Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Alex Krainer: When “the Few” Run the World, “the Many” Should Rise

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

The world order is changing. The West is no longer the undisputed center of global power. Europe is gradually experiencing a decline in influence. Developing nations are emerging as formidable competitors. Economic elites are increasingly locked in battles with one another. Meanwhile, public awareness is rising in a wave unlike anything seen before.These are the arguments put forward by Alex Krainer, market analyst and founder of Krainer Analytics, in his conversation with Gita Wirjawan. In this episode, Krainer invites us to rethink the long-term trajectory of our world and reflect on what truly matters about our shared humanity in an era of war: preserving our freedom, or becoming servants of the system.Full topics:0:00:00 - Intro0:01:30 - Grew up with history, power, and politics0:05:50- How war intellectually shaped Alex Krainer0:11:40 - "The European Union is going to disintegrate"0:20:26 - Civil war: "The clash is inevitable"0:28:30 - Ukraine-Russia hostility “will never end”?0:34:45 - Neocolonialism: “You’re conquering a country through debt."0:39:35 - Oil price could worsen0:43:55 - Eschatological look of the Middle East conflict0:50:53 - Iran: “This isn’t Trump’s war”0:53:45 - We can’t avoid Thucydides Trap1:00:40 - Oligarchy, “this is by design”1:08:30 - Why we can beat plutocracy#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #AlexKrainer------------------You may also like these episodes:   • We’re Not in World War III Yet, Realist Jo...      • Francis Fukuyama: Is Western Civilization ...      • Myth on Capitalism and Sex Industry - Kimb...  ------------------Special thanks to our “future narrators” channel members:Mariko Yoshihara, Yemotto IBRAHIM, hobi kluyuran, Fajar Prasetyo, Dyah Firgiani, Arie Gunardi, Yayi Trisnawati D, Teddy Chow, Wwertyssnb, Widi Aphrian, Faizal …Mariko Yoshihara, Yemotto IBRAHIM, hobi kluyuran, Fajar Prasetyo, Dyah Firgiani, Arie Gunardi, Yayi Trisnawati D, Teddy Chow, Wwertyssnb, Widi Aphrian, Faizal Tajuli, hndraable, hendro trihatmojo, Muhammad Taufik Evendi, Qun＇an Syukrilah, Charles Andrew Tang, Ariyo Arinsa Putra, Reda Bellarbi, Jaz Simbolon, Muhammad Ismail Mubarak, KATE WOLSKA, rrtrent892, Itje Chodidjah, Geralt Fajar Bukan, Jack Duan, Elmi CK Ong, Lucy March, Anggun Noventina, Irawan Purwono, Krishna Putra, Agnes Pranindita, nazaruddin nasir, 747sgw, Patricia S, Gusko Adnyana, Jerry Budiman, Mawan Darmawan, diah anggraini, Adrian Baskoro, Bambang Haryanto, Ezwan Zakaria, Irene Kurniati, Naufal M, Kianti Darusman, Revolution R, liza dewi, Joanna felicia, Susanto Uno, Taswin Munier, M Firaldi Akbar Zulkarnain, Seno wibowo, Hendry Ahen, Ilham R, Ferdy Reza, Ayu Arman, Haju Ara Podcast, Flores Exotic Tours, Niki S, Anita Amalia, Dewi Risnawati, birgietta katherine, Derry Harnanda, Ridwan Sakidja, Rita Sahara

Wars are great revealers. Russia and China and Iran want to build a completely new security architecture on the Eurasian continent. Which means evicting the Western colonialist powers, which have relied on this balance of power, pitting one nation against the other, keeping them constantly at war, keeping them weak, and keeping them dependent on Western powers for weapons and for credit. We might get a period of Cold War, between Iran and the West, but not the end of hostilities. More wars are coming.

Even among the ruling circles, there's increasing talk about a civil war. Hi, friends, it's a pleasure to tell you that my book, What It Takes Southeast Asia, has been released in English and Bahasa Indonesia. You can buy it through books.endgame. ID or at any of these stores. Now back to the show. Hi, friends. Today we're honored to be raised by Alex Craneer, who is from Craneer Analytics. Alex, it's a pleasure to have you on our show.

Thank you for having me, Gita. Thank you for the invite and my warm greetings to all your viewers and listeners. Yeah. I grew up with a lot of people from your country. You were born in what was called then Yugoslavia. You spent time in Venezuela, Switzerland, and the U.S., and you're a student of history, power, and politics. Explain to our audience here, your intellectual journey and how your upbringing

might have shaped your intellectual journey so far. Yes, so as you said, I grew up in Yugoslavia, which is no longer. And my first 20 years were growing up in the socialist system with the one-party communist government. Our official ideology was Marxism, and I grew up in that environment. But at the same time, you know, in Yugoslavia, we were free to travel.

So we were free to go abroad. And of course, we were all attracted to the West. And as far as I can say, most of my friends, most of the people that I grew up with, we all kind of rejected Marxism because it simply wasn't delivering. We had like a chronic economic crisis, inflation, nothing was really working. We rejected Marxism, and as a young teenager, I wanted to go abroad. I wanted to go to the United States. And the one opportunity to do that was through the student exchange program. So I ended up in California,

in a place called Simi Valley, which is close to Los Angeles. I spent three years there, finished my high school there, and the first two years of college, then I got scholarship to go and study in Switzerland. And I spent the next three years in Switzerland, where I fell in love with the Venezuelan girl. And then I went to Venezuela after that because... That's a plus. Yeah. And then while I was in Venezuela, in 1993, Venezuela had a banking crisis.

