Economy Could Be ‘Destabilized’ – David Lin (Uncut) 01-25-2025

‘Enormously Dysfunctional Catastrophe’: Economy Could Be ‘Destabilized’ | Richard Wolff

Tariffs are a tax. They raise the price of what those taxes are applied to. If we tariff, that is tax, imports to this country, even on a small scale in the manner Mr. Trump has been talking about, the result will not be to bring down prices but to raise them.

Donald Trump was inaugurated on the 20th of January this week, and he already signed over 40 presidential actions, including reducing the cost of living, expanding the energy supply, and implementing an America first foreign policy. At his inaugural speech, Trump highlighted the importance of bringing back a golden age of America. Take a listen.

The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.

During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first. Joining us to discuss what this golden age means for not just the economy but global stability, as well as whether or not Trump can actually achieve a lower cost of living, is our next guest, Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Amherst, where he taught from 1973 to 2008. He is the co-founder of Democracy at Work.

Welcome back, Professor Wolff. Good to see you again. Happy New Year.

Well, Happy New Year to you too, David, and thank you for inviting me. I enjoy our conversations very much. Thank you.

Let’s begin with reacting to what Trump said at his speech in regards to this golden age. Take a listen and we’ll react together. We will do it at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.

Next, I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we are going to use it. OK, he wants to bring down the cost of living. He signed an executive order on reducing the cost of living.

What is your reaction to what was just played? Well, I admire the sheer effrontery of what the man says. He is not in control of what happens to prices. Mr. Biden wasn’t.

No president who has ever confronted an inflation has been able, in some kind of magical way, by issuing an order to stop it. It misunderstands the relationship between economics and politics. One is the driver, that’s the economy, and the other one reacts as best they can, usually late, usually in a limp way, trying to make some adjustment, and if they’re lucky, they can get away with it.

So, baldly saying he’s instructed his associates to do the impossible, it strikes me as charming. It’s like instructing them to go and practice so they can leap over the Empire State Building. All the practice in the world is not going to help you do that, you silly person.

It’s a kind of theatrical fakery that passes for heavy concentration. And let me drive something else home. Drill, baby, drill? Really? You know the costs of that? You think that an explosion of drilling is going to stop the inflation? No, it isn’t.

There are lots of factors that are pushing prices up. Not the least of them is deporting immigrants. Another big one, imposing tariffs.

Tariffs are a tax. They raise the price of what those taxes are applied to. If we tariff, that is tax, imports to this country, even on a small scale, in the manner Mr. Trump has been talking about, the result will not be to bring down prices, but to raise them.

This is a basic law of economics taught in every classroom across America, but apparently beyond the capacity of Mr. Trump and the people applauding. And you really have to use metaphors I will not dare employ to capture what’s going on here. But Professor Wolff, the counter argument to what you just said is to look at what happened during the first Trump presidency.

One would point to the fact that the CPI did not explode to the upside between 2017 and 2020 before the pandemic hit, which as we know, the Fed printed money during that time and inflation went up. But before that happened, his first tariffs or round of tariffs didn’t cause significant upwards inflation. And in fact, over the course of 2019 or early 2020, we had periods of a brief period of deflation as a result of the pandemic.

How would you respond to that? It is easy if I had the time with you and we can do it in the future for me to show you easily and the empirical record that for every time that tariffs have been imposed, there were either price increases or if you didn’t have price increases, you would ask the logical question, as you always do in economics, if a relationship that normally exists didn’t, what might have been another factor you don’t normally see that would explain the abnormal reaction? Otherwise, we enter the following game, David. You can bring up the graph you just did, and I will bring up a graph of a different period of time where imposing tariffs were followed by price increases. This is silly.

This is not serious kind of work. Look, it could happen now too. You could impose tariffs again, and let me give you an example.

If at the same time that we impose tariffs that raise prices and we have a collapse of the poor people in this country’s economic circumstances, in other words, they cannot service household debt, which is at a record level in this country, or corporations cannot service their debt, which is also at a record level in the history of the United States here, one of the responses would be something that happened a few years ago in Japan, depressant. In other words, the opposite of an inflation, you have a deflate of falling prices. That could happen, and then someone would say, see, when you impose tariffs, prices go down.

