“The Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
– Vice President Dick Cheney (January 20, 2005) [1]
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
In January 2002, the president of the United States was warning that Iran, together with Iraq and North Korea, constituted an “axis of evil” that would be “seeking weapons of mass destruction.” [2]
Now, after saying for three decades that Iran was “on the verge of developing nuclear weapons,” on June 13, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu punctuated his warning with an attack on several nuclear facilities and military sites, while assassinating several top military officials and nuclear scientists. [3]
Over the past week, there has been an exchange of missile attacks, allegedly targeting military and missile protection sites. In spite of the Iron Dome over Israel, missiles have penetrated and struck targets. [4][5]
U.S. President Donald Trump released a statement on June 19, stating, “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.” [6]
As Dr. Jack Rasmus stated in a recent article, Trump is following the standard USA “how to go to war” playbook. Meaning the trigger on this war has been pulled. The two weeks is simply a matter of waiting for the hammer to fall. [7]
Will this war escalate into a larger global conflict once the U.S. is involved? Is the U.S. empire destined to slide even further into a decline? These are the questions we ask this week on the Global Research News Hour.
In our first half hour, we are joined by Drago Bosnic, GRNH’s frequent guest and military analyst, He will assess how the U.S. and NATO generally are already assisting Israel in its first strike. He also assesses the Russia-angle as they have signed a security pact with Iran and are already fighting NATO via Ukraine.
And in our second half hour, Jack Rasmus joins us again to assess the state of the U.S. Empire following the decline in the last two decades and whether or not Trump could at least slow the decline in the wake of yet another forever war. His book, on which a lot of this discussion takes place, Twilight of American Imperialism, goes to sale in October.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the books, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017 and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, 2020. Follow his commentary on the emerging banking crisis on his blog, https://jackrasmus.com; on twitter daily @drjackrasmus; and his weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern and at https://alternativevisions.podbean.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
(Global Research News Hour Episode 478)
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
Transcript of Jack Rasmus, June 17, 2025
Global Research: Reviewing American imperialism, there are certain principles, ten you listed in fact, that all empires adhere to, but in fact they all rise, they peak and then they fall. Looking at history, why does any empire think that it will be different? What kind of thinking clouds the minds of people with access to basic scholarship?
Jack Rasmus: You know, those who manage and run the empire think the empires are going to last forever, and that’s their mindset, and they think they should last forever, and they undertake activities to try to ensure they continue. It’s not quite descriptive to say empires rise and then they fall.
Empires go through crises periodically, and they may recover from the crises and re-establish hegemony of some sort and go on and then have another crisis and recover. It’s when they fail to recover from the inevitable periodic crises that they experience, and most of these crises that they fail at are because they can no longer afford to maintain the empire. And those empires are very expensive.
You know, you’ve got a military, sometimes you’ve got a colonial administration, you have to, you know, develop your economy to support it. It takes a lot of money to maintain an empire. As long as the empire, and all empires attempt this, can continue to extract surplus from the countries it controls, then it will have sufficient resources, financial and economic resources, to afford the empire.
But when the cost of empire outrun the ability to extract surplus resources, then the empire is in trouble. A good case example is the Roman Empire. You know, the Roman Empire initially established wealth from plunder, and then extraction of wealth from taxes and the surplus, mostly agricultural surplus, from different parts of the empire.
But when the Roman Empire lost those areas of surplus generation, in other words, mostly agricultural surplus, you know, wheats and grains and so forth, then it could not field a sufficient military in order to continue the empire. I mean, the Eastern Empire and the source of grain from Israel was cut off when the empire split. And then you had barbarian invasions, which took Spain and North Africa and Sicily, you know, the Vandals, the Visigoths.
So, then the empire did not have sufficient resources in order to provide the military. And it reduced its border, you know, It’s border forces, and that was it. It was over for the empire, and it died slowly. Okay, the same thing with the British.
You know, the British empire had this tremendous resource extraction from around the world, and they would buy its navy, but then it entered World War I, and it was economically devastated in World War I. The U.S. propped it up in the 1920s, but then World War II came, and it went broke. All the European empires went broke. All they tried to maintain, you know, in Indochina and Algeria and places like that, but it was too late, right? It was too late.
They were broke. They had to turn over their empire, most of it to the USA, in particular the Middle East, you know, was British. It turned it over to America.
America extracted a very severe financial support for the Europeans during the war, and they had to pay the price, and they became secondary empire. They became an appendage of the American empire. Well, my argument is today, if you look around, the empire has become too costly.
It cannot afford it. The way it’s structured now, and that’s why last time we talked, you know, in my view, Trump is trying to restructure the empire, both at home, in terms of the economy, to make it more affordable, to finance defense spending, which is well over a trillion dollars now, $1.3 trillion, my estimate, per year, right? Pentagon’s only $900 billion only, but it’s going to a trillion, but then there’s all other costs of empire that add another $300-400 billion to it. So, $1.4 trillion every year.
