Transcript: Putin, China & Iran Call Hegseth’s War BLUFF, WW3 Next? w/ Ben Norton & KJ Noh

So it looks like Marco Rubio is planning some kind of decapitation strike attack to try to bring about regime change.

In 2019, the first Trump administration carried out another coup attempt in Venezuela with this puppet Juan Guaido, and it just never ended. I mean, the US has been constantly at war with Venezuela for over a decade, ever since ten years ago, Obama declared Venezuela a so-called “extraordinary threat to US national security,” which is completely absurd.

But of course Obama started that. He started this economic war to destroy Venezuela because by passing this executive order declaring Venezuela a so-called national security threat, then Obama could unilaterally impose sanctions without the approval of Congress. So that’s one area that I think we should really keep our eye on. It’s very dangerous.

You mentioned Iran. I mean, the US has been at war with Iran for decades. And Trump has escalated that to a new level. Let’s not forget that during his first term in 2020, Trump killed Iran’s top military commander, Qasem Soleimani.

And in response to that, in 2020, back when Pete Hegseth was a Fox News host, he once again called for changing the rules of war to be advantageous to the US. He called for the US military to bomb hospitals and cultural sites and schools, which is exactly what Israel is doing. So the US is going to do exactly what Israel is doing.

This reminds me, the leftist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who has given some powerful speeches in support of Palestine and condemning the US empire and Israel. Petro made a very interesting comment and I agree with him. He said what the west is doing to Gaza is what they plan on doing to all of us in the global south, is what he said. It’s a trial run.

What the US and Israel are doing to Gaza is what they want to do to Iran and Lebanon and Yemen. They have been doing it to Yemen and Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba and any country that stands up with an independent sovereign government that resists US-led imperialism. So the situation is very, very, very dangerous.

And I just have to point out the irony that, you know, Trump, after Hegseth gave that speech at Quantico with all these generals, Trump gave another speech for an hour, just this crazy, rambling speech. He gathered all the top generals and he just bloviated about random topics for an hour.

But in that speech, Trump complained that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, but no one wants to give him the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet in the same speech, he boasted of bombing Iran, bombing Venezuela. And he said very clearly that China and Russia are targets and that he’s carrying out a new arms buildup, a new arms race with both China and Russia.

And Trump said that the target of the US Military is the, quote, “enemy within.” And he went on these long rants about how these Democrat-run cities are all out of control. So he’s going to deploy the military to more and more Democrat-run cities. He’s already done it to Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Portland, Oregon. Chicago is next.

And he said that this is a war. He referred to this as a war. And he said that the US Military is going to be using cities in the US as training grounds. So I mean, this is fascistic. This is what, you know, this is what empires always do eventually.

But this is, you know, a key part of fascism is that eventually these imperial powers, they wage wars all around the world and then eventually that war comes home and they say that the enemy is within and they deploy the military to wage war against their own population. So this is the moment in which the US Empire is now bringing those wars home, which always happens and we see it now.

War Comes Home: The Enemy Within

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah. And KJ, in a World War Three scenario, far different of course than World War Two, what Ben just said, war on the population that is being driven into aggressive war with one, two or maybe multiple so-called adversaries is definitely part of the equation. And it seems like Trump and Hegseth are vocalizing that openly.

Now I’m going to pull this up, KJ. You know, we have these tankers moving from Qatar to toward Qatar, all moving from the United States, UK and Germany. And then we also have a fresh round. KJ, it’s, you know, the situation in the Middle East.

The first round of warnings, first you had Sergei Lavrov himself saying that new strikes against Iran are under discussion. Sources have told him, he said this at the UN General Assembly. And then Iran itself said that if anything like this were to happen, they would of course fight back. And that goes without saying.

Now not only is Iran sending this warning, KJ, war with the United States would be what comes next should Israel attack again, but also what Ben said about Venezuela. Nicolas Maduro isn’t saying we’re going to wave the white flag and allow a decapitation strike to take us out. They also said they’re going to fight back.

So this is a situation where Trump is making a lot of threats and it appears that there will be, of course, major pushback. Your thoughts? KJ, oh, sorry, you’re muted. Continue.

A Modern Travis Bickle Moment

KJ NOH: I am very, very frightened by all of these developments, including, you know, the logistical positioning of tankers to Qatar, the threats against Venezuela. All the signals that we see indicate that we are rapidly building up to war.

As I said, you can track war in this three-stage process. The first is information war, manufacturing consent. The second is staging the theater and the third is provocations. And we’re seeing all of that with all of these theaters of war.

But I want to go back to Hegseth’s speech because I think a lot of people have been framing, certainly not Ben, but a lot of people have been framing it as, you know, kind of an anti-woke rant and they’re pooh-poohing it or incensed about it. But I have to say I’m really, really frightened and I see it as a kind of a war speech, if you will, a prolegomenon to war.

And to me it sounds a lot like, I’ll be honest here, it sounds a lot like Travis Bickle’s monologue in Taxi Driver. It’s like he’s auditioning for Travis Bickle. I don’t know if the audience knows Taxi Driver. But anyway, you know, it’s this person who is a vet, you know, who has kind of lost it and he’s preparing to, you know, do violence. And it really strikes me as something like that.

And, you know, the whole speech was like the national equivalent of a Travis Bickle monologue. And so what I’m seeing here is this, you know, kind of message saying that, you know, we have to buck up, we have to kick some ass, including overweight DEI, you know, ass. We have to shave some beards and stop doing the hot yoga and then we are going to go to war. And I really feel like it’s that message, which is the core message that’s going on.

I agree with Ben. You know, the violence of the empire is boomeranging back on the homeland. But there’s also my concern is that they will simply distract externally and take the war to Iran, take the war to Venezuela. And of course we know that they’re preparing the war against China.

I think Hegseth’s speech has to be seen in coordination with his Shangri-La speech where he said that China is the imminent threat.

China and the Western Hemisphere: The Next Targets

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah, yeah, definitely KJ. And many people didn’t pick it up, Ben. But when Pete Hegseth was talking, here’s the transcript, because a lot of people didn’t highlight this clip, but he did say that “likewise, the nature of the threats we face in our hemisphere and deterring China is another speech for another day coming soon.”

But the fact that he said that China and the Western hemisphere are targets of war makes me think that this is exactly the path that the Trump administration wants to go on and that this speech was really a huge bluff toward moving in that direction and preparing the way, both for people consuming it, Americans consuming it, but also for the military brass themselves to begin getting ready. Your thoughts?

The Western Hemisphere and Global War Strategy

Yeah. As KJ mentioned, a lot of the media coverage of the speech focused on Hegseth’s attacks on DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, and on wokeness and especially his complaint about fat people in the military, which you just have to point out the hilarious irony of, you know, Donald Trump, this obese billionaire who eats McDonald’s every day, and he had a, you know, this event at the White House, if you remember, during his first term, where he invited people to eat a feast of McDonald’s at the White House and his administration is complaining about fat people in the military. Very, you know, just peak irony.

But regardless of that, you know, the media loves to fixate on these cultural issues and they portray everything as part of a culture war. But if you listen to the full speech or read the full speech, this is one of the most hawkish speeches I’ve ever seen from any official, not just a US official. Imagine if this were like a Russian military leader giving a public speech like this. The media would be full of stories, not about attacks on wokeness, about how Russia is planning on invading the world and ordering soldiers to commit war crimes and all of this.

I mean, this is exactly what is happening. He literally is telling the top generals of the military, take off the gloves, ignore international law, carry out atrocities and war crimes. He said very clearly in one summary, in a one line summary, he said, “Your job is to kill people and break stuff.” And that’s what they’re planning to do. The Department of War is planning on killing a lot of people and breaking a lot of stuff.

Now, in terms of the domains of this war, obviously there are concerns about another war on Iran. But the real focus, if you listen carefully, not only to this speech, but if you listen to some of the other rhetoric of the Trump administration officials. And you know, last time I was on, Danny, on your show here, we talked about this report in Politico that claimed that the new national defense strategy, which I guess I’ll have to change the name to the National War Strategy, but you know, every five years or so, the Pentagon releases this new strategy.