And so eight or nine of the 16 largest banks in Venezuela failed. There was a complete collapse, the economy ground to a halt. and I thought, okay, so this might take forever. I'll just go back home. I'll volunteer for the military service because at the time about a third of Croatia was still occupied. And so I've done my military service.

Croatia recovered its occupied territories during that time, for which I don't take full credit, but okay, let's... And then, you know, I assumed that after the war there would be opportunities in Croatia to, you know, the country had to recover, rebuild. But nothing of the sort really happened. The economy remained in a recession. And then I had the good fortune to get offered a job in oil trading in a company in Monaco. So I came to Monaco. one thing led to another, and I'm still in Monaco today, 30 years later.

But what formed my thinking over the years was that everything, I felt that everything we were taught in school about history and economics and politics and all these very relevant social sciences were, to put it politely incomplete, And if I'm going to be more blunt, most of it was false. And one of the catalysts was obviously the war in former Yugoslavia and how that could possibly come about. Because maybe before the war erupted, literally days before the war erupted, nobody there believed that there could possibly be. war. You know, Croat, Serbs, Muslims,

Slovenians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, the society was very mixed, intertwined culturally, even through family connections. I myself am a child of a mixed marriage between a Croatian father and a Serbian

mother. And so the war took us by surprise. But once once it erupted, once there were casualties, suddenly the whole psychology of the society polarized, and from one day to the next, you could no longer have nuanced discussions about whether one side has a legitimate grievance

and the other side has a point in a different way. So suddenly war became the central observation. of the people in society. Fighting the war became the patriotic duty of every young man in the country. And that was a patriotic thing. And any new one's discussion was looked upon with suspicion that maybe you're not sufficiently patriotic. Maybe you serve the other side. Maybe you are betraying your own nation's interests. And so until the war ran its course, that's how things were. It took me a very long time to understand that the war was instigated from abroad, from outside of the country, and that this was an outcome that was planned elsewhere, not among

the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. And so I wondered why. How did all that come about? Who were the instigators and what were their incentives? And then, you know, these events are happening as we speak in other parts of the world. And so there had to be a reason. There had to be some kind of a moving principle behind it all. And I always wanted to understand where it is. Then another, you know, 9-11 was also an interesting event that kind of drew your attention and you wanted to understand.

Because in that case, it became very clear that the story didn't unfold as we were told that there was something else behind the event, an agenda, a plan, which we then saw with the global war on terror. And then the financial crisis of 2008, which was puzzling again because, you know, when you analyzed. And I, but by this time I was in the financial services industries, industry and I was running a hedge fund as an investor. So I was paying very close attention to the economic policy in Western country. And you very quickly realized that the policies were. obviously not aimed at fixing the economy, that either everybody in charge was completely incompetent or they were doing something else that they never explained to us. And so, you know, little by little, I formed my own opinions about what is going on, why it is going on that way,

and found out through my research that these plans and agendas have a very, very long continuity stretching centuries, not always from the same power centers, but the power centers, let's call it, they were same or similar structures, but the power center migrated. So it was, if we go back 2,500 years, It was in ancient Greece, then it moved to Rome, then it moved to Venice, then it moved to Amsterdam, then it moved to the city of London. And now it's probably still in the city of London, but with a powerful satellites on Wall Street, Paris, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Tokyo. and it's kind of permeating the global system and is defining the conduct of the global system.

And now it has run into viable, credible opposition in nations like Iran, Russia and China primarily. But I think that this resistance, this opposition is now gathering strength and it's gaining a much, much better understanding about the nature of what they're up against. And as they say, wars are great revealers. And so the war in Ukraine, the war in the wars in the Middle East,

they have revealed a lot to us that we didn't necessarily understand before, or maybe we suspected it, but it wasn't clearly, discernible. Now it's becoming much, much more discernible. And I think that works in our favor. When I say our favor, I mean the rest of humanity. And so I think that we are probably now at an inflection point in history where maybe the last five or six hundred years of a very Eurocentric global order is giving way to something else. And that's something else. is only beginning to take shape. And how it takes shape might depend on how well we understand it

and how effective the solutions to these problems are going to end up being. With your ability to detect what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, what's truth and what's non-truth, with respect to what's happened in the last, call it 2,500 years or the last few decades, I want to take you to Europe, right? How do you see Europe evolving on the basis of what you alluded to earlier, that there's actually some structural variables that are causing a certain event, a certain episode, or even a certain trend, which perhaps many people might have misperceived in the past?

