its trade. The only country in the world that has tried to weaponize trade and finance is the United States. And yet Europe is, European politicians are stating that it is the only country not weaponizing their dependency is the United States. We’re dealing with an inside-out world. And again, how do we explain how absolutely crazy this is? Well, obviously, there’s personal opportunism at some point there, personal support from the United States. It’ll be very interesting to see as the United States winds down the AID and National Endowment for Democracy subsidy of politicians, whether somehow you remove this whole block of inside-out politicians and somehow enable room for a logical, realistic European discussion to take place.

I’m sure, if you look at Trump’s interview with Macron yesterday, Macron was trying to say the usual silliness. I mean, it’s just hilarious to see the visuals of Trump while Macron was speaking. Well, the next meeting, I guess, as we’re talking now, is probably going to be with England’s awful Prime Minister Starmer, who’s going to say the same thing as Macron was saying. You’ve got to fight Russia. You’ve got to give up your attempt to make peace. And then tomorrow we’ve got Zelensky with the crazy raw materials deal. That also impacts Germany. Because what Trump wants to say is there’s going to be a lot of demand of money that needs to be spent on Ukrainian reconstruction.

Most of the real estate property destruction has been civilian areas in the Russian section. The Ukrainian destruction has been largely in its military sector for industry. But there’s going to be a large, let’s say, investment opportunities in Ukraine. What Trump and Zelensky are discussing tomorrow is how do we prevent Europe from getting any part of this reconstruction?

How do we make an iron curtain between Germany and Europe on the one hand and Ukraine on the other, linking you to the United States? All of this discussion is to isolate Europe and essentially to treat Europe like Trump is treating Canada and Mexico, as dependencies. And there’s hardly, I haven’t seen any discussion in Europe as to say, they are cutting us out.

The Europeans have spent most of the money on the, Ukraine’s war against Russia, which is really NATO’s war against Russia. And yet Trump is acting as if the United States has been spending it all. And so all of the, not only is Ukraine lost the war, but it has to pay reparations for losing. Not to compensate Europe at all, but only to compensate the United States. All of this is locking out Europe. I mean, this should be the centerpiece, you would think, of European politics. And it’s something that’s too embarrassing to bring up in public discussion. That’s the story.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. And I think that there you have it again. You have these politicians, look, they bet on the wrong horse. That’s their problem. After World War II, they made the decision, understandable, but they made the decision to bet on the United States. That was their best hope. And they did it. And they forgot why they did it. And they forgot all the hesitancies, which is always a terrible mistake. And they made believe if they were all together in the same ideological war against communism. And that was another mistake, because that was not the real reason.

They weren’t threatened by communism in a serious economic way. That was never the case. Russia was always much too poor and much too backward, even in the 30s and 40s and in the 50s, to be an economic. It’s not like China is a completely different economic issue for the United States than Russia ever was. That has to be understood. So they bet on the United States and like people who bet on the wrong horse, they’ve put everything into it. What in the world will Baerboch in Germany, the Green Party leader, what will happen to her now that the United States has said, Russia? Putin’s not a monster. We’re having meetings with Mr. Putin. We don’t have a problem with Mr. Putin. What? What? Before he was the unspeakable monster. Now he’s the important global leader that we have meetings with.

The United States is meeting, I believe, today in Istanbul, and the name of the game there is to establish their embassies, the U.S. in Moscow and the Russians in Washington, in order to, quote unquote, normalize relations. Well, you have a generation of politicians who are not willing to normalize relations with Russia, even as they were dependent on Russian oil and gas. They were so confident that they had bet on the right horse that they would denounce as monstrous and with the international court promised to arrest and prosecute Mr. Putin. And now this has blown up in their face.

My judgment, and Michael might disagree, but my judgment, they have no idea what to do now. They have no idea. The whole world is watching. Michael’s quite right. I hadn’t thought of this that way before. But the whole world is watching Mr. Zelensky, who is not anymore, you know, his elected term is over. He didn’t have another election. So there isn’t clear who is in charge of this country by its own constitution. It’s not Mr. Zelensky. He hasn’t been elected. He was elected in the last term, but not this one. So an unelected leader is taking the minerals under the soil of a country, Ukraine, and discussing selling them or some access to them to the United States. Please notice the Europeans are not in the conversation. They spent money, but they’re not getting any back. Only the United States. What?

And let’s also remember that if you’re giving away wealth in the country that loses the war, then the demand for reparations, which has come usually in the last century from the winners against the losers, then the question is, where are the Russians? But the difference between the Europeans and the Russians is the Russians already control a good part of those minerals because they have the army there. The Europeans control nothing. They’re the odd man. And nobody should miss what that means.