And allegedly, according to Politico, the new strategy is focused on the Western Hemisphere. And supposedly the way Politico framed it is there’s less emphasis on preparing for war with China and more emphasis in the Western Hemisphere. I talked last time, Danny, about how I’m skeptical about this, because first of all, this is a public facing document. It’s part of a public relations campaign by the Pentagon.

But at the same time, so I still think, as KJ emphasized, it’s very important to keep in mind that you look at all the evidence the US is preparing for war with China. It’s very, very clear. Hegseth said that very clearly in the speech he gave in Singapore in May at the Shangri La Dialogue Conference where he said, “We are preparing for war.” That’s an exact quote.

Militarization of Latin America

But the takeaway from that, the alleged national defense strategy that’s being negotiated according to Politico, I think they’re exaggerating the element of the move away from China. What’s the real point to take away from that, in my view, is that the Trump administration is really heavily emphasizing the militarization of the Western Hemisphere. And this isn’t new, but they’re taking it to a whole new level.

Of course, the Obama administration backed numerous coups in Latin America. The Biden administration backed coup attempts in Latin America. But Trump is not just backing coup attempts in Latin America, which the US has done for many decades. Trump wants to militarize an attack many countries in the Western Hemisphere, especially in Latin America.

We talked about Venezuela. They’re very seriously talking about a direct US military attack inside Venezuelan territory, decapitation strikes to try to overthrow the Venezuelan government. This is what the US did in Panama in 1989. It’s what it also did in Grenada, a tiny island, to overthrow Grenada’s president. And of course, Venezuela is much bigger than both Grenada and Panama.

But this is also coming at a time when Trump has been talking about colonizing Greenland. And why does he want Greenland? Of course, part of it is because Greenland has a lot of critical minerals and rare earths, but also because the US already has a military base in Greenland and they want to make even more military bases to prepare for a potential war with China and or Russia in the Arctic region.

And in the speech that Trump gave right after Hegseth, he once again semi jokingly, but not so jokingly said that Canada should become the 51st state. And there have been reports recently that over $1 billion of so called aid that was frozen earlier this year by the Rubio State Department when they merged USAID into the State Department, that so called aid is now being used to pursue regime change in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. That was reported by Reuters.

Trump’s True Imperial Face

So this is another example once again of this ridiculous narrative we hear from the Trumpists claiming that Trump wants peace, he’s anti interventionist. It’s the exact opposite. That’s just the cynical rhetoric. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Because what Trump says again in this speech that he gave, he says “I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.” And then literally two minutes later he boasts about bombing Iran and destroying everything. He boasts about bombing Venezuelan boats and making Venezuela afraid and saying that Maduro is not a legitimate president and he’s going to overthrow Maduro.

And in terms of the militarization of the Western hemisphere and the so called aid, USAID has always been, this is the so called U.S. Agency for International Development has always been a front for the CIA. But USAID did not just dissolve, it was merged into the State Department. So instead of having overt operations to the extent that they were overt on paper, but you know, they had public documents claiming that they were doing these so called aid operations which involved a lot of meddling in countries where the US wants to carry out a color revolution. They’re still active, but now they’re secretively working covertly working within the State Department.

So Marco Rubio is now the head of USAID. And Reuters has reported that he’s using this money to pursue regime change in Latin America. So I mean, I’ve always emphasized this point. Liberals love to portray Trump as like this extreme deviation and that everything was great and rosy until Trump came in. That’s not what happened. Trump is the true face of the US Empire.

This is the last phase of major imperial decline where as an empire is in decline, it enters a fascistic phase of extreme authoritarianism, extreme violence, extreme aggression, where it just lashes out all around the world and against people domestically in a desperate attempt to save the declining empire. And you know, every US president is a war criminal. But Trump has really taken off the mask and is becoming extremely aggressive and it really does keep me up at night.

I really think the US is going to be launching direct military attacks in Venezuela. Who knows with Iran? We haven’t even talked about Gaza and this like colonial plan to make Tony Blair the king of Gaza. I mean, this is just like 19th century style colonialism. Yeah.

DANNY HAIPHONG: And KJ what Ben was saying there, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are literally are actually just telling us this now right to our faces that this is what they want to do. And it’s not like the rest of the world isn’t aware again that you had Sergey Lavrov talking about how there is going to be strikes on Iran. You had Iran saying that they will be in a war with the United States when that next strike comes. They are predicting that it’s going to come, that it’s not an if, it’s a when.

Also Venezuela, you have Nicolas Maduro, he said that he’s ready to declare the state of emergency if the United States attacks. And now it’s looking more like also a situation of not so much if, but when. How much of this KJ do you see as being part. Because we’ve talked about all these theaters, even Gaza, the flotilla, everything that’s going on as part of a pathway kind of being burned toward China. And we haven’t even gotten into Russia, which we will in a second.

But all of these wars seem to be pointing in that direction. And Iran, when I think about Iran and Venezuela, very close themselves, very close to Russia and China, it appears that there’s a logical extension in relationship to why the Trump administration is really setting their focus on these two so called, quote, unquote adversaries.

The Strategic Sequencing Toward China

KJ NOH: Yes, I’ve said this before, but both Iran and Venezuela are allies of China. They’re very, very important trade partners. They support each other. They’re members of the Belt and Road. And I’ve always said that, you know, the US has a plan to take down China. It’s a three course meal. Russia was supposed to be the appetizer. The appetizer turned into flounder. And therefore they’re not quite sure whether to have a complete division of labor or to continually, you know, support it. They’re still figuring that piece out.

And then Iran was supposed to be the dessert. But now it looks like they’re trying to shift it up into a second first course, a soup or a salad. And so we see that the world is moving into global war. And as Kurt Campbell said, he said that this is a unified field. He says he sees all of these wars as a single unified field and as he said he wants to unleash “a magnificent symphony of death.” Those are his words.

So in that context. So there’s the sequencing. We can see it’s a very deliberate strategic sequencing that involves taking out the periphery of China, either through overt warfare or overt allies, or by destabilizing governments all around. In particular, most recently, Nepal, but other countries that are close to and around China’s periphery.

And then you can also see that there is very, very deliberate escalation. There’s something very, very ominous and very, very. There’s a very clear pattern we can figure out. And coming back to what Ben said about, you know, fascism, it’s not simply that, you know, this is the Brechtian presidency, where the mask is off and you can actually see what’s going on.

Capitalism in Decay and the Path to War

But we know that, you know, under monopoly capital, industrial capacity gets attrited. You essentially just get monopolies. And so then you force rents, and then you increase, you know, the capacity of your devious lawyers to extract rent while the engineers are forced out and starved and manufacturing starves. And then once you take that contradiction to its logical extreme, then you hit a point at which the only way to reboot the system, because everything has been initiatified and everything is falling to pieces, the only way to reboot the system is to have a world war. It’s the reset button. It’s the rebooting.

And so I think that this is what we’re looking at. You know, this really kind of the capitalism in decay leads to fascism, and that is rebooting. The capitalism is rebooting itself by escalating to war. So in Gaza, certainly, the genocide is part of that. It’s part of that US agenda. Israel is not simply a subcontractor of the United States in perpetrating that genocide because subcontractors bring their own tools. It’s an employee, it’s a hired hand that is committing the genocide.

And then we see it escalating against Iran, as well as, you know, Lebanon, Syria, and then it’s expanding into the Western Hemisphere, in particular Latin America. And we also have to remember that, you know, regarding the Politico article where they said that US is looking as if it might pivot out of Asia, pivot away from China. Right after Politico had that article published, General Paparo came on Stars and Stripes and he said, “Yes, it is true, we are going to focus on the Western Hemisphere and the homeland, but China is part of the homeland. The Pacific is part of the homeland.” It’s you know, that old idea “who lost China.” China’s ours, the Pacific is ours.

So no, I do not see any de escalation. I see all the momentum for a massive escalation towards war as part of the inherent trajectory of fascistic capitalism in decay.

BEN NORTON: Yeah.