How do you see Europe unfolding in the context of the war in Ukraine and in the context of the so-called integrated European Union? I think the European Union is going to disintegrate. Because European Union is actually in terms of power politics, it's a very similar structure to the Soviet Union. you know, where you have the European Parliament, but European Parliament doesn't decide anything. All the laws are drafted by the European Commission, and it's not even drafted by them. It's drafted by lobbyists

that then forward these laws and directives to the European Commission. European Parliament ostensibly debates them, but generally they rubber stamp whatever comes from the European Commission, and European Commission adopts whatever comes from these lobbyists. And I think in most cases, these lobbyists are invisible to us. They're actually secret. We're not meant to know who these lobbyists are,

because we shouldn't be able to trace whose interests they represent. And so this is pushing the EU on a collision course not only against countries that still care about their independence and sovereignty, it's also pushing it on a collision course with the people of the European Union who are opposed to many, maybe most of the important measures that the EU is pushing, which by now includes heavy-handed censorship. Orwellian dystopian controls of society, the desire to pen us into 15-minute cities, preparations for war against Russia, which are underway and which are taken in the most serious sense by the leaders of the EU. The ordinary people don't want to have anything to do with this. They see that their farms are under attack, the farmers are under attack. food production is being eviscerated, the energy security has collapsed, Europe's competitiveness in the global

marketplace has been lost and so forth. And then there's also this colonialist aspect, because the leading colonialist powers like France and the UK are still fighting hard to regain control of their former colonial possession. They dress it up in, you know, economic cooperation, investment, international aid, and so forth. But ultimately, it amounts to a colonialist subjugation of generally the global south. Wherever, wherever there's a labor force to be exploited, wherever there are natural resources to be extracted, they're trying very, very hard to take control of those regions. This is not the democratic will of the European people.

These are certain structures of power that have created a set of incentives that rewards the worst, most atrocious, aggressive types of behavior, and it doesn't reward a more reasonable approach to policy. I think that this collision course is only accelerating. It's, you know, the people want what they want. Basically, they want to be left alone. They want to be able to live in a reasonable, well-ordered, prosperous society. They want their children to have good education, to have safe streets in their countries,

decent health care, you know, normal things. But somehow we can never have these things, even though we pretend to be democratic regimes. People can never have what they want, but they can always have plenty of what they don't want. You know, war and insecurity and uncontrolled immigration and, you know, gender dysphoria as practically the foremost ideology of the system. Censorship on and on and on and virtually no economic operational. opportunity. This is really a big problem. And then we're getting things like GMOs, even though nobody wants GMO, you know, genetically modified foods. They're pitching insects as a new thing. Artificial meat. They're planning to completely phase out consumption of red meats by 2050. They want to completely phase out air travel. And so obviously, what the system does is very different from what they say that the system does. And what they say is, you know, we're liberal democracies of human rights and freedom of speech are sacrosanct.

We are working for just and lasting peace and blah, blah, blah, as they're preparing for war. So clearly there has got to be some kind of an organizing principle that is behind all this. because it's not the will of the people. And it's not incompetence either. Because, you know, they like to tell us, oh, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I think that's another lie, which is exactly the inverse. I think we should say never ascribe to incompetence

what can be adequately explained by malice. And so we live under. a predatory system. And it's not only predatory to the target regions of the colonialist system. It's also predatory towards the populations that live in Europe and in the West in general. And I think that now people are starting to understand all this.

They're starting to realize that. I think that one of the catalysts was the pandemic that we had six years ago. Most people were taken completely unprepared, by surprise. They never could imagine that the ruling structure of society could be so completely co-opted to flat out lie to the people about what is really going on. But as time passed and all these completely incoherent measures and incoherent narratives came into full view

and clashed with what people already knew what some of the top experts were suggesting people started understanding something is deeply wrong with our system and I think as a result there's a much, much greater discernment among people

and much less trust in the ruling structures of society. In fact, and in the media, obviously, media here have played probably the most nefarious role of all. And now the trust in media has collapsed and people are gravitating towards social media and things like X and Substack and others. I would just add that, you know, there is an increasing number of democracies that have shown real bad behavior and democracy. democratizing public goods. And they pride themselves in just being able and distributing power, but not welfare, health care, social value, moral value.

And how some of these major platforms have been so good and trying to equate democracy with algorithmic amplification, right, which is not necessarily the case. I take note of the fact that there is a widening divorce between reality and leadership, a widening divorce between policy and opinion. But I guess my question is, at the rate that these guys that are engaged in predatory behavior, they're in control of trillions of dollars of liquidity. To what extent do you think this implosion that you alluded to earlier, is still likely to take place, or the inflection rather, is still likely to take place at the rate that these predators have control over so much financial or economic power?

I can't imagine how it can be avoided. I think that the clash is inevitable. Even among the ruling circles, there's increasing talk about a civil war. And in fact, you have an American professor who is, I think, in King's College. His name is David Betts. And researching civil wars and conditions that lead to civil war led him to the conclusion that Western societies, primarily Britain and a few other European countries are not only likely to slip into a civil war, but I...

I think his words are very close to that they are explosively configured for an eruption of a civil war. And now we're seeing a gathering of social apprisings in Europe. And the response from the authorities is not to bend to the popular will, not to, you know, adjust their policy. take popular grievance into consideration, but rather to push back, to repress, to formulate systems of censorship that would completely disable free exchange of information among us. And then introduction of extremely restrictive measures

like digital IDs, controls of controls of who can participate in social media, who cannot, you know, this is being slipped under some kind of age restrictions ostensibly to protect young people from pedophiles and predators online, as though they actually care about this at all. And then introduction of central bank digital currencies. And I think that this is where we are, are most vulnerable because they have already started using sanctions to silence dissidents.

