Geopolitical Economy Hour

di Radhika Desai

Pravin Sawhney: India Abandons New World Order For America | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

Is India's celebrated strategic autonomy real, or a myth sustained by domestic politics? Pravin Sawhney, director of the Force Research Institute, joins me to dismantle the popular narrative around Modi's foreign policy. According to Pravin, the world became multipolar in 2013, when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin outlined a new international order built on sovereign equality, only for the Modi government to reject China's rise and hitch India's fortunes to Washington instead. We examine why India refused to accept China as a major power despite an unbridgeable gap in military, economic, and technological strength, how this refusal shaped India's recent four-day war with Pakistan, in which, by Western assessment, the Pakistani military performed better. Even more so, Pakistan's ties to all three major powers now position it closer to the new order than India itself.

27 set 2026

1:00:33

Ali Alizadeh: Iran Is Destroying All American Bases In West Asia | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

The United States has run through every tactic it knows against Iran, sanctions, assassination, a forty-day air war, tit-for-tat strikes, and still cannot achieve its objectives. Ali Alizadeh, editor of the Jadal YouTube channel, joins me to explain why. Alizadeh details how Iran has systematically dismantled the American military presence in West Asia, driving US forces out of bases in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, then out of Iraq entirely after eighteen years, including Ain al-Assad, one of the largest American bases in the world. Jordan is next. Iran has even fired warning shots at a US aircraft carrier, a calculated signal of what it can do without crossing the line into nuclear escalation. Alizadeh argues this is not a quick war Iran expects to win in days. It is a methodical campaign to exhaust the United States and force it out of the region entirely, one base, one country, at a time.

27 set 2026

59:02

Sushant Singh: India's Fear of China Is Sinking BRICS | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

The 2026 BRICS summit in New Delhi should have marked twenty years since Putin first gathered its leaders in a UN hallway. Instead, the Delhi Declaration was so watery that even a hawkish Indian foreign policy voice called it a virtue. Sushant Singh, consulting editor of Caravan magazine and lecturer at Yale, joins me to explain why. He traces how Modi's government, terrified of being seen as anything less than China's peer, blocked de-dollarization, AI cooperation, and climate coordination that would have cost India nothing and helped it directly.

27 set 2026

1:01:01

Warwick Powell: America Chose Wall Street Over Factories And Now Is Paying For It

China's refusal to sign the G20 finance communique reveals a fiction Washington depends on. Warwick Powell, adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, joins me to show that the line between market and non-market policy never actually existed, and that every industrial power, including the United States, was built on state intervention. Warwick argues the real imbalance sits on the capital account, where American money now inflates Wall Street instead of building factories, while China's state-owned banks stayed disciplined toward production for eight decades. We look at why 2015, the year Chinese owned manufacturers overtook foreign firms operating inside China, marks the real turning point behind the overcapacity complaints. What America calls Chinese overcapacity, Warwick argues, is Global South demand finally being met after decades of the Global North pricing that equipment out of reach on purpose.

27 set 2026

59:57

Michael Hudson: Russia, China and Iran Are Building the System America Can't Print Its Way Out Of

Is the world quietly reviving a plan the United States buried eighty years ago? Professor Michael Hudson joins me to revisit Keynes' original Bretton Woods proposals, built on balance, capital controls, and the principle that bad debts should be written off rather than enforced into depression. Washington rejected all of it and built the dollar system instead, one designed to keep the world dependent on American credit and American rules. Now Russia, China and Iran are building the alternatives Keynes once imagined, from Lavrov's proposed SCO development bank to China's CIPS system shielding Iranian oil trade from US sanctions, while even the Netherlands has asked Washington to send its gold home. The dollar system is unraveling. The question is what replaces it, and whether the world has the will to build something more balanced this time.