DANNY HAIPHONG: And Ben, KJ often references the strategic sequencing. It’s almost as if the Trump administration itself is strategically sequenced. You have Pete Hegseth, an incredible China hawk, someone who is in a crusade against China, Iran and then of course the left and all kinds of other things. But he has this hawkishness about it.

And then you have on the other side, you still have a raging war in Ukraine that Trump said he was going to end. But he has an envoy here that is seemingly. Now people joked about Keith Kellogg, he’s not really anything or. But now he’s like, he is the Ukraine guy. He is the only one speaking about Ukraine and everything he says either comes into fruition or some version of it comes into fruition. Here is what he said at a recent forum of warmongers talking about the direction that the conflict is going in.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

KEITH KELLOGG: The Russians don’t get a vote. Okay, you want to put troops. That’s a Ukrainian decision. That’s a sovereign decision of a nation. I don’t care if it’s Ukraine, I don’t care if it’s Bermuda. The fact is you make the decision what’s going to happen. The coalition of the willing is more than willing to do that. It’s sort of like an aerial ceasefire. If you have a no fly zone, that’s an independent decision made, but it has to be supported properly by the alliance. So that’s a big one to do that. This thing about them setting conditions, I don’t think anybody should accept that. I don’t. You know, maybe Peskov says that or maybe somebody else is going to say it and it’s one of those.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANNY HAIPHONG: To me it’s noise level. I appreciate sort of like there’s a comment I make among my team. Thank you for your interest in national defense. I really don’t care what you said.

So he’s talking about no fly zone, coalition of the willing. I mean this is kind of a Libya style suggestion that he is putting out there. But when it comes to this conflict, Ben, it’s also being kind of bandied about that Europe is the one taking it over and Europe is now talking about this drone wall. And Ursula von der Leyen reinforced this with massive expenditures coming from Europe.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

URSULA VON DER LEYEN: If we all agree that Ukraine is our first line of defense, we have to step up the military support for Ukraine. This is the reason why today we are dispersing 4 billion euros for Ukraine. 2 billion euros of that will be invested in drones.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANNY HAIPHONG: So this conflict, Ben, doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere close to ending. And all of this seems to point to a kind of multifaceted, multi front war pursued by the Trump administration. What’s your assessment?

The Reality of Russia’s Victory in Ukraine

BEN NORTON: Yeah, well, I’m not one to gloat about these things, but, Danny, you and I have been talking about this for years now, and I think our analysis has been proven correct. I’ve been saying for years, I’m on record going back to the last presidential election, when it was first Biden and Trump and then Kamala Harris and Trump. And I said, regardless of who wins, the U.S. is not going to be able to stop Russia from winning this war. Russia won. All of the leverage is on Russia’s side.

And Trump thought he pledged dozens of times. I read an article counting that he pledged over 70 times during his presidential campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine either during the lame duck period, during the transition or on the first day of office. And here we are, it’s almost a year later, and the war continues. And Trump is actually very angry about this. He’s mentioned this in multiple speeches.

So I mentioned the speech that Trump gave in Quantico, and that was after Pete Hegseth’s insanely hawkish speech. And Trump also gave another crazy speech at the UN General Assembly. I’ve watched a lot of UN General assembly speeches over the years, and that was definitely the craziest I’ve ever seen. Trump was just ranting for an hour. Most world leaders speak for 15 to 20 minutes. He spoke for an hour, and he just spent most of the speech talking about how he’s the greatest leader ever, the U.S. is the greatest country ever. He spent like five minutes criticizing other countries for sucking and failing, and they’re all stupid and he’s the best.

But in that UN General assembly speech, Trump criticized Putin and Russia. And then in the Quantico speech a few days later, he again echoed those criticisms. We’ve heard this nonsense for years, the whole Russiagate nonsense, claiming that Trump was a Putin puppet. Well, he’s now publicly criticizing Putin and complaining. He said, “I wanted to end this war, but Russia won’t end it.”

Now, the way he says it is as though Russia is just obstinate and doesn’t want to. What he really means is that Russia refused to accept the U.S.’s terms of surrender. The U.S. demanded that Russia come to meet all of its demands. But as Danny, you and I have been discussing for years, the U.S. does not have the leverage. Europe has even less leverage.

What is Europe going to do? Send some more weapons to be destroyed, as Ursula von der Leyen is talking about? What weapons? Where are those weapons going to come from? They’re going to come from the U.S. military industrial complex.

And in the speech that Trump gave in Quantico, he boasted proudly of how weapons corporations in the military industrial complex in the U.S. are making trillions of dollars. As he said, probably hundreds of billions, but he said trillions of dollars off of NATO purchases. He bragged that he forced NATO countries to more than double their military spending from 2% of GDP to 5% of GDP. And Trump boasted, “All of those weapons are coming from us. They’re buying it from U.S. weapons.”

He said that he’s been having meetings with executives from U.S. weapons corporations and telling them they need to massively increase their weapons output.

Trump’s Shifting Rhetoric on Ukraine

So in terms of Ukraine, Trump in his UN speech, also officially, for the first time publicly at least, he changed his rhetoric on the war. And he now said that Ukraine should retake all of the territory that is now part of Russia, which is completely insane. It’s never going to happen in a million years. With whose army? The only country that has the army that could force Russia to do that is the U.S. military. But are they talking about a world war with Russia? I don’t think they’re going to do that.

So the Trump administration’s rhetoric is all over the place. It’s totally contradictory. You just played this clip there. I mean, they have no, there is no strategy because they lost and they refused to accept that they lost. They cannot accept that they lost. This is a major war. And accepting that they lost would be a massive blow to NATO as a project.

And what is the point of NATO? From the very beginning, we’ve known that it is to keep the U.S. on top, Russia out, and Germany down. And now you add in the forthcoming continuation of the war in Iran, the war in Venezuela. I mean, it’s not guaranteed that the U.S. will win these either. They can cause a lot of destruction and chaos.

But look at Iraq. Iran is a much bigger country than Iraq. It is a very advanced military. And yes, Iran has been suffering under sanctions for many years, but Iran’s economy is also stronger than Iraq’s was by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. I mean, Iraq was in, the economy was in extreme crisis. This came after the U.S. imposed genocidal sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s that caused hundreds of thousands, at least 500,000 Iraqi children to die because of lack of medicine and food.

And Dennis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, famously resigned in protest, calling it genocidal. So the U.S. destroyed Iraq’s economy. Iraq was barely hanging on by the time the U.S. invaded in 2003. Iran is a much more formidable adversary.

It’s certainly not guaranteed at all that the U.S. will win that war. They could cause a lot of devastation and destruction, which is the U.S. is very good at. Like look at Libya or look at Venezuela. Certainly it’s not guaranteed that the U.S. will win this war. They can cause a lot of death and destruction and civil war.

In fact, if you read some of these, I mentioned these reports in the New York Times, the New York Times is a mouthpiece for the right wing oligarchic Venezuelan opposition. But even some of these opposition figures in Venezuela, the ones who are not mouth foaming fascists, the slightly more moderate ones in scare quotes, even they are concerned. They say that if Trump carries out these decapitation strikes and war on Venezuela, it’s going to cause a civil war which will spill over into Colombia.

I mean, it’s absolutely insane what they’re talking about. And they’re just going to unleash chaos and more devastation and destruction around the world. They think they can easily win all these wars. The U.S. has not won a major war really since World War II. And the U.S. is used to beating up small countries. I mentioned the invasion of Panama in ’89, the invasion of Grenada in ’83. I mean, these are tiny little countries. Venezuela is much bigger. Iran is significantly bigger.

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah, yeah. And K.J., you have the UK, Ben Wallace, the I guess their equivalent of the Secretary of Defense out in the United Kingdom, which is essentially a U.S. satellite at this point in terms of foreign policy, saying they want to choke Crimea until it cannot breathe.

As a strategy to defeat Russia, it seems like all of the United States and its European vassals, their whole strategy here is to do everything they’ve done in the past and throw everything at the, throw everything in the kitchen sink at Russia. Even though a lot of these so called threats are really difficult actually to make good on.

What’s your assessment where this conflict is at and its connections? Because obviously the United States, especially the Trump administration, is doing its best to try to carve up each one of these conflicts and make it appear that they are separate. But as Ben noted, they are very much all happening at the same time.