No, no, they don’t, but if you do tariffs at the same time that other major influence on prices occur, well, then it can go any which way. That doesn’t deal with the normal. All I’m telling you is that if you have a big program of tariffs, you is now become incumbent on Mr. Trump, if he’s going to do that, to tell us how and why we should expect offsetting developments in the world economy that could bring us down.

Giving us examples of when it went one way or the other is irrelevant. He has to do that, and he hasn’t done that. There’s absolutely nothing that we should expect in this kind of situation.

Okay, well, take a listen to this 20-second clip of what he said he plans to do in regards to tariffs. It’s on the topic of tariffs. We’re talking about a tariff of 10% on China based on the fact that they’re sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada.

How soon on those tariffs? Probably February 1st is the date we’re looking at. If you have for Mexico and China, we’re talking about approximately 25%. Okay, 25% tariffs on China, 10% on China and Mexico, and then 10% on Canada because of February 1st, we’re looking at what is likely going to be the response from China, Mexico, Canada, and any other trading partner that Trump wants to implement tariffs on, Professor.

Well, I mean, I have several reactions. At the instigation of the United States, we have a treaty called NAFTA. Under Mr. Trump’s first presidency, that treaty was renegotiated, signed again by Mr. Trump, in fact, as the president of the United States, which expressly commits the United States not to impose tariffs.

That’s what the treaty is for. This is a decision made by the president to impose tariffs. And the reason given? Fentanyl? You’ve got to be kidding.

No one in their right mind would believe that, except perhaps here in the United States, because they dare not ask the question. Fentanyl was coming into this country when NAFTA was passed and when the next Congress was passed. Everybody in their right mind knew because it was in the financial press.

What NAFTA was, was to give access to the United States to products coming from Canada and Mexico without paying a tariff. And vice versa, goods from America going to Mexico. That’s what the thing was for.

Mr. Trump is unilaterally breaking or threatening to break a treaty obligation and giving us his reasons something that makes absolutely no sense at all. We knew what was coming into this country. What was coming was the same thing coming now.

By the way, the reason it comes, and by the way, it will come whether these tariffs are imposed or not, is because the United States is a buyer at incredible wealth of all of these drugs. As the president of Mexico recently said, the drug problem exists on both sides of the border. All we have is the cheap shot of a president in the U.S. who finds it convenient to blame one half of the story and pretend the other one isn’t guilty.

You’re not doing this for any other reason, Mr. Trump, than most of the things you say, which are performative theater. This is not going to cut it. Now, let’s imagine, however, that he goes through with it.

Let’s imagine that the Republican Party is in sufficient control to make it happen. I have only two things to say. One, all Americans should join me in taking a step back and realizing what Mr. Trump is proposing.

The Republican Party, for at least the last century, has presented itself to the American people first and foremost as the party that is cutting your taxes. Vote for us because we cut taxes, we want to reduce government, blah, blah, blah. A program of massive tariffs is a program of taxation increase.

A tariff is a tax. If you’ve taken a course in economics, your teacher told you. It is a tax on imports.

Just like we have a tax on income, a tax on wealth, a tax on sales, a tax on property, we have a tax on imports. We’ve had it from the beginning of the United States. It used to be called import duties, now it’s called tariffs.

But this is a party that has abandoned tax cuts and now puts forward tax increases. But because it is a theatrical party and is afraid to confront the reality, it finds it terribly exciting to refer to tariffs as if they weren’t taxes. And as you know, Mr. Trump is fond of talking about tariffs as if they are being imposed on China, which of course they can’t be.

The only imposition of tariffs on China that can be done is by the government in China, not here. It’s just silly stuff. Anyway, here’s the second point.

I want to focus on Mexico, but the same story could be told anywhere. Mexico is an economy with a lot of problems. It’s a poor country, certainly relative to the United States.

The United States is now its largest purchaser of Mexican exports, a result in part of the NAFTA agreements. Okay, if you deport millions, which he’s promised to do, into Mexico, as you impose tariffs, which he’s now promised to do on Mexico, you’re hitting the Mexican economy with a one-two-three punch. I would like everyone to understand.