A lot of it is waste, particularly, you know, funding all these agencies, NGOs, and USAID, and so forth, and throwing all this money into Europe, which is not strategic to the US anymore. And, you know, to recap what we said last time, Trump is trying to cut those costs, cut the costs within the Pentagon. You know, we have like 45 generals, four-star generals.
You know, after World War II, we had four, now we have 45. So, this big bureaucracy has blossomed as the empire has continued. So, he’s trying to cut there, but the whole idea is not to cut it, it’s to redistribute the savings into new strategic areas and new weapons systems.
The US is behind in certain weapons systems, drones, hypersonic missiles, etc. And, of course, it wants to reorient to, you know, the main threat, which is China, and it’s got itself bogged down in Ukraine. The neocons, the US neocons, and the Europeans manipulated Biden and got him sucked into their war, fighting their war for them.
Just like the US fights Israel’s war in the Middle East, the Europeans got us to fight their war in Ukraine. The US has paid mostly for that. So, it was a big mistake, strategic error by Biden, who was just manipulated.
I mean, this guy was a lightweight when he was mentally acuity, you know. But he, you know, clearly it’s coming out now that, you know, he’s barely walking dead. So, you know, the US got sucked into that and wasted a lot of money, three, four hundred billion so far, and Trump wants to shift that around.
Now, we got the same situation in the Middle East with Israel, but it’s different here in that the Zionists control the US Congress and most of the deep state bureaucracy in the US. They are so deeply entrenched that no one dares even criticize Israel.
GR: They have more people in the Senate and in Congress than Trump has probably.
JR: Oh, absolutely. And a good number of them were former officers. Some of them were former officers in the Israeli Army Defense Force, you know.
I mean, it’s a big problem for the US. It’s a big strategic problem for the US. And now we see ourselves embroiled in the Middle East again.
I mean, we’ve supported Israel long for the same reasons. We’ve given Israel since 1978 in Camp David about 350, 400 billion dollars, you know. That’s how much we’ve been throwing at Israel.
Israel, you got to think about it, is the US landlocked aircraft carrier in the Middle East. That’s what Israel is. And that political control, the Zionist control, which is not just the AIPAC and the foreign control from Israel, but you got all kinds of deep Zionists in the US who are also supporters of Israel.
And it’s going to destroy the US really eventually, I think. And we can see this going on in the Middle East. So, the US is stuck in another unaffordable war, which is about to explode, right? The US very clearly has been involved with Israel in planning this attack on Iran.
And I believe the US will join that attack on Iran.
GR: And Iran will fight back.
JR: Oh, yes.
Yes. And the question is, see, the US and Israel can’t do more than just an air war. You don’t win wars just with air wars, right? I can’t think of any conflict.
But the US cannot send military into Iran, will not. First of all, it doesn’t have the forces to do that. It just has a professional army that’s a global police force, right? And it always uses proxies.
The US is using Israel as a proxy. And Israel, of course, is using the US in this case. But the same thing is Ukraine.
Ukraine was the proxy. The US has to have these major conflicts using proxies globally, because it doesn’t have the force or the public opinion support to send US troops into any of these countries. You got to see Trump trying to pull out of Ukraine, because the US cannot afford wars in NATO in Europe, wars in the Middle East and prepare for a war with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea islands.
It just does not have the resources. And it doesn’t have the resources when you look at what’s happening with the deficit and the debt. We are now chronically running $2 trillion a year deficits.
That’s mostly because we’re spending one and a half trillion or whatever a year on wars and defense. But at the same time, in the 21st century, well, actually, even a little earlier, we’ve been cutting taxes, mostly on corporations and the wealthy and the rich. We’ve cut $17 trillion in taxes since 2001.
$17 trillion, maybe $18 trillion now. We spent $9 trillion on wars just in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s $26 trillion of the $35 trillion national debt because deficits accumulated mean the national debt.
So wars and tax cuts for the rich have been the primary cause of these huge deficits. But they can’t continue spending on wars and tax cutting for the rich. You see, that’s the dilemma they face.
GR: And in addition to that, you also have to consider that one of the things that Iran can do is shut down the Straits of Hormuz, which is like a 33 kilometers through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes. So the price of gas is going to go up and the price of oil and all the things associated with that. So that’s on top of it.
And then there’s still cutting taxes of the rich. So I don’t know if there’s, I mean, does there come a point when, I mean, is collapse, is it going to be inevitable? Or is, I mean, is it going to come soon? Or can it be continued? And is what the things that Trump doing going to bring on the collapse even sooner?