The Coordinated Strategy and Nuclear Escalation

KJ NOH: Yeah, absolutely. As I said and as others have said, including Ben, there’s very, very deliberate sequencing going on. This is a chessboard or a go board where the moves are being coordinated and sometimes people say, “Oh, it’s all chaos,” or “the U.S. is consolidating.” No, there’s very, very clear continuity we can track. And so we have to hold that in mind.

It’s very true that the U.S. is not ready for peer competition. It’s not ready for a world war. And as Hegseth himself points out, the U.S. has not won any wars since World War II. It’s, to borrow his own metaphors, it’s flabby and soft, but that’s not so much about standards and training. It really has to do, as I pointed out before, has to do with the contradictions of capitalism itself in the way that it deindustrializes. And also it’s a choice of doctrine.

For the past 20 years, the U.S. doctrine of war was counterinsurgency, essentially shooting pastoral herders from the sky with massive amounts of munitions and high tech weaponry. That kind of warfare is no longer the case. We are really looking at peer competition, certainly in the case of Iran, certainly in the case of Russia, most certainly in the case of the United States.

So what is the United States thinking about? Iran is 3.8 times, it’s almost four times the size of Iraq, it’s two and a half times the size of Afghanistan, and it is one of the most mountainous countries in the world. And one of the reasons why the U.S. was so ineffective in Afghanistan was because it was so mountainous.

But I think that what they’re relying on is an escalation to tactical nuclear weapons. We see that already in the threats to send Tomahawks into theater both in Ukraine and towards Central Asia. We also know that Tomahawks have already been sent into the Pacific. Tomahawks are dual use, they’re nuclear capable. And so I think there is very clearly a strategic calculation that they’re going to use nuclear weapons. That’s the only thing that makes sense if we assume this notion that they’re going to go to war against major powers.

I’m going to point out that I just recently read an article in Foreign Affairs, which is the Foreign Affairs Journal of the Council for Foreign relations. And one of the things they said, it was a very curious article, very odd because they said the U.S. doesn’t have a military plan for fighting war with Beijing. That’s nonsense. They’ve had a plan since 2009. It’s called Air Sea Battle, and it’s derived from Air Land Battle, which was the strategy of war against the USSR itself, derived from Israeli battle strategy, which is essentially to go in and decapitate and attack the rear in this incredibly vicious fashion that we’re currently seeing right now.

So they’ve had this plan since 2009. It’s been revised nine times, and yet Foreign Affairs says, “Oh, we don’t have a plan for waging war, deterring Beijing.” But in this article, even as they make this strange complaint, they say something which is really, really ominous to me, and they say, essentially they say that we need to have a plan that uses nuclear bombs to thin Chinese forces, and they just toss it out in this casual fashion. In other words, they’re planning nuclear attacks on China, quote, unquote, “to thin them out.”

So I think that all of this is in the works. We know Elbridge Colby, who drafted the national defense strategy and is currently working on the current one, soon to be released, has been arguing for at least a decade that the United States needs to make the use of nuclear weapons as easy as calling an Uber. He says that there should be a seamless continuity between conventional and strategic nuclear weapons. So I think that is at least what I’m most concerned about. And that’s what I think is the implicit calculation behind all this belligerent rhetoric that we’re hearing from the west and most certainly from the United States.

BEN NORTON: Yeah.

Trump’s Belligerence on Ukraine

And in particular on Ukraine. Ben, I’ll just put up all of the various examples that we should go over here in terms of this belligerence. Here’s the X post true social post you’re referring to where he literally says that now with the support of the European Union, Ukraine is in a position to win back all of its territory.

Of course, a lot of people read into that and said, well, this is really true. There’s all kinds of things we could say about Trump pushing this off to Europe and Ukraine is now alone. The policy, I think, shows that that’s not actually the case because the US this is actually just breaking, is to provide Ukraine with the intelligence for long range strikes into Russia via Ukraine.

This is the exact same policy as the Biden administration. Whether it’s possible or not, that is another question given the weapons issue but of course, those Tomahawks are being actively discussed. But I just want to play quickly. What Vladimir Putin said during the Biden administration about what long range strikes with US And NATO intelligence into Russia mean for the conflict is that the flight.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

VLADIMIR PUTIN: The flight missions in these missile systems can in fact be inputted only by NATO military personnel. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. So it’s not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not.

It is a question of deciding whether or not a NATO country could be directly involved in a military conflict. If this decision is made, it will mean nothing else but the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct participation.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANNY HAIPHONG: So, and you probably remember this, Ben, shortly thereafter, when these strikes were signed off by Biden and started to happen, Russia did launch its first Oreshnik missile, which is a powerful new hypersonic missile that has the capabilities of a nuclear weapon even without the nuclear fallout.

So, Ben, your thoughts on this? Given that there is all of this rhetoric about the Trump administration ending the war in Ukraine right now, it feels like everything has remained the same, except worse. Your thoughts?

The Myth of Trump as Putin’s Puppet

BEN NORTON: Yeah. Well, it’s so funny going back to this nonsense of Russiagate during Trump’s first term, right, where this idea that Trump was a Putin puppet, but as those of us at the time pointed out, if you actually looked at Trump’s actions, he escalated the war in Ukraine, that was already going on. It started under Obama.

And you know, Victoria Nuland, famously the secretary, the undersecretary of State in the Biden administration back in the Obama administration, she was a top diplomat in the State Department and was sent to Kiev during the 2014 coup, and she handed out cookies to all the coup supporters. And so, and then famously, there was this leaked recording of a phone call between Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Jeffrey Pyatt. And they’re discussing who will be the new leaders of Ukraine following the coup.

And what’s often forgotten is that, so Obama started that war and there was a war. I mean, it wasn’t just the coup. There was a war in the eastern part of Ukraine. Immediately after the coup, NATO started doing military exercises in Ukraine. Ukraine became a de facto member of NATO. Ukrainian soldiers and officers were being trained by NATO, which means by the US Military. And then the Ukrainian government deployed the military to the east to attack people who were protesting.

So this idea, actually, I’ll get to that point in a second. Let me finish my first thought. So Obama started that and then Trump, when he came in, he accelerated the war, the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. And Trump boasted that he sent to Ukraine offensive military equipment, lethal military equipment that Obama had refused to send because even though Obama started the war, allegedly, reportedly Obama was concerned about escalating the war.

So he only sent so called non lethal military aid to Ukraine. Trump sent lethal military aid, including missile systems, javelin systems, and famously, Trump has boasted multiple times he said Obama only sent pillows and blankets to Ukraine. I sent javelins, I sent missile systems and lethal aid to fight against in a proxy war against Russia.

The Fantasy of Retaking Ukrainian Territory

Now the other point I was going to make in terms of this, this absurd fantasy of retaking these areas of the Donbass and even Crimea, which is even more of a fantasy, it’s never going to happen in a million years. First of all, even if it were militarily feasible, which it’s not, we’ve seen that all of NATO combined hasn’t been able to defeat Russia because as KJ pointed out, Western capitalism has become completely de industrialized.

It’s become completely financialized because why would capitalists invest in industrial manufacturing when they can just buy stocks and bonds and then pump up their stocks by buying back their own stocks? Literally this year, US corporations are spending over $1 trillion buying back their own stocks.

Bloomberg did a study. It’s a bit dated, it’s from about a decade ago, but it’s still pretty relevant today. Bloomberg found that over 90% of the earnings of companies in the S&P 500, these are the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. over 90% of their earnings goes to paying dividends to their stockholders and buying back their own stocks to pump up the price of their own stocks. They don’t invest.

The only investment we’ve seen in recent years by US Companies is in capital expenditure for artificial intelligence. Because they think they want to be. These companies think they can get a monopoly. So they’re all fighting to be the first company to get a monopoly of so called AGI, artificial general intelligence. And they all think that it’s two years away permanently. Right.

So excluding that investment, US Companies don’t invest in anything. The US Is completely financialized and de industrialized. And even compared to the rest of Europe, which obviously, you know, parts of it have not, have not de industrialized as much as the US like say Germany. But Germany has demilitarized. So it’s going to take a long time for Germany to remilitarize.

