Richard Wolff

The Iran war is lost — left, right and middle grudgingly agree. Sanctions are a dike: every hole plugged opens another (cascading unintended consequences). Now says Trump’s advisors know they cannot bomb Iran into subordination, so Washington maintains an unstable status quo it cannot walk away from without looking defeated: "Bombs never win a war." Now says Iran denying the US and Israel a knockout victory is a world-historical event that ended the American unipolar position, that the United States is no longer invincible and Iran has proven it, and that Washington has authorized shipping 40,000 tons of its largest bombs to Israel so that Israel rather than Washington carries the blame for the attack he expects to follow.

Europe breaks out — Germany (AfD/BSW) reopens cheap Russian energy and stops funding Ukraine; NATO may not survive it. Europe "bet on the wrong horse."

Says Israel has overextended and is now isolated with no allies left, and that the real internal debate in Washington is no longer how to protect Israel but how to extract the United States while appearing to still support it. Doubts Israel has the ability to survive much further given the position it has walked itself into, and expects Congress to move against the arms and support sustaining the war if the November midterms go badly for Trump.

US global primacy is eroding fast, and Washington is compensating with an old-fashioned reassertion of colonial control over its own hemisphere (dramatized by a hundredfold spike in Panama Canal tolls) rather than adapting to a multipolar order. Now argues the US inherited a dozen European colonial empires after 1945 and took on an impossible role as hegemon of the whole planet, that Europe is finished because its colonialism is over, and that the future belongs to China. Now says the United States inherited a global colonial position it can no longer afford and so, instead of ruling indirectly, openly demands tribute from Korea, Japan and Canada to fund its own domination, in a world he reads as governed by brute strength rather than by rules. Now says the United States is only witnessing the decline of its empire, performing a theatre of power it no longer has while it actually withdraws.

Neoliberalism chucked for a harsh economic nationalism (Trump buying corporate stakes, Bessent intervening in markets). $40T debt, >T/yr interest; can’t borrow long without breaking the mortgage market. Now notes oil above 05 a barrel in the middle of what he calls an absurd war, propped up indefinitely by an administration hoping for more freedom to act once the election is behind it. Now says the Fed is trapped, since raising rates against oil-driven inflation risks recession while a proposed 600 billion dollar defense increase compounds debt stress with interest costs already above the defense budget, and notes diesel at 6.50 dollars a gallon, roughly double a few months ago. Now says trillion-dollar deficits, an AI-borrowing boom competing with the Treasury for lenders, and an unfunded midterm giveaway are pushing US debt toward a Liz Truss style reckoning.