And what these sanctions amount to is a socio-economic death sentence because they suddenly cut you off from your bank account. So you can, from one day to the next, you can no longer pay bills, you can no longer buy foods. you can no longer receive money, work, you can no longer support your dependence. So it's a very, very harsh sentence, and then they're applying it in a very harsh way because they don't,

they don't just sanction the targeted person. Then they realize, aha, his spouse has a bank account. Well, we have to sanction her too, so they punish the spouse. and then if they have grandparents and so forth, they try to they try to completely disenfranchise all these people. So that's extremely harsh.

That's extremely brutal because it actually completely destroys your life. And we can imagine that if they are successful with introducing central bank digital currencies, they will be able to do this even more easily because there will be no possibility of doing any transaction in cash. But this is where I think they slip up, because throughout history, when authorities forced the people in overly restricted arrangements, people react by opting out.

So what you have is an emergence of gray and black markets, which are then extremely powerful because black markets become like a magnet, not only for consumers, they also become a magnet for entrepreneurs, because suddenly you have a marketplace where you can transact without paying any taxes, without any government red tape, without any regulation. And so it kind of awakens the entrepreneurial spirit among those who are so inclined. And, you know, if you want to limit people to, okay, so you can only consume, burn 10 liters of gasoline per week, 100%. Some clever person is going to steal a tanker truck and sell it for something in his best.

backyard. And that something is going to become a new currency, whatever it may be. Will it be pieces of silver? Will it be pieces of gold? Will it become cans of sardines or packs of cigarettes? Nobody can predict such things, but this then tends to spin out of control of the government. Because, you know, when you have a small number of people making transactions in the black markets, then you can maybe investigate, find them, and make an example of them. But if it's a whole percentage of society, then you lost control and you cannot get it back. And we've seen such example in recent years in places like Argentina or Venezuela where something close to half of the nation's GDP is being transacted on the black market.

And my friend, I have some friends in Argentina who told me, you can get anything you want in the black market. And so, of course, this is extremely interesting for the people. And it's also extremely interesting for the entrepreneurs. And the governments don't let it happen because they want to, because they think that's good. They have no choice. They lost control of the society. I call that spider web capitalism. Yes, yes.

That's correct. Spider-Web capitalism. But, you know, if you've alluded to this in the past, as it relates to the diminution of ammunition, the fiscal space compression, the continuing excessive financialization of various economies in Europe and other parts of the world, put all that in the context of the Ukraine war. How much longer are we exposed to this ongoing hostility? Well, let's say that the hot war between Russia and Ukraine is probably going to end relatively soon. It would be hard to predict how soon. But if I had to venture a guess, I would say a few months, maybe within this year, within 2026.

But the conflict is not going to end because the forces that are targeting Russia have been targeting Russia for something like 200 years now. And they will never stop. They will not say, okay, well, I guess we lost maybe. I mean, you know, I may as well say, I think that the top of the command and control structure, that hierarchy leads us to the city of London. And the city of London has been obsessed with controlling Russia and destroying it as a nation for a very, very long time.

And they will never give up. If we just go back 200 years, we had the Napoleon's invasion, which was not a French invasion of Russia. It was led by Napoleon. but practically all the countries of Europe participated in that. It was the largest invasion force ever assembled to that day. It counted about 600,000 troops. That's a very, very expensive undertaking.

Then we had the Operation Barbarossa in 1941, which was the new largest invasion force ever assembled against Russia, ever assembled against anywhere. When the Operation Barbarossa launched in July of 1941, it counted about 3.5 million troops, and within the first year, it rose to 600,000, sorry, 6 million troops. again, it was led by Hitler's Nazi Germany, but virtually all European nations participated in this undertaking. Some countries as allies, but other countries allowed recruitment of volunteers in large numbers.

And so that again is a very, very expensive undertaking because you cannot get a man to volunteer to go to war. for just nothing because, you know, the best he can get out of it is to come back home alive. And they have to leave their families, they have to leave their businesses and farms and jobs. So that had to be incentivized. And I did a little bit of research online and I found recruitment posters that were plastered everywhere around Europe in the run-up to that invasion. including places like Serbia, which was, which it traditionally has been allied with Russia, or at least ostensibly they've been allied with Russia. So again, that tells us that there's some kind of an organizing principle behind all this,

that they have their incentive. You know, their plans are not because they're bored. if there's something they want to get there. And it's not difficult to discern what that is then, you know, because when you take into account that Russia is the wealthiest country in the world in terms of natural resources estimated between $75 and $90 trillion, when you take into account the way our financial systems work, then you realize that all this wealth can be turned into collateral.

And once you have money, good collateral, you can issue loans on the basis of that collateral. And in our financial system, loans are assets. So the minute you loan a dollar to your client, that loan becomes your asset. So you're one dollar richer. Once you take political control of a region, then you can multiply that a trillion times over. So if the Western powers took political control of Russia, that would give them a massive, massive credit impulse. And they would suddenly find themselves in control of all those financial flows that would then be extracting wealth from Russia to the money centers in the West.

And then that money could be used for other things and colonizing other parts of the world, raising bigger armies. paying more mercenary battalions and divisions and so forth. And so it's almost like a cancer. It's like a parasite that wants to infect the whole world and run the whole world and extract wealth from the whole world. In your recent conversation, I want to take you to what's going on in Middle East, just to pick up on your colonial point. We're seeing somewhat of confusion or obfuscation between balance of power and

hegemony, right? And then you alluded to just recently in a separate conversation where some, you know, colonial activities have always been about extracting assets and whatever. But what we might be witnessing in the Middle East is not necessarily for extraction of assets, right? It's just territorial hegemony or occupation or whatever. Is that the right way of thinking? Well, it's both in fact, you know, the balance of power serves the purpose of preventing any power from emerging as a regional hegemon that could then, they could then say no to the dictator of the Western Empire.