And Germany is in the process of de industrializing because they’re boycotting Russian energy and buying very expensive US liquefied natural gas LNG sent across the ocean. And then also because the anti green Green Party, which is actually anti environmentalist and pro war and pro NATO, they shut down all the nuclear plants, which is the greenest, most efficient form of energy. And they reopened coal fired power plants, which is the most environmentally destructive form of energy.

So German’s industry is collapsing. France is not in a much better situation. And then you know, you have northern Italy, which is an industrial base, but Italy doesn’t have a very advanced military either. What military are they going to defeat Russia? So anyway, it’s not going to happen in a million years.

But finally the point I was going to make is that even if they could magically defeat Russia, the population in the Donbass is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian. They speak Russian and they’re pro Russian. They don’t want to be part of Ukraine. That’s why this whole conflict started after the US backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. So it’s just a fantasy in so many ways. It’s never going to happen in a million years.

US Leverage Over Russia

And you have to ask why is the Trump administration saying this? And it’s because Trump thought that he could just force Russia, just strong arm Russia into doing whatever he wanted. And as you and I, Danny, have been talking about for years, the US has no leverage over Russia other than sanctions relief.

But as I’ve emphasized endlessly, Russia is no longer that concerned about the western sanctions. Russia has shown that there are countries that are too big to be sanctioned because yes, the US has succeeded in crushing relatively smaller countries with these illegal sanctions like Cuba, a country that has been under illegal US sanctions for over 60 years.

Or Venezuela, the US was able to devastate Venezuela’s economy because Venezuela is a petro state. It has been for 100 years before Hugo Chavez was born. And, and the government revenue almost entirely came from exporting oil. The US tried to crush Venezuela’s economy by imposing sanctions and then Trump expanded those sanctions into a full on economic embargo during his first term.

And Venezuela was not able to export its oil, the vast majority of its oil, and Venezuela was not able to import the chemicals it needed to process its oil because Venezuela’s crude is very heavy and you can’t just use the heavy crude out of the ground. You have to refine it and, and process it. And the US and Venezuela was previously had been importing a lot of those chemicals from the US which they can no longer get because of the sanctions and then Venezuela’s oil industry was basically built by US companies going back many decades again before Hugo Chavez was born.

And Venezuela was unable to import the technology and the capital equipment needed to fix and modernize and repair and update its oil infrastructure because of the US sanctions. So, yeah, the US has been able to crush these relatively smaller countries.

Russia is a massive country, over 100 million people, one of the largest countries on Earth, one of the largest economies on Earth. When you measure its GDP purchasing power parity, Russia is a major power. It’s too big to be sanctioned. And those sanctions have actually only deepened Russia’s economic integration with Asia, with China, with India, with Turkey, with BRICS countries.

So the US has no leverage. They’re never going to be able to retake that territory. They’ve lost the war. But all this is about is a refusal by the US led NATO forces to accept that they’ve lost. There’s nothing they can do to reverse that loss. And they simply are just dragging out the, they’re dragging out the day where eventually they have to acknowledge that.

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah. K.J. Your final thoughts on this before we move on?

The Dangerous Refusal to Accept Defeat

KJ NOH: Well, you know, I wish I were less pessimistic, but I have a feeling that they won’t accept their loss. And they think they have two things, at least three things on their side. One is they think that they can use nukes. And if you go, for example, there’s a very recent Rand article that they wrote last year, they essentially say the United States must be prepared for nuclear escalation and place more emphasis on managing escalation risks regarded to it.

They consider, for example, China. China’s nuclear threshold is unclear, but it’s also movable, meaning they think that they can get away with a lot of nuclear attacks. So I think that nuclear is definitely part of the picture.

I think AI, they also have kind of deceived themselves into thinking that AI is the killer app that allows them this extraordinary advantage. It certainly doesn’t. We’ve seen that currently. We’re seeing that currently even in Israel where the Israelis are using AI to target and to, you know, genocide of the Palestinians is still not working. But they’re counting on AI, they’re counting on nuclear, and they’re also counting on their capacity to mystify and indoctrinate and propagandize and make it seem like they’re willing, they really believe that they can create their own reality if they tell themselves enough lies and if enough people believe these lies.

So I think it’s very, very dangerous. And, and certainly as Ben has pointed out, they have a strategy of trying to starve out their opponents. Certainly they tried to do that. They were trying to do that with Russia essentially trying to sanction it to death. They believed that actually that it would collapse until China and others came in and continued to trade with it. And certainly they’re trying to do that with Venezuela right now.

The Bullfight Strategy

But this is the US plan. You know, it’s like, I don’t know if you know anything about bullfights, but before you bring the bull into the arena to be slaughtered, what you do is for days and days, you starve it, you deprive it of water, you shoot it up with drugs, you beat it, and then you bring it into the bull fighting arena and then you slaughter it.

And that was what we saw, for example, with Iraq. You know, Iraq was sanctioned for 10 years until it had no capacity to fight. And then the United States came in and shock and awe and etc. And you know, what an incredible success. So this is literally the strategy they use.

And they’re trying to do it to Russia, they’re trying to do it to Venezuela. They have been trying to do it with China specifically regarding tech and regarding industrial development per se. And so they think that if they put enough pressure, the country will be attrition weakened, enough internal contradiction that they will be able to go in and attack it or at least put enough pressure that with a combination of subversion, direct attacks, provocations and internal economic collapse, they’ll bring this down.

So I believe that their agenda is still extraordinarily ambitious, hubristic and terribly, terribly violent. I’m not ruling anything out. I certainly, I wish and I hope I will be found wrong, but the cynical and pessimistic part of me is still very, very concerned.

BEN NORTON: I can’t say I disagree with you.

Russia-China Relations and Western Panic

DANNY HAIPHONG: KJ, when we’re looking at this side of the geopolitical map, when it comes to the United States and where its trajectory is heading. Ben, you know, speaking of sanctions proof, there has been, we can move to China, but in respect to Russia, because there has been some recent panic, almost planted panic, it seems like, about this relationship once again.

First we have Taiwan becoming the largest importer of Russian nafta, which is a really important oil product that fuels the tech production that Taiwan, the province of China so heavily relies upon. Says it’s been buying millions of tons of the oil product NAFTA from Russia since 2022. The quote unquote invasion of Ukraine, raising concerns China could lean on Moscow to choke off supply and threaten Taipei’s economic security. And it talks about the surge over the first half of 2025 to an average of six times higher than 2022 levels.

And then there’s this curious leak that’s coming out of a think tank, Ben, affiliated with the UK’s Royal Air Force. This is the leaked documents reveal what Russia is teaching China about war. Just going to go to what we should know. This British think tank, RUSI, which is affiliated with the Royal British Air Force, it says areas where Russia surpasses China military capability are diminishing. And Russia has practical experience to where they have seen contracts obtained by the hacktivist group Black Moon, that there’s a 2023 deal in which Russia has agreed to provide China a suite of weapons designed for infiltration operations.

Russia has also committed to a full cycle of training for a Chinese airborne battalion. Of course, it’s so interesting that they’re relying on sources obtained by a hacker group when the United States and the UK were so keen on punishing Julian Assange for literally just reporting on sources. But nonetheless, Ben, talk about your reaction to this. Given that we’re supposed to believe that the United States and even Europe, that they’re looking away from China and they’re looking at this world situation as being kind of carved up into certain pieces to target with the Western hemisphere and the homeland and all of this being the primary target, but still every day there’s panic about China and its relationship with Russia. Your thoughts?

US Strategy to Divide Europe and Russia

BEN NORTON: Well, when they talk about so called hacktivist groups, they mean the CIA, right? I mean, come on, they expect us to be so infantile and naive. Oh, some hacktivist group just happened to get access to these confidential Russian government documents. Oh, yeah, I’m sure. Okay.