Number one, millions of Mexicans or Central Americans now working in the United States send money back to Mexico. It’s called remittances. It’s a very important income to the Mexican economy.

That will either disappear or be sharply reduced in a relatively short amount of time. That’s a major economic blow. If you hit them with tariffs, it will shut off a significant portion of their exports, because those will become too expensive in the United States, because the cost of production in Mexico will have added to it the tariff importers have to pay Uncle Sam, which is what a tariff is.

That will hurt exports from Mexico, and the U.S. is its number one market, third and final. If you do these two things, you will depress employment in Mexico. People who can’t keep their jobs because their employer cannot sell exports in the United States because of the tariff, which means Mexico will have no remittances.

Millions of people arriving looking for work at a time of shooting up unemployment. You know what that is? A recipe to fundamentally destabilize an economy. We’re going to have on our southern border an enormously dysfunctional catastrophe.

I’m curious as to what you think is going to happen to the world economy now that we’re entering, or perhaps re-entering, a period of protectionism like we discussed. Tariffs on other countries will probably be met by tariffs from other countries on the U.S. Take a listen or take a look at this article written by an author by the name of Ian Fletcher, who wrote a book called Free Trade Doesn’t Work. This was published in the Huffington Post in 2010.

He argues that America was founded as a protectionist nation. Historically, protectionism has in fact been the American way. This pattern even predates American independence.

He goes on to say that during the late 1800s, Karl Marx was alive in those days, keenly watched American capitalism, wanted to see American capitalism break down, and therefore favored free trade for its destructive potential. Unfortunately for Marx, this was the golden age of American industry. When America’s economic performance surpassed the rest of the world by the greatest margin, it was the era in which the U.S. transformed itself from a promising, mostly agricultural backwater pupil at the knee of European industry into the greatest economic power in the history of the world.

Is the author correct in supposing that protectionism in the late 1800s was a major factor in why America industrialized to the same extent that it did? Yes, this author is brilliantly rediscovering the wheel. It is a staple of American history. Unfortunately, it’s also a staple of European history and Asian history and African history.

It’s called in economics, where it has a great tradition, which this author apparently didn’t mention. At least, I didn’t see it as you scrolled it across the screen. It’s called the infant industry argument.

It’s been around for two centuries, if not more, and it says the following. If you’re a country that’s behind other countries in its economic development, which the United States in the 19th century, certainly the first half of it, was, but you’re now having the ability to at least start to have an industrial foundation, you might then say that your industries were in their infancy. Well then, the argument was you need protection from the more advanced industrial powers, which for the United States in the 19th century was, above all, Britain, of which it had been a colony until not that long before, and to a second degree, Germany.

And by the way, infant industry argument, if you look at the most developed arguments for it, is German. The German economy list, L-I-S-T, is famously associated with the most sophisticated arguments. You might tell this author that would help him learn what he’s talking about a bit better.

In any case, the argument goes you’ll be squashed in your infancy because the more developed, having the market to themselves, because you’re not there yet, will lower the price, which you cannot achieve, and so they’ll kill you. And if you want to live, and you want to grow, and you want to be an industrial base, you have to protect yourself until you’re of a size comparable to the old guys, and then they can’t do anything that you can’t match. That’s an argument for a tariff protection or other kinds of protection.

The United States has used them on and off. Absolutely. There’s nothing new, revolutionary, or original that Mr. Trump would sign it.

But let me underscore what he’s not telling you. We have, for the previous half century, been the number one country favoring free trade, because we could excel, because we were the old guys. We could squash the infants who had to protect themselves, which they did around the world, mostly by tariffs.

In most cases, the United States wouldn’t let them have tariffs, threaten damage to them if they did. The one country in the world that had something better than a tariff protection was the People’s Republic of China. They had the Communist Party and the whole ideological, geopolitical barrier that prevented them from having to worry.

They could develop their own market. Because of the size of their country, that could mushroom quickly relative to what the West had. So they were able, without tariffs, to protect themselves.

But you can be sure that if the richest country of the world, which used to be the protector of free trade, can’t make it anymore in a free trade world that it helped to create, will now lead the march back to tariffs, back to protectionism. And to answer your question, absolutely. The number one question in Europe today, among the giants there, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, is whether and how to follow the United States.

