Every Major War Begins Under False Pretenses

ELI5 / TLDR

The economist Richard Werner (author of Princes of the Yen, the man who coined “quantitative easing”) sits with Tucker Carlson and argues one big thing: every major war is engineered by a small, hidden elite, and the lever they pull is money. Wars start with false flags, get sold with propaganda, and end with a redrawn monetary system that hands more power to fewer people. His through-line: Britain destroyed a rising Germany a century ago to protect its empire, and America is now doing the same to a rising China — with Venezuela and Iran as opening moves. The finale is a warning about central bank digital currency as the ultimate control grid. Some of this is solid economic history. A lot of it is an unfalsifiable grand narrative where every event, good or bad, becomes proof of the same conspiracy.

The Full Story

The Lusitania as a template for how wars begin

Werner opens with the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, the passenger ship whose loss helped drag America into World War I. The standard story is that a German U-boat sank an innocent liner. Werner’s version: Britain officially listed the ship as an auxiliary military vessel, knowing the rule-following German navy would then treat it as a legitimate target. Germany even ran ads in American newspapers warning passengers not to board.

“The German government put ads in American newspapers telling Americans not to board the Lusitania because they might sink it.”

The kicker, per Werner, is Churchill. He claims a BBC documentary shows Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ordering the ship to slow its engines as it approached a known U-boat — making the sinking inevitable. The point isn’t really the ship. It’s the mechanism: a false flag, magnified by friendly media, manufactures public consent for a war ordinary people never wanted.

“All wars are engineered… most ordinary people are good people and that creates this problem that they just can’t imagine that we’re dealing today with such dark and evil forces.”

This is the spine of the whole conversation. Hold onto the structure — false pretense, propaganda, monetary reordering — because Werner applies it to everything that follows.

Britain vs Germany: the railway that had to be stopped

Here Werner is on firmer historical ground. Before WWI, Britain ran a quarter to half the world through naval dominance. Germany (built on the earlier success of Prussia) had become a fast-growing industrial and scientific rival — and crucially, a continental power dependent on shipping lanes Britain controlled.

Germany’s solution was the Berlin–Baghdad–Basra railway, engineered by Siemens and funded by Deutsche Bank, to reach Gulf oil overland and escape British naval blackmail. Werner argues this railway was the real trigger for British war planning:

“Had that been built in time… it would have rendered essentially the British naval dominance irrelevant.”

He backs the “blackmail” claim with a genuinely sharp historical fact: after the 1918 armistice, Britain maintained its naval blockade into 1919, and an estimated one million Germans starved. That blockade is real history. He weaves in the Boer War concentration camps (also real, also a British invention) to paint Britain as the brutal hegemon willing to do anything to crush a rival.

China is the new Germany

The analogy is the payload. America, Werner says, inherited Britain’s role and its playbook. China is the rising rival that “needed to be built up first to have a proper war” — which is how he explains decades of Western investment and tech transfer into China, just as American firms (ITT, GM, Ford, Brown Brothers Harriman) invested in 1920s–30s Germany.

China’s Berlin–Baghdad railway is the Belt and Road Initiative — overland routes to escape the US-controlled sea lanes (Hormuz, Malacca) and an off-ramp from the dollar. So, in Werner’s telling, the recent US actions against Venezuela (heavy oil, refined by China) and Iran (oil supplier to China) aren’t about nuclear programs or regime change for their own sake. They’re choke-point moves aimed at China. He notes Belt and Road infrastructure was reportedly hit in the Iran bombing.

“I think of the claim that we went to war with Iran because of its nuclear program as a kind of IQ test. Anyone who repeats that claim has failed the test.”

He layers in Mackinder’s heartland theory (whoever controls Eurasia controls the world) and Stratfor’s George Friedman on the perennial goal of keeping Germany and Russia apart — and, Werner adds, Japan and China apart.

The IMF, the World Bank, and “Ricardo’s vice”

Werner’s economics gets more interesting and more defensible here. He argues the IMF/World Bank system is a modern colonialism that locks developing countries into exporting raw commodities and forbids them from climbing the value chain. He cites the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis — commodity exporters face declining terms of trade over time — as real evidence the free-trade gospel is rigged against the poor.

The intellectual villain is David Ricardo and his theory of comparative advantage. Werner’s charge, which he calls “the great deception,” is genuinely worth chewing on: Ricardo’s model is logically airtight but rests on unrealistic assumptions, and logic is not truth.

“Logic can only ever tell us about theoretical possibilities, but never tell us about what is true… That’s an empirical question.”

He extends this to mainstream “equilibrium economics,” noting the probability that all eight required assumptions (perfect information, complete markets, zero transaction costs, etc.) hold simultaneously is vanishingly small. His alternative frame — the short-side principle, where whichever of supply or demand is smaller gets the power to pick and choose — is a legitimate heterodox idea. Applied to money: the supply of credit is the short side, so whoever creates money holds power over the whole economy. That is the through-line to his banking thesis.

