The Duran Podcast - Trump's BRICS anger and ephemeral deals

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Trump's BRICS anger and ephemeral deals

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Trump's tariffs announcements, many tariff announcements, 50% on Brazil, 25% on India, possibly 100% on so many countries in eight days now, eight days and counting. And this seems to be Trump's foreign policy tool going forward is tariffs. This is not about the U.S. economy, or at least not completely about the U.S. economy. It's not about reindustrialization or bringing manufacturing back to the United States. Tariffs have become a geopolitical weapon, at least that's how it seems. Or maybe this is about growth in the U.S. economy.

It seems like the U.S. economy is growing. Well, it is growing according to the reports, 3% GDP growth. You'll probably address that in this video. But where should we begin? Where do you think we should begin? India, Brazil, Russia. He's going after Russia really hard as well. China.

Or do you want to talk about the US economy? No, let's stop. A lot to discuss, by the way. There's an awful lot to discuss and to unscramble. But let's actually talk about the tariffs and the sanctions, because as you correctly say, they merged. I mean, it's now becoming very difficult to, if actually become impossible, to separate one from the other.

We were the first ones to mention that, by the way. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they've become a geopolitical tool. They're also, and I have to say this, if you go by the comments Trump has been making and he's been firing off one after the other on true social and various comments that he's making all over the place, they also seem to reflect the president's temper any particular moment in time. I mean, following the events at the last 24 hours, I mean, you can always get a sense of government by tantrum. So, you know, Brazil, he's angry with Brazil for all kinds of

reasons. He really doesn't like Bricks. I mean, he's got really, really angry with Bricks. He's convinced himself that Bricks is there to undermine and destroy and replace the dollar. Can you ask you a question on that? Before you continue, is that Trump that doesn't like Bricks or is it Lindsay Grab and the neocons whispering to Trump about Bricks? Because he didn't have this position about Bricks before. He even said that Spain was a part of Bricks. I don't even think he had a clear understanding about Bricks. Graham and the Neocons obviously hate Bricks.

Do you think there's that influence of the neocons with Brits? I've absolutely no doubt about it. If you go before the election, did he talk about Bricks? Barely at all. I don't remember a single comment or torture and social posts from Donald Trump about Bricks anywhere. He said nothing

about it. Suddenly, over the last couple of weeks, he's got really worked up about Bricks. I suspect that this has been a major driver in pushing him, tilting him in this direction that he seems to be taking now. He's convinced himself and has been

convinced and been persuaded by someone. And it might just possibly be Lindsay Graham for all I know. The bricks is a mortal danger to the United States and to the dollar. And you could see that this is driving his policies now. So he goes after Brazil and he brings up Bolsonaro, but he also brings up the bricks because Brazil is part of the bricks. He's very angry with India.

Here again, he seems to have hoped or expected that India, which one day he calls a good friend, he is going to somehow capitulate and agree to the kind of big trade deals that he wants, is going to agree to distance itself from Russia, buy more weapons from the United States, do those sort of things. The Indians did have a big trade delegation in Washington. Apparently, it's now returned to India. So it looks as if negotiations between India and the United States are over, at least for the moment, Trump is clearly very disappointed by this and very, very angry. He's now published on True Social comments about India like Russia being a dead economy and about India having the worst tariffs of all and how he doesn't care about India

anymore. He's going to slap 25% tariffs on them. And perhaps high. tariffs to come, 100% tariffs or 500% tariffs. But you can again see it's partly about the bricks. It's partly about the fact, obviously, that India is with trading with Russia. It's also, and this is what the Indians themselves are saying, that India is a protectionist economy in many respects. Now, you would have thought that Donald Trump, who supports and favors protection, wouldn't be angry about that and would understand it.

But apparently protectionism is good for the USA, but it's bad when it's applied by anybody else. And he really doesn't like the fact that India does have protectionist policies, which it does. And what he wanted is India to lift its restrictions on imports of food and dairy products, grain and dairy products. Now, India, bear in mind, is still very much a peasant society. I mean, it's much more than that, of course.

