Geopolitical Economy Hour

German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz says, before an audience of schoolchildren, that Iran has humiliated the US. Donald Trump announces the withdrawal of 5000 of its troops from his country. Meanwhile, Minister Donald​Tusk, Prime Minister of the most loyal of East European states loyal to the US and the Atlantic alliance, told the Financial Times that Europe's "biggest, most important question is if the United States is ready to be as loyal as it is described in our (NATO) treaties. The question is if NATO is still an organisation ready, politically and logistically, to react - for example, against Russia if they try to​attack." The trouble is not recent but in the first year and a half of Donald Trump’s second administration these strains now seem to be building up to breaking point. The two sides of the Atlantic find themselves on opposite sides of both the major conflicts of our time, that in Ukraine and that against Iran. Tariffs on the European Union are hurting its economy. There is increasing discussion particularly in Brussels, on how that body should seek an autonomous defence infrastructure. Europe and Canada are ramping up defence expenditure and if such an infrastructure were to be built, notwithstanding the interminable squabbles of EU member countries, it would represent a major reversal of the foundation of the post Second World War North Atlantic alliance, the security umbrella that the United States provided to Europe in acceptance of US leadership. Radhika Desai and Kees van der Pijl, foremost critical international relations scholar of the Atlantic Alliance discuss

In this episode, I am joined by Michael Hudson to discuss how the United States is attempting to defend dollar hegemony at a time when its global financial power is facing mounting pressure. We examine the role of swap lines, dollar liquidity, sanctions, oil politics, and the Iran crisis in sustaining a world economy still organised around the US dollar. Although swap lines may appear to be a technical instrument of central banking, they reveal something much larger about who has access to liquidity in moments of crisis, who remains dependent on Washington, and how the United States continues to use the dollar as a tool of geopolitical power. As more countries search for alternatives to the dollar system, this conversation asks whether these new financial arrangements are signs of strength or signs that the old order is beginning to crack.

The illegal, criminal US-Israeli war on Iran is now almost three weeks old. There are new twists and turns by the hour. However, some things are clear. The US and Israel are not winning, Trump is desperately looking for an off ramp and even the most delusional one is not available to him given that it is not up to the US-Israeli side to end the war, only up to Iran, which is willing to fight for months, even a year, and is seeking nothing less than the exit of the US from the middle eastern region, ending a more than century long engagement. Meanwhile, the war has already had significant economic and financial effects The price of oil and gas have risenSo have prices of associated products, like fertilizerInflation and food inflation are rising.Expected cuts to interest rates are now on hold and may even turn into hikesStock markets are falling on expectations of a recessionand dollar denominated asset markets, vulnerable to higher interest rates could soon be tottering on the brink of collapse While there is a lot of commentary on all this, there is hardly any discussion of that the war on Iran means for the dollar system and to the prospects of de-dollarization? In this Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai discusses the ins and outs of this question with Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, who has served, inter alia, with the IMF, the New Development Bank and the Brazilian government.

Starting Sunday, 22 March 2026, Radhika Desai is leading a Capital Reading Group on line. It will consist of an hour’s lecture followed by at least an hour’s discussion.In her lectures, Radhika will be presenting an interpretation of Capital that she arrived at in the course of developing Geopolitical Economy, the Marxist approach to understanding the international relations of the capitalist world, which placed imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance at its centre and has required rescuing Marx’s original analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production from more than a century and a half of misinterpretation by Marxists themselves.In this first episode, Radhika analyses an Introduction by Ernest Mandel as well as two Prefaces by both Marx & Engels.