The question Richard Wolff puts to Glenn Diesen near the end of their conversation is the one that does not usually get asked out loud in American foreign-policy commentary. It is not whether the American empire is in decline. Wolff has been saying that for years, and N° 19 read his case for it. The question is what comes after. Wolff names two options: a different empire, in this case the Chinese; or the multilateral, multipolar global regime that was foreshadowed in the League of Nations after the first world war and in the United Nations after the second. He notes that this question is being discussed in Beijing. He notes that it is not being discussed in Washington. The piece below treats his argument as a partisan one — Wolff is a Marxian economist with a clear position — and uses it to follow a thread the post-1991 order pretended was closed.
↑ N° 19 · Companion to N° 19, from the same conversation. Where that reading tracked the empire’s gestures — Greenland, Panama, the ballroom, the Maduro raid — this one tracks the question Wolff puts about what comes after the gestures stop working.A different question for the same meeting
The Beijing summit produced modest deliverables. Wolff is interested in something the deliverables conceal.
The two leaders met at the Great Hall of the People on 14 and 15 May. Trump described Xi as “my friend.” Xi described the question in front of the two governments as whether they could “overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations.” The agreed framing for the next three years was “constructive, strategic and stable.” There were soybeans. There was a rare-earth pause. There was an invitation to a return visit on 24 September.
The visible asymmetry, on Wolff’s reading, is that one side wanted a framework and the other wanted commercial wins to bring home. This much is shared with the companion reading. What Wolff does next, and what is worth following on its own, is to step back from the bilateral frame altogether. He treats the meeting as the surface of a question that no longer fits within it. The question is about the rest of the world.
The development economist's quiet vacancy
Wolff’s most personal move in the conversation is a confession about his own field. The field he studied no longer holds the position it held.
When he was getting his PhD in economics in the 1960s, Wolff says, the most popular subfield among graduate students was development economics. It was the field that asked how poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America could find their way to higher standards of living. It was confident enough to be missionary about it. Its students went on to UN consultancies, to World Bank missions, to advisory roles in newly independent governments. Its operating assumption — Wolff is willing to call it arrogance — was that the West had the monopoly of relevant knowledge about how a country grew. That assumption framed two generations of policy. The Washington Consensus, in its later codification, was the doctrinal version. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s were the operational one.
What Wolff observes is that none of this missionary apparatus went to China. China was off-limits. There was no Marshall Plan for China, no World Bank-led structural adjustment of the Maoist economy, no fleet of returning Yale and Chicago PhDs reshaping its central bank. China did the thing the development field was ostensibly designed to teach — the lift of several hundred million people across most credible poverty thresholds — and did it without that field’s help. The point Wolff is pressing is not that the field was wrong about everything. It is that the field’s authority rested on a counterfactual the field never had to face. The country that did the thing best is the one that did not take its instruction.
The vacancy this creates is what Wolff is interested in. If you are an economist in Manila, or Lagos, or Bogotá, or Bucharest, and you are asking yourself which set of policies your country should adopt over the next thirty years, the comparative table no longer reads the way it read in 1992. The Washington Consensus is in retreat from its own former defenders. The Soviet alternative collapsed in 1991 and is not coming back. What sits in the third column is the Chinese arrangement, and that column has, on the numbers, the strongest evidence.
The hybrid as case study, not template
This is the place where Wolff’s argument has to slow down, because the inference it invites is one his own analytical commitments resist.
The Chinese arrangement is, in Wolff’s phrasing, neither private capitalism in the Western sense nor state socialism in the Soviet sense. It is a hybrid: roughly half private capitalist enterprises, both Chinese and foreign, and roughly half state-owned and operated enterprise, the whole supervised by a powerful state apparatus which answers in turn to the Communist Party of China. He uses the word sui generis — its own kind. He notes that whether to call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” “state capitalism,” or something else has been an unsettled argument inside political-economy departments for thirty years.
The careful move he makes is to insist that the hybrid is a case study, not a template. Other countries cannot replicate the specific institutional history that produced it: the Long March, the cadre system, the 1978 reform decision, the Township and Village Enterprises of the 1980s, the WTO accession of 2001, the Belt and Road financing of the 2010s. What they can do, in his view, is study the hybrid as evidence that the binary the second half of the twentieth century enforced — markets versus state ownership, capitalism versus communism — was not the only available frame. The category broke. The new category is wider.
[Exhibit: Comparison of the three claimants]
The Chinese arrangement sits outside both columns. It pairs a large state-owned sector with a large private sector, markets with industrial policy, a single party with technocratic management, opening with strategic closure. Whether this is best read as a third claimant, a hybrid of the two, or something the categories cannot capture is the analytical question Wolff says the post-Cold-War order pretended was answered.
The reason the inference matters for the rest of the world is not that any other country can become China. It is that the demonstration effect is structural. When a Chilean or Vietnamese or Ethiopian planner asks “do we have to choose between the Washington model and the Soviet model that no longer exists?” — the answer, after 2008, after the Belt and Road, after Beijing’s 2026 confidence at the summit, is that the question itself has been reframed.
The unrehearsed third option
Wolff’s most interesting move comes at the end of the conversation, and it is not the one his usual critics expect from him.
