Iran’s MAD Standoff with the Rest of the World

Michael Hudson • April 17, 2026

Announcing that “A whole civilization will die tonight,” Donald Trump threatened on April 7, 2026 to destroy “every bridge in Iran” and “every power plant … burning, exploding, and never to be used again.” His intention to continue committing war crimes is driving the world toward a Financial Winter as devastating as the Great Depression. Iran’s April 8 response called his bluff, laying down the terms for ending the conflict and opening the Strait of Hormuz. Oil-importing countries will need to compel U.S. and Israeli compliance with these terms in order to avoid economic crisis.

We are seeing the economic version of what the 1960s called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).[1] The term referred to the military standoff that avoided the global Nuclear Winter that would have occurred if the world’s leading powers had used atomic weapons against each other. The possession of atomic bombs by both the United States and Soviet Union assured that they would not attack each other as long as the arms race maintained nuclear parity. The resulting balance of terror made the U.S.-Soviet Cold War relatively peaceful as far as fighting among the world’s most heavily armed adversaries was concerned. Their mutual restraint enabled America to wage its wars in Southeast Asia and Latin America without threatening world conflagration.

Today’s world is threatened with a more economic kind of global collapse. Iran is defending itself against the prospect of U.S. and Israeli military attack by threatening to destroy OPEC’s oil and gas trade if its survival as a sovereign country is endangered.

“This threat is confronting the world with a fateful choice: Either countries will suffer a deep depression if Trump follows through on his threat to destroy Iran and seize its oil – in which case Iran’s retaliation will destroy OPEC’s energy trade on which many countries have become dependent – or they must actively move to prevent the U.S. attack.”

In the 1960s it was understood that an atomic attack by either of the major powers would not be survivable by them in meaningful terms. But today’s economic version of MAD has no such restraint on America’s floundering attempts to reverse the loss of its economic power that has left it with few major levers to exert control over other countries. Its main leverage is its ability to threaten countries with economic and financial chaos, by closing off the U.S. market to their exports and by blocking their access to oil and gas from Russia, Iran and (until just recently) Venezuela in its drive to force reliance on its own energy supplies and Arab OPEC oil under its control.

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https://www.unz.com/mhudson/postponing-the-worlds-financial-winter-for-how-long/