And they’re not at all unaware that when countries become protectionist turning inward, they become unreliable allies in global politics. Because they’re out for number one. Now they always were, but number one’s interests were a global free trade environment.

Now number one isn’t. And you have the irony that Mr. Xi Jinping in China is talking about free trade and open dialogue. He’s the champion of free trade because the United States cannot play that role.

But that’s because our economy is in trouble and declining, not because we are strong and powerful. The latter is make-believe. I see.

So what you’re suggesting is, and then we can move on to foreign policy in just a bit, is that the America First policy is also somewhat mirrored by the European countries and this will result in less trust between our allies. Is that what’s going to happen? Less international cooperation? That’s well underway. All right.

Just finishing off on the cost of living discussion, and then we can move on. This is exactly specifically what the executive action calls for. You already said that this is outside of the purview of the government in the most part to lower the cost of living, but they want to pursue appropriate actions to lower the cost of housing, expand the housing supply, eliminate unnecessary administrative expenses and rent-seeking practices that increase health care costs, eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the cost of home appliances, create employment opportunities for American workers, including drawing discouraged workers into the labor force, and eliminate harmful, cohesive climate policies that increase the cost of food and fuel.

Professor, if you were in the administration and the president asked you to design a policy to lower the cost of living, would it look like what I just read or something else? No, I would not. What you just read is written in every government document for the last 50 years. It’s empty.

It’s a template. They probably copied this. The only thing in there that’s even a slightly bit different is the last line.

In other words, it’s a lame attempt to explain the inflation in food and fuel as if it had to do with, quote, harmful, coercive climate policies. Their position, as is captured in the vulgarity of drill, baby, drill, is to avoid dealing with the negative consequences of climate change and instead try to focus everybody on what some negative consequences might be of doing something about it. This is a childish debate that even half-educated people will understand is pure administrative BS.

So, what would you… Everybody, seriously, everybody who looks at the fuel prices and their enormous impact on inflation knows that they have to do with the cost of getting oil and gas, with the geopolitical problems in the world market in oil and gas. That’s why oil and gas prices go up and down by large amounts over the last 30, 40 years that are in no way coordinated or correlated with this or that climate policy. That’s just junk.

For example, the cost of fuel in the last few years is overwhelmingly a result of a political decision made by the United States government and supported by all these people, namely to impose sanctions on Russia, which is one of the top three producers of oil and gas in the world. You put a sanction on them. You shut off Europe as a market for oil and gas because Russian oil and gas had enabled the European economy to be successful over the last 30 years.

As everyone there knows, if you shut off Europe, you are plunging the energy markets of the world into turmoil, which it did. And it drove the price of oil and gas crazy, which it did. And it produced a devastating inflation in Europe, which it did.

It had nothing to do with climate. This is silly. And by the way, when did the market calm down? When the BRICS demonstrated their power by having China and India turn around and buy from Russia, once again, the oil and gas that Europe stopped.

The whole strategy of bringing the war in Ukraine to an end was thereby defeated. Bringing Russia to its knees, that’s a quote from President Biden, became the pipe dream that we now see it all was, because he didn’t understand that in the new world economy, the power of the United States and its allies isn’t what it was. So none of this is interesting.

Lower the cost of housing. How exactly are you going to do that? What are you talking about? This is just fluff. This is like saying to someone, when I’m president, I’m going to order all my subordinates to do a whole lot of good things.

Here they are. Make this better. Make that better.

Stop. It’s shameful that you write like this. Someone ought to talk to the president.

Get a better writer. What would you suggest they do to combat this cost of living crisis is the word they used in this document. Let me propose a theoretical solution, which actually is not theoretical.

It’s been done before. Cost controls. Suppose President Trump were to say, you shall not raise the price of housing or rent by 5% next year.

What would that do? I love that. That’s exactly the kind of proposal I would make. But before I spell it out for you, let me remind our audience.

August 15, 1971, the then conservative president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, declared a wage price freeze as a way to control the inflation that was troubling the American economy then. By the way, contrary to Mr. Trump’s ignorance, the inflation he had to deal with and Biden had to deal with was not the record inflation. That’s what he called it.