It's got thriving cities. It's got technology hubs. It's got all of those things. Much of India is still a peasant society. People depend there on producing milk and grain and those things. These people are very much the sort of people who support Modi and the BGRA. JP party in India. They're not people that Modi can afford therefore to ignore. And the Indian government yesterday said that it would make sure that the rights of medium and small businesses

and companies in India were going to be protected. So, I mean, they insisted on that position. And apparently that's infuriated Trump. He's very, very angry about it because he somehow believes that India and all of these countries should also import U.S. agricultural goods. So he's very angry about India. He's now doing trade deals to develop a Pakistani oil and gas complex, which may exist. Some people say it doesn't exist or whatever, but he's tilting towards Pakistan. Unaware, presumably, that Pakistan is also a close friend of China's, but anyway, never mind. He doesn't seem to be very clear with this.

So anyway, he's angry because the Indians didn't crumble and capitulate to what he's doing. He also doesn't understand that India is an economy which actually doesn't trade a great deal. I assumed that India's biggest trade partner was the United States. I discovered that it's actually China. China is India's biggest trade partner. I also assume that India was running a deficit against the United States. It's running a small surplus of $45 billion. But we're talking about an economy of around $11 trillion in terms of GDP.

This is a tiny sum for them. I mean, it's a rounding off era. So it's not going to affect India. And if you look at the Indian stock market or the performance of the very tightly controlled Indian currency, the rupee. They barely shifted in the face of all of these threats. Now, there is a strong pro-American voice within parts of the business community in India. And they also support Modi and they're apparently big funders of his. So it's possible that at some point more negotiations will come and more things will happen in, you know, a few weeks or months time, with

the dust is settled. But I doubt that India will change its underlying positions. And then, of course, his negotiators have been negotiating with the Chinese in Stockholm. Notice that we've heard very little about that, but it looks as if the Chinese are digging in their heels. I've been speaking to various people from China, people who've been tracking social media there. They point out that within China, there is social media. There is within social media what you might describe as a semi-official social media. In other words, there are outlets which are clearly well-informed and are practically connected to the government. And then, of course, there's the official media as well.

Anyway, what the semi-official media is saying is that over the course of the negotiations in Stockholm, the US not only demanded that China stop imports of Russia. Russian oil and gas, which of course China refused. But that wasn't even its main demand of China. Its main demand was that China lift all restrictions on exports of rare earths and completely open up its rare earth's industry to development by the United States. Now the Chinese again refused to do that because of course they see that as a strategic industry. The United States has strategic industries. The United States protects those industries,

as it should. China has strategic industries. Again, from Donald Trump's perspective, it looks as if other countries applied protection measures to defend their economies. That is bad. But if the United States does the same thing, that is good. And as I said, we have government. We have tantrums. He's furious with the Russians, because, They've not shown any inclination so far to capitulate to his demands. And he's now getting into a slanging match with Dmitri Medvedev, which just seems to me completely pointless. Medvedev, by the way, has responded today.

I'm not going to waste time going over all of that. But, I mean, as I said, it's very bizarre to see. He is getting, and then one has to say this, some successes. I mean, he's got that South Koreans and the Japanese to agree unfavourable deals with him. And favourable to them. We'll come to that, just a moment. He's also got Ursula von the Lion to do all of these things. But again, what I do think he realizes is perhaps a point which is in your mind is that these things are ephemeral and even fantastic.

Because he's asking the year, he's getting the Europeans to buy 750 billion. dollars of energy from the United States over three years, which is impossible. I mean, everybody says these are fantasy numbers. There's no way that the United States can, rather that the Europeans can buy that quantity of energy from the United States. He wants the Europeans to invest $600 billion in the US economy. Osula has agreed to that, but again, that makes absolutely no sense at all because how is Ursula going to force European industry to do that? And for all we know, EU member states might balk at funding direct investments themselves. He's got South Korea, apparently, to commit to spending money on the US energy system and to import an energy.

