The week Trump returned from Beijing, Richard Wolff sat down with Glenn Diesen to argue, with the calm of a man who has been making the case for years, that the meeting itself was the least interesting thing about the meeting. What was interesting was the context. The American president arrived hoping to look strong. He met a host country whose growth rate has run roughly two to three times the American average for four decades, whose strategic oil stockpile is now the largest in the world, and whose first overseas military base sits in Djibouti, a few miles from one of America’s last reliable footholds in the Horn of Africa. Wolff watched all of that and called the moment what he thought it was. The American empire, in his account, is not declining. It has declined.
↑ N° 14 · Continues themes from N° 14, where Wolff read the Iran war as the moment a world economy optimized for efficiency began rewiring itself for survival. This conversation looks at the wider field around that rewiring — the empire it implicates and the model that has been quietly running parallel.The meeting as transition marker
Wolff’s first move is to bracket the actual outcomes of the Beijing meeting and look instead at the conditions under which it took place.
The two presidents met at the Zhongnanhai compound on 14 and 15 May. The readouts produced what readouts now produce: a “constructive China–U.S. relationship of strategic stability,” an unspecified Boeing order, an agreement that the strait of Hormuz must remain open, a reciprocal Xi visit to the United States penciled in for September. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he and Xi had not discussed tariffs or chips, that Taiwan was the “most important” issue for Xi during their talks, and that he had made “no commitment either way” on arms sales to Taipei. Wolff is uninterested in the specifics.
What matters, in his account, is that one side knows time is on its side and the other does not. One side spent the meeting pressing for free trade, multilateralism, and the resumption of stable flows — the posture of the country that is doing well inside the existing system. The other side spent the meeting trying to extract a transactional win to bring home. The asymmetry, Wolff argues, is the meeting.
That asymmetry is the surface of something older. China’s GDP, by World Bank figures, has grown at roughly two to three times the American rate for four decades. The Chinese strategic oil reserve, by the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s own April 2026 estimate, is the largest in the world — a buffer the U.S. SPR, drained twice since 2022, no longer rivals. The U.S. dollar is still the global reserve currency, but, as Wolff notes, that is part of what gives Beijing room to wait: the architecture of American advantage is also the architecture inside which China has been growing.
The American president, Wolff says, flew home and posted on Truth Social that he wanted a ballroom as large as the one in which he had been received. It is a small detail, and it does its work.
The hybrid that ran the race
At the center of Wolff’s argument is a specific economic claim about what China is. He has been making this claim for years and is more confident in it now than he was a decade ago.
China, Wolff says, is not the Soviet Union and is not the United States. Roughly half the economy is private capitalist enterprise, both domestic and foreign-owned. Roughly half is state-owned or state-operated. The whole is supervised by a Party that retains the prerogative to set strategic direction, redirect capital, discipline private actors, and shape labor markets. This is not market capitalism with characteristics. It is, Wolff argues, a third thing — a hybrid that the late-twentieth-century categories were not built to see.
The taxonomy matters because, for forty years, the developmental economics profession into which Wolff was trained ran on a confidence that the path to prosperity for poor countries lay through the American model, mediated by American advice. He names the assumption explicitly. He and his cohort believed they had a monopoly on the relevant knowledge. They went to Asia, Africa, and Latin America as consultants. They did not go to China, because China was communist and there was no Marshall Plan for China. China got no help. China outgrew every country that did.
That is the part of the argument that costs Wolff something to make, and it is the part of the argument that lands. The countries that took American advice grew, on average, more slowly than the country that was excluded from receiving it. The implication, in Wolff’s account, is not that American advice was deliberately bad. It is that the model under which American economists thought they understood development was wrong about a thing it could not see — the productive role of a state apparatus that holds the option to discipline private capital when private capital begins to wreck the conditions of its own reproduction.
He pauses on the obvious caveat. Whatever the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” means, it does not mean what Scandinavian social democrats mean by socialism, and it does not mean what Soviet planners meant. The taxonomic question — is this socialism? — Wolff leaves on the table. He is more interested in the empirical question. By the only metric on which the Cold War contest was supposed to be settled, namely the rate at which a poor country becomes a developed country, the Chinese model has produced a result the American model has not.
Time, on which side?
Wolff returns repeatedly in the conversation to the Thucydides trap — the historical pattern in which a rising power and a declining one find themselves at war. He thinks the Chinese have read the same history he has, and have drawn a different lesson.
The American case, Wolff argues, is a country that has not metabolized the end of its own moment. The Chinese case is a country that has read the same arc and decided not to repeat it. China is in no hurry. It has no interest in destabilizing the dollar before its own alternatives are mature. It has one overseas military base, in Djibouti, against an American count of roughly 750 in eighty countries. It is selling its currency-swap lines and its Belt and Road infrastructure into Asia, Africa, and Latin America at a pace it can sustain. It is, in Wolff’s reading, doing very well inside the architecture of American power, and therefore has no reason to break the architecture.