It was much worse back then in 71 and so on. Anyway, a conservative Republican did it. He declared a wage price freeze.

He said to the American people, and I listened, I was listening to his speech on the radio, if you raise your price as of tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, we will come for you, we will arrest you, and we’ll throw you in jail. It’ll be a crime. You can’t do it.

And the inflation stopped on a dime. So you don’t have to ask the question hesitantly, David, because it’s not as though, well, maybe, maybe. We have historical examples that a government, if it wants to, can do that.

European governments have done it over and over again. It has a different name in Europe. It’s called an incomes policy, but it’s the basically the same idea.

And here’s its root and why people should think about it. According to the U.S. Census, 3% of Americans are employers. The other 97% of us are not.

The person who sets a price, who raises it, lowers it, keeps it the same, that’s an employer. Employees don’t do that. Employers do.

They have the final say. They have the authority. So if prices are going up, it’s because employers make the decision to raise them.

And they hate the fact that they’re responsible. So they have come up with an army of people, including economists like me, to come up with a lot of noise to give people the idea, is somebody else. Get angry at the But if you want to control inflation, the first thing to do is to understand you’ve got to deal with the 3% of the people who are employers, which is what you’re proposing does.

It says to them, well, at least for three months or a year or two, you’re not free to do what you have been doing. Bingo. Turns out, solves the problem.

And you know something? It’s a lot fairer than having the Federal Reserve raise interest rates. Because, of course, a higher interest rate hurts a poor person a lot worse than a rich one. But Professor Wolff, how would you respond to the free market counterargument that if we were to impose price controls, there would simply be a supply shock, case in point, the Soviet Union, case in point, Venezuela.

If, in theory, employers were not allowed to raise prices at above a certain point and cost inputs were to rise, they would simply not supply that good. Yeah, here’s how I would answer it. If you don’t allow them to raise prices, the first impact will be on their profits.

Their profits will not go up the way they might have had they had the freedom to raise their prices. And we know that’s the reality because we’ve had rising prices for the last 40 years and a stunning redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom and the middle to the top. Okay, so here’s my suggestion.

40 years ago, the CEO of an American corporation, on average, earned about 40 to 50 times what the average worker in that corporation earned. Today, it’s 365. Here’s my suggestion.

Stop allowing price increases, lower the profits, and take it out on the CEOs and the upper managers. They’ve had a really good run over the last 40 and 50 years. It’s time, now that the nation has a big problem, to stop that process and to recoup some of that wealth by, at the very least, not allowing it to continue.

The majority of Americans, in poll after poll, agree that the distribution of wealth and income is unjust in the United States today and affirm their support for making it less unjust. Well, a price control does that. Am I denying that that abridges the freedom of enterprise? Not at all.

Honest discussion of free enterprise should always have understood that it, like everything else, has good consequences and bad ones. And we pretend it’s only a good thing, then we get the result that the bad ones get worse and worse, and that’s where we are. Okay, let’s finish off on some foreign policy news and discussions around what’s happening in the Middle East here.

This came in from the press. Israel’s military chief resigns amidst a political crisis for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has accepted a ceasefire deal with Hamas, and military leaders don’t like that.

My question is why they’ve accepted a ceasefire deal now, the week of inauguration? Do you think US pressure was behind this decision? Not only do I think that, but I cannot, and I have tried, imagine anything else. So the real question here has nothing to do with Mr. Netanyahu. The United States has been the senior party to an alliance between the United States and Israel for pretty much the last 50 years, if not longer.

The arrangement is this. The United States provides them with a military security blanket, provides them with the military means to be the powerful military in the Middle East, and provides them with the funds to keep alive a small country like that. Seven million Jewish people, seven million Arab people, that’s the population, could not survive without the funding of the United States.

Now, in an exchange, Israel has been the point person. They’ve been active to make sure that the Middle East oil keeps flowing where we want it to. They’ve been active in repressing the forces within the Arab world that are inimical to the United States.

It was a nice alliance between the two. Each of them understood. They got and they gave to produce it.

Okay, that has now changed. It has changed for two reasons. The long 50-year attempt to destroy the ability of the Palestinian people to resist their subordinate position in Israel has not succeeded.

