DW—Michael Hudson joins the discussion on July 30th, 2026, as global tensions, particularly concerning Iran, are escalating. The conversation begins with a report about Donald Trump’s frustration over military options and lack of progress with Iran, amidst chaos in West Asia and retaliatory attacks between the US and Iran.

Hudson explains that Trump’s anger stems from the military’s assessment that defeating Iran is not feasible due to Iran’s advanced radar systems and defensive capabilities. He criticizes the US strategy of targeting civilians, arguing that it only strengthens Iranian resolve, and highlights the difficulty of hitting Iran’s dispersed military targets while the US military faces resource shortages.

GD—Maritime Attacks Impact Regional Oil Exports and US Interests:Ukrainian strikes on Russian Black Sea port ships also cripple Kazakhstan’s oil exports via the Caspian Sea, harming global energy markets and US corporate interests like Chevron. This unintended consequence has induced caution in the US regarding further maritime attacks, illustrating the complex balancing act between strategic offensive and economic fallout among allied nations and partners.

EZ—billionaire owns at least a thousand million dollars, and that’s far more than is needed in order to fund the careers of (by advertising, and hiring of campaign aides, for) politicians to win office on the basis of lies — public promises that are no more credit-worthy than are forged currencies or checks. By contrast, the private promises to those megadonors must be fulfilled, because once having won office this way, a politician is forever afterward dependent upon them, not only by having been bought, but also by those megadonors total knowledge of the dirt in their personal background that could destroy them and even blackball them into ignominy. Thus, in a capitalist society, money is power; and, so, in a capitalist electoral ‘democracy’, the billionaires control the Government, and the public are mere workers and consumers for their corporations, and their votes are thus always mere choices between the candidates of Democratic Party billionaires and of Republican Party billionaires — but ONLY by billionaires.

OLL—Perhaps among the most important of all these provocations were the NATO-supported attacks on Russia’s nuclear triad. Ukraine has targeted the strategic bomber component of Russia’s nuclear triad via deep-penetration drone operations, most notably Operation Spider’s Web in Nune 2025, and prior coordinated base strikes. Ukrainian security services infiltrated Russian territory, hiding short-range attack drones in cargo trucks near multiple strategic airbases – including locations in the Amur region, Murmansk region (Olenya Air Bae), and Irkutsk region (Belaya Air Base). Operating via local mobile networks, the remote strikes damaged or destroyed dozens of aircraft, targeting the airborne leg of Russia’s nuclear delivery systems. Earlier coordinated drone attacks struck deep inside Russia, targeting bomber fields like Engels Air Base (Saratov region) and Ivanovo Air Base, impacting nuclear-capable heavy strategic bombers such as the Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3.

These attacks have exclusively pressured the strategic bomber fleet (the weakest and most vulnerable leg of the triad). They have not compromised Russia’s core second-strike land-based ICBMs or sea-launched ballistic missile submarines.

BL—I was 20 years old in 1968 and for anyone born either three years earlier or 3 years later I’m confident you know exactly what that experience was like. In the capitalist psychology of the West we were taught to separate individual development (ontogenesis) from world history. History, after all is made by extraordinary people, not by the average bloke. But in my experience my psychological development as a young adult was inseparable from hitting a cop on a horse with an anarchist flag at an IRA demonstration in New York City against the English in the Fall of 1968. My initiation into love in young adulthood was no college dance. It consisted of having a polyamorous relationship with a revolutionary woman working for the War Resisters League.

AA—Regarding China, a search of all Jacobin’s articles on China yields, as expected, a mix: on the one hand, articles opposing US pressure on China, for the former, while on the other, many pieces accusing China of having become capitalist. This is yet another confirmation that one of the main features of Western Marxism is to oppose actual existing socialism. This Jacobin position has been fully debunked in Carlos Martinez’s two books: The East is Still Red—Chinese Socialism in the 21st Centuryand No Great Wall: On The Continuities of the Chinese Revolution.

The heart of the matter is that Rockhill demolishes the very raison d’être of Jacobin and their ilk. On China, Rockhill’s own work along with Jennifer S. Ponce de León also points in that direction, as part of his ongoing defense of actually existing socialism: