America Has Been Demoted (Full Lecture)

America has never been what you think it

is. It's never been what you think it

is.

You know,

when you see someone with a gold medal

on their chest or they have a title belt

around their waist, you think that that

means that they beat somebody. You think

that that means that they won something.

That's what you think. It's logical, but

that's not the case with America.

That's not the case with America at all.

That never was.

That was never the case.

When did America become the world

superpower, the unipolar superpower?

Okay, most people would say

after World War II.

Or

when the Soviet Union collapsed and so

forth. Okay, these

This is technically correct.

Technically, that's the right answer.

But think about what that actually

means.

Think about what that actually means.

America did not become the world

superpower by defeating its rivals.

America became the world superpower

because its rivals ceased to exist.

That's very different.

Their rivals collapsed. Their rivals

wore themselves out. That's victory by

default.

Victory by default.

That's not dominance. Victory by default

is not dominance. It's just filling a

vacancy.

If everybody in the race drops dead,

then you don't even have to be the

fastest runner to win.

That was the case with America. That's

how America got to where it is. And that

changes everything.

A power that only holds its position

because nobody else is standing is

fundamentally fragile. That means that

the moment credible alternatives emerge,

the whole thing dissolves.

Not gradually.

Not after some long struggle. It

dissolves because

the conditions that produced it

were always temporary. They're always

conditional, you know? If you're If If

you're the only pizza place in town,

then you can sell people microwave

pizzas and still be successful.

But the moment a real competitor

competitor, real competition arrives,

then that's over. Your business is done.

And that's exactly what we're watching.

That's exactly what we're watching right

now with the United States of America,

the so-called unipolar moment. America

as the

the sole global superpower, the

unchallengeable, the indispensable.

Well, that moment is over. It's over.

And I'm not saying that because

I want it to be true, because I hope

it's true. I'm saying it because this is

an objective reading of what the

evidence shows.

I'm saying it with open eyes and clear

vision.

And you need to understand this because

you cannot keep thinking about America,

and you cannot keep treating America

like it's something that it no longer

is.

Or like it's something that it never

really even was.

I can take you through it and I I I'll

be as methodical as possible. Let's look

at three three different things, okay?

Look at the historical record first of

all, because you have to understand

how America got to where it got

uh so that then you can understand how

how or why it can't it it's impossible

for it to stay there.

Second, we'll look at the structural

evidence, the structural evidence of

America's demotion.

The institutional shifts, the military

realities, the political economic

realities, and so forth. Again, this is

not aspiration. This is fact. We're just

going to look at evidence.

Uh and third,

and this is where it might get genuinely

complicated, the internal dynamics of

American power, because it's not just

external. It's not just

uh

America's not just being constrained by

external uh competitors. The constraints

are coming from within as well. There

are domestic constraints being imposed

upon America uh

uh domestically, the the domestic power

dynamics in America are also

um

contributing to

the demotion of America from a global

superpower to a regional hegemon.

So, let's start with history, because

uh

history is is mis-told about America.

And that the mis-telling of that history

has consequences to your understanding,

okay?

So, phase one, you're talking about 1914

to 1945, the industrial and American and

and and economic ascendancy of America.

This was not built by out-competing

Europe. It was built while Europe was

destroying itself

across two catastrophic world wars.

And America was isolationist.

So, by 1945, the United States of

America held uh had approximately 50% of

all global industrial output uh global

GDP.

That wasn't because American industry

was superior. It was because European

industry had been bombed out, had been

blockaded, had been exhausted into ruin,

was destroyed.

So, the US emerged from World War as the

only major industrial economy

that had their uh productive base still

completely intact. That's the

foundation.

Not American superiority.

European self-destruction. That's the

basis, the beginning basis, okay?

Then phase two, from 1945 to 1991, this

is the Cold War. So, you had

uh Soviet industrial capacity, nuclear

deterrents, they had the Soviet sphere

of influence across Eastern Europe,

across Central Asia,

across significant parts of the global

south.

And American dominance during this

period was always contested, and it was

always geographically constrained by the

Soviet Union, okay?

You had proxy wars that, you know, like

Vietnam ended in defeat, Korean War was

a stalemate.

Even though the Soviet Union was uh

economically and technologically

inferior and behind, still they were

enough to keep the United States of

America in check globally for 50 years.

That's your your superpower, okay?

Phase three, from 1991 onwards, the

Soviet Union collapses, and this is the

moment that everyone points to when the

Soviet Union collapses.

Uh

and America became the unipolar

superpower. But why did the Soviet Union

collapse? Was it defeated by the by the

Americans? No, they collapsed from

within.

It was ideological exhaustion. It was it

was economic dysfunction, elite

fragmentation, and corruption. The

United States did not defeat the Soviet

Union. They just outlasted it. They

outlasted the Soviet system uh

until the system the Soviet system

collapsed collapsed itself by its own

internal contradictions.

So, unipolar moment happened. This is a

phrase that was that was coined by

Charles Krauthammer in 1990 or 1991.

And it was always intended to describe a

vacuum.

Not a victory.

Not a victory when you

conquer your challenger, but the moment

between when you're when when one

challenger

disappears before between that period

and when the new challenger emerges.

That's the unipolar moment. It was

always understood to describe a vacuum,

not a victory.

This this vacuum period

when when one challenger has exited the

stage, not been defeated, but exited the

stage,

collapsed, and then the next challenger

emerges. It was always understood that

this is what would happen because a

power whose position rests, like I say,

if their position rests entirely on the

absence of any viable alternatives,

then they will be automatically demoted

the moment any viable alternatives

appear.

The

military defeat doesn't have to happen.

No formal transfer of power has to

happen.

No resistance threshold has to be

crossed. No revolution has to happen,

what have you.

The mere existence of genuine

competitors dissolves the whole thing

because the whole thing was never earned

in the first place. It was just

inherited by default.

And it can only exist in the absence of

competitors. Well, competitors have

appeared. Alhamdulillah.

So, the the the demotion of America is

already structurally complete.

So, what we're watching now, what you're

going through now, is just the the

institutional and the narrative

catch-up.

They're they're trying to catch up to a

reality that has already been unfolding

for the last 20 years.

But structurally, it has already

happened. So, I mean, look at the

evidence.

Not We don't have to look at arguments.

Look at the evidence. In 1991, the birth

of the unipolar moment.

The United States at that time accounted

for approximately 25% of global GDP,

okay? So, that's already half the

post-war World War

peak of 50%. In other words,

over the Cold War period against an

economically inferior rival, the Soviet

Union, America lost half of its share of

the global GDP

in that 50-year period. And by 2024,

the US share of uh global GDP declined

to approximately 15%. So, that's a 10%

drop

in just 30 years. In 30 years during

which you had no rival whatsoever.

Losing while having total global

dominance.

Okay?

And now more significantly, you have

BRICS, the BRICS plus. China, Russia,

India, Brazil, South Africa.

Uh and then with the with the expansion

in 2024, it includes functionally Saudi

Arabia, officially UAE, Iran, Egypt, uh

Ethiopia.

They collectively exceed the entire G7's

share of the uh uh global GDP.

That's the first time since the post-war

uh World War order.

That the the Western block of

industrialized countries do not

constitute the majority of global

productive capacity in the world, okay?

This is a structural reordering of the

global economy. It's already underway.

It's already happened.

Okay, the dollar is still there. Yes,

and the dollar still is a dominant

reserve currency, but their share of

global foreign exchange reserves has

already declined also.

From 72% in 2026 years ago to

approximately 58% in 2024. So, that's 14

percentage points in two decades that it

has declined.

And that trajectory sharpened

uh after uh 2022 because of that um

the decision to freeze the the the the

Russian assets, the Russian uh sovereign

reserves.

$300 billion worth of uh Russian state

assets that were held in Western

financial institutions unilaterally

frozen.

Okay? So, every state outside the

Western alliance immediately understood

that that means that our dollar assets

are not ours. They're conditional.

We're holding on to them

uh

on someone else's terms. We're holding

all those dollars on someone else's

terms, and they can do whatever they

want with them. They're not safe. Our

dollars are not safe.

That was the message as of 2022, and

everybody understood that.

So, the rational response that's now

underway across multiple economies all

around the world is to reduce

uh dollar dependency. You have China's

CIPS CIPS payment system

that's now already processing uh

transactions for over 100 countries. You

have the mBridge uh central bank digital

currency project

that was developed uh jointly by China,

by the UAE, by

uh Hong Kong, Thailand, and Saudi

Arabia. And it is explicitly designed

explicitly designed to enable

transactions that uh bypass uh Swift,

the Swift system entirely.

So, the alternative financial system is

being built and being used.

And then there is uh Saudi Arabia's

decision in 2023 to price a portion of

their oil sales in yuan. Okay? Everyone

knows the Petro Petro dollar arrangement

where uh oil can only be sold in dollars

uh artificially increased demand for

dollars. That was the load-bearing

pillar of dollar hegemony for 50 years.

So, when Saudi Arabia decided to

fracture that agreement

uh

they did it very carefully. They did it

very calculatedly, the way they do

everything. Well, they signaled that

even one of America's most historically

reliable allies in the in the region,

one of the most important economic

allies

had uh come to the conclusion that being

aligned exclusively to the dollar was no

longer strategically viable, and they're

right.

Now

uh people look at the US military

as a sign of their uh

global superpower status. They're

actively bombing Iran right now. They

kidnap Maduro. They got bases all around

the world and so forth.

So, everyone says that, you know,

they're the most powerful military on

Earth and that makes the narrative of

military dominance

uh

sort of essential to the whole unipolar

story.

But, the evidence in terms of their

military is actually operationally, in

my opinion, one of the most concrete

signs that the demotion has already

taken place and is and is uh continuing

to take place. I mean, okay, if you look

at their defense spending, sure, they're

the winner.

But, the defense budget in America is

not a metric of military capacity,

military capability. It's a

money-laundering device.

You know, it's like if you buy property

at 10 times the value because you

actually just trying to gift that money

to someone

and you want it to look like a

transaction. That's how you do.

That's what the military-industrial

complex is. That's how that works. It's

a subsidy.

It's a It's It's like a bribe. They

overpay for everything. It's corruption.

They literally lose money. So, the

numbers don't tell you anything about

what the military can actually do. Look

at the actual capacity to fight.

You know, a genuine global superpower is

supposed to be able to manage so

simultaneous

peer-level conflicts

across multiple theaters. The United

States can't do that.

America can't do that. Not anymore.

They said so themselves. It's not me

saying. The 2018 uh National Defense

Strategy formally acknowledged that.

They don't have that capability anymore.

So, if you want a real metric, look at

their track record. Look at their

performance. So, you go at uh uh 1991,

Desert Storm, 34-nation coalition,

right?

Defeated a regional military power in

100 hours of combat uh uh uh ground

combat.

That's the high-water mark. Then,

Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan,

uh Afghanistan, the longest war in

American history,

concluded with a uh

chaotic withdrawal and the restoration

of the same government that you went

there to overthrow in the first place.

Iraq, you had Okay, you achieved your

regime change,

but that was followed by Iranian sphere

of influence expansion into Iraq,

which directly contradicted the whole

stated objectives of your whole mission

in the first place. Libya, you have

state collapse and ongoing civil civil

conflict, civil strife.

In Syria,

you failed in in in in all those years

to get rid of Bashar al-Assad.

You weren't able to get get to get rid

of him. Bashar didn't leave until his

patrons decided to remove him. The

United States didn't remove him. So, you

couldn't even get rid of Bashar. You

couldn't really even get rid of ISIS.

Yemen, you can't stop the Houthis. You

can't stop the Houthis from disrupting

the Red Sea shipping lanes. You know,

what can you do now except brag about

destroying fishing boats off the coast

of Venezuela?

And even that that that Maduro

operation,

you required Russian and Chinese

agreement in that cooperation. And you

even needed cooperation from inside

Maduro's own government.

They're attacking Iran right now

because that operation, that conflict is

folded into the regional interests.

And even in that, you can't even defend

your own bases. You can't even defend

your own allies.

Even Israel keeps getting hit. They

can't prevent it.

You see, they they want to withdraw from

all of this. They can't manage it. They

they want to leave NATO. They want

Ukraine to fight to to fight Russia, but

they won't fight Russia. They won't

fight China. No, they won't. They won't

fight North Korea.

No.

I mean, honestly, in terms of their

capability capabilities, look, Egypt

could actually do what the United States

is doing in Iran right now. Turkey could

do it. Pakistan could do it. They

wouldn't do it obviously, but they could

do it in terms of actual capacity,

actually what's being done.

Anybody can bomb a girl's school. That's

not exactly storming the beach at

Normandy. No, what the US has had that

others haven't had is the hubris and the

psychopathy. But in terms of raw

military capability, I don't think that

we've seen the United States

military forces do anything that

surpasses what other large militaries

could do in at least 30 years. Like I

say, they're not doing anything in Iran

that Egypt couldn't do or that Turkey

couldn't do or that Pakistan couldn't

do, or that India couldn't do.

Certainly that China couldn't do. Anyone

could do in Iran what you're doing.

In terms of the actual military

capabilities.

Anyone can drop bombs. You're not doing

something special. You're not the the

power that you're showing

is not showing you to excel or to

surpass any other military power in the

region or in the world.

And then you can look structurally at

the the diplomatic cloud that America

has lost. In 2023, it was China that was

credited for brokering the normalization

between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Uncle Sam wasn't in the room.

Uncle Sam wasn't in the room. That used

to be his room to control. That

everything in the Middle East used to

belong to America. They nothing could

happen in that region except that

America said so.

Within all within the living memory of

anyone alive today, everyone knows that

that was America's sphere of influence

and now China is brokering deals there.

The 2024 BRICS expansion with Saudi

Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia

joining

BRICS.

This is very significant.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE joining BRICS

while still maintaining US formal US

security ties, intelligence ties, and so

forth. This is the clearest possible

statement that these states that are

allies of America have concluded that

the United States centric

world order is not a permanent

condition. They're building

relationships

with the emerging multipolar order, the

multipolar system.

Even while they're they're maintaining

this with America even while America

calls BRICS explicitly anti-American,

but they can't stop them.

They can't stop them. Anyone who wants

to join BRICS, BRICS will decide.

America has no say.

So, that's the external picture. America

has been demoted. This is clear. It's a

structural demotion and it's

compounding.

But the external story, the the the

rising multipolarity

uh

the the increasing options. This is a

second order story. The first order

story is actually, like I said, what's

happening inside of America itself,

domestically.

Obviously, I've talked about this many,

many times. I've talked about the OCGC,

the owners and controllers of global

financialized capital.

Uh

and I have

uh

I've said that the United States as a

state has been captured. I don't know if

you really understand or really think

through

the ramifications of what that means,

that America has been captured as a

state.