A discussion over minerals. And forget now whether the minerals are really there or not and how valuable they are, because apparently that’s unknown. But the conversation is between two of the four combatants. It’s between the Ukrainians and the Americans, led by a Ukrainian who isn’t the elected leader because he hasn’t had elections. And two other combatants, the Europeans and the Russians, are not involved in the conversation. That’s craziness. That’s a little bit like having those peace conferences that they had in Switzerland and those other places where they didn’t invite the Russians. Interesting. You don’t have a peace conference in a war where one of the two sides isn’t present. Interesting. And then you wonder why no one cares or no one knows what happened at those conferences, because it doesn’t matter. It’s the same issue here. It doesn’t matter.

They’re going to have elaborate conversations. They have been having them. They are now, if I understand, Mr. Zelensky is going to come and sign something. And Mr. Trump will sign something. And we will laughingly refer to that in the future because two of the four players in this game weren’t present and are not going to accept any. And it’s just, wow. Michael is right. There is something farcical emerging here that the situation is so dire and the behavior correspondingly desperate that it’s beginning to become humorous because it’s too difficult to find a serious thread, as people who are acting out. Even Mr. Merz in Germany acknowledged in his victory speech how badly their party had lost over recent years. Even Mr. Scholz, who was kicked out of his party for the awful showing they made, thereby underscored, wow, they’re now going to do something. It’s a little bit crazy, you know.

Last point. Mr. Trump won the election over Kamala Harris by one and a half percent of the vote. Now, whatever that is, a mandate, it isn’t. So you see how when politics gets crazy, you have to say over and over again, you have a mandate. You actually have to act as though you had a mandate. To take the richest man on earth, give him a chainsaw in order to show what we’re doing. The richest man is taking jobs from average men and women in the government like you and me. This image is so bad for Trump, you have to stop it. What in the world is possessing you to function like this? And the only answer you really can get is the sort of answer Michael gave. There really is something nutty emerging here. We’re at that stage of a unwinding of a historical phase. And maybe if I knew my history better, I could find parallels at the end of the British Empire or the Persian or the Ottoman or the Roman or the Greek, where things like this comparable crazinesses emerge.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Not only nutty, but illegal. I want to make one comment about tomorrow’s meeting between Trump and the Ukraine. It’s very much like the concept of odious debt. Odious debt is when a government makes a deal that benefits or takes on debts and receives money, borrows money that are used only for the government officials themselves, not for the country as a whole, or debts that are imposed externally on a country in the interest of the creditors or the trade surplus people with that country, not in the interest of the country.

The concept of odious debts is that these debts should be annulled. Well, what we’re having on Friday is going to be something like an odious resource sale. It’s the resource sale negotiated between Trump and Zelensky. How many billions of dollars is he going to give to Zelensky to pay off the kleptocrats that are the current owners of these? What resources that Trump wants to spread it around? And what will Trump and the U.S. get? The agreement for Ukraine to pay reparations for a war that it has lost to the countries that have created a coup d’etat and put a foreign-backed leader, Zelensky, in charge of the population, waging a war that the population opposes, and making a settlement, for the natural resources.

Trump originally said is we only want not only the natural resources, we want the ports and everything that makes money. This is an odious resource sale that has no foundation in any body of international law. It’s not in the interest of the nation, but of its corrupt leaders doing insider deals dictated by force and the urgency of a foreign government under military urgency by a former president that has no legal standing as president. Only the Ukrainian Rada today has the permission to make such a deal, not the personal head that is a puppet of the United States that is the main beneficiary of getting something for nothing from Ukraine.

Trump is not saying we’re in exchange for these resources, we’re going to give you the Patriot missiles and the ability to hit Russia and all the military support. We’re not going to support you militarily. We’re not going to let you into NATO. We’re just making a deal between you and me, Zelensky, to transfer Ukraine’s resources to us. And that is an odious deal subject to annulment by any international court. So again, how do you make a forecast of what’s going to happen when, as if what’s being proposed is all legal and it’s a signed contract that has no solidification under contractual law subject to international law, and the usual concepts of economic order. It’s what America calls, I guess, the rules-based order.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I like that image of the odious debt because it touches so many other issues. And I know that, you know, that Nima’s program is interested in a whole range of issues across the world. But I’m reminded of those famous Latin American loans that I used to study where you get a cozy room somewhere in an elegant New York City hotel. And on one side of the table are three or four bankers from the big New York City banks. And on the other side of the table are three or four big politicians from and I’m afraid I have to say, any Latin American or almost any Latin American country.

They sit around and they’re discussing the deal and they work out the deal. And I’ll give a hypothetical number. A billion dollars. The bankers are ecstatic. They’re going to now get a loan for a billion dollars. Out of the billion dollars, the first hundred million will be an assortment of fees paid to the bank for making the loan. The second hundred million will be a set of fees paid to a variety of the officials in that country that are sitting on the other side of the table or are directly, indirectly connected to them, which will also be fees for managing them. What does the country finally get?