The two options Wolff names for the post-American moment are not “another empire” and “no empire.” They are “another empire — in this case the Chinese” and “the multinational, multilateral global regime that you saw foreshadowed in the League of Nations after the horror of World War I or the United Nations after the horror of World War II.” He notes, with a directness unusual in the conversation, that this latter option is being discussed in China. He notes that it is not being discussed in the United States.
The proposition behind the move is hopeful, and it sits in tension with Wolff’s general theoretical commitments. The Marxian tradition does not typically rest its account of historical change on the realization of cosmopolitan-liberal institutions. The point he is making is not theoretical, though. It is observational. He says that Chinese intellectuals he has spoken with — and he has spoken with many — already operate in a register where the question is not “how do we replace the empire?” but “how do we avoid the Thucydides trap that the British and the Americans escaped only after two wars?” The answer that gets discussed, on his account, is some version of an institutional architecture that does not require a single hegemon.
The Chinese, what is their hope? To be able to achieve the same thing — minus the two wars. Because we cannot afford the wars now.
— Richard Wolff
The empirical content of the third option is thinner than Wolff suggests. BRICS has not yet produced a currency — Wolff acknowledges this — and is internally divided on whether it should. The UN Security Council remains structurally what it was in 1945. The G20 has not displaced the G7 as a steering mechanism, only paralleled it. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a real institution but is not the World Bank. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is large but consultative. Read narrowly, the third option is more aspiration than fact.
Read structurally, Wolff’s claim is that the option is being kept open by the patience of the side that could afford to close it. China’s reluctance to provoke, its preference for stability, its willingness to take the long view — these are not, in his framing, signs of weakness. They are the operating conditions for an institutional architecture that has not yet been built but cannot be built under accelerating great-power conflict. The reason China is not in a hurry to dollar-detach BRICS, in this reading, is the same reason it is not in a hurry to escalate over Taiwan or to seize the moment the Iran war opened. The third option needs time. The patience is the policy.
What the activist economist outside China is now being told
Wolff’s audience for this part of the argument is not the U.S. policy class. It is the development economist in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe.
What an activist economist in those regions is being told, on Wolff’s reading, is fourfold. First, that the question of which development model to study has reopened. Second, that the strongest empirical case sits with the Chinese hybrid, and that the hybrid is best treated as evidence that the markets-versus-state-ownership binary was always too narrow. Third, that the institutional space for a third option — multilateral, non-hegemonic, plural — is being kept open by Beijing’s strategic patience, and that the principal threat to that space is not Chinese assertion but American flailing. And fourth, that the next several years will produce information whose pattern, not whose timing, can be predicted: more Iran-shaped misadventures from the empire’s late phase, more Gulf-state recalibrations, more BRICS expansion, more dollar-detachment on the margin.
The voice here is partisan. The four items are not. Each can be checked against the record as it accumulates. The fourth is the most testable. Either the pattern Wolff names continues to produce the kind of evidence he reads it as having already produced — the Iran cascade, the UAE refusal, the polling collapse, the relative growth gap — or it does not. The reading the activist economist is being offered is one that explicitly invites disconfirmation.
What the same economist is not being told, and this is the part that distinguishes Wolff from his ideological neighbors, is that the third option is inevitable. He does not predict it. He notes that it is being discussed in Beijing and not in Washington. He notes that this asymmetry is itself a fact. He asks the reader to consider what the asymmetry implies, and to weigh it against the alternative readings — that the empire is reordering, that the meeting was just a meeting, that the Gulf realignments are reversible — without claiming the question is closed.
Coda
What remains uncertain in Wolff’s argument is exactly the part he himself flags. He does not know whether the multilateral option, the one being discussed in Chinese intellectual circles and not in American ones, will be built. He does not know whether the Iran-shaped misadventures of the empire’s late phase will end with Iran or extend to Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, or somewhere not yet named. He does not know whether the November 2026 midterms will discipline the U.S. political class into a different posture, or whether the next adventure will be undertaken anyway. The structural conditions he names do not predict timing. They only predict the pattern.
What is not uncertain, on the empirical anchors a reader can check, is narrower and harder to dismiss. The Chinese economy has compounded faster than the American one for three and a half decades. The Chinese strategic and commercial oil reserve, at approximately 1.4 billion barrels, is larger than the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve at about 413 million. The Gulf Cooperation Council declined to join the Iran war. The American public opposed that war from day one and has not changed its mind in three months. BRICS has expanded. The Belt and Road is a real institutional fact. The Washington Consensus is not what it was in 1995. These are not partisan claims. They are conditions.
The use of a reading like Wolff’s is to refuse the simpler answers that are still being offered. The simpler answer in Washington is that the empire is reordering rather than ending, and that the multilateral question is the question of the next century rather than this one. The simpler answer in Beijing is that the transition is already done and that what remains is the management of its aftermath. Wolff sits in neither place. He says the transition is real, the option is open, the asymmetry of patience is the policy variable to watch, and the next several years will produce the information that distinguishes the readings. The reader is left to weigh that against what is happening on the surface of the meetings whose readouts dominate the news.