A state that has been captured by

private sector interests

does not and cannot project power in

pursuit of coherent national strategic

objectives for the nation.

It projects power in pursuit of the

revenue and positioning objectives of

the private sector, of their captors.

This is completely different, you

understand? The state cannot undertake

uh foreign policies

that conflict with the interests of a

national capital, even if it's in the

even if it's in the interest of the

nation. Ask not what your shareholders

can do for you, ask what you can do for

your shareholders. Uncle Sam is a

company man. I'm using the word captured

in the technical sense.

This means the

demonstrated ability of concentrated

private actors,

their ability to veto, to preempt, to

rewrite, to delay,

or to selectively enforce state policy

through finance, through procurement,

through media, through lobbying,

through dependency.

This is captured. Means you're captured.

You can see it everywhere in America.

The revolving door between the United

States Treasury, the Federal Reserve,

and all of the major financial

institutions.

This is so well established with the

banks and so forth. This is so well well

established and so well known that it's

not even scandalous anymore.

The regulatory agencies that are tasked

with overseeing finance, with overseeing

energy, telecoms,

uh

and so forth. These are all staffed by

and they return their staff to the very

industries that they're supposed to be

regulating.

This is self-regulation essentially. In

American electoral politics, I mean,

let's be serious. They're an auction.

It's an auction. Your politics, your

your elections are an auction.

There's documented bidders, there's

documented prices, there's documented

returns on investment. And the

consequence is that the most expensive

state apparatus in human history

is not pursuing nationalist state

strategies. It's managing a portfolio.

This is the the most comprehensive

constraint on American power. The most

the deepest constraint.

But let me be more precise because I

always have to make this this

distinction. Within the OCFC, there are

two primary factions. And their

interests and their revenue models are

not necessarily the same. They're quite

different. I've discussed this before

many times, obviously, but it's worth

repeating.

The first faction is what we call the

a-national OCFC. This is capital,

business, and so forth that is that have

they've transcended national loyalties

as a category.

Their assets are distributed across

jurisdictions. Their supply chains are

around the world. They're global.

Their supply chains are from here and

there and everywhere. Their financial

instruments are all denominated in

multiple currencies. They use they do

transactions through multiple systems.

They don't need American dominance.

They're not reliant upon American

dominance. What they need is a stable,

legally predictable,

uh commercially accessible global

system.

This is the faction that grew out of

financialization and globalization

accelerating through the 1980s and

through the 1990s. And they just outgrew

any meaningful sense of nationalism.

They outgrew it.

The nation no longer serves their

interests. Nationalism doesn't serve

their interests. In fact, it can

interfere with their interests. That

that was the booster rocket that got

them up, but now that booster rocket has

become dead weight and they want to

jettison it.

You understand? So, they're

repositioning and that repositioning is

what we're seeing. The Mar-a-Lago accord

framework.

Uh they include uh dollar devaluation,

tariff restructuring,

pushing security costs uh onto their

allies,

exiting from multilateral institutions

and so forth. This is not nationalistic

economic policy. It's a nationalistic

economic policy. Dollar devaluation

undermines dollar hegemony, which is

fine for them.

Institutional retreat dismantles the the

the American-managed so-called rules uh

rules-based order. Security [snorts]

burden redistribution reduces the cost

that America bears

for maintaining the enforcement

structure of their own dominance. Means

they're not interested in that anymore.

You understand?

This is a national capital uh conducting

a controlled demolition

uh of the American system of dominance.

America is being downsized. It's being

downsized.

Because it can't perform like it used

to.

At that the scale that it used to. So,

it's being downsized.

Because why would the captors of the of

the American state, the ones who

captured the American state, the private

sector and so forth, why would they

dismantle its dominance? That's That's

one of the reasons why they captured it.

Because the dominance has become an

interference for them. It's gotten in

the way.

Then the second faction is what we call

the nationalistic faction of the owners

and controllers of global financialist

capital, the OCFC. Their capital uh

their revenue model is geographically

and institutionally bound to American

state power, to American supremacy.

The military-industrial complex, that's

the archetype. Lockheed Martin,

Raytheon, Palantir, and so forth. Their

whole uh

sort of contractor ecosystem.

These are entities and companies that

require the US as customer, the US

military as a distribution channel, the

US

geopolitical conflict as a demand

generator. Their revenue model is not

portable.

They can't relocate to Singapore. They

need American dominance because their

whole business model depends on it.

So, their interests are different from a

national capital. But now, because

they're stuck in America, they have no

other way to make their money except

being tied to America, now they have

shifted. So, now their profit center is

going to become and already is

increasingly domestic. by private prison

operators,

uh

surveillance technology and so forth, uh

border enforcement contractors,

data-driven

policing systems and so forth,

militarized policing. All of these

things require a very active and

easily spending interventionist American

state.

And they require one very specific

thing, which is permanent insecurity.

A stable, secure domestic population

does not generate sufficient demand for

surveillance, for detention, for

militarized policing. So, they need

things to be unsteady.

They want a counterinsurgency.

So, insecurity is managed. It's managed,

not resolved.

Immigration is managed. It's managed to

sustain border enforcement contracts.

You want to You want problems always.

You don't want them to be resolved. You

don't want to eliminate the demand.

Urban instability is managed to justify

the militarized policing, surveillance,

uh detention, so forth. It's not

addressed. It's not addressed through

any type of measures or policies that

would actually reduce the problems.

People think this is a conspiracy. It's

not a conspiracy. It's a business model.

It's just a business model.

And internationally, obviously, we

already know this translates directly

into

uh conflict management logic. The

nationalistic OCGFC have no interest in

a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, for

example. Settlement would terminate the

weapons contracts.

>> [snorts]

>> Settlement would terminate the

intelligence expansion, the the advisory

deployments and so forth. The conflict

as a managed asset

that is supposed to be sustained and not

they're not supposed to let it escalate

to the point of great power

confrontation. This is their

the the optimal outcome for them. Latin

America follows the same logic. The

cartel economy is not a policy failure

from their perspective for the

nationalistic OCGFC perspective, no.

Cartel activity justifies militarized

border enforcement, it justifies

counter-narcotics programs,

uh uh counter-terrorism programs,

surveillance technology deployment,

again detentions and so forth. I mean,

the conditions that generate cartel

power, that give the cartels the power,

that could be addressed at some point,

but it's never going to be addressed. It

will never be addressed because if you

resolve these problems,

then you would also eliminate the demand

for the entire domestic

uh

the entire domestic security suite,

security product suite. Now, these

factions do have competing interests,

but the but you understand the

relationship between these two factions

is not a competition between equals. The

nationalistic OCGFC,

those companies

uh are are investment holdings within

uh

a national OCGFC portfolios.

BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and so

forth.

Uh the three largest institutional

shareholders in most of the US defense

and security firms.

These are a national entities.

These are the same entities whose

capital is simultaneously positioned

across the global south

and and and investing in the global

transition.

So, the nationalistic faction can't go

rogue. They can't go too rogue, anyway.

There will always be an escalation

ladder, and there will always be a

ceiling to that ladder where it can't go

past that.

They can pursue conflict maintenance

operations through a corridors of

permissibility defined by a national

capital. You understand? Corridors of

permissibility, and they can't break

through those corridors, and they can't

act outside of those corridors. This

applies, in my opinion, to Iran right

now.

The military operation that the attacks

that are going on now, this serves that

the nationalistic OCG OCGFC. They get to

drop their bombs, and they get to sell

the replenishments for those bombs, but

they're not going to be allowed to

escalate to the point of state collapse.