JR: That’s a good question. You know, Trump’s, by the way, before I answer that, you talked about the Straits of Hormuz.
Well, that’s why the US has sent three aircraft carrier task forces to the Arabian Sea, right? If they try to shut it down, the US is going to attack all those ports in Iran on the sea to open it up again. That’s for sure. That’s why they’re sending them there.
And they got another task force in the Mediterranean. They have four task force, aircraft carrier task force, you know, with submarines, you know, missile launching submarines and RLE class destroyers and so forth. The US does not commit resources like that unless it has a plan to attack, right? You got to understand that.
And you got to understand how this is very much like Iraq in 2003, right? Look at Iraq in 2003. What was the argument? Oh, weapons of mass destruction, yellow cake, right? Oh, you know, we got to get rid of it. What’s the excuse now? Oh, Iran has a bomb, or they’ll have a bomb in two weeks.
Even though in March, the IAEA said there’s no evidence, right? And the US DNI said there’s no evidence that Iraq is immediately going to have a bomb. There’s no evidence of that, right? And then you get in negotiations. And the same thing is happening that happened with Iraq.
The US, while it’s building up and preparing, it’s in negotiations. You see, it always goes to lull the other side of negotiations. Well, negotiations have been going on with Iran.
And in fact, they were supposed to occur here on the weekend until, you know, Israel scuttled the whole thing. But that’s all part of the strategy to you negotiate. But when you’ve decided to go to war, and the wheels of war are cranking the US, you know, you can’t pull it back, the US won’t pull it back.
I believe it’s past the point of no return here. And it’s going to engage in that you don’t send forward task forces, you know, without a plan to attack. This talk about, oh, it’s the bomb, you know, we got to get rid of the bomb, Israel says, right? Yeah, they’d like to do that.
But really, what this is about is regime change. You see, this is the and that was the case of 2003. You know, Saddam was engaging in negotiations, Saddam made the US offer, send the IEA, American inspectors can come in, you can go anywhere you want, see that we don’t have WMDs, of course, and then prove that later that they didn’t.
Well, once the US had decided it didn’t care about whatever offer the, you know, the other side made, it would just move the goalposts make it even more difficult. You know, the US at the end there, wasn’t demanding in Iraq, wasn’t demanding, okay, we won’t send inspectors anywhere to make sure there’s no WMDs. It was dismantling your military to Saddam, right? And the same thing is going on now with with Iran, right? It’s not about the bomb.
It’s about regime change. Iran has said, in the past week, we will assign a non nuclear, no proliferation, we will agree, you America can send your own inspectors in to see, you know, as well as IAE, that we’re, you know, where we are in relationship, the bomb, the bomb, and we will agree to any kind of treaty, any kind of writing that you want that we won’t develop a weapon. Well, this is not being reported that much in the US media, right? But Iran is saying, you know, before before the attack, we’re saying all of this, but the US didn’t care.
You see, the US has made a decision to support Netanyahu, whose objective has always been to suck the US into the war. And he knew he could do it, because he’s got all this political influence in the US government, and with Trump as well. So, it’s the same thing going on in 2003, in Iraq, it’s the same march towards war, the machine is cranking, and the US is going to engage, I believe here with them, but it’ll be an air war.
And the question is, can Iran sustain, you know, its government and its economy, given an air war? And the second question is, will Russia and China allow their ally, Iran, to collapse, like Syria? You see, Syria, they had to clear Syria out before they do this. This enabled, encouraged the loss of Syria, and enabled, encouraged them to really start the war with Iran.
GR: You know that the third adjustment in the 1980s, the neoliberalism, and then it blew up in around 2008, 2009, right? And now we’re into this fourth readjustment.
JR: Restructuring, attempt to restructure the empire, right?
GR: Yeah. So, what would you, if you were in a position to make a new set of adjustments, and if the empire would act, your colleagues would actually agree to what you’re saying, what do you think might help save some of the empire, you know, at least for a little while longer? Because it doesn’t seem like it’s on a good trajectory right now. Well, what would you do as a substitute, do you think?
JR: Well, you know, look at what Trump was trying to do initially, at least he talked about it, I think it’s dead now.
He wanted to pull the US back to the Western Hemisphere and Asia, you know, Pacific Ocean and Asia and the Western Hemisphere, and extract the US commitments in Europe and the Middle East. That was the talk, you know, Greenland and all that stuff, right? That was all about pulling back to the Western Hemisphere and relying on these two oceans, you know, I mean, the US is not threatened by anything coming from Europe side or whatever. So, that was his attempt.