Take example, Iran. Iran is now a regional power with, you know, in military terms, escalatory dominance in the region. So you want to weaken that power. And you want to use the other powers and, you know, the United States and other other allied nations. to cut Iran down the size. Maybe regime change it,

but the regime change serves the purpose of political control. And once you have political control, then you can start selling these investments and then what would happen is BlackRock would go in and they would make investments. They would start buying up Iranian companies and taking the controlling share. You know, in these parts of the...

the world, companies tend to be well-oiled machines. There may be some corruption there, but generally they tend to be profitable with low debt loads. So that means that you can load them up with debt up to their eyeballs. What that means is you issue credit to them. That credit now is your asset and those companies now have to pay back those credits which creates a financial flow from Iranian companies to City of London and Wall Street Banks. And then you start funding development of resources that will create more. So you're basically conquering a country through debt. And then as they have to repay that debt, that means that all the wealth or most of the wealth that is being generated in that country is being extracted to Western money centers.

So, you know, the balance of power is subordinated to this objective. The political control of any nation in any region is subordinated to that same objective. and then the economic side of the equation, the investments and the development of those regions also serves that exact same objective. And this has been the history of European colonialism for centuries. This is why today, after two, three hundred years of rampant colonialism, most of the colonized nations still live in other destitution.

misery. They have hardly any infrastructure. The infrastructure that has been built has been built only to serve the purpose of extraction. So Europeans will brag about, oh yeah, we civilized African countries, India, whoever. We built their rail networks. But they only built the rail networks that they needed to extract the resources, to transport them to the ports, and then to bring them to the Western markets. They didn't do it like China to be able to transport one million passengers a day on 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail networks. So, you know, it's just another in the whole canopy of lies

that is concealing the true nature of this colonialism. We're currently exposed to potentially 10 to 20% supply site disruption when it comes to oil. Yes. In addition to which other derivatives, right, collard gas, phosphate, fertilizers, and all that good stuff, on which good chunks of the world are dependent upon, right? And I guess my question to you is the impact on the global economy. And I want to infuse to this question of the eschatological variable that could be driving the longevity or the length or duration of this hostility or war. And how is that going to draw the picture in terms of how the world economy is going to look if that argument holds in terms of. terms of sustaining the war for a much longer period of time than expected.

I think we'll have to find out because I think it's impossible to predict. Obviously, we had the greatest disruption to the oil markets in the whole history of oil markets. I don't think that the markets have yet digested what had happened. You know, we are now trading the barrel of Brent crude oil. trading below $100 a barrel. That may seem high compared to where it was in September, October, which was around $60 a barrel, but it's not high compared to what we had in 2022, when we hit $120 a barrel. In 2008, we hit $140 a barrel. So where we are now, given the circumstances, is relatively low. And I think that it's been kept low through, you know,

narrative manipulation through market manipulation in the commodities futures markets, and also in United States selling off their, how do you call it, strategic petroleum reserves. But that's going to hit a wall at some point. If the war in the Middle East escalates once more, there's a risk that this, let's call it, 10% disruption where about 10% of crude oil has been removed from the global marketplace might triple. It might go to 30, 32%. Because what is the American and Israeli idea?

Oh, to hurt the Iranians, we're going to destroy their energy infrastructures. And the Iranians had said, fine. You do that, we're going to destroy the energy infrastructure in the whole region. And if they do that, that's about 32% of global oil supply that is taken out of the market. So I think that the Trump administration is going to try to avoid an escalation. But at this point, you know, the Iranians who now understand the power that they wield and the leverage that they have over the Western countries, they're going to exploit this to its greatest effect to try to evict

Western colonialist powers from the region. And I think that they have support of Russia and China in this, because Russia and China and Iran want to build a completely new security architecture on the Eurasian continent, which means evicting the Western colonialist powers, which have relied on this balance of power, pitting one nation against the other, keeping them constantly at war, keeping them weak, and keeping them dependent on Western powers for weapons and for credit. So this comes to an end. How long it will take and how bad the situation will become? I wouldn't dare to try to predict, but I think we're

certainly looking at a fairly dramatic transition from the old security architecture to the new. Now, if you ask me about the eschatological dimension of this, this is practically crazy town. You know, I first came across this about a year ago, and I spoke with a good friend of mine who is a devout Muslim, but he studies Islamic and Christian and Jewish eschatologies. And he explained this to me from, you know, particularly the Jewish eschatology. I was taken aback. I thought, okay, so this is, this is so profoundly irrational that I can't see it forming policy, you know. But then over time, as you observe events taking place, people's statements, you do a bit of research, you go to this Jewish sect of Habad Lubavich and their most powerful rabbis like the late

Rabbi Schneerson. And you see their relationship with the leading segment of political and military structures in Israel, then you realize that this is a real thing. And so it appears that what they're trying to achieve is what they call the redemption of Israel. Redemption of Israel, my understanding, and this is the correct understanding. It may sounds completely irrational, but basically what they're trying to do is they're trying to usher Armageddon. Armageddon basically means that the whole world will unite against Israel

and that they will end up punishing Israel very severely and the Israelis. And it is this punishment that then allows for the redemption of Israel. Why is this important? It's important to, because it's only after redemption of Israel that the Messiah will reveal himself. Now, how do they get to Armageddon? Basically, they have to unite the world against them. And the way they do it is by misbehaving in the worst possible ways.