>> [snorts]

>> Because that would produce regional

chaos that is damaging to Gulf capital

positions. And and the Gulf is connected

to the a-national OCGFC.

That would disrupt energy infrastructure

and so forth. That's within the

a-national portfolios. And it would put

a whole complete freeze on the whole

global South repositioning project. So,

I think that constraint will hold. I

don't think that we'll see state

collapse in Iran. I don't think anyone

is actually trying to pursue that. So,

let me put this together.

The full picture of American power

constraint, the constraints on American

power right now, is not just

external multipolarity and the existence

of alternatives, and it isn't just the

internal capture. It's the interaction

between the two, between these two

dynamics.

External multipolarity, the existence of

alternatives, this constrains what

American power can actually achieve.

Chinese military capabilities, for

example, constrain US dominance in the

in the in the Indo-Pacific, the South

China Sea and so forth.

Russian nuclear deterrence constrains

direct confrontation in Europe. For

example, the BRICS plus financial

systems and alternatives, this

constrains the coercive reach of

American unilateral sanctions, dollar

sanctions. Okay?

These are the hard constraints on

American power projection from the

external. And the internal capture

constraints on American power is

it constrains what America what American

power is permitted to do.

There's the external, what they

it constrains what they can do, what is

actually achievable for them, but the

internal constraints by by the

by the fact that they have been captured

those in the internal constraints of

their uh capture the private sector

capture of the state this puts

constraints on what they are even

allowed to try to do. The A national

OCGFC is repositioning

requires the multipolar system to

succeed

because their capital is being placed in

the global south. Their capital is being

placed in BRICS financial systems

in the in the commodity corridors that

constitute the emerging multipolar

economy. So the A national OCGFC have a

direct interest in constraining the

American state from disrupting this

transition too badly.

This is why for example decoupling from

China is so selective on the part of

America. They target specific sectors

semiconductors AI adjacent technologies

and so forth military supply chains and

whatnot while still leaving completely

intact the vast manufacturing and the

commercial interdependence that A

national capital depends upon.

A genuine rupture with China

would destroy enormous value in their

portfolios and this isn't going to

happen. They're not going to do that.

I mean even the decoupling itself is not

really about trying to hurt China. It's

about shrinking America's sphere of

influence

and pushing China to expand their sphere

of influence into the regions where the

US is withdrawing from.

The nationalistic faction channels the

American power towards American state

power towards whatever generates

revenues for them. Regardless of whether

it serves any coherent national interest

any strategic objective. It doesn't

matter at all. This is the most

consequential paradox in in contemporary

geopolitics you could argue that you

have the most expensive military in

human history that cannot win wars and

that doesn't have to.

They don't have to because victory would

terminate the revenue stream. They're

not interested in winning wars. You

understand? The war in Afghanistan

transferred approximately 2.1 trillion

dollars from the US Treasury into the

the coffers of the nationalistic OCJFC.

After which the original adversary was

restored to power.

I mean, from a national strategic

standpoint, that's a catastrophic

failure. But from the

revenue standpoint, it's a perfectly

executed operation. It's beautiful. It's

perfect.

They're not interested in winning wars.

America is a regional power now.

No more, no less. They are a regional

power. They are no longer the global

superpower.

And this has direct implications.

You have to understand this. This has

direct implications for how non-Western

states should now engage with American

power.

That's the whole point. That's the whole

point of talking about this because the

countries of the global south have to

understand how to navigate

uh dealing with America.

Because America still has

tremendous coercive capacity. They're

still dangerous within the a-national

OCJFC's permitted operational corridor

for the nationalistic OCJFC. So, states

that fall within that corridor, states

that have accessible extraction targets

without having countervailing a-national

associated interests,

then they remain genuinely vulnerable.

See, none of this none of this change

makes American power benign in any way

whatsoever. But it does make it more

predictable.

You can map where may be applied, where

will be applied, and where it will be

constrained, where it should be

constrained by mapping the factional

interests that are tied to this or that

area or this or that regional leaders of

those interests. You understand?

Yes, the multipolar transition is

happening. It's underway.

And it will proceed. There's not another

way for things to go. But everyone who's

happy about

multipolarity, it is understandable that

everyone is happy about it. But don't

overlook the risks, the actual risks.

The risk isn't that the transition is

going to fail.

The risk is that the transition will

succeed, but it will succeed on terms

that are preset by a-national capital

and not by our own people. The OCJFCS is

not dismantling American hegemony

because they oppose concentrations of

power, consolidation of power. No, it's

the exact opposite. The OCJFCS

represents the biggest

concentration of power, the biggest

consolidation of power that the world

has ever seen.

They don't have a problem with

concentrated power.

They have a problem with being

constrained themselves by any state,

including the United States.

So, their preferred outcome for the

transition would be, for example, a

BRICS integration that creates new

dependencies

rather than genuine sovereignty. That's

what they want to see, new dependencies.

They want to see infrastructure

corridors that generate debt

obligations.

Debt obligations structured through the

same legal frameworks and the same

arbitration mechanisms that made the

structural adjustment reform so

effective of the IMF.

They want to see digital payment systems

that replace SWIFT dependency with

another dependency.

With dependency dependency upon an

alternative platform. Okay, different

controllers, same logic.

Conditional access.

They want to see a world that has been

formally decolonized at the level of

political sovereignty, but remains

substantively colonized at the level of

economic and financial dependency.

It looks different, but it functions the

same. This is what they want to see.

But, there's a window. We have a window

of opportunity. It's a transition

window.

Because the geopolitical space

that the A-national OCJFCS managed

retreat has created for us,

this space is genuinely available for

non-Western institutional and

non-Western economic systems to be built

in the global south. Alternative payment

systems, alternative diplomatic

platforms, and so forth. Alternative

trade settlement mechanisms, and so on.

Alternative legal frameworks. And this

is happening already. This is already

happening.

And it's happening with implicit

A-national OCGFC tolerance because they

see that these mechanisms facilitate the

transition that is required, but their

intention is to control those mechanisms

that we're creating.

Once the Once the transition is

complete, they still want to be on the

top. So, the the the countries that use

this window to build genuine sovereign

capacity

uh

uh

uh genuine productive capacity, food

security, energy security, energy

sovereignty, uh build educational

institutions that generate uh indigenous

knowledge, build financial systems that

serve their own populations, uh those

actors Those are the actors. Those are

the states. Those are the countries who

are going to arrive at the

post-transition order in a qualitatively

different position, in a better

position. And the countries and the

states and so forth and the communities

uh that participate in the transition

without building any genuine

sovereignty, uh well, they're going to

find themselves inside of a new

dependency. A new dependency that in

some respects is going to be even harder

to escape than the previous one because

this dependency is going to be dressed

in the language of multipolarity and in

the language of South-South cooperation.

So, you're not going to be even ready.

You won't even be thinking about it as

colonization, and it will be

colonization. So, I would say this to

the uh uh Muslim-majority countries and

to the countries in the global South

more broadly, and I would say it to

anyone who is trying to navigate this

transition with their sovereignty intact

and who wants to end uh get to the other

side of this transition with their

sovereignty intact. The end of the

American unipolar order is not a victory

for us in and of itself. The the just

the weakening of America, even though

America has caused tremendous and

extraordinary harm to our people, that

in and of itself is not a gain.