Exactly. The trouble is, again, Trump doesn't seem to realize that the United States is now making more commitments to sell LNG than it actually has because, I mean, first of all, it looks as if production in the US has peaked and there are geological and technological limits that have now been established. So, I mean, he's making deals that have an element of. fantasy about them. So this is the problems that we are starting to see. So in the long term, these deals which look so good to Trump now may not mean what he thinks they mean in the long

term. In fact, they definitely won't. So it's very chaotic and it's very, very muddled, but it is gradually moving the United States towards a situation where it has very high tariffs with most of the world. The last figure I saw was 17.5% tariffs overall in terms of trade. I think this latest round is going to push that further up, so we could be getting 20% tariffs with most of the world. This is much higher than what we see. saw in the 1930s, it's probably much higher than what US industry needs. It's a chaotic picture because you're going to have different tariff levels with different economies around the world. And that's going to be incredibly confusing. So, you know, one tariff with South Korea,

a different tariff with, I don't know, Madagascar. You know, it's going to be an extremely difficult thing to administer. It's going to be a smugglers jarter. So you can see, you know, say South Korea will move its goods to a country with a lower tariff regime and all kinds of things will happen because they'll start to feed in products into the United States in that way. He's imposing tariffs on India just to come back to India, which undermines Apple's plan to relocate from China to India and to export to make its iPhones and its tablets and his laptops in India. to sell them to the United States, which probably means, by the way, that the Indians will transfer to buying and having laptops made, getting to doing deals with Chinese companies, which also, of course, make tablets and all those things. So, I mean, it is very, very confusing and very, very chaotic.

And it is not, as far as I'm concerned, the way you conduct a trade policy. I mean, and it's certainly not the way you would conduct a protectionist policy. And, well, there it is. Well, I agree with you, but it is the way you would conduct a marketing policy, right? And I would say it's not the way you conduct a geopolitical foreign policy, but it does seem like Trump is using the tariffs to conduct foreign policy. Actually, he definitely is using the tariffs to conduct foreign policy. We warned about this. We said that tariffs are not to be used to conduct foreign policy.

But there it is. Tariffs are now being used in much the same way that sanctions were used. And we know that we know the damage that sanctions have done to the United States and to the collective West and to the world, really. It's a marketing policy, though, to me, above everything else, it seems as if this is meant to give the U.S. an economic sugar high in a way before, before. it comes down crashing. Yeah. I mean, you know, you look at the GDP, the 3% GDP growth and the money that, that allegedly the U.S. is bringing it in from all of these tariffs.

And I'm thinking short-term, you know, wow. And people in the U.S. seem to be, you know, amazed at what's going on. They seem to be very happy at what is happening with the revenue that Trump is talking about that's being brought in from all these tariffs and the constant announcement on social media. This is, he's doing this on purpose. I mean, he's putting out all these. posts on purpose talking about all the great deals because he wants to show that he's that he's

making all of these great deals. He wants to show the American people. Look at all the deals that I'm making. Look at all the money that I'm making. $750 billion in EU energy purchases and $600 billion in investments and another $100 billion from South Korea and oil and gas in Pakistan that we're going to be exploring. There are physical, like physical limits to all of this that he doesn't talk about. nor can you put into a truth social post.

You can't express the details in a truth social post, the fact that the United States would have to redirect all of its LNG production to Europe to even get to the halfway mark of the 750 billion purchases over three years. I mean, it just can't be done. It can't be done. Physically, physically, it can't be done.

But it's a marketing. gimmick to me in a way. I mean, it is providing real results in that money is coming in. But I guess my question to you is, what happens after this sugar high wears off? Well, indeed. That's the big, that is the very big question because, of course, we're getting completely different pictures about the economy. And this is something that I've been reading in mainstream media, which is hostile to Trump, and one has to allow for that. So they have an in-building, and in-building, buyers to play down the economy down, but I'm also reading it from people who are actually been up to know very sympathetic to Trump. I mean, what has basically been happening is that

there's been a secular trend, a long-term trend in the United States for manufacturing to decline. And that has continued during the time that Donald Trump has been president. I mean, there's been the odd uptick in industrial production. But overall, it's his history. It's a continuing to receive. It's continuing to go downward. What is happening at the same time, in the meantime, is a number of things which are keeping the GDP figures. And this is a point which, again, needs to be reiterated. We've made it, but many, many times. High GDP growth, as the Biden era showed, is not a good guide ultimately as to the true. underlying state of the economy. So GDP is being inflated. It's been goosed up, if you like,