I don’t, you got to understand Trump, Trump has ideas, he talks big, right? But when he tries to implement them, he runs into the deep state, and the deep state checks him, or if it’s tariffs and whatever, the big corporations check him. No, you can’t do that, and he pulls back. That’s the way he operates, you know, he talks big, he has these ideas to get public appeal and support for him, but he always retreats, you know, that’s why they call him Taco Trump, right? Trump always chickens out, T-A-C-O.
Well, it’s not a personality thing, it’s the way the system works now. You see, the presidents don’t have that much power. The presidents, it’s the deep state that runs the country, you know, that’s the bureaucracy, the Pentagon, all of that stuff.
Trump has made some token moves to put people in to try to reform it. I don’t think he’s going to succeed in trying to reform the deep state. And you can see, whenever it comes push to shove, they push him and he backs off, right? He thought, you know, I’m going to get this Ukraine negotiations and so forth, and the neocons and pretty much just said, no, you can’t do that, right? So, he’s backed off.
And the same thing in the Middle East, he falls into the deep state and the neocons lap every time, and that’s what’s happening now. That’s what’s happening in the Middle East, that’s what’s happening in Ukraine. They are the deep state, the neocons are reasserting their control over Trump, and they’re going to wait him out.
And, you know, he caves in. He talks big, but he caves in. That raises the question, what do they really have on him, you know? You’re sure, for sure, you know, the deep state has some shit on this guy, you know, and I think it makes him back off when push comes to shove.
He may want to do things, but he gives up. And that’s what we see going on in the Middle East.
GR: I don’t know if your book touches on this subject, but what can ordinary, ordinary Americans do? Can they do anything to make the decline of America under Trump or the deep state or what have you? You know, you can’t change them, but can you at least, can they do things on the ground, on the street to at least make the decline of their nation less vicious going into the years ahead?
JR: Well, in the 21st century here, what we’ve seen is an attack on democracy from both parties, both wings of the corporate party of America and with their friends in the Supreme Court, right? They are delimiting, you know, the space to act democratically.
I mean, with a small D, you know, with, I mean, it starts with Gore versus Bush, Bush versus Gore, right? Supreme Court selects the president, right? And then what you get is Citizens United, and I believe they opened those floodgates and they corrupted the hell out of the Democrat party. And it’s, you know, it’s not the party of workers or anything anymore. It’s a party of big, big money.
You know, and then we have the elimination of campaign finance reform, right? And then we have the pulling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We’ve got gerrymandering authorized by the Supreme Court, so that’s only 30, 40 seats in the House change every election. They’ve tightened up the Democrat, you know, the democracy control by eliminating voter suppression, you know, I could go on.
There’s all kinds of civil liberties, you know, the Patriot Act, NDAA, all that stuff. You got a picture in the 21st century, as the empire is going to war forever wars, the empire is struck, stuck in forever wars, right? It’s not going to end. And to enable it to continue that, and to continue shifting the surplus domestically from, you know, working class to the rich, they’re destroying democracy.
That’s part of neoliberalism. You see, neoliberalism is antagonistic to democracy, it can’t continue. And it’s enabled, you know, the eliminating of democracy is enabling neoliberalism to continue.
I think he’s not going to be able to restructure the economy again, because the deep state is too, too, too embedded, right? The President has limited, you know, power and authority. Congress is controlled by the big corporations, you know, the military industrial complex, the pharma, you know, health complex, the big tech companies, all these, they’re not going to bring back the jobs, they don’t want to, they’re just waiting him out, you know, he’s not going to do that. If you look at the decline of empire in the 21st century, when it’s accelerating, really two main developments, one’s the Iraq war and the start of forever wars, right? And the other is the 2008-09 crash.
The US has not recovered from either of those. So far, if you look at GDP, after the crash of 2008-09, it grew maybe two thirds of normal throughout Obama’s period, you know, it never really fully recovered. Then we get the COVID crash of 2021.
And they threw $10 trillion of fiscal monetary stimulus at it at that time. And what did we get? We got a two and a half percent GDP, a normal average to two and a half GDP after $10 trillion, between 22 and 24. That’s the picture.
And if they didn’t throw 10 trillion, you know, we’d be in a depression right now. But the point is $10 trillion to get you a normal two and a half percent GDP growth rate is broken. It’s broken.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.
The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca
Notes:
- https://jweekly.com/2005/02/04/bush-should-not-push-israel-to-do-dirty-work-in-iran/
- https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/13/israel-attacksiran-what-we-know-so-far
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/20/iran-israel-trade-air-attacks-as-conflict-enters-second-week
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/18/how-has-iran-managed-to-pierce-through-israels-air-defence-systems
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-20/donald-trump-iran-israel-decision-strikes-continue/105439658
- https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-war-iraq-ukraine-iran/5891660?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
Counter Information publish all articles following the Creative Commons rule creative commons. If you don't want your article to appear in this blog email me and I will remove it asap.
No comments:
Post a Comment