What we do with the uh conditions and

the circumstances and the opportunities

that have been created by the demotion

of America

uh will determine whether or not it

becomes a genuine gain for us or not or

whether we're just going to transition

from one form of subjugation into

another form of subjugation. So, one of

the first things that we need to do

again to the Muslim world and to the

countries in the global south,

analytically you need to update

yourself. You need to stop reading

American behavior through either the

nationalistic surface narrative that

they offer you or the liberal

institutional narrative that they offer

you. Both of these are noise. You need

to look at the factional interests that

are operating underneath. So, when

American policy looks incoherent to you

or when it seems like they are

simultaneously pursuing

contradictory objectives, then you know

that what you're seeing is the

competition between the private sector

actors that control the American state.

But, those private sector actors operate

within a nested hierarchy. So, you

should be able to read their behavior.

And if their behavior is more readable,

then it's more it's more easy to

navigate and it's even potentially

possible to manipulate and exploit that

behavior.

And then the second thing that I would

say is that you have to understand that

the

the window of opportunity, like I said,

the window of opportunity

during this transition,

that it's open now,

but it's not going to remain open

indefinitely.

Uh

the space that is currently existing for

us to build genuine de-dollarization and

develop sovereign financial systems and

so forth, trade frameworks that don't

embed dependency conditions upon our

people,

uh that space is available now in a way

that it has not been available for

decades. And it may not be available

again for decades after this if we don't

use it now. So, use it now. And then the

third imperative is structural.

Uh and that's the hardest one. That's

the hardest one because it requires

being honest. It requires being honest

about the internal conditions within

Muslim majority states, Muslim majority

countries, and countries in the global

south and global south economies that

make genuine sovereignty difficult to

achieve

regardless of the

external environment. I'm talking about

elite capture. I'm talking about

comprador collaborator class. I'm

talking about educational systems that

produce administrators for the global

economy rather than uh builders of

sovereign development.

I'm talking about financial sectors that

are uh mere extensions of international

capital rather than instruments of

domestic investment. You understand me?

Structural sovereignty.

None of these things are going to be

addressed by the multipolar transition

automatically.

The A national OCGFC are quite

comfortable working with the

collaborator class of elites in a

multipolar world. The colonizer

collaborators. That class of people has

always existed in colonization, and they

need to be completely expunged from our

societies.

Genuine sovereignty requires a

combination of external conditions and

internal transformation.

The external condition is already

improving. That's already being taken

care of. The multipolar transition is

already happening, and it's creating a

real space for us. But, the internal

transformation,

the displacement of the collaborator uh

class and the collaborator institutions

and the building of genuine productive

capacity, the building of uh and the

development of knowledge frameworks

within our countries and within our our

societies that serve our communities

rather than serve our colonizers and our

extractors, uh that needs to be worked

on. That's something that we have to do.

No shift in the global order is going to

do that for us. BlackRock's not going to

do that for us.

BRICS isn't going to do it for us.

And then the fourth uh is

epistemological. The fourth thing is

epistemological, and this is the most

fundamental of all. The unipolar order

was not just maintained by military

force and by financial systems. It was

maintained by a system of ideas, a

system of psychological colonization,

uh uh telling you what development

means, telling you what good governance

is supposed to look like, telling you

what uh what forms of social

organization are modern and which are

backward.

They were telling us all of this. Who

has the right to narrate history, and

whose narrative counts as uh factual and

as

as truthful. That system of ideas is

also in transition, but the institutions

that carried that system of ideas, the

universities, the think tanks, the media

institutions,

the NGO ecosystem, the credentializing

system and so forth, those are not going

to be dismantled

by geopolitical multipolarity.

We need active, conscious,

sustained counter construction that we

do ourselves.

We have to build the capacity to narrate

our own reality,

to produce our own analysis, to evaluate

events through our own frameworks that

center on our own interests and our own

historical experience.

And that's what we're trying to do at

Hamdulillah at Mideast Nation. A step

towards epistemological sovereignty, the

refusal to accept imported frames,

imported definitions and imported

understanding. The insistence upon

reading the world through

lenses that we have built,

that we own,

and that serve our analysis rather than

someone else's agenda, that serve our

interests rather than someone else's

agenda.

So, America has been demoted. Understand

this. They have been demoted.

The evidence for that is structural.

The demotion is already complete at the

level of

the underlying reality even if it is

still incomplete at the level of

institutional acknowledgement, but it

has already been completed in real

terms. The constraints on American power

are compounding and they operate

simultaneously from outside and from

within America. The factional logic of

the capturing private sector is legible,

it's predictable once you understand it.

You have to you have to try to map it

and read it and understand it and

operate accordingly. And as I say, the

transition window is open. The

transition window is open, but it will

close. So, what we do with that window

or what we do during the period of that

window, that interim. That's the

question. And the answer to that

question is not primarily geopolitical.

It's about us. It's about us. It's about

whether we build in this period

uh the sovereign institutions, uh

financial institutions, intellectual,

productive, educational

that will allow us to arrive at the

post-transition

uh

as genuine actors rather than as uh

participants in someone else's

redesigned dependency, redesigned

updated colonization.

The world is being reorganized, and that

reorganization is not our gift. This is

a challenge.

The same way that uh America didn't win

anything just because everyone else

collapsed.

Uh that resulted in them being the

global superpower, but they didn't do it

through achievement.

They didn't do it because they defeated

their rivals. Well, now our rival, the

one who has been uh uh the rival for the

global south, the rival of the Muslim

world for all these years, America, they

are in decline. They are receding. They

are collapsing.

That's not a win for us. That's not

something that we have won. That's just

something that that they have done to

themselves.

So, now the question is what are we

going to do for ourselves uh now that

that uh uh

uh collapse of the American system is

underway. What are we going to build for

ourselves? Just because America is

leaving the global stage,

that doesn't mean that our countries are

now going to be perfect and wonderful

and that we're going to succeed. Now we

just have the opportunity to succeed

that has been denied us for all this

time. So, the question is whether or not

we're going to use this opportunity. So,

yes, the demotion of America is a good

thing for us. It's the removal of a boot

from our necks.

Uh but once that boot has been lifted,

that's when you have to show now

uh

you have to show what you have been

prevented from doing all this time that

that boot has been on your neck, you

understand? What you've been prevented

from building, what you've been

prevented from creating, what you've

been prevented from achieving.

And like I say, there's no time to lose

because the truth of the matter is that

that American boot can very easily and

will very easily

be replaced by the boot of a national

capital.

So, if you don't want that boot on your

neck, then you have to stand up. You

have to stand up, you have to make your

plans, and you have to make your

strategy, and you have to fortify

yourself.

Because we don't want a world that just

looks different, you know, on the

surface.

We don't want a world where we have uh

new institutions, new blocks, and so

forth, new platforms, but underneath all

of that, we have the same logic, the

same logic of extraction, the same uh

dependency, you know, the same the same

system just administered by different

hands.

>> [snorts]

>> So, like I say, the question is what are

we supposed to do? What are we supposed

to actually do about it?

Uh how are we supposed to actually use

this um transition window?

Well, that answer has I think two

dimensions because just like I talked

about with America,

uh you have the, you know, the external

constraints and you have the internal

constraints. You have external

conditions and you have internal

conditions. You have the uh the external

positioning and you have the internal

transformation that I'm talking about.

And neither one works without the other.

This needs to be done in concert. Now, I

talked about the two factions of the

OCGFC, the uh the uh a-national faction

and the nationalistic faction, and I

said that the

the nationalistic faction uh I said that

they are still, and they are, still

operationally dangerous.