If it’s lucky, seven or eight hundred million dollars out of the billion. But what does the country owe to the bank in New York? A billion dollars, because that’s what the size of the loan was. So the mass of the people are stuck with having to pay the taxes from which the interest will be paid to the bank in New York. And the amortization, the repayment of the one billion in principle. A dozen people in that country have become millionaires overnight. They are going to become very important political and economic figures in their country among the 50 richest people. The bankers in New York will become the names we hear in the years ahead, Because their cut of what they just got is 20-30 million out of this deal they worked out. Because the bank is making so much money. Then this goes on year in and year out.

More and more the countries have to go to New York and have to sit down with the bankers because they are in debt up to their eyeballs with what they’ve done. Their own country. They have to borrow more to pay the debt on the previous one. This never stops. It never stops. And it makes the United States’ economy complicit in the most odious way with the colonial ripoff. But the beauty of this is that no one sees the hand of the United States. It’s local officials in Peru or Argentina. It doesn’t matter. Who are having to have the meetings in their Congress and raise the taxes. Oh, fantastic.

It’s a colonialism run by the bankers, hidden away, unknown, unavailable, unaccountable, until it blows up and then it’s all over. And then everybody gets crazy because no one has explained how we got to this. You know, we saw this in war. The victims of war often become mentally disturbed because nobody explained to them. Where? Why is this happening? Why did a bomb just fall in my house? What did we do? How did? And no one has any answer for them. And that’s too much. You can handle, you know, losing your left arm. But you can’t handle living in a world whose level of chaos is murderous. It’s too much. Too much for human beings to handle.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to make one technical comment that makes the situation even worse than what Richard described. He talks about the loan that’s negotiated. It’s not the loan that’s negotiated. It’s the size of the debt. When the debt issue is issued, the buyers buy it below par. It’s sold below par. So the amount of the debt that is agreed on is much less than the actual proceeds, the loan proceeds that the borrower receives. So there’s that opportunity for a capital gain in time.

And of course, as the price of the debt goes up and down depending on the risk, there is a very active arbitrage trade going up and down. And I think since Richard just pointed out we’re dealing very much like a post-war situation, this is PTSD on an economic scale, post-traumatic stress disorder. So you could say what we’re seeing politically is the counterpart to what soldiers receive in wartime.

RICHARD WOLFF: I’d also like to just make one last comment if I could, Nima.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead.

RICHARD WOLFF: Almost every country in Europe, like the United States, is now more or less anti-immigrant with varying degrees of deporting people the way the U.S. is doing or making it much harder for people to come in or both. Okay? But there is one glaring exception, and that is Spain. Over the last few years, Spain has welcomed immigrants, has brought them in, has not only not made it harder, made it easier, has explicitly committed itself to welcoming immigrants. And it is one of the best-performing economies in all of Europe.

If you put Spain’s pro-immigration politics next to Germany’s or Italy’s or other countries, anti, you would come away, at least with the hypothesis, noticing how the two numbers move, that being pro-immigration is a better road to economic well-being than being anti-immigration. And if you think theoretically, it kind of makes sense. An immigrant comes into Spain like he or she would into any other country, around somewhere between 18 and 30 years of age. Young people. It’s too arduous. It’s too difficult. It’s too risky for children and elderly. So it’s young people. And here’s what that means. And let me put on my Marxist hat. Young people cost the society resources. You have to feed them. You have to clothe them. You have to shelter them. You have to educate them. And then finally, when they’re, say, 20 years old, they’re ready to do what?

To come in and provide surplus value for the employer. But the beauty of it is the employer class gets surplus from these immigrants without having to invest all of the resources for the first 20 years of that immigrant’s life. The cost of making that immigrant a productive worker is borne by the country that the immigrant leaves. So, yes, if you bring immigrants in, it may be dangerous for your own working class.

The immigrants may compete, offer themselves for less work. That’s true. And that’s a serious issue. But for the economy as a whole, and for the capitalist system’s robustness, it’s wonderful to have immigrants. It’s one of the irrationalities of our time that what capitalism needs, and I haven’t even gone back to mention the declining population, which is a serious issue. But even without that, capitalism needs these free workers to be producing surplus. But they have so badly managed immigration that they’ve created such hostility with their own working class that they have to expel what they need. Oh, that’s a time that should show you you’ve got a system whose internal contradictions have exploded on you.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Adam Smith made that a central point of what he was saying. He said that the Protestant countries of Europe, such as England, were benefiting from the flow of skilled labor from the Catholic autocracies. And in France, you had the driving out of the Huguenots that became the intellectual class, the workers, not only of Europe, but into the United States. And this idea of using the objective of industrializing a country would be to draw the population in from the trade deficit countries was central to the dynamic of British mercantilism that they expressed very clearly throughout the 18th century.

I have a whole chapter on that immigration point in my book on trade development and foreign debt. All of this is dropped from current trade theory. We don’t look at the fact that deindustrializing leads to emigration, not immigration. Industrialization draws in immigrants. And in fact, the skilled immigrants that are part of the industrialization process. You have the propaganda today as if all immigrants are backward, not performing economic, any economic function at all, which, of course, is a travesty of reality. Only economists think that way, but they’re the people who are making all the models today....