So, you know, the genocide of the Palestinians, the genocide of Lebanese now, the brutal atrocities inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank, on Arabs in Syria, the attack on Iran, the killing of Iranian leaders, the constant hostilities shown towards countries like Turkey, like Egypt, like Pakistan as well. This is all creating an anger that's kind of coalescing and it's slowly uniting the world. against Israel. And so this can then lead to Armageddon. The big great war in which the Israelis get their punishment

and then their redemption and then comes the Messiah. And then even this whole story in itself is so incoherent that they had to invent the second Messiah.

So there's going to be two messiahs. First, not the real one and then the real one, the real one. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the first Messiah would be Ben Joseph, who could conceivably not even be Jewish. So let's say Donald Trump could be in that role, or alternatively, could be Jared Kushner, somebody like that. But then after that comes the real Messiah. We don't know who the real Messiah might be, but if I'm going to venture a guess, I would say it would be somebody from the Rothschild family. And then, you know, the idea is that you're going to have a period of history that they call the Pax Judaica.

The whole world is going to unite in a new global order. The capital of that global order would be in Jerusalem under a Jewish king. And that then presupposes the dissolution of the United States. And there can't be rival powers like Russia, like Iran, like China and so forth. This has to be the shining city on the hill. And everybody else has to be subordinated to this one-world government in Israel. So that's their idea. That's basically the outlines of their eschatological agenda.

But this is not, we are not the first generation to be looking at this. You know, practically every generation has these rabbis that fantasize about, you know, ruling the world, subordinating the whole world to them. And during the past 2,000 years or so, it hasn't worked out so well. I don't see how it works out this time around. But you can see that they're trying very, very hard. And they're trying, you can. I mean, just yesterday, the United States House Armed Services. Committee passed the

2007 NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which basically merges U.S. military with Israeli with the IDF and makes the United States military with all their most advanced

technologies, most advanced weapons system, they become subordinated to the Israeli military leadership. And then presumably the Israelis think that they will be able to wield the United States as their own proxy military power. And you see that there's increasing talks about bringing back the draft conscription.

Ballanteer is all over that. And if they are influential enough that they can slip this provision into NDAA, then there may be powerful enough to slip in a provision. to institute a draft and then you know maybe raise a million two million three million men army for the future plan to go against Iran when when they regroup so this is what they're doing how it appears how do you see the role of China in all this and I guess I'm trying to get at the possibility of an off-ramp in an near foreseeable future so that there's world peace in a near foreseeable future so that many of us or

most of us or even all of us can feel a little bit more stable and peaceful. Trump needs an orphan because he's losing and it's becoming harder and harder to conceal this fact. So he has to find a face-saving way to just basically back off. But this isn't Trump's war. You know, Trump started this war. Trump was maneuvered into launching it, maybe because he thought it would be an easy thing to regime change Iran and take political control in Tehran.

That didn't work out. And so he needs to back off for his political reason because he's losing. But this war basically was a convalued. of a continuity of policy that stretches back far beyond Trump administration. As General Wesley Clark revealed, there has been an agenda to take down seven nations in five years. And we learned about that in 2007, but that conversation that Wesley Clark was referencing took place in 2001. So the five years where Iran was supposed meant to fall within 2006.

That didn't happen, but it tells you that the same policy that is still targeting Iran stretches back at least 25 years. So even if Trump engineers an off-ramp for himself, that doesn't mean that those forces that want to take down Iran. And whatever incentives are pushing them in that direction, they're not going away. That's, you know, this Anglo-Zionist conspiracy is going to regroup. They're going to co-op the next American president and the one after that president and the one after. And they will never stop. And the same is true for Russia, you know, they will never try to stop. trying to destroy Russia as well, and then China.

If you go back about five years, and you look at the discourse among the American political class, you can see that they were very, very determined to go to war against China. And the talk was, 100% will be at war against China by 2025. That was the talk in 2020, 21, 22, 23. And that was all escalating. There was a famous interview between Tucker Carson and Marjorie Taylor Green. And she told him that, look, I'm sitting with these people. And they're talking about war against Russia, against China.

Like it's a sure thing. Like, we're doing this. It's not even a question of maybe or we are doing this. And they were preparing for that war. Trump changed the priorities. So Trump, for whatever reason, decided, yeah, we'll go against Iran first. Maybe it was even, you know, if they managed to take control of Iran, it would have been that much easier to go after China.

Now that kind of fell apart. The Chinese are perfectly aware of all this. They understand. when Trump was in China last month, Xi Jinping flat out told him, can we avoid the Thucidity's trap where, you know, the waning power tries to take down the rising power.

And I think that Xi Jinping knows the answer to that question. And the question is, no, we cannot avoid that. we will get an off-ramp. We might get a period of Cold War between Iran and the West, but not the end of hostilities. And I think that they will never stop trying to take down China, Iran, Russia, but maybe that escalation will be delayed by who knows, maybe five years, 10 years, maybe 20 years.

