Julie Telgenhoff
In 2013 I stumbled across a video that shook my world. At the time I had already begun questioning the endless cycle of wars that seemed to define modern geopolitics, but I still didn’t have a framework that explained why they kept happening. Governments always offered the familiar explanations—national security, spreading democracy, protecting allies—but something about the constant interventions never fully added up.
Then I watched John Perkins describe what he claimed to have done for a living.
Perkins is the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a book he says he first attempted to write in the 1980s but repeatedly abandoned after threats or bribes persuaded him to stop. When I first heard that claim, I remember leaning forward in my chair. It immediately suggested that whatever story he was about to tell was not meant to be widely understood.
According to Perkins, his job was not to overthrow governments with weapons.
His job was to trap them with debt.
These projects were marketed as the path to modernization.
But Perkins says the numbers used to justify those loans were intentionally inflated. The economic growth projections used in the financial reports were unrealistic, making the projects appear far more profitable than they would ever be in reality.
Once the loans were accepted, the trap was set.
Many of the countries simply could not repay the debts. And when repayment became impossible, the leverage began.
Perkins argued that those nations were then pressured into political concessions. They might be pushed to support U.S. policy at the United Nations, open their natural resources to foreign corporations, allow military bases, or hand large contracts to multinational companies. In the process, much of the money flowed right back to massive engineering firms and contractors in the industrialized world.
Meanwhile the population of the borrowing nation carried the burden of the debt.
The wealth gap widened.
Local economies weakened.
And entire countries found themselves politically constrained by obligations they could never realistically pay off.
Perkins described the tools of the trade in blunt terms: fraudulent financial projections, bribery, political pressure, rigged elections, and in some cases darker tactics that appeared when leaders refused to cooperate.
Listening to that explanation in 2013 was honestly shocking.
I remember sitting there realizing that if even a portion of what he was saying was true, it changed the way you understood global power. The old image of empire—armies marching across borders—was replaced by something far quieter.
Loan agreements.
Financial forecasts.
Debt contracts.
It suggested that modern control didn’t always require military conquest first. Sometimes all it required was convincing a country to sign the wrong loan.
What hit me hardest watching that video was the simplicity of the mechanism. Debt is not just a financial tool; it can also be a political weapon. When a nation owes more than it can repay, its choices shrink. Policies become negotiations. Sovereignty becomes conditional.
Perkins also argued that when countries eventually asked for debt relief, the conditions attached often required them to privatize essential public services—electricity, water, healthcare, education—and remove subsidies that supported local industries. At the same time, powerful economies often continued protecting their own industries with subsidies and trade barriers.
In other words, the playing field was never level.
Watching that video didn’t just teach me about one man’s story. It forced me to think differently about the architecture of global power—how financial systems can quietly shape political outcomes without most people ever noticing.
And once that idea settles in your mind, it’s hard to look at the world the same way again.