by a number of factors. So we've had this major instability in terms of tariffs. So tariffs are coming, going. Nobody's been absolutely sure. So there's been a rush to import things into the United States in advance of the tariffs. That's built up inventories. Those inventories are being run down. Apparently, imports are now falling fast. The rush of imports, however, pushed up the receipts from the tariffs, which enabled Trump to say, look, I've got all of this money coming in, and this proves that the tariffs are working as a revenue raising measure. But of course, now that imports are apparently falling, is likely,

that that rush of money is going to start to recede before long. And in the meantime, of course, companies are now running down their inventories. And that also is having a statistical effect on the GDP figures. And that was the reason why we got 3% growth in the second quarter. It's not because the underlying economy is improving. Now, there are reports that if you're looking at spending overall in the economy, it is actually falling. And when I think is the most interesting thing, and it's been pointed out by, well, I had confirmation of it from somebody who actually lives there, which is that in Vegas, they're having a very bad season. Tourists are not turning up. They're not spending money there. When they do go, they don't spend as much money as they should.

The impression is that people are running short of money again, that the situation in the economy is that inflation is gradually ticking up again and that this is causing a sense of stress, a stress in household budgets, and that that is starting to reflect itself in a fallen spending. And of course, if you have tariffs coming in, that will have an inflationary effect on top of all that we have seen. And it's likely that even though Trump so far is not succeeding in cutting Russia's energy exports, he's now also going against Iran's energy exports. This is going to have a complicating and disorganizing effect. We're going to have probably very high tariffs, 100% tariffs, 500% tariffs against Russia itself. That's not going to affect the US, but it's going to make people

nervous, that might push up energy prices in even more. Oil prices have been rising over the last couple of days. The oil market is actually quite tight, contrary to what many believe. So we could start to see further rises in inflation in the United States in the autumn. And we could also all of this, despite the fact that household budgets, it seems, are already barkling. and people are cutting down on spending. Now, if all of this happens and if all of this adds up in the way that people are saying

and at the moment the figures are confusing, but if this is all, as people are saying, then in the next couple of months, we could start to see the economy fall and even a recession happen. Now, Trump has previously said that he would not be afraid of a recession and he even told people at one point

early in the spring that if putting the United States on a protectionist path required a short recession, he was prepared to accept that. But then he said that and then he imposed all these so-called retaliatory tariffs and then he withdrew them. So it could be that, you know, again, he's saying more than he really means. We'll just have to see what happens if there is a recession and people's incomes in the United States are put under pressure again

and real wages, which apparently are falling against, start to fall further. Well, what then happens, it's difficult to say. It's impossible to believe that this won't affect Trump's popularity in the United States and it won't cause major fissures within his MAGA movement. But how Trump himself will respond will just have to. license. Yeah, I mean, I agree with Trump's thinking in that, you know, if we have to go through a recession, that's fine. But go through a recession with the goal being a flat tariff policy, a simple flat tariff policy, which hopefully brings back industry. Yeah. I mean, I thought that

was the plan. Yeah. I thought that was what his policy was all about. Five or five, 10% tariffs, make it simple, make it easy to understand, don't make it complicated, don't make it about bullying or punishing or retaliation, make that the policy work to bring manufacturing back to the United States, at least get it started. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take many, many years. But at least get the ball rolling. I thought, and if you have to go through a recession, okay, at least the American

people are going to understand that. We're doing this because in the future, five or 10 years out, our goal is to bring back a certain amount of manufacturing or industry or something like that. I think American people would understand that. But that's not what's playing out. What's playing out is I don't like Bolsonaro. I mean, I don't like Lula because of what's happening with Bolsonaro. Whatever your position is on that. I don't, you know, whatever. If you're pro-Bulsano, pro-Lula, whatever. But the policy is, I like Bolsonaro. I hate Lula. 50% tariffs. India, you're buying Russian weapons, 25% tariffs. We're losing the conflict in Ukraine, and Ukraine's going to become my Afghanistan. What Afghanistan was to Biden, that's what Ukraine

is going to be to me. Trump knows it. He's losing. Russia's defeating NATO. 100% tariffs. That's my only solution. That's my solution. I can't defeat Russia. We're going down. We're going down in flames, I made the stupid, dumb decision to listen to Keith Kellogg and Lindsay Graham. I'm going to stick with Keith Kellogg and Lindsay Graham, even though J.D. Vance and Steve Wickcalf were telling me a whole different story, but I ignored them and I'm going to stick with the loser policy of Kellogg and Lindsay Graham. And because I'm so upset with this, I'm going to place 100% tariffs on all the countries trading with Russia. I mean, this is not What he sold us on with tariffs.