The Thucydides analogy that Wolff returns to is the one most Americans do not know. Before the Britain–Germany rivalry that produced the First World War, there was the Britain–America rivalry that produced two wars in twenty years — the Revolution and the War of 1812. Britain lost both, to its own surprise. The lesson, Wolff says, is that the loss took a century to absorb. After 1815, Britain and the United States did not fight each other again. The transition completed without further war. That is, in Wolff’s framing, what the Chinese are trying to do — to absorb the transition without the cost of the wars that would otherwise be its grammar.
Wolff is candid about what this requires on the American side, and unconvinced it is available. The notion that the American empire is over, he says, is so difficult for the U.S. political class to hold that the political class continues to act as though the empire is in expansion. Greenland, Panama, Canada as a fifty-first state, the Venezuela operation that captured Maduro in January — these are, Wolff says, the gestures of a country whose ship is sinking and that has begun to flail.
We are watching a transition moment in human history. The American empire is in decline. The Chinese are riding the upswing. The question is whether we can achieve the transition without the wars.
— Richard Wolff
Iran as the inflection
Wolff returns several times to the Iran war of February through May 2026 and treats it as the moment around which the conversation pivots. Not because Iran is the largest of the recent American defeats, but because of when it happened.
The United States lost in Vietnam and lost in Afghanistan, Wolff says, and the world did not adjust. The Communist Party of Vietnam runs Vietnam today; the Taliban runs Afghanistan. By the only test that mattered for the country that fought those wars — does the other side still hold the territory — the United States was defeated. But neither defeat reached far enough into the international system to force the kind of reassessment Wolff is now describing.
Iran, Wolff argues, is different. Not because the campaign was larger — at roughly ten weeks of strikes, Operation Epic Fury was a fraction of Afghanistan — but because the context had changed. The United States went to Iran with a fantasy of regime change, succession, and a redrawn map. It assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening hours and was met by the elevation of his son to the office. It demanded a verifiable end to the Iranian nuclear program and was told, by an IAEA increasingly reluctant to report on what it could not inspect, that the program’s enriched stockpile had been dispersed before the strikes. It assumed that the Gulf states would form the political infrastructure for whatever came next. Iran closed the strait of Hormuz instead, and struck targets in all six GCC countries before a ceasefire was reached on 5 May.
Wolff reads the Gulf states’ war experience as the second-order event the meeting in Beijing was actually a response to. Having an American base on your soil, he says, did not function as protection during the war. It functioned as an address. Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman — all hit, in varying degrees, by Iranian missiles and drones. The political reading of this in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will not be the reading that suits Washington.
The empire's fantasy life
Wolff’s most pointed section is on what the American leadership now does with the fact of its decline.
He is direct about it. The political class, he says, cannot afford to acknowledge that the empire is over, because the acknowledgment would force a different national conversation than the one the country is currently having. So in place of the acknowledgment, there are gestures.
The gestures are the ones in the news. The threat to annex Greenland. The proposal that Canada become the fifty-first state. The seizure of the Panama Canal as a policy aim. The Venezuelan operation in January that captured President Nicolás Maduro and installed the vice-president as interim leader under American pressure. The Lindsey Graham television appearances forecasting, in the early days of the Iran war, that Iranian oil would soon flow to American buyers. The Trump White House ballroom — originally $200 million, now $400 million in construction costs that Trump promised would be borne entirely by private donors, with congressional Republicans now seeking $1 billion in additional taxpayer funding for “security upgrades” to the project. The bombing of a corner of Nigeria, framed as protection of Christians, which Wolff reads as a placeholder gesture against the continent’s largest oil producer.
The pattern Wolff identifies is what psychologists call reaction formation. The expansionist register intensifies precisely as the territory shrinks. The grandiosity is the form the loss takes.
He notes one thing the American leadership has not yet fully metabolized. The American public has, by polling done before and during the Iran war, been against the war from the first week. The 21 percent who supported strikes in February 2026 is not the patriotic mobilization the country sustained for the first three years of Iraq, or the first two of Vietnam. The midterms in November will, in Wolff’s reading, turn on this — on the ballroom, on the war, on the gap between what the public wants government money spent on and what the government has spent it on. The students he teaches in New York City, he notes, cannot find Iran on a map, and do not want to be told why their country went there.
What remains uncertain in Wolff’s account is the management of the transition itself. The Chinese case, as he reads it, depends on the United States not doing the catastrophic thing — the strike on Taiwan, the attempt to break Russia through the Ukrainian theater, the next adventure that misreads the position. The grammar of the gesture, as he describes it, is not stable. Reaction formations tend to escalate.
What is not uncertain is the developmental record. The country that grew without the help, while the countries that received the help did not grow as fast, is now the country whose system other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will study. The BRICS architecture, Wolff says, has its slowness because China is in no hurry. China is in no hurry because China is doing very well inside the existing system. The transition does not require force; it requires patience.
What the reader is left with is a piece of Wolff’s training showing through. He came up in development economics — the field that was supposed to teach poor countries how to become rich countries. The field’s central assumption — that the model on offer was the American one — turned out to be wrong about which model would work, and wrong about which country would model it. Beijing is where you watch that admission land.