Anyway, in terms of part of his narrative, what is very clear is that the US has succeeded in its long term goal of dividing Europe and Russia. If you go back to the 1990s with the overthrow of the Soviet Union, when the US imposed Boris Yeltsin, this alcoholic US puppet who destroyed Russia, the US also imposed capitalist shock therapy. It led to millions of excess deaths. According to UNICEF, the life expectancy of Russian men fell by several years. It was just complete collapse and chaos.

Now, in 1997, during this collapse, there was a book published by the US Imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Grand Chessboard,” in which he talks about plans, outlines different plans for continued US global domination. This is the peak of the unipolar US moment. The US is the only major power in the world. The US Empire tries to continue control every corner of the world and tries to destroy any independent country, imposing sanctions and waging war against all these independent countries.

And in that book, Brzezinski outlined three scenarios that would be very dangerous for the continued global dominance of the US Empire. The first was a potential alliance between China and Japan. Very unlikely. The second was what he called the most dangerous scenario, which is an anti-hegemonic coalition between China, Russia and Iran, which is essentially what we see in the world today.

But the other scenario that he was concerned about, which was much more realistic than the China-Japanese alliance, is what he feared would be a European-Russian alliance, and especially a German-Russian alliance and, or a Franco-Russian alliance, but especially a German-Russian alliance, because Germany is the industrial heart of Europe, it’s a major industrial power. And Germany needs a lot of Russian oil and commodities, especially minerals. And Russia is the world’s commodity superpower, producing, it’s one of the biggest producers in the world of oil and gas and many minerals and ores and wheat and fertilizer.

So the US for decades was trying to divide Germany and Russia and more generally Europe and Russia. And of course, this happened during the first Cold War, right? But especially in the 1990s and the 2000s, because at that time, you know, there were Russian leaders, Yeltsin and then Putin when he came in in 2000, they were trying to integrate Russia into the west, in particular, trying to integrate Russia into the larger European family.

So, for instance, Putin speaks fluent German. He spent a lot of time in Germany, and he had pretty good relations with Angela Merkel. And then, of course, Project Ukraine was one of the main reasons that caused the sabotage of that relationship. But there are, of course, other factors. I mean, you go back and listen to Putin’s famous Munich speech, which is now, you know, 17 years old, 17, 18 years old. And he’s already complaining then about the US empire’s unipolar dominance of the world and the importance of multipolarity.

So in terms of breaking off those relations, the US has been very, very successful in burning the bridge between Europe and Russia and then salting the earth. I mean, like, I really do not think that within our lifetimes, Europe and Russia will ever have good relations for at least one generation, if not two generations. It’s just they’re done. Europe and Russia see themselves as enemies. The situation is not going to improve, especially as you have the increasing influence of Eastern European countries like Poland, which has been one of the faster growing economies with a large population as Poland grows in influence. I mean, this is the most viciously anti-Russian country in the European Union. It’s just done. It’s not going to. So the US has succeeded in that.

Sabotaging Europe-China Relations

What the US is now working on is trying to sabotage European relations with China, which are not very good, but they’re certainly better than European relations with Russia. China is one of the largest trading partners of Europe. And you even have Emmanuel Macron who claims to be independent. He tries to invoke Charles de Gaulle and claim that he’s, you know, an independent nationalist. It’s a joke. It’s just, you know, larping at this point.

But, you know, Macron took a trip to China last year and then he came back to France, he did an interview and he said Taiwan is an issue of China to deal with. He didn’t engage in this nonsense where, you know, the US and some of these hawks in Europe are supporting these separatist extremist forces in Taiwan that only have the support of the 6% of the population, according to polls.

So Europe’s relations with China are not horrible, they’re not great. But what the US is focusing on now is sabotaging them as much as possible, forcing Europe to be completely subordinate to the United States in every single way, which increasingly is already the case. The US is now the largest exporter of oil to Europe and by far the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.

So economically, the US wants Europe to be more dependent on it and the US wants Europe to cut off its relations with China. And especially as Trump wants to re-industrialize the US, he wants Europe to be a market, a captive market for the export of US manufactured goods, which is not going to happen. The US is not going to re-industrialize. It’s a fantasy.

So if you listen to the press conference in which Trump forced the European Union to sign a so called trade deal, it’s not a trade deal. It’s an unequal treaty in which Europe accepts 15% US tariffs and European exports to the US market. But European countries cannot impose any tariffs on US exports to the European market. Trump boasted that Europe is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying oil and gas from the US and weapons from the US and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the US.

So this is the US strategy. It’s to turn Europe into even more of this subordinated vassal area to cut off Europe’s relations with China after already cutting their relations with Russia. And this whole propaganda about linking China and Russia together in terms of the war in Ukraine. That’s what this is all about. The US is trying to say the war in Ukraine is actually, you know, China is one of the parties in this war. And Europe, you’ve already put sanctions on Russia and pledged to boycott Russian oil and gas, which you’re still buying from India indirectly, but now you need to put sanctions on China and cut off your trade with China and instead import everything from us. Yeah.

DANNY HAIPHONG: KJ, same question to you. What’s your assessment of the situation?

Breaking Up the Multipolar World

KJ NOH: Well, yeah, I agree with Ben. I think that, you know, once again the idea is they’re going to try and see if they can break up the rising multipolar world, the global south, and the way that it’s stitching itself together as a counter-hegemonic bloc. Certainly they want to split off Russia, they want to split off as many countries as possible or turn them into rubble, create unlivable chaos inside them and then use that chaos as a way of launching attacks and of putting additional pressure on China’s periphery.

For example, we see Myanmar currently right now is in total chaos. There’s also tremendous pressure somewhere in the range of 120,000 people have been enslaved on the border in Myanmar and in Thailand and other countries in that region in these, what they call online scam centers. They have people essentially enslaved and they’re forced to work non-stop and try to scam people out of money online. And if they don’t, you know, they get raped, they get beaten, they get tortured, sometimes they’re threatened to have their organs extracted. We know people have been killed.

And all of this affects China because many of the people who are enslaved are actually Chinese citizens. So already you see this kind of gangster, capitalist, fascist approach being used against China along its periphery, along with other types of terrorism, etc. So the situation is extraordinarily, extraordinarily escalatory and threatening.

The Nuclear Escalation Risk

And at the same time, I want to come back to this idea that the ruling elite are not thinking rationally the kind of dialogues that they’re having amongst themselves. They sincerely seem to believe that they can prevail in war against Russia, against Iran, against China. Just one small example. Small Wars Journal is kind of an elite insider publication and it’s focused directly on operations and strategy and tactics. And it kind of bridges the gap between, you know, the big grand strategy papers that you see at RAND and CSIS and CNAS and CFR and the actual scaled operations.

Anyway, they recently came out with an article saying that, you know, if China, if the US went to war with China over Taiwan, they would simply wipe out the Chinese forces. They compare it to the ANZAC, the Australia, New Zealand invasion of Gallipoli during World War I, where essentially the Allies were completely wiped out by the Turks. But what they fail to understand is Taiwan is an island and Gallipoli, which is, was a peninsula which allowed the Turkish troops to reinforce themselves.

So really, the real analogy that they should be thinking about is that Taiwan is kind of a watery Dien Bien Phu. You know, the French believed when they created Dien Bien Phu that they had actually created a fortress trap in which they could lure the People’s Army of Vietnam into a set piece battle and then just kill them all. It was supposed to be a kill box and they used the term meaning, you know, hedgehog. But that hedgehog strategy is actually very similar to what the US has planned for Taiwan, which is a quote unquote, porcupine strategy.

It’s not going to work because the equation is actually the other way around. It’s the Taiwanese on the island, the Taiwanese troops on the island, and that are going to find out that they’re very, very similar to what happened to the French in Dien Bien Phu. But likewise, during Dien Bien Phu, the French backup plan was a plan called Operation Vulture, which was to use tactical nuclear weapons.

And I think it’s very clear that the backup plan for Taiwan, as far as Elbridge Colby is concerned, because he stated it explicitly, is once again to use nuclear weapons. So, once again, you know, not to be alarmist, but I really believe that the stakes, the risks are very, very high. And we have to do everything humanly possible to prevent the escalation to war. Because it’s very, very clear, in my opinion, that the escalation ladder is very rapidly set to go nuclear.