No, agreed. It's the exact opposite. It's exactly the opposite. You're absolutely correct. I mean, that was, by the way, I thought that that was what he was talking about. I mean, he talked about William McKinley and William McKinley's tariff policies. William McKinley was spinning in his grave, if he could see this. This is not what William McKinley was about at all.

First of all, the tariffs are much higher, as I understand it, than McKinley's taboo. were. And as you correctly said, McKinley had a clean tariff policy, which is consistent right across the board, and which was not contaminated by all these extraordinary, you know, geopolitical and frankly ego-based concerns. So, I mean, it is completely different. And of course, the United States in McKinley's time had an industrial policy which complemented the tariff Borisi. They two went hand in hand. The United States doesn't have that at the moment. And I get to here express my own fear. And I use the word fear. Because one of the other big problems is that the US is over leveraged. We have very high debt to GDP ratios in the United States, probably

over 100%. The economy itself, a lot of businesses are over leveraged as well. The Trump administration promised us that they were going to work to reduce the deficit. I mean, that was another thing. It was going to be part of the re-industrialization program, I mean, which would be correct. I mean, one of the things you want to do, you want to build up manufacturing. It's a well-known understanding that if you, in order to increase manufacturing, you have to level demand so that you don't get a over demand. You don't have an overheated economy. So you have to cut spending. You have to reduce your deficit to bring it more into alignment with demand, internal demand. So in fact, he's doing

the opposite. The budget deficit is growing. I mean, despite, you know, the old uptick in receipts and things of that kind. I mean, defense spending is off the scale. I mean, it's now running at over a trillion. The Doge experiment was ultimately a failure. So, I mean, again, huge overspending on the same kind of scale as we saw during the Biden period, a runaway bubble, as far as I'm concerned, on Wall Street, narrowly based around a small number of tech companies driven by AI. Now, you know, I'm not saying AI isn't real and that it isn't going to change things in

the end. But if you remember back in the 90s, there was a similar bubble around, you know, tech and internet things at that time. And nobody's saying that that technology wasn't real. But it got out of control. I mean, there was overinvestment, which went far beyond earnings and the whole thing began to get unstable and eventually it led to a fall in stock market values and then there was a housing bubble that replaced it and it all took us to 2008. So we have a, you know,

a very over stimulated stock market. Also, it seems to me, I'm, you know, not as speculator. I'm not the expert on stock market. And we have a president who in the middle of this situation where budget deficit is increasing and where there's all this going on in Wall Street and where his tariff policy is likely to put upward pressure on inflation as well, he wants the Fed to cut rates, which if he's successful in doing, is obviously going to stimulate the economy even further. It will give another sugar rush. it does start to run a very serious risk of overheating. And if we start to get serious overheating, then of course the inflation numbers are going

to start to take off. So I don't think he understands this. I don't think people are advising him about this properly. Again, I can't help but think that he's approaching a lot of this very much as the real estate person. He wants low interest rates. He wants high demand because that's always good for real estate. And he assumes that the entire economy works in that way, which, well, some parts of the economy do.

But manufacturing emphatically doesn't. Yeah. A final question. Do you think that the geopolitical part of this policy, if you want to call it a policy, this tariff, policy that Trump is initiating is aimed at at defeating Russia, marginalizing China, breaking apart Russia and China, keeping down India, keeping Brazil in check. Bricks, do you think that there's a lot of this tariff policy, the geopolitical

part of it, the things that Lindsey Graham and the neo-cons telling Trump is directed at Bricks in a way is the White House or Trump's method to somehow pull out some sort, pull off some sort of a victory when it comes to Project Ukraine and also deal with China, India, Brazil, all at one go. Did you understand my question? It feels like this is about, okay, so if I do all of, If I do all these tariffs, if I put all this pressure on these countries, if I throw out all these threats, if I try to tell, because because Bessens, from what I understand, told China, drop Russia, drop Russia now or else 100% tariffs. I think we're getting the same messaging to India.