It has repeatedly been repressed, and it has repeatedly come back from that repression. Israel cannot defeat them, which isn’t surprising. Remember, there were many other settler colonialisms in the world after World War II.

They’re all gone. The only one left is in Israel. They all were overthrown.

The first book I ever wrote was a study of the economics of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. That was the overthrow of a British settler colonialism by the indigenous African population. Israel is now at that point.

Mr. Netanyahu, being a leader who couldn’t or wouldn’t face any of this, decided that this repression this time would be cataclysmic, which it has been in Gaza. That’s why it’s called around the world a genocidal response. The problem is we are not in the 18th or 17th or even the 19th century.

Settler colonialisms are a relic of the past, whose victims are now in charge of most of the countries of the world, and they hate it. And Israel is therefore reviled, isolated, which means the United States, as its funder and military provider, is allied to something that’s not good, as all the recent votes in the UN would show you if you dare to look at them. So it’s no longer a profitable enterprise for both the United States and Israel.

Well, so the new Trump administration told Mr. Netanyahu, we want this to stop, and you are therefore to stop. No more bombing Gaza, which has been the flash point. What does the U.S. gain from this ceasefire? At this point, it’s trying to cut its losses.

It doesn’t gain much. It is no longer being hammered. I mean, my family is partly European.

Across every European newspaper, not across American, but across every European newspaper, the horror of what Israel has done in Gaza, the destruction of the cities, the killing of people, the arresting of people. I mean, it goes on and on and on. It’s front page news.

Everybody knows about it. And the opposition of those people and their governments are clear. Oh, they may not say so, because they have to pander.

But this is not working. It’s a way of putting the United States in the worst possible light. We the United States, we are blamed for our complicity, and there’s no escaping that we were.

Mr. Trump wants a new leaf. I understand that. He would like to take office not being complicit, in fact, saying, I’m the one who got it to stop, which in case your audience doesn’t know, is what the United States is saying all over the world.

The new Trump stopped it. He is a peacemaker, unlike his predecessor. They are hammering at that.

It’s the first positive thing they’ve had to say. They still want Israel to play the role that it did. They’re not sure it can.

But here comes the punchline. The United States is looking at that alliance the same way it’s looking at the NAFTA alliance with Mexico and Canada. You’ve been our dear friends, but our economy is in deep doo-doo and shrinking, and we got to take extraordinary steps.

So pardon us, but screw you. Professor Wolff, one more question on Gaza, and we’ll finish off on another topic. What is going to happen next? A reporter straight up asked President Trump, how confident are you, Mr. Trump, that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza? This was two days ago.

I’m not confident. This is not our war. It’s their war, but I’m not confident.

But I think they’re very weakened on the other side. How confident are you, Professor Wolff, that the ceasefire in Gaza could be kept? I agree with them. I’m not confident at all.

All I see is more trouble, more fighting, more horror. But I can tell you this. At some point, not Mr. Netanyahu and not the right-wingers that he’s assembled and calls a government, but at some point, the other portion, which is at least half, of the Israeli society will understand that the endless effort to squash 7 million Palestinians in the interests of 7 million imported citizens is a hopeless effort.

The destruction just done by Israel in Gaza has already produced, as any thinking person knew it would, an enormous number of young men and women who have gone through that as children, watching their siblings, their parents be blown to smithereens, losing an arm, losing a leg. You know who those people are? The recruits for Hamas for years to come. And they’re surrounded by countries that will fund Hamas, will arm Hamas, and there’s nothing the Israelis can do except what they just did.

And that didn’t work either. So here’s my thought. Eventually, it’s not that the fighting will stop.

We’re going to have more of that. But what’s going to happen is a decision that the whole strategy was doomed from the beginning. It has run its horrible course for 50 years.

Now it’s time to drop it. And all it takes is the commitment politically, just like you and I have been talking. The commitment to free trade, to globalization that we had for 50 years in America, has been dropped.

Mr. Trump is triumphantly leading us to protectionist nationalism instead. Policies are dropped when they no longer work. That’s what happened here with trade.

That’s what’s going to happen, I would argue, in the Middle East. Final question, Professor Wolff. Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end.

