Professor Michael Hudson, Aug 23, 2026

Russia has independently adopted Iran’s strategy in protecting itself from US/NATO aggression in Ukraine. Just as Iran has defended itself from the US Oil War against it by making clear that if its oil exports are blocked, so will all exports through the Persian gulf be blocked. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz providing about 20% of the world’s trade in oil, fertilizer and helium, while the Yemeni blockage and destruction of Saudi Arabian production has stopped another 5%.

Iran recognizes that it alone cannot defeat the United States or prevent it and Israel from blocking its imports, seizing its tankers on their way eastward and imposing financial sanctions in an attempt to strangle it. Iran’s moves have left it up to the Global Majority to take action to save themselves from what now is an almost certain economic and financial depression to result from the US and Israeli attacks.

NATO Europe, South Korea and Japan already have rejected U.S. requests to join Trump’s Oil War. But they have not taken proactive steps to demand that the United States withdraw its attack on Iran and its economy by imposing the kind of sanctions on the U.S. economy that America routinely imposes on them.

These same European, Asian and African countries are now being threatened with an equally serious disruption of an estimated 27% of world trade in grain as a result of NATO’s war against Russia by supplying Ukraine with missiles to bomb and burn Russian oil refineries and ports to sink Russian ships trying to export its grain across the Black Sea and also the Azov sea as well as its railroad transport system. Russia has retaliated by bombing Ukrainian ports in Odessa and other coastal shipping centers, closing off Ukrainian grain, sunflower seeds and other agricultural esports.[1]

The resulting grain shortage and rising food prices thus will be hitting the same group of countries that will be suffering from soaring oil prices as the U.S. and other national petroleum reserves and fuel inventories are exhausted in a month or so. And to make matters worse, this summer’s heat wave has lowered crop yields from Europe to North America, exacerbated by the rise in fertilizer prices and also the rising interest rates on farm credit needed to harvest and move the crops, while the drought also has sharply reduced European river transport of food and other products.

The joint U.S.-backed attack on Russian oil and food shipping along with Iranian and Persian oil threatens to intensify the coming economic depression and balance-of-payments crises for many countries. After Russia’s special military operation was launched in 2022, international pressure was brought to stop Ukraine from attacking Russian ships so that Ukraine could transport its farm surplus. U.S. propagandists tried to attract Global South sympathies by blaming Russia’s attack on Ukraine, claiming that blocking its grain exports will worsen the food crisis of Africa – but none of this went to Africa in any case. It went to Europe.

So the parallel Russian and Iranian actions have upped the ante for other countries to oppose Trump’s drive for historical glory by winning wars against Russia and Iran as he prepares for America’s ultimate conflict with China. The United States is not in any position to win either war, but its disruption of oil and food trade may indeed make Trump a historical figure for triggering a new Great Depression. Asia, India, Africa and America’s own European alike will be victims.

The ball therefore is in their court. Will they be willing to stop soaring prices for their electricity land other energy, fuel for their transportation and food? Failure to take a stand will force many of their industries to close down, while governments are pressed to run budget deficits to keep their economies solvent and enable their citizens to survive the sharp rise in the cost of living and doing business.

The most optimistic scenario that I can think of is that this may mobilize sufficient foreign resentment to draw a line and isolate the U.S. economy by sanctions to force it to stop what has become its desperate war against the rest of the world as it seeks to avoid the loss of the control that it had before deindustrializing and becoming the world’s major debtor country.

President Trump has promised that the U.S. economy will be immune from the world oil crisis that his war has created, and Treasury Secretary Bessent has promised that the Federal Reserve can simply print enough money to pump into U.S. financial markets to keep interest rates low and support stock and bond prices. But the U.S. economy is at least as prone to financial and trade disruption as other countries.

An obvious first response could be to declare a moratorium on all foreign U.S. dollar debt and transfer of other payments to the United Statse. Money has become the taproot of America’s weaponization of the U.S. financial system and its drive to achieve choke points over the world’s oil, sea transport and information technology and chip making. These are the obvious areas that other countries can mobilize to break away from U.S. control and hence its ability to keep waging its war to subdue the rest of the world’s economy.