In the meantime, we might get a situation with Iran, which will be like northern Cyprus or, you know, or, you know, the two Koreas or something like that. But the wars, more wars are coming. And I think that the situation will ultimately be resolved in a total defeat of one side or the other. I think that now at the present time, Given that Russia, China, and Iran perfectly understand what they're up against, they understand their playbook, they understand their strategy, their tactics, as well as their weak points. I think that those three nations will take steps to weaken the Western Empire. and I think that they will be able to do that

and ultimately defeat the Western Empire. And then you're going to get a transition from Western-centric world to something else, to hopefully a multipolar global order and a long period of peace. Because most of the wars that we've lived through and the ones that we haven't lived through because they happened before.

They're always instigated by this Western colonialist empire. The United States between 1946 and today has instigated more than 80% of all wars fought around the world. That's since World War II. And we're talking about something in the neighborhood of 200 wars fought in the world in the last 80 years. so once this system falls, once this system collapses,

then an era of peace becomes possible. And then we'll have to figure out how to defend that peace because these oligarchic structures can emerge in any society. And then again, they're inclined towards perpetuating colonialism, But something about the Western Empire has been unique in human history in the sense of, I think that the Western empires have been the most ruthless and destructive to the world, because we destroyed six major indigenous civilizations around the world in the last 500 years, and we've destroyed literally thousands of different cultures and tribes.

kingdoms and we've depopulated huge sways of the earth. You know, like there isn't a single native Tasmanian left in Tasmania. Well, I can speak of some parts, you know, other parts of the world. I mean, I come from Southeast Asia. I mean, we had a good taste of colonization for a 300 years. Some parts by 80 or 90 percent. by Western colonialists. Yeah, I guess, you know, until there's peace,

we're all exposed here in Southeast Asia to uncertainties, right? And just to give you a sense, we consume about 5 million barrels of oil per day, of which we produce 2 million. So that remaining 3 million barrels of oil, every litter of that goes through the straight-of-form moves, as much as one might want to think about re-architecting the pre-existing supply side architecture, that's going to take time.

Yes. Because the differential crude specs and all that. And the strategic reserves range only between 20 to 65 days, unlike China and Japan, which have probably about a year's worth of supply. So they can withstand this, you know, longer than most. And I can just see how the global South in general is so exposed to these uncertainties. I guess you mentioned the word oligarch. I can't resist asking you.

I mean, you know, I call it participative inequality, right? How oligarchs have been able to actually thrive because of democratic institutions, as opposed to despite democratic institutions which were tasked to actually help democratize public goods. But inequalities are rising. and oligarchical forces are just thriving because of these democratic institutions which are actually supposed to support forces or elements beyond oligarchs. Talk about that. Well, Gita, my conviction is that this is by design.

Because you see, in an autocratic regime, like Russia, like China, like Iran, the political power is above the oligarchic power, right? The oligarchs are subordinated to the top of the political hierarchy. And so if the behavior of oligarchic families, clans, individuals becomes abusive, the sovereign, whether it be the Grand Ayatollah, the spiritual leader of a country, whether it's the head of the Communist Party, whether it's Vladimir Putin, head of the president of the Russian Federation, they can cut the oligarchs down to size. And we saw that happen in Russia.

I think Russia was one of the most amazing real-life experiments in that, because when Russia transitioned from communism to capitalism, let's pretend that that's how it was. What actually happened is that the political and economic power shifted from the Communist Party to a group of oligarchs. And all these oligarchs were trustees for Western financial interests. And during the 1990s, while Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russian Federation, these oligarchs were the top of the food chain,

and they ran the country as they saw fit for their own best interest, that is, for the best interests of their foreign sponsors. And we saw trillions of dollars of Russia's wealth looted and extracted to Western financial centers. Russia itself turned into a basket case. it was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. You had practically collapse of law and order. You had gangs having shootouts on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The military was in disarray.

The different republic stopped paying taxes into the federal budget. Many of them wanted to break off, become independent countries. So Russia was, it was a beginning of the deal. disintegration of Russia, what the Western interests actually wanted to achieve. And then Vladimir Putin came to power, and he started to reverse this. And one of the first things he did is he summoned a group of 15 of the most powerful oligarchs, lined them up. Well, he set them down at a big roundtable in the Kremlin, and he told them,

a gentleman from today on we have a different rule of the game. We will not nationalize your assets. So what you stole stays with you. Your obligation is to run your businesses, pay your taxes correctly, treat your employees correctly, and stay out of politics. And this last condition was the most painful one. That was practically a declaration of war. And so a number of oligarchs tried to challenge Putin.

government, they all lost. It was, you know, it wasn't like a bloody purge, like a knight of long knives that suddenly all these oligarchs started turning up dead. It was usually a, in every case it was a legal process. The cases went to court, but the government prevailed. And this was clearly a turning point. And then the only one of these oligarchs who ended up in prison in 2003 was Mikhail Kodorkovsky, who was one of the seven bankers. You know, it was, that period was actually called Sembankirschchina in Russian, the rule of seven bankers. And he was the most important of them.

He ended up in prison, not for challenging Vladimir Putin, but for tax evasion, you know, kind of like Al Capone. But he spent nine years in prison, and other oligars had to make peace. with the fact that they're no longer in charge. And we have seen the transition of Russia from that time on. Russia went from a complete basket case to one of the leading global powers, not only in military terms,

but also in terms of Russia blossomed in terms of diversification of their economy, standards of living, return to the rule of law, and the ability to resist the dictatorship of the Western Empire. So it has become a power to reckon with.