Banking is the one lever

This is Werner’s home turf and the strongest stretch. His core claim: economic outcomes are driven by bank credit creation, not interest rates or fiscal policy, and textbooks hide this by leaving banks out of their models entirely.

He retells the Weimar story through this lens. Hjalmar Schacht — appointed to the foreign-controlled Reichsbank — ran policies that helped export the Depression to Germany, then used credit creation (an early form of QE) to engineer recovery by 1936, before military spending ramped up. Werner’s point: one lever, monetary policy, decided whether Germans thrived or starved.

“There was just one lever in the German economy and it was monetary policy. When you cranked it in one direction, people thrived. When you cranked in the other direction, they starve to death.”

He praises decentralization throughout — thousands of small local banks lending to small firms (the Prussian/German/Japanese high-growth model that China copied via Deng Xiaoping) — and laments the central planners’ war on small banks (the ECB overseeing the disappearance of 6,000 European banks). The ECB, he argues, is the “revived Reichsbank,” deliberately modeled on the worst central bank in history.

The finale: CBDCs as the control grid

Werner’s conclusion ties the bow. Every big war ends with a monetary reordering — pound to Bretton Woods dollar to petrodollar (Nixon shock, 1971) — and each transition uses inflation and crisis as camouflage. The next reordering, he predicts, is digital, tied to digital identity.

His distinction is sharp: we have used digital money for fifty years (bank deposits). The novelty of a central bank digital currency isn’t “digital,” it’s “central.”

“I call it central bank digital control… programmable, permission-based. Only what the central planners allow you to use your money for, at what time and place and location, will be permitted.”

He frames AI and the data center buildout as the infrastructure to micromanage billions, invokes Lord Acton (“power corrupts”), and ends on the warning that we’re sleepwalking into the most centralized, dystopian system in history.

Key Takeaways

Wars often begin under false pretenses — the Lusitania and Gulf of Tonkin pattern is real enough that healthy skepticism of official casus belli is warranted.
Werner’s grand thesis: a hidden elite engineers wars to reorder the global monetary system; Britain crushed rising Germany, America is now crushing rising China.
Venezuela and Iran, in his read, are choke-point moves aimed at China’s oil supply and Belt and Road, not their stated justifications.
The IMF/World Bank as neo-colonialism keeping poor countries as commodity exporters — backed by the real Prebisch–Singer terms-of-trade argument.
“Ricardo’s vice”: logically valid economic models built on false assumptions are sophistry, not science. Logic is not truth.
Bank credit creation is the master lever — Werner’s genuine and well-regarded contribution. Decentralized small banks fuel growth; concentration starves it.
CBDCs are the endgame — the danger is the “central,” not the “digital.” Programmable money equals programmable people.

Claude’s Take

Werner is not a crank, which is what makes this hard to score. He’s a real monetary economist — he documented Japan’s “window guidance” and coined “quantitative easing.” When he talks about bank credit creation, the short-side principle, the limits of equilibrium models, Prebisch–Singer, and the realpolitik of war finance, he’s serious and largely defensible. The historical bones are sturdy: Britain did maintain the blockade into 1919; concentration camps were a British innovation in the Boer War; the petrodollar and the Nixon shock are textbook; “Ricardo’s vice” is a recognized critique. A reader with a finance background can take a lot home here.

The problem is the connective tissue. Werner runs every event through a single explanatory machine — “a small evil elite engineered this to centralize power” — and that machine is unfalsifiable. China’s rise is proof of a plot (they “built it up to have a war”). China’s high growth is also praised as genuine. American investment in China is sinister; American investment in Germany was sinister; both prove the same thing. When a theory explains the thing and its opposite equally well, it has stopped being an explanation. The Churchill-ordered-the-Lusitania-to-slow-down claim is contested and rests on a documentary characterization, not a paper trail. And the back third drifts into territory that should set off alarms: the Mao famine as deliberate population control, the Club of Rome / Rockefeller / Malthus depopulation arc, “RNA shots” dropped in as another genocide tool, the one-child policy as a Western-imposed payoff. These are presented with the same calm authority as the credit-creation material, which is the rhetorical trick — laundering speculation in the voice of a careful scholar.

Tucker’s role doesn’t help. He’s not pressure-testing; he’s nodding the conversation toward ever-grander conclusions (“I think I’m starting to understand how the world works”). The CBDC warning is the one place the conspiracy and the legitimate concern genuinely overlap — programmable money does concentrate power, and “the danger is central, not digital” is a clean, fair point worth keeping regardless of the rest.

Score: 5/10. High for the monetary-history and banking content; dragged down hard by the unfalsifiable grand narrative and the depopulation conspiracy detours that a viewer should not mistake for established fact. Worth watching as a stress test of how a credentialed expert can mix real insight with genuinely fringe claims — and as a reminder to separate the two yourself, because the format won’t do it for you.

Every Major War Begins Under False Pretenses & the Central Banks Are Behind It. Economist Explains.