BEN NORTON: Yeah.

Assessing the Real Threat Level

DANNY HAIPHONG: And Ben, what do you make of that last point? You know, there are people who say, well, oh, no need to be alarmist here. You know, everything will be different in two weeks. You can’t trust anything Trump says. The United States is kind of a basket case when it comes to its foreign policy at this point. What do you say about this? Because it seems to me that what we are actually seeing is that there is a lot happening quietly that we can only get a whiff of when we read carefully between the lines of what the Western mainstream media says about, let’s say, China and the US’s aggression building up toward it.

But on the other hand, there’s all these other theaters of conflict which are escalating quite clearly, and it’s very much in our face. How do you respond to this? Well, there’s really not so much to worry about because the United States is in this kind of weakening and declining position itself.

The Dangers of Imperial Decline

BEN NORTON: Well, that’s precisely what concerns me. Everything that you just said, the chaotic nature, the unpredictable nature, and the fact that the US is clearly in decline. When empires are in decline, they often commit their worst crimes. The end of the German Empire culminated in Nazi Germany. The end of the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Armenian genocide, also against Greeks and Assyrians. The end of the British Empire culminated, well really in World War II. But also, I mean, so many atrocities all across the British Empire. Man made famines in India, the Bengal famine.

So the US is really capable of causing a lot of damage and destruction. We’ve talked about how I don’t think the US can win, but it can destroy countries. I mean, there’s a lot of debate about like, did the US succeed in Iraq, did the US succeed in Libya? Well, from the perspective of a very cynical US imperial strategist, yes, because it destroyed the state. They didn’t need to necessarily take control of the country. They destroyed an independent, sovereign, anti-colonial state, which has been one of the main missions is just simply destruction.

So yeah, the US will not win in Ukraine, but it could just turn Ukraine, at least the eastern parts of Ukraine, into a failed state. Maybe they would try to do that. Maybe the US cannot succeed in Venezuela, but they can overthrow Venezuela’s independent, revolutionary, anti-imperialist government and turn Venezuela into a failed state. The same thing in Iran. Okay, maybe the US cannot succeed in imposing the MEK or whatever puppet or the Shah, the Shah’s son in Iran. You know, whisk him away from Los Angeles to Tehran and say that, you know, he’s the Instagram king of Iran. It’s not going to happen.

But maybe the US and Israel could destroy Iran’s state and cause chaos and civil war. That’s what they did to Syria. Look at the situation in Syria. No one in their right mind would look at Syria today and say, wow, the situation is much better. You know, we were bombarded with propaganda for over a decade saying that Bashar Al Assad is Hitler reincarnate, the worst dictator ever, blah, blah, blah.

Syria as a Failed State Model

Literally, Syria is now run by the head of Al Qaeda. It’s not an exaggeration. The literal head of Al Qaeda is the leader, the unelected, so-called President of Syria. He still doesn’t control all the territory of Syria. There’s still ongoing violence. There are constant massacres of minority groups in Syria, including Alawites, other Shia Muslims, Christians. You know, Israel is using this excuse of attacks on Druze. There have been attacks on Druze, but Israel is using it as an excuse, cynically, to colonize part of Syria.

Syria’s chaos, pure chaos. And there’s no way that this Al Qaeda leader who changed his name, Ashara, you know, Jelani, the same guy, whatever his name is this week, there’s no way he’s going to create a stable government and provide a quality, high standard of life for average people in Syria. It’s a failed state, and it’s going to be a failed state for the near future. This is the US alternative for these countries.

The Madman Strategy and Nuclear Risk

So, yeah, I mean, whether or not it escalates into nuclear war, it’s impossible to predict. I mean, part of Trump’s strategy is going back to Nixon. You know, the madman strategy is you portray yourself as crazy on the world stage, so people have no idea what you will do. In Trump’s case, it’s not just acting. I mean, he genuinely has a few screws loose. He’s clearly suffering from early onset dementia like Biden was. And that’s going to only accelerate in the upcoming years.

If you listen to Trump’s recent speeches, I mean, he’s always been rambly, he’s always had a tendency to go off topic and rant, but especially his UN speech, it’s just completely embarrassing. I mean, it’s just like the Simpsons character of old man yelling at the cloud, but in the international stage, just yelling at other countries about how awful they are. Absolutely crazy.

So it’s impossible to predict what they will do. And unfortunately, I do share some concern, like KJ has, that it could escalate into nuclear war. Because, you know, in Washington, you have these imperial madmen who are more than willing to destroy the world rather than accept the end of the US Empire. But even if it doesn’t escalate into nuclear war, this point that I just made, I think is really important to keep in mind that the US doesn’t need to succeed in imposing a puppet and having a stable government if the US can just bring about state collapse like Libya.

Unwinnable Wars and Depleted Stockpiles

DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah. And then perhaps get your thoughts on this final point. One of the major concerns, it seems, is that as the United States as an empire declines and it really gears up and participates in, as we saw with Iran, into these incredibly dangerous escalations which have a huge human cost. If we look at what happened during the 12 Day War is an extension of what’s going on in Gaza, et cetera, et cetera, massive human cost. But at the same time, these wars are now unwinnable.

So if you look at Russia and what Russia has the ability to do militarily, China, I mean, we have reports coming out that the Pentagon, and this is such a fantasy, right? The Pentagon is asking to quadruple missile production and it’s asking Trump to do this because of a growing anxiety as it looks toward a future conflict with China, because there’s a surge in demand for long range weapons and air defense interceptors which have been depleted of its missile stockpiles. And this was a huge point during the 12 day war, quote, unquote, against Iran.

So, KJ, you know, to me it seems like these unwinnable wars leading to more militarization, leading to more dangerous escalations. That seems to be the path that the United States empire is on. And I think that kind of bolsters your point about it being very unpredictable and very dangerous.

BEN NORTON: KJ, I’m sorry for interrupting you. I just want to add one quick comment before you respond. Just pointing out what, responding to what Danny showed there about that report with what minerals? Where is the US going to get the rare earths needed to quadruple its missile output? China has restricted the rare earths in response to US tariffs. I mean, it’s just a complete fantasy. Go ahead.

China’s Rare Earth Restrictions and US Industrial Decline

KJ NOH: Yeah, Ben is absolutely right. China has restricted rare earth elements and rare earth elements are necessary for any of the guidance systems that are involved in those high tech weapons, certainly missiles, the guidance systems, you know, so all of this is breaking down, the industrial capacity is breaking down, the country has been deskilled and simply the contradictions are getting unresolvable.

But at the same time, there’s always a little patch that they’re throwing out each time. They believe that they could take down Russia. They believe that they could prevent China from developing. They believed that they had China in a four point choke hold that would destroy its capacity to develop technologically. That was only just a few years ago.

And they believe that, for example, they can get Korea and Japan and to a certain extent India to take over the industrial manufacture for the US war machine. They did this during the Vietnam War. Hyundai was a subcontractor to Halliburton or Brown and Root at the time. So they think that they can replicate the same system and the same industrial military supply chain that they had before. And this is how they’re going to deal with their problem of missile envy.

But, you know, the facts don’t uphold those projections. It’s just simply not possible. They simply don’t have the human capacity, the industrial capacity, or even the resource, the raw materials to do this. But still they hold on to this delusionary worldview, and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

The End of Their World

It’s not that they’re going to eventually come to grips with reality and then decide that, okay, we were wrong, and then we’re going to accommodate and, you know, be a nation among other nations having normal relations. They’re still so deeply wedded to this concept of total global hegemony that, as Ben said, and as I have said as well, they would rather take down the world. They would rather destroy the world than see the end of their power and privilege.

Because for them, the end of their power and privilege is the end of their world. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the end of their world. And they’re willing to take everything and everybody down if they see themselves losing their concept of total control of the planet. That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. And that’s why everybody has to put their shoulder to the wheel and see if we can get the Western European governments to back down from this continued rampage, this genocidal escalation to total global war.

BEN NORTON: Yeah.