27 set 2026

46:09

Mohammad Marandi: Trump's Gulf Allies Are Bankrupting Themselves for His War | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

Is this the most dangerous phase yet of the US war on Iran, or the moment the empire loses whatever control it still has? Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi joins me for our monthly assessment of the conflict. He finds that Iran's retaliation now far outpacing Washington's. Recently Iran struck eight tankers, ten commercial ships, and fired warning shots at two US warships, all in response to unprovoked American strikes that hit a wedding. Marandi explains why Iran has abandoned its defensive posture for good and why the Gulf regimes that hosted this war are now the ones paying for it in dwindling reserves and battered economies. We examine why even Trump's own allies, from the Gulf states to Britain, are quietly breaking ranks with him, and why, of the only three ways this war can plausibly end, just one party has any real interest in prolonging it: the Israeli regime itself.

27 set 2026

48:50

Einar Tangen: China Is Destroying The US-Led World Order | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

Xi Jinping is heading to Washington on September 24th, but is this summit a genuine reset, or just China managing an American system that can no longer manage itself? I am joined by Einar Tangen, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and Chairman of Asia Narratives, to unpack why Trump's own Beijing visit was quietly declared a failure, and why Beijing now approaches these encounters with a rehearsed playbook rather than any real expectation of breakthrough. Einar traces the roots of America's dysfunction back to the Powell Memo, the decades-long financialization of an economy that rewards betting over building, and an oligarchy that has hollowed out its own middle class while blaming China for the damage. We discuss why the United States increasingly resembles a rogue state even by its own definition, and how China's patient, methodical model has quietly reshaped the Global South through initiatives like the Belt and Road. As the American midterms loom and speculation grows over Trump's own political survival, Einar makes the case that the real story of US-China relations is not happening in Beijing at all. It's happening inside a crumbling American republic. Explore Einar Tangen's work: https://substack.com/@asianarratives

27 set 2026

52:41

Did Nationalism Trump Socialism When Socialist Countries Attacked One Another? Keith Bennett

In the late 1970s, wars involving three self-declared socialist countries, China, Vietnam and Cambodia were gleefully reported in the Western press along with lurid allegations of ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia. Many considered that this had sounded the death knell of socialist internationalism. In this Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai is joined by Keith Bennett, co-editor of a new book on China’s foreign policy, to help disinter facts that lie buried under decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of these complex events. Our purpose is twofold: to help understand these conflicts in a broadly historical materialist manner, one that makes socialist sense, and on that basis to dig deeper into the complex interrelationship between class and nation in the advance towards socialism. Some of the question we discuss are: Why did Vietnam attack Cambodia and China attack Vietnam? What drove these countries, which had stood shoulder to shoulder against US aggression, apart? Who were the Khmer Rouge and what motivated them? Where did it all go wrong?

6 set 2026

1:18:04

Westerners Think He Made China Capitalist. They're Wrong | Mick Dunford & Radhika Desai

Zhu Rongji, China's reform-era premier, has died, and the Financial Times wasted no time eulogizing him as a liberal hero, hoping Xi Jinping might take a leaf out of his book. Mick Dunford, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex and a longtime resident of Beijing, joins me to dismantle that myth, walking through the real human costs of Zhu's reforms, from mass layoffs to soaring inequality, and arguing they were not capitalist triumphs but turbulent steps within a still-socialist system, whose excesses were later corrected by Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and Xi himself. The "liberal hero" the West is mourning is largely their own invention.

6 set 2026

1:00:14

Laith Marouf: Iran Is Now A New Global Superpower And The West Can't Stop It | GEH W/ Radhika Desai

Is the West's devotion to Israel rational statecraft, or ideological blindness dragging the whole imperial order down with it? Laith Marouf, founder of Free Palestine TV, returns to break down why even mainstream military and intelligence assessments now admit Iran cannot be defeated, why the CIA's own hidden regional bases have been destroyed, and why Washington's pivot to economic warfare, sanctioning Iranian gold, crypto, and aviation, is a mark of desperation rather than strategy. Laith argues a rational empire would have abandoned Israel decades ago to preserve itself, but Jewish supremacist ideology among Western elites now overrides basic imperial self-interest, pushing them to strip their own populations of civil liberties to protect the colony.

6 set 2026

46:37

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