Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

Editor’s note: this episode contains two discussions covering current affairs, one from 12th December 2025, and one from 5th January 2026. (The Editor got distracted by Christmas!) We’ve published them together as one backs up the other regarding our stance on the dollar. There is an audio interlude between the two segments on the audio version.

Comments from 12th December

We’re wrapping up some recent current affairs today. What’s been going on that people need to know about?

Well, one of our themes has been that we’re plainly at an end-of-the-empire situation with the United States. The US has been the predominant world power since the end of the Second World War. It’s been a remarkably short run as empires go, because it’s clearly in decline.

Empires do some pretty crazy things as they die as well.

Yeah, they usually do. What makes this situation unique is that we’re now literally in a position to end life on this planet. Certainly all higher life forms, or even if it didn’t go that far, the complete destruction of the human global civilisation, possibly the extinction of the human race. We’ve never been in that situation before. How we navigate this is obviously critical, and it’s obviously out of our hands. The more people who have a realistic assessment of the situation, the more likely it is that pressure will mount to navigate it safely.

I just wanted to indicate a few of the areas where it’s showing up. It’s like Groundhog Day. We keep saying it’s the situation as it has been, but it’s getting more extreme. You’ve got the Israeli government continuing its devastating destruction on the Palestinian areas of its own state, also lashing out into surrounding states like Lebanon and Syria. It’s a matter of time before there’s another attack on Iran, although you’d have thought that the decisiveness of the response last time might hold that off. Who knows?

The other ongoing conflict is, of course, Ukraine. The way that it’s developed on the ground over there in the last month or two has come as no surprise to me because I’ve been following this. It was quite obvious that despite the accounts we’ve had in the Western mainstream media trying to put the best gloss possible on it, Russia was making the running. However, this has now become so obvious and so unavoidable that it’s no longer possible to pretend otherwise.

Yet the so-called leaders of Britain, France and Germany continue to deny this. They think that somehow or other they can roll it back. They continually try to find a way to confiscate the frozen Russian assets, which are mostly held in a Belgian bank. The Belgian government is resisting that. The logic of doing that really defies common sense because the idea was that when Russia had been defeated, these could be legitimately confiscated. I don’t know whether legitimate is quite the right word.

There’s no logic whatsoever if you assume that there’s any chance that Russia might not be defeated. The chances of it being defeated look increasingly remote. Also, the unmistakable support that the Europeans are giving to the Ukrainians really amounts to the reality of their being in conflict with Russia. Of course, we’re all hoping that it remains contained. Russia doesn’t actually strike out at our own countries, which it could make a very strong case for doing.

Recent developments have been the attacks on Russian oil tankers. Most of the ones that have been attacked have been empty, as far as I can figure out, and on their way to pick up a shipment. There have now been five that have been badly damaged, probably rendered unusable. The logic behind this was supposedly that if they could strangle Russia economically by cutting off its oil exports, it wouldn’t be able to continue to maintain the war in Ukraine. There hasn’t been any sign.

So the sanctions didn’t work, so we’re going to try and sink all the ships instead.

As I say, they’ve attacked five so far. I don’t know how many tankers they have in total, but I believe it’s somewhere in the region of 1,000 or 1,500. They’d have to sink a lot more before it would have any real impact on Russia’s economy. But it’s obviously a flagrantly illegal act under any interpretation of international law, as is the sinking of half a dozen to a dozen small Venezuelan boats because they were transporting drugs destined for the USA.

Yeah, that’s a cover story for implementing the geopolitical change they want to enact.

This has been taken a step further. I don’t know whether you noticed, but one of these boats was heavily damaged and its hull was still floating in the water. It’s on video, which has gone around the world, that two passengers were seen clinging to the hull of the boat. Another attack went in there and killed them in cold blood. That is an absolutely black and white war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Even if the original attack was justified, which it clearly isn’t—assuming that there was a strong case that they were smuggling drugs, which is highly unlikely because the United States coastline is 2,000 miles away and those boats don’t have that range—but even assuming that, the right thing to do obviously would be to intercept them, search them, collect the evidence and put them on trial. Give them an appropriate punishment, which isn’t the death penalty for smuggling drugs anyway. Certainly not in international waters.

This has taken another notch up with the American commandos dropping from a helicopter onto a Venezuelan oil tanker and capturing the tanker on whatever pretext, which is simply an act of piracy. This is visible for the whole world to see. So America seems to me to be eroding its own credibility faster than it’s achieving anything useful.

Yeah, I sometimes wonder what goes through the minds of those commandos. They must just blindly follow orders.

You have very little option but to follow orders if you are in the military.

It’s not a—I don’t mean this to be patronising—it’s not a thinking man’s occupation.

That’s the way I would look at it.

If you turn the tables on any of these situations, if these things were happening to the United States boats or oil tankers, it would be the end of the world. It would trigger a chain of events that could be catastrophic.

Yeah, we’re still in the phoney war stage. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The usual way these situations work out is that the CIA have paramilitary forces in the country and they execute a coup against the leader, which could well happen. However, what would happen after that is anybody’s guess. Maduro obviously does have enemies. No leading politicians fail to do so, but he obviously enjoys enormous support from the majority of the population.

Any attempt to set up a puppet government there would be extremely troublesome, to say the least. So there we’ve got it. The other thing from the economic realm is that the stranglehold the United States has had over world finances, because there was really no alternative, has now decisively come to an end. The entire BRICS group now has sufficient trade among themselves that it no longer needs the United States or the Western world in general as a marketplace.

It no longer depends on them for supplies of anything because China’s manufacturing and technical sophistication is rapidly outstripping everybody else’s. They don’t need them for the financial arrangements because they’ve set up a parallel system that will almost certainly work better anyway. The necessity of holding dollars as the reserve currency has more or less eroded over the past year or two.

China steadily reduces its holding of US Treasury bonds of one sort or another. It’s replacing that either by gold or by holding the currencies of its trading partners. So, in a way, we’ve come full circle to the way the system of international exchange worked before America essentially monopolised it in the aftermath of World War II.

I was thinking that maybe this was the primary change that happened after World War II.

Yeah, it was. The Bretton Woods system really locked the rest of the world into subservience to the United States. At the time, that made sense. It was by far the most economically powerful nation in the world. It was by far the richest. It was owed money by most of the European countries. It had gold backing to the dollar, which rendered the dollar literally as good as gold. That lasted less than 30 years, 25 years until Nixon closed the gold window.

Now that it can no longer rely on that and no longer enforce the dollar as the purchasing mechanism for oil, it could unravel very much more rapidly than anybody expects. I don’t know at what point it would become the case that it can no longer pay all these military personnel stationed all over the world in any currency with meaningful buying power. But that would handicap its ability to exert military force.

The unknown quantity is whether it would do something utterly destructive in response. For all that, I’m still of the opinion that we’re going through some kind of birth process of a more positive era for the human race. Time will tell whether that was fruitless optimism or whether there is some hope of that.

I think it has to be, otherwise we won’t be here. There isn’t a middle way. I don’t think we can continue in this manner.

It’s not doing us any harm to be aware of what’s going on as long as we don’t let it drive us into depression, which I’m doing my best to avoid.

Yes, keep standing in the light.

Comments From 5th January 2026

I’ve noticed every January that the ‘False Matrix’ or ‘The Empire’ doesn’t waste a...

Is the United States an Empire in Violent Decline?