Drop Russia. So obviously, he's trying to break apart bricks. Yes. And at the same time, he's stuck in Project Ukraine. He's all in in Project Ukraine. He's going with each passing day, he's getting more and more bogged down in Project Ukraine. But perhaps the only way out of Project Ukraine is to destroy bricks, which would, in his mind, defeat Russia and cause Russia to agree to capitulate and to agree to the Kellogg Seasfire plan.

I think the way they've rationalized this is, okay, we're not going to defeat Russia on the battlefield. We're not going to get a regime change with sanctions. So let's work backwards. And then we're not going to be able to eventually get to China because we wanted to defeat Russia to get to China. So let's work backwards. Let's just go directly towards bricks, try to break them all up, try to smash them. And then that will take us eventually to the defeat of Russia in Ukraine.

I mean, it's a word. Yeah. That's exactly what they're trying to do. I mean, this is a full frontal assault on bricks. And Trump is talking about. this. I mean, by the way, just a few days ago, I mean, this is it so just to you how zany the whole thing was becoming. He said that Bricks was dead. That all his threats kept people away from the Rio meeting and that proved that bricks no longer existed to any extent. But

now he's back to worrying about Bricks and it's a full frontal assault on bricks in every single direction. Again, this doesn't look at why Bricks developed in the first place, which is that, of course, it came about precisely as a response to this kind of economic coercion and pressure that the United States has been exerting. And the assumption seems to be that if you intensify that pressure even more, then you will arrive at that point where everything cracks and, you know, bricks finally falls apart. But do more of the same, but do much more of it. And eventually you will get there. Now, I don't myself think that's going to happen. I think, again, this completely misunderstands the dynamics of bricks.

It doesn't show much understanding, for example, of the nature of the Indian economy or of the Chinese economy. I mean, China's biggest trade partner now is not the United States. as the Americans appear to think. It's Asia. I mean, China trades much more with the East Asian states, the other East Asian states, than it does with the United States. And I don't see that changing. I don't see them placing the kind of restrictions on their trade with China that the Americans are.

So that is likely to bind those countries closer to the bricks than not. So, you know, and of course with Brazil, China is also, Brazil. biggest trading partner, having overtaken the United States there as well. And if we're talking about Russia, I mean, it's hopeless, I find, trying to get Americans, some Americans, to understand the realities about the Russian economy. Kellogg made an extraordinary speech, or gave an extraordinary interview the other day, which he was talking again about the fact we need to tighten up exports because Russia is a petro state. And it was, we do that, the oligarchs will rebel and they'll force Putin to change course.

I mean, this is, I remember people saying this back in 2014 that, yeah, apparently there was even an intelligence report that German intelligence gave to Merkel, which said that, you know, if we imposed the sectoral tariffs that Obama and Merkel imposed on Russia in June 2014, then within six months, the oligarchs will have forced Putin either to change course or will replace him. I mean, had Kellogg's used to be stuck with this. I mean, I even remember there was a time when there was internet chatter because Putin wasn't around for a couple of days or wasn't appearing on his website for a couple of days. This is in 2015 and there was speculation that a coup was underway. And it seems to me that Kellogg still hasn't gone beyond that.

And neither has Lindsay Graham. If you look at Lindsay Graham's commentaries, he still seems to be stuck in this. So yes, this is a full frontal attack on the bricks. But to me, it looks like a full frontal attack on the bricks based on and completely out of date, understanding first of what bricks is and also of the nature of the economies that make it up.

Yeah, Kellogg, listening to Kellogg is going to bring Trump down. And Kellogg's going to disappear. He's not going to care. But Trump is going to be left holding the bag. Yeah, of his defeat, he's going to be left having to deal with being defeated. Just a quick final question. Bessett mentioned that the Europeans, the collective West, that they are signed up to 100% tariffs as well on countries.

trade with Russia, what happens to the collective West? What happens to Europe? What happens to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all these countries that Bessenset are in the alliance. Bessenset, in our alliance, all the countries have agreed with the United States that in eight days, if the conflict in Ukraine is not resolved, if Russia does not capitulate, then they too will place 100% tariffs on China, on India, on Russia, on Turkey, on Iran. What has What happens to those economies? Well, I mean, if they actually, if Bessent is correct and they actually are signed up to this tariff policy. He probably is.