And this happened basically by putting the oligarchs into their sandbox. This is where you can play. Enjoy your wealth, run your businesses, do whatever you want, stay out of politics. And what happened in democracy is this

got inverted. So now you have elected leaders who are ostensibly in charge, but they're not because the oligarchy is above them and they are subordinated to the democracy. And here also we have a contemporary testimony from the British Prime Minister, Liz Truss. Liz Truss about two years ago, she went on Steve Bannon's war room and she gave us a big, reveal. She said, well, when I became a prime minister, I thought I was going to be in charge. I thought I was going to be to implement my policies. But what I found out is that actually Bank of England is in charge and that they craft the policies that we have to then follow. And she was out very quickly. But what she told us is a revelation because we know that the elected

leaders don't formulate policies. They don't implement, you know, they implement the policies that are handed down to them from the Bank of England. And the Bank of England is a private institution. Well, formally it's a public institution, but in reality, Bank of England is controlled by the private city of London banks. And they run the government, they run the royal household,

they run the media, they run everything that matters, actually. Alex, I know you got to go. Can I ask you one more question? Yes, please, go ahead. Are you optimistic that at some point sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to upend the pre-existing narrative of plutocracy? Yes, I'm very optimistic, Gita,

and the reason why I'm very optimistic is because there's an undeniable tsunami of political awakening happening in the world as we speak. we are the first generation of humanity that has this insane thing called the internet and social media. We get to have these conversations that we were never able to have before. We are able to source our news from a massive variety of sources. And so we get to uncover the truth. and that will enable us to re-engineer the operating system of society.

And I know that there are many people who are actually working on this. And one of the first things that we have to reform is the money system. And people are becoming aware of this. People are studying this. I don't know what Bitcoin is. I mean, I know what Bitcoin is, but I don't know if it's a solution, really or if it's a trap. I don't know that yet.

I'm agnostic. But blockchain as a technology will probably prove very useful. It'll take time, but we're getting there. And I think that every day, every day we're a step closer, not only in understanding who the real enemy is,

but also in understanding what we have to do to emancipate humanity, to de-incentivize colonialism, exploitation, war, conflict, and so forth. Only 30, 40 years ago, we literally depended on radio, television, and newspapers for the narrative. So it was very easy for the oligarchy

to control the narrative and to tell us what they wanted us to know. So it was easy to push people into war. Now this is becoming very, very difficult. And you can tell by listening to the other side. And you see that how incredibly vexed they are about social media. They're inventing all kinds of ways to try to control it, buying up TikTok. But it's, I think it's not working.

I think the genies is out of the bottle. and they're now playing whackamol. But it's not, you know, the heads that are popping up are more and more and more and more. And they're running out of hammers to hammer us with. Well, yours being one of them. Well, you know, I had my second book banned twice in 2017 and in 2018. team. And I kind of knew that was coming. But if you look at the social media space,

at the podcast, there's literally thousands of people with very sophisticated ideas and very granular understanding of different problems who are coming out, who are sharing their knowledge and their experience and you can see the traction that they're getting. So people are gravitating towards those sources and they're soaking it in. And it becomes much, much more difficult to gaslight people and to...

You can see what happens with these pandemics. You know, since 2022, I think, or 23, they tried to ramp up pandemic's care with the monkeypox. So there was like in July, 2003, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox as the global health emergency of international concern. Nothing happened. Then they tried disease X, and the disease X was going to be something. They didn't know what it was, but they knew it was going to be a lot worse than COVID. nothing happened.

Then they tried monkeypox again in August of 2024. Nothing happened. Then they tried bird flu again in November of last year. Then they tried the Hanta virus. And I suspect that story may not be able, because as we speak now, it's 5th of June. The people who were on that cruise ship, M.V. Hondias, they're still in quarantine.

And the supposed incubation period sets the critical time around mid-June. So we might start to get, you know, the Hanta virus might come back in the new cycle. They'll say like, oh, my God, you know, like people are dying from henta virus because supposedly the mortality rate is 40 to 50%. But then, you know, meanwhile, they came up with Ebola. and then something else popped up in Australia. So they're trying harder and harder, but it's getting no traction. And I think this is because they no longer control the narrative.

And so all these elements, you know, give me a lot of optimism and a lot of hope. I want to end with this, Gita. There's a Confucian saying that says, when a large tree falls, it falls with great noise and destruction. But seeds grow in silence. And so the moment we're experiencing in history is the collapse of these old structures of governance, which are fearsome, which are, you know, practically they hypnotize you, they mesmerize us. And we're paying great deal of attention to everything that's going on, the wars, the killings, the political crisis, and so forth. but these seeds are growing in silence.

So they don't draw our attention, but we have to take into a consideration that everywhere in nature, seeds are actually immensely powerful. And they grow according to nature's law, and they always grow into something very beautiful. And I think that those seeds are us. And so it's our assignment at this point in time

is to make the best of this time in history, to open our eyes, to sharpen our minds, and to do everything we can, however small it may be, to try to lead humanity towards that emancipation because the alternative is final enslavement. That was great. Alex, thank you so much. Thank you for the invite.

Thank you for your time. It was a pleasure to join you. And again, my best. to your audiences and until the next time. All right. Okay. Take care. Bye bye. Friends, that was Alex Krainer from Kraner Analytics. Thank you.