Well, Ukraine and Russia have renewed missile strikes on each other just this week. How’s Trump going to do this? The only way Trump can do this is basically parallel to what he just did in the Middle East, and I’m sure he knows it. There is one side in Russia versus Ukraine that is dependent on the United States and Western Europe for its economic existence, and dependent equally for its military capability.

And that’s Ukraine. And it will stop resisting Russia if and when America or Europe or both of them say, you got to stop, because there is no option for them. They literally cannot do it otherwise.

Mr. Trump could do that. The Europeans could do that. Their leverage over Russia, by contrast, is nil.

They can’t stop Russia. They’ve been trying to do that for over three years now. That’s a big, fat failure.

They pretend otherwise because all of these issues are too hard. So they pretend to make them go away. Russia is now possessing, if I understand it right, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the territory of Ukraine, heading west from their former border.

Russia has made their demands crystal clear. The question is only, will Mr. Trump be able to force the Ukrainians to the table to cut a deal? He may not be able to, in which case he will then have a second decision. Does he simply withdraw the help? Because here’s something I can assure you.

The people of Europe will not permit European governments to step in and to do what the United States stops doing. No way. The majority of people in Europe are not in favor of this war or supporting it.

And by the way, that portion of the European population that feels that way is growing fast and isn’t about to change. Final follow-up, Professor Wolff. What if we stop, by we I mean the U.S. government, stops giving aid to Ukraine like you suggested? Does that not put Ukraine in a position of risk facing the Russians? Would Putin not be incentivized then to move west, take all of Ukraine, take Kiev? The expansion of Russia and its empire, so to speak, does not threaten NATO.

Isn’t that a risk? You know, I look at these kinds of questions and I sort of scratch my head and wonder. It just took Mr. Putin and the Russians three years to get as far as they’ve gone against a small, poor country, which the Ukraine basically is. It has cost them a fortune in lives, in money.

Can you imagine what the resistance they face would be if they took more territory, if they took another country? Stop. This would be self-destruction and there’s nothing about Mr. Putin that suggests, or the people around him, that they don’t do that. They have differences with the Baltic republics and with Poland.

I don’t know how those are going to get worked out. My guess is nobody’s going to want to see the destruction that they’ve seen and they will have to work out their difficulties. What the Russians want in Ukraine is simple.

A neutral country, not part of NATO, and then everybody can go back to building their own lives. They want the security. That’s not a country expanding.

Look, if you want to, here’s how the rest of the world sees this. There’s no evidence that Mr. Putin has ambitions beyond that. The only comment to that effect comes from his enemies here in the United States.

Meanwhile, the new president of the United States has told the world he may take Greenland, Panama, Mexico, and convert Canada into the 51st state. One country is talking about expanding big time across the opposition of the leaders of those countries who are basically saying, shut up, no way. There’s nothing comparable in Europe.

Nobody has been designated by Mr. Trump as an object of Russian interest at all. I mean, yeah, he could be lying, but then the burden is on the person who says it. Okay, come up with some evidence that Russia is doing that.

Yes, we don’t have any. The last time Russia had power in Eastern Europe, it was obviously to protect itself against invasion. Napoleon invaded Russia.

Hitler invaded Russia. United States in 1917 and 18 invaded Russia. Russia has historical reasons to fear invasion.

The United States doesn’t. Russia never landed its troops here, but Americans landed, along with French, British, and Japanese, to put down the Russian revolution. That’s part of Russian history.

Every kid there learns. They took the cordon from Poland in the north to Bulgaria and Romania in the south as a cordon sanitaire, they used to call that, as a protective list of countries to be able to give Russia more time when the next invasion surfaced. And that’s a defensive maneuver, not an attempt to expand.

All right. Well, Professor Wolff, you’ve been very generous with your time and analysis and thoughts, so I thank you for that. We thank you for that.

Where can we learn more from you, your work, Democracy at Work? The easiest way, and thank you for doing this, the easiest way is to go to our website, it’s all one word, democracyatwork.info, I-N-F-O. Everything we do is available there, no charge, etc. Okay, we’ll put the link down below, make sure to follow Professor Wolff and Democracy at Work there.

Thank you very much once again, Professor, and we’ll speak again soon. I hope so. It’s a pleasure talking with you.

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