But like I said, they operate within

certain limits. There's a ceiling on

what they can and cannot do. And that

ceiling is defined by the interests of

the a-national faction that's above

them. So, every country needs to

identify where they sit vis-a-vis both

of these factions.

Countries that fall inside of the

corridor of permissible aggression by

the nationalistic OC GFC, those are

countries where the a-national OC GFC

have no significant stake. They have no

portfolio exposure, no infrastructure

investment, no co-investment with the

sovereign wealth funds and whatnot. You

understand?

They have nothing to lose if the

nationalistic faction makes moves

against them.

They have no

contributive role in the transition, in

the managing of the transition. That

makes a country vulnerable. That's what

makes a country vulnerable in 2026, not

just military weakness, not just

military weakness, but economic

irrelevance

to the people who set the ceiling

and and who set the the limits and the

parameters of nationalistic OC GFC

aggression.

So, the first imperative of external

positioning is to make yourself too

expensive to destroy. You understand?

Give the a-national OC GFC a stake in

your stability, not a controlling stake,

a manageable stake.

Just enough that destabilizing your

your country, destabilizing your country

damages their portfolios, damages their

returns, and complicates their

repositioning in your region.

When that's the case, the nationalistic

faction of the OC GFC isn't going to get

the green light to attack you.

Because the people above them have

something to lose. You understand? So,

you have to understand these dynamics.

This is exactly what the Gulf states

have been doing. They've been doing it.

They've been doing it quite

intelligently.

Saudi Vision 2030 isn't just an economic

development program. It's a strategic

recruitment program of a-national

capital into Saudi Arabia's stability

and Saudi Arabia's success, and in fact,

the whole region's stability and

success.

When BlackRock has billions of dollars

deployed in Saudi infrastructure, when

they have major Western asset managers,

co-invested in Vision 2030 projects when

the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf

of the GCC are deeply interlocked with

the investment portfolios of the global

financial elite,

then Saudi Arabia is no longer a target.

The GCC is no longer a target. It's a

partner.

Okay, it's an imperfect, contested, and

conditionally respected partner, but a

partner. An indispensable partner, you

understand? The UAE has done the same

thing. They've been doing it for even a

longer period of time and arguably more

comprehensively.

Dubai isn't just a financial hub, it's a

it's a very deliberate architecture of

mutual dependency with global capital.

You can't destabilize the UAE

without damaging an

an enormous web of international

financial interests

that runs through Dubai.

That's not an accident, that's a

strategy. They did that on purpose and

it has worked. It's worked for them.

Never mind what's happening now with the

Iran doing what they're doing with the

with their attacks and what not. That's

not going to be allowed to spin out of

control.

Believe me, that's not going to be

allowed to spin out of control for

precisely the reasons that I've

mentioned. Because there's a ceiling,

there's an escalation ladder, and

there's a ceiling and that's set by a

national capital.

Now, don't misunderstand this because

you might think

uh that this is just a more

sophisticated form of dependency, this

relationship with a national capital.

You might think that dealing with the a

national OCFC means that you're just

trading one master for another. And yes,

it can be. It can be that way.

That is what can happen if you do it

wrong.

Because the truth is the only difference

between strategic leverage and

dependency

is just one thing. There's just one

thing, which is whether or not you can

retain overriding state authority to set

the terms.

Whether the state holds the power to

define what is permissible and what is

not permissible, regardless of how much

capital has been recruited. You

understand? The state has to be strong.

The state has to be able to determine

whether the relationship that you have

with A National Capital serves your

national project or if it redirects your

national project to serve that

relationship with A National OCGFC. Yes,

it's a minefield. It's absolutely a

minefield and it's very dangerous, but

you have no choice. You understand? You

have to navigate that minefield.

You need to know this. There is no other

game in town. There's no other game in

town.

You know, it's like those ships right

now that are

navigating the Hormuz right now. They're

turning off their transmitters. They're

trying to avoid detection.

There's nothing else you can do.

The external situation is what it is.

The A National OCGFC exists.

>> [snorts]

>> This huge non-state economic actor that

owns and controls the state power of

America, the state power of the West,

they exist.

You can ignore them if you want to,

but that's not going to make them ignore

you.

You understand? If you don't handle that

relationship in some kind of way, if you

don't navigate that relationship, if you

don't figure out how to deal with them,

they're going to crush you. It's that

simple.

It's that brutal. They exist and they

are predatory and you are in danger and

you have to protect yourself by one way

or another way. But the good thing about

it is that we know what their incentives

are.

We know what their incentives are. We

know what their motives are. We know

what drives them and that makes it

easier to deal with them.

Getting it right is not easy. I didn't

say it's easy. It requires a strong

state like I say, a state that is both

strong and savvy.

You need the A National OCGFC to have

skin in your game. Without that, you're

exposed. An exposure in this sort of an

environment is a death sentence. It's a

death sentence. Well, you might as well

put the chains on yourself.

You might as well set your own house on

fire.

Look, you have to have the ability to

negotiate with them when they make you

an offer that you can't refuse. You have

to be able to negotiate your way out of

that line of fire. Ask Libya, ask Iraq,

ask any country that found themselves

inside the corridor of permissible

aggression when they had no

countervailing relationships to

constrain what was done to them. This

has never been as true as it is today.

America is an extortion racket.

Everything is transactional. This is the

reality that our countries are dealing

with. This is the reality that our

countries are trying to navigate today.

And if you don't understand this, then

you will misunderstand everything that

is happening in the world today, in the

Muslim world, in the global south, and

everywhere else. The wolf is at your

door. You understand me? There's a wolf

at your door. I'm not saying fear him,

but I am saying know he's there and make

your strategy responsibly. Because for

instance, look at the at the Gulf

involvement in conflicts across the

Muslim world, in in Sudan, in Libya, in

Somalia, right? The UAE and Saudi

Arabia, they've got their hands in all

of those things, in all of those

situations, and it's not always clean.

And people see that. They see what

they're doing, and they revert to what

they've been trained to revert to. Oh,

it's interference, it's destabilization,

it's the the regional powers acting on

their own interest at the expense of

weaker states, it's exploitation, and so

on. Arab colonization and what have you.

And yes, certainly some of what happens

genuinely deserves criticism,

absolutely.

But understand the context. Understand

the context. Think about what the

alternative actually is. Because the

alternative the alternative to Gulf

involvement in those conflicts is not a

clean, uh, peaceful, self-determined

resolution. You're in a dream world. The

alternative is vacuum, and a vacuum in

this environment isn't going to stay

empty, it's going to get filled by the

nationalistic OCGFC, by the uh, the

OCGFC and their contractors, by

Western-backed proxy forces, by IMF

restructuring programs that arrive with

their peacekeepers in tow,

By NGO ecosystems that are going to

embed

Western institutional frameworks into

the post-conflict settlement, and

they'll call it reconstruction. They'll

call it peace.

We've seen this time and time again. We

know exactly how it ends. We know

exactly how it goes. Just a rebranding

of colonization. So, when Saudi Arabia

and the UAE are present in these

conflicts, uh negotiating with the

different factions, cultivating

relationships across the whole uh

political landscape in this or that

country, maintaining economic leverage

over this or that actor, you know, over

multiple actors in any in any given

conflict, what they're doing,

uh whatever their specific motives may

be,

what they're doing is keeping that

conflict inside a regional framework.

They're the ones who are in the room,

you understand? They're the ones who

have relationships on all sides, which

means that when a settlement comes, when

a settlement is arrived at, they are the

ones who are in a position to broker

that settlement.