The Samud Flotilla and Imperial Desperation

DANNY HAIPHONG: And, Ben, I can get your final thoughts. As KJ was talking, I was thinking to myself, you know, the United States can’t even allow, because it’s my opinion that the United States wanted to tell Israel it has to let aid into Gaza. It could easily do so. And so when we think about the Samud flotilla incident, I was thinking about that and thinking, well, yeah, the United States, the empire, is so desperate and so keen on continuing and maintaining its position and posture that even something as simple as sailing a boat with aid to help starving Palestinians who are being massacred as well, is a threat.

And that in and of itself is a threat and it has to be stopped. And, of course, Israel intercepted the Samud Flotilla. But your final thoughts, Ben, as we close up here?

The Blunt Fist of Imperialism Returns

BEN NORTON:

Yeah. Well, I go back to this comment that was made by Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro. What the US and Israel are doing to Gaza is what they plan on doing to the rest of the global South. And, you know, KJ and I have actually talked about this before on his show, the China Report, about how in the unipolar era, in the 90s and early 2000s, the US empire was so dominant and so strong around the world that it no longer needed to use the blunt fist of imperialism.

You know, in the first Cold War we saw of course that the US backed many coups and military dictatorships, especially in Latin America, but also in East Asia. And they were brutally repressive and extremely violent. And by the 80s and 90s, with the rise of neoliberalism, you had the rise of these liberal governments and they of course they privatized their state owned enterprises and sold off their resources to US multinational corporations and imposed austerity on behalf of the IMF and the World Bank, etc. But the US did not need to resort to the blunt fist of imperialism through imposing dictatorships and things like that.

Today we’re in a very different situation. The US is going back to that kind of very blunt, violent, neocolonial naked strategy that it had during the first Cold War. It can no longer use this nonsense rhetoric about democracy and human rights and civil society organizations. No, that strategy clearly isn’t working. The US Empire is clearly in decline. So they need to go back to blatant acts of aggression, blatant wars of aggression, invasions, and backing military dictatorships and all of these things.

And that’s just going to, I hate to break it to people, that’s going to escalate and get worse in the upcoming decades because it’s a reflection of the massive shift in global politics. The geopolitical situation today is extremely different. We’re in a new Cold War, the second Cold War. And the US is going to wage more war. It’s going to pursue more regime change operations, install more puppet dictatorships.

US Military Expansion in Latin America

I mean, for instance in Argentina this morning the latest news is that Javier Milei, the right wing libertarian puppet leader of Argentina, has passed an executive order without congressional approval allowing the US military access to Argentina’s military bases, allowing the US military to carry out military exercises and have control over Argentina. This violates Argentina’s constitution.

This already happened in Ecuador. Ecuador is governed by a right wing fail son of the richest billionaire oligarch in Ecuador. His son is. The father is Alvaro Noboa, the son is Daniel Noboa. And he did the same exact thing. He passed a law, an executive order that allows the US military to enter Ecuador at any time for any reason without the approval of the Ecuadorian government, that allows the US military to open more bases in Ecuador.

I mean, this is the trend that the situation is. The world is moving in. And this is why the US is trying to remove all of the independent governments that will resist that. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba. These are the countries that have revolutionary anti-imperialist governments that refuse to allow Washington to dictate their policy. They have good relations with China and Russia and Iran. The US Empire is going to try to remove all of those governments through war, sanctions, regime change, coups.

And the US is going to do the same thing in Asia, of course, and Africa, but especially Asia and Latin America. That’s the focus in this new Cold War, to remove any countries that could be allied with China and Russia to prepare for eventually full on war.

The Inevitability of China’s Rise

If the US cannot succeed in isolating China, which obviously it’s just not going to happen, there’s no way. China is the largest trading partner of the majority of countries on Earth. And over time, China’s role in the global economy is becoming more important. China’s role in global commerce is becoming more important. The US role is becoming less important over time.

This is why imperial strategists in Washington are so desperate, because they recognize that if they keep waiting, they will permanently lose their hegemony. So their assessment is that they have to be as aggressive as possible, now wage as many wars as possible, now assert control over West Asia. This is what the genocide in Gaza is about, maintaining U.S. hegemonic control over West Asia. Because otherwise it’s inevitable. In 10, 20 years, there’s absolutely no stopping China, period. There’s none.

And I personally don’t think there’s any way of stopping China. The US Empire has. It’s been defeated in terms of preventing China from rising, which was one of their goals. Now the US can cause a lot of damage in other parts, around the world and other countries, which keeps me up at night. I’m very concerned about that. I’m not trying to downplay that. But the U.S. thinks that this is the last opportunity they have to try to prevent their decline, which is why they’re so aggressive and so desperate.

DANNY HAIPHONG:

Yeah, yeah, it’s very full circle. Hegseth’s bravado, the speech that he gave. On the one hand, it was gamed out and put out in terms of PR as almost like a pep talk to whip everyone into shape. It could also be seen as a desperate attempt to push the US military even further into a mode of aggression for those exact things that both you, Ben and KJ outlined here.

With all that said, everybody, I think we can close up this stream on this note because I think that’s a great note to close on. I just want to recognize everyone’s super chat and super sticker. I don’t think we had a lot any questions here. But I want to acknowledge you guys because this is a lot of generosity tonight and I appreciate that.

Celebrating China’s National Day

Coming out on October 1st, this is the birthday of New China, of the Chinese Revolution. I know Ben, you’re out there. How’s the vibe been as I do this? How has it been out there? I know it’s very crowded. Everyone’s out.

BEN NORTON:

Yeah, well, you know, everyone’s very happy. Of course, there are a lot of proud feelings of patriotism and support for what China has accomplished. The year is kind of weird. It’s 76, so it’s not like one of these fancy, like, you know, 75 is a big deal, but 80 is going to be a very big deal in four years. So, you know, people are enjoying. Everyone gets a holiday for a week. So, yeah, it’s nice.

And, you know, I wanted to travel, but it’s always impossible to travel this week because everyone in China on what they call Golden Week, that everyone goes and visit, visits their home, their home province and their family. You know, a lot of people, I live in Beijing, so a lot of people here are not from Beijing. They work here or they study here or whatever, so they go back to their home province. So all of the high speed rail tickets are sold out like two weeks in advance. But yeah, it’s a great time.

DANNY HAIPHONG:

KJ, anything you want to say before I do the closing for folks?

China’s Climate Leadership

KJ NOH:

Well, I just want to say that, you know, there’s been a really great report out from a British think tank called Ember. It’s an energy think tank, and they have pointed out that China is decarbonizing the world and that is essentially showing us a pathway out of global climate catastrophe.

Traditionally, you know, the whole idea was that if you modernize, you had to become capitalist, you had to become more Western, and it was also going to be more carbon intensive. Those are the three foundational presuppositions about any notion of development or modernization. China’s kicked all three out of the park.

And they’re saying that you can develop on your own terms. You can develop a society which is people centered and human centered, and you can develop without creating climate catastrophe if you use the sustainable energies that we are offering to the world as a global good. Nobody controls the wind, the waves and the sun. This is a global commons. And here you are. These are technologies that you can use to harness that. And that I believe is tremendously inspiring and optimistic for the world.

BEN NORTON:

Yeah.

DANNY HAIPHONG:

What if Xi Jinping says “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets”? And I mean that. Ben’s out there right now. I’m always in awe when I go there, just how far ahead China is in renewable energy. And Ben, I’m sure you experienced it every single day. It’s just so different being here in the United States and seeing how none of that investment is happening. And it’s not even just about the environment. It’s. There’s no investment in any of this which could lead to jobs and good things for ordinary people.

But we don’t have it. We have Trump bragging about a trillion dollar military budget as he says he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. So that’s our predicament here in the United States.

Closing Remarks

But with all that said, everybody take care. Go to the video description. You can find places to find both KJ’s and Ben’s work, their YouTube channels and their shows that they host. Also, all the places to support this channel, Patreon, Substack and much more. Thank you to all the moderators. I should do that more because you all do great work in the chat.

Without further ado, everyone. I’ll see you again very, very soon. Watch out for that announcement. Hit that like button as you go to keep the show going so people hear Ben and KJ’s words even after we are done here. Take care, good night, good morning, wherever you are. Bye bye.

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