Can I just say, I mean, if we go back to what happened, apparently in Beijing a few days ago, the EU sent a big delegation to China. They made very similar demands of China that the Americans are making of India and the Americans are also making of China as well. They didn't just demand that China stop its assistance to Russia, but they also demanded that the Europeans also demanded that China give unrestricted access to rare earths and guarantees that rare earths would not be denied again in future. The Chinese basically sent them all packing. and the meeting, which was supposed to last three days, barely lasted one. So it's quite likely they will do this because this is where they're working themselves up to. So I think that probably Besant is telling the truth. The problem is, of course, again, we are going to get ourselves into a situation

where then the Chinese will start to retaliate. They will probably withhold rare earths again. that, I mean, we haven't talked about that, but when that happened previously, that was causing major problems throughout the entire Western industrial system. I was tracking it, the Financial Times, was writing a whole series of articles about it. There was squirreled off the sort of back pages, but the supply chains in the spring was starting to break down. So we might have that kind of a crisis, on top of all of the other problems that we said. But, okay, let's assume that there isn't this problem with rare earths in the autumn that we saw in the spring. Let's assume that

some kind of magic has been, you know, come up with. I mean, then we are going to start to see Europe especially, which is much more of a trading economy, by the way, than the United States is. The United States is mostly a self-sufficient economy. I mean, it trades a lot, it imports a lot, but overall, you can imagine a situation where the United States could drift into self-sufficient. Let's see it, at least for a while. Europe cannot do that. The industrial and economic crisis in Europe would simply deepen. And, of course, China has for Europe been a vital trade partner, just as Russia.

has been, we will see a further spiraling downwards of the economies of Europe and further de-industrialisation and economic stress there. There's been a very insightful article on the financial times, by the way, talking about Europe and saying how, and you know, we perhaps want to say this to how Europe has three times this year capitulated to trust. Trump and giving him a big financial tribute. They firstly agreed to 5% to spend 5% on defence, which will of course enable the US to pull back its forces from Europe and is a promise the Europeans cannot keep. The second is they agreed to buy weapons from the United States.

So as they're going to arm Ukraine with American weapons, which they will pay for. And the third thing they've done is this deal that Ursula made, 15% tariffs on European goods, probably much higher tariffs on steel and aluminium and those kind of things, plus this insane commitment to give the United States $600 billion and to spend $750 billion by more energy from the United States. States. And the Financial Times article said, even if you accept that all of these numbers are completely fantastic, which they are, it nonetheless shows the extent to which Europe has basically exposed its catastrophic weakness, not just to the United States, but to the whole world.

Yeah. I think we're going back to what we were saying maybe three years ago. go, which is that the world is going to be the collective West and then everyone else. I mean, basically, I think that is exactly where we're going to. Maybe not so much spheres of influence, or maybe, maybe just two big spheres of influence. The world, and then the collective West, which is just basically the United States and these satellite vassals, I think that's that's the picture that we're looking at. But that's not good for the US. I mean, this is not what the US wants is to have to have to prop up these economies that are dying.

Well, absolutely. We did have that brief period in January and February when it all looked about spheres of influence. Remember the Greenland business? Whenever they came of that, we never hear anymore. Panama Canal. But spheres of influence is a. I mean, many people think it is cynical and immoral policy and all of that. But you can see how that could have worked at the US's advantage.

You create a coherent economic community centered on the United States itself, which then dominates it. So that you have the heartland and the periphery operating, functioning around the United States. this division that you're talking about, which is indeed exactly where we're heading, on the contrary, what it lands the United States with is the dead weight of the European economy, which will just pull it down, because the United States ultimately is going to have to support it. Exactly. All right. We will end the video there, the durand. Dotlocos.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, Bitsheet, Telegram, Rockfin, Fid, and X. Go to the Durand shop, pick up some merch. Like what we are wearing in this video update,

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