Not the West.

That matters enormously.

A settlement brokered by uh regional

actors, even imperfect actors, even ones

who have their own interest in the

outcome, okay? They're not angels. I

didn't say they are. But it's still

structurally very different from a

settlement that's going to be brokered

by the West or by Western-controlled

institutions. It's completely different.

The terms are different, the

dependencies that it creates are

different, the uh institutional

frameworks that it embeds are different.

Uh

who controls the reconstruction, the

post uh post-conflict reconstruction?

That's different. And all of that all of

that

flows from whoever is in the room.

Whoever is the one who's in the room.

These are not externally created

conflicts, you understand? These are

internally created conflicts that have

external players taking sides in those

internal conflicts.

And those players now, alhamdulillah,

are from our own people, not from the

West.

Because look, it's going to be one of

the other either way. It's going to be

one of the other. If it's not our

people, it's going to be them. If it's

not our people, it's going to be them.

These are the only choices.

These are the only options. There is no

option of everybody mind their own

business and leave a country to resolve

their conflicts in their own way. That's

not an option. That that option does not

exist.

If our people are not there, America

will be there.

If our people are not there, the UK will

be there or France will be there and so

on. The West will be there. The IMF will

be there. So on and so forth.

You understand? China brokered that

Saudi Iran normalization not because

China is a neutral party with no

interest in the region, but because

China was present. Because China was

engaged. Because China had built

relationships with both sides.

And that resulted in the most

significant diplomatic realignment in

the Middle East in decades

on terms that did not embed Western

institutional dependency. Okay? That's

what regional engagement produces when

it works.

Even messy, contested, interest-driven

regional engagement

still produces better outcomes for us

than the alternative.

We are the ones who are engaging with

the actors in these conflicts. That

means that we will be the ones to

negotiate the settlements that end these

conflicts. We will be the ones to

contain them and we will be the ones to

resolve them. Not the West, not Western

institutions, us.

And you have to understand what that

means.

That's not nothing.

That's everything.

Wallahi, that's everything.

So when you evaluate

Gulf involvement in Sudan, in Libya, and

wherever else, when you evaluate that

through a Western framework and you

reach the conclusion that for example

the the United Arab Emirates is behaving

badly and they should be condemned and

they should be pressured and they should

be should be isolated and what have you.

I'm sorry to tell you, you are not being

principled.

You're being useful. You're being useful

to the people who want our states to be

weakened, who want our states to be

stripped of their regional influence,

who want our states to be pushed out of

the rooms where the settlements will be

negotiated.

No, you're undermining the consolidation

of Muslim power in Muslim lands. Your

sincerity, no matter how sincere you

are, your sincerity doesn't change that

function. You can be completely sincere

and still be completely wrong about what

you are functionally doing. Look, the

frameworks that the colonizers, that the

Westerners gave us

uh to evaluate the behavior of our own

governments and our own regional powers,

those frameworks were not designed to

serve our interests. They were designed

to manage us for their interests. You

understand? And one of the primary

things that they manage us into is

internal opposition

to the exact institutions that for all

their flaws represent the only realistic

base

from which genuine sovereignty can be

built. Genuine sovereignty can be built

and can be defended in this moment in

time.

This is the epistemological trap, and

it's a very sophisticated one because it

works through your conscience. It works

through your heart. It works through

your conscience, not against your

conscience. It makes collaboration with

external pressure feel like you're being

principled. It makes undermining your

own state feel like accountability.

Somehow you can actually convince

yourself that you can ever achieve

justice by siding with the West against

the Muslims and by calling upon America,

subhanallah, to intervene in the Muslim

lands, to intervene in Muslim issues.

Well, no, that just makes you a

mouthpiece for the colonizers. Yes, it

does. Just a mouthpiece for the

colonizers, even if you have deluded

yourself into thinking that you're

speaking on behalf of the oppressed

Muslims.

No, we have to be clear-eyed about this.

Wanting better governance is fine.

That's perfectly legitimate, but the

question is what's the path that

actually leads there? How do we actually

get there? And the path that runs

through weakening your own state, the

path that runs through inviting external

pressure and collaborating with the

forces that are openly hostile to your

country's sovereignty, well, that path

has never once, not once, produced

better governance in any country.

It produces Libya. It produces Iraq. It

has produced nothing but destruction.

It's produced populations that are

genuinely defenseless. That's all they

ever produce.

Defenseless against not just their own

imperfect governments, but against

everything.

So, like I say, if you're going to

negotiate with the A national OCG of C

and you must,

then you're going to need a strong

state.

You're going to need a savvy state.

You're going to need a state that can

make itself irreplaceable.

So, let me talk about the internal

dimension that I mentioned. Because the

external strategy only works if you have

a strong state capable of executing

things on their own terms. And this is

where most of the global South countries

and most of the Muslim majority

countries face their real constraint,

not external pressure alone, but

internal

institutional weakness

that makes them unable to really

properly

hold the terms of engagement with

external capital.

Makes them unable to prevent the

collaborative class from forming and

from operating freely in their societies

and in their economies. Makes them

unable to build real sovereign

institutions.

Even even even while the the transition

window makes it possible to build them.

They don't have the capacity or the

capability to build them.

So, what is the state that you need? The

state that you need, what does that

actually look like? It's not necessarily

a large state. Doesn't have to be large.

Doesn't have to necessarily follow a

nationalization model in terms of their

resources, but it requires a

non-bypassable state authority

that has non-bypassable state authority

over the private sector. Meaning capital

can operate, sure, it can grow, it can

engage internationally and so forth, but

it cannot form autonomous relationships

with external actors that run outside of

the state's strategic agenda, the

national agenda.

It cannot align their interests

horizontally with transnational capital

in ways that bypass or undermine the

national project or national agenda.

The state holds the overriding power.

That's the condition. The state has to

hold overriding power. The collaborator

class

is precisely what emerges when that

condition is absent, when the state

doesn't have that power or doesn't exert

that power, when private sector actors

develop loyalties and develop

dependencies that cater to external

capital

rather than to the nation, rather than

to the national project. When your

business elite

uh is more accountable to the

international partners that they have

than to the society that they operate

in. When the most educated and most

capable people in your country

uh have oriented their careers

towards integration into the global

economy as it currently exists, rather

than towards the construction of

something genuinely sovereign,

uh genuine alternatives to the current

model. This has to be structurally

prevented.

The collaborator class

not through the suppression of private

enterprise, but through the maintenance

of a state that's strong enough and

coherent enough and sufficiently

grounded in its own national project

that private actors cannot bypass it.

You know, you understand me?

The state must be the senior partner,

always.

And a state with that kind of authority

cannot function without the human

capital necessary to staff it. And

that's where the real work needs to be

done because the professional class, in

my opinion, that most of the global

south and most of the Muslim majority

countries currently produces,

uh

they're essentially trained to serve the

global economy as it is currently

structured. You understand me? They're

educated in uh western epistemological

frameworks. They're

uh credentialed by western institutions,

and they are oriented uh towards

integration into the existing status quo

system rather than construction of

alternatives. Rather than uh being

interested in the construction of

alternatives. Their expertise is real,

but their orientation, the direction

that their expertise points, is outward

and upward into the global system, not

inward and downward into the roots of

the national project, of any national

project, or you can even say regional

project. So, the professional class that

you need

is a very different kind of animal.

You need outstanding technical uh

expertise in finance, in law, in

strategic economics, and so forth. The

actual mechanics of how global capital

works.

>> [snorts]

>> That expertise is non-negotiable. You

absolutely need that. You cannot

navigate the transition window

uh without people who genuinely

understand the system that they're

navigating.

You have to know the waters, you

understand? But alongside that

expertise, they must be absolutely

grounded in an ethical and an

epistemological framework that is their

own, that is from their own people, an

indigenous worldview, and a uh a

civilizational identity.

You understand? Something that roots

them and roots their loyalty vertically

to the national project rather than uh

horizontally into uh transnational

capital. That rootedness can't just be a

decoration like a

Palestinian keffiyeh draped on your sho-

draped on your shoulders. It's not a

cultural accessory

that you just add to the package to make

it look more authentic. I'm talking

about real rootedness, real rootedness.

That's what keeps a highly capable

person who has all the options in the

world that their that their expertise

opens up for them. They've got all those

opportunities, but they choose to build

here

rather than extracting value here and

living somewhere else. That's what makes

the difference between a technocrat

uh who's actually serving the nation,

serving the national project, the

regional project, or what have you,

uh

uh and a and a and a technocrat who's

just passing through that time that type

of work

on their way to an international career.

You understand? You cannot build

sovereign institutions with people whose

minds are not sovereign, with people

whose minds are already captured.

The battle is has to be won there first.

If it's not one there, it's not going to

be one at all.

And then you have to look at the the the

regional dimension of all of this

because a single state, like I've talked

about this before, even a strong one,

even a well-governed one, even one with

a rooted and capable professional class,

they still are very limited in the

leverage that they have against the

pressure that a national capital can

bring to bear if they decide to move

against you. You understand? That

pressure is too large, is too

multi-dimensional, is too capable of

finding and exploiting weak spots, weak

points.

But states operating cohesively

as a regional block

uh sharing intelligence, coordinating

economic policy, presenting a unified

front on investment terms, and refusing

to be played against one another, well,

that's a qualitatively different

proposition.

You understand? The GCC, the Gulf

Cooperation Council, they've

demonstrated the basic principle. Saudi

Arabia and the UAE, they have

significant leverage in their own right

individually. Both of those countries

have significant leverage individually,

but operating in coordination

with aligned sovereign wealth fund

positioning and shared diplomatic

relationships where they all have their

ducks in a row, well, they have a

leverage of a completely different

order, of a different magnitude. And

BRICS plus is the expanded version of

that same logic.

You become collectively too large, you

become collectively too interconnected,

too consequential to the A-national OCG

FC's repositioning project that you

cannot be casually destabilized.

There's too much at stake.

The weak link in collective sovereignty

is always the same. Individual states

that can be pressured, that can be

incentivized, or they can be internally

destabilized into breaking ranks.

One state that can be flipped. One elite

faction that can be bought off.

One domestic opposition movement that

can be mobilized against the government

or against the regional project.

That's all it takes to fracture

cohesion.

And fracturing cohesion is their

standard tool. Divide and rule, we know

that. It's not subtle.

And it's applied consistently

everywhere.

It's applied consistently everywhere

because it consistently works.

Which brings everything full circle.

This goes back to what I was talking

about earlier, strong states.

Internal cohesion with non-bypassable

authority over their private sectors and

a professional class that is loyal to

their nation, loyal to their national

projects.

These are the preconditions for

collective sovereignty to be able to

function because you cannot possibly

build a strong regional block out of

weak, fragmented, divided, internally

compromised states.

Collective sovereignty is the

multiplier, but you need to have

something to multiply in the first

place. So, you need strong states. So,

everything that I said about

the external positioning,

the internal transformation,

uh regional cohesion,

this all rests on one foundation, and

that foundation is unity. Not unity in

the sense of everyone agreeing. We're

not I'm about uh soft and squishy unity.

Not unity in the sense of everyone

approving of everything that is done.

No, we're talking about real unity, the

hard kind.

The hard kind of unity that actually

costs you something, that actually

requires some sacrifice from you.

I need you to understand what's at

stake.

What's really at stake because I I I

genuinely think that a lot of people

don't understand it. You don't

appreciate what's at stake.

We're not in a period of normal

political disagreement today in 2026

where you can afford the luxury of

fragmenting along factional lines or

withholding your support from

governments that you disapprove of

or collaborating with external pressure

because you decided that this or that

particular leader or this or that

particular policy is bad enough to

justify doing so. No, we are in a

transition window that is finite.

It's finite and it's contested and we're

facing forces that are very

sophisticated, that are very patient,

and that have been doing this for a very

long time.

This is not the moment

for bickering.

This is not the time for that.

And I'm not telling you that our

governments are all beyond criticism and

that everything and anything they do is

fine and I'm not telling you that

everything that is done in the name of

sovereignty is automatically legitimate.

But what I'm telling you is this.

A weakened state cannot protect you.

A weakened state, a fragmented region

cannot protect you. A professional class

that has been trained to look outward

and has no loyalty whatsoever to their

nation or to their national projects

cannot build what you need.

And an opposition that collaborates with

external players, external pressure,

however principled that they believe

themselves to be, they're opening the

gates and you don't get to control what

comes through those gates once they've

been opened.

Libya tried that. Syria tried that.

The people who opened those gates, they

also believed that they were fighting

for something better. They weren't wrong

about the imperfections that they were

objecting to, but they were

catastrophically wrong about what would

replace it. If Muhammad bin Salman

falls, if Muhammad bin Zayed falls, if

El-Sisi falls, or whoever else,

who do you think is going to replace

them? The Mahdi?

No. Larry Fink is going to replace them.

And once Larry Fink replaces them,

you'll be lucky if you ever lift up your

head again. Unity does not mean only

standing with those who you like.

It doesn't mean standing only with the

people that you agree with. It doesn't

mean that you only stand with the people

whose conduct you fully approve of. It

means recognizing the reality that you

are standing against a common threat.

A threat that is structural, a threat

that is patient, a threat that does not

care one bit about your internal

disagreements, except in so far as they

can use them.

And you cannot afford to let them use

them. You cannot afford cracks in the

walls of your fortress, not now, not

during this period of time.

Because look, the fortress that you're

protecting is not any particular

government. It's not any particular

leader. It's not any particular policy.

The fortress that you're protecting is

the possibility of genuine sovereignty

itself.

The possibility of arriving at the

post-transition order as actors rather

than as dependencies.

That's what's at stake.

That's what you're either protecting or

surrendering with every choice that you

make during this period. Yes, the world

is being reorganized. It's being

reorganized around us, but it's not

being reorganized

for our benefit. That's not why they're

doing it.

But the window that that reorganization

has opened is real, and what we build

during the course of that window, during

the this interim period, the

institutions, the states, the regional

cohesion, the professional class, the

epistemological sovereignty, and so

forth, that is what determines whether

we're going to come through this as a

civilization that has reclaimed its

agency

or as a civilization that has just

traded one subjugation for another and

called it progress. Look, we've been

through worse than this in our history

and we've come through it.

But we can only come through it united.

We can only come through it with states

that hold and that do not fracture.

We can only come through it with

leadership that understands the moment

and with populations that supports that

leadership.

That their populations that understand

what is required of them at this moment

in history.

That's what is required of us now.

Nothing less than that. Nothing less

than that. We are standing against a

flood. You understand? We're standing

against a flood, against a deluge. So

lock your arms with whoever is next to

you. Just like in the salah. Shoulder to

shoulder, foot to foot, and don't leave

any gaps in the saf.

Stand together and don't let shaitan

find a single opening.