Richard Wolff argues the US is in imperial decline like Rome and Britain, pointing to the dollar's weakness and military losses in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He warns against overreach and advocates negotiating with China and BRICS nations to avoid catastrophic conflict between nuclear powers.
This is part of something Americans have not yet wrapped their heads around. The American empire, like every empire before it is now shrinking. You know, empires rise, they have a flourish, they grow. It's very impressive. And at their peak, they can't imagine that it won't last forever. It never has. Every empire, the Greek, the Roman, the Persian, the Turkish, you fill in the blank. They all went up, then they went down. The ride up, much more fun than the ride down. We are now in the ride down. And we better be very careful, because denial, which is the way most of America is so far dealing with it, is not a solution. It doesn't go away because you pretend it isn't happening. The dollar's decline is a literal barometer week in and week out of what we're seeing. The failure in Ukraine is another one. I mean, you got to see we didn't win in Vietnam, we didn't win in Afghanistan, we didn't win in Iraq. You can dance around it 20 different ways, but. But it is the truth. This is not an argument about who's the good guys and the bad guys. I'm just explaining. We are not facing a decline that is underway and that is showing us its face, if only we're willing to see it. And we could have a, quote, decent soft landing. Empires do not have to go out in a horrible explosion. They can decline. Britain, not that they're a model, but after trying twice to stop the United States in the War of Independence and again the War of 1812, the British figured out we can't do this militarily. And they came to terms with their decline and being replaced by the American empire. I don't know what's coming next. I don't know whether the Chinese will be the next empire or, or whether it'll be handled in a multinational way. And there's some evidence in both directions. But the United States is not able to do what it did. And one of the greatest mistakes empires in the past have made is overreaching when they can't do that anymore. And my fear is we're at a very delicate point in that process, hampered by a denial of what's going on that periodically frightens me.
So if people, if our politicians could get out of the state of denial and face reality, what would that look like? What would this soft landing that you just described look like?
They would have to sit down at this point, either with China or with China and what we call the brics, this group of nations that are really working well together, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Russia. I left out Russia. Right. And there's a dozen other countries that have applied. So they're going to become much, much bigger in the next 12 to 24 months. You'd have to sit down with them and work out a live and let live arrangement. You know, the world needs a lot of things produced. Americans can produce, some of them. Chinese can produce and Brazilian. We'd have a much better world if it were more generously distributed. It shouldn't all be in North America and Western Europe. That's a legacy of colonialism we should better put behind us. If more of the different parts of the world really are integrated, they'll be less likely to be tempted to do militarily what they really can't afford. That's already underway. We might have done terrible things vis a vis China if we weren't as dependent on the Chinese as we already are. Look, from the time that Kissinger and Nixon went to China and reestablished relations with them several decades ago until 10 years ago, the United States and China were helping each other. We're trading a lot. That's when a lot of American companies invested in China, et cetera, et cetera. We were able to live together. Those were years of great prosperity in the United States and great economic growth in China. My feeling is, look, we have much to gain and we can avoid a terrible loss. A war. Are we serious? Are we going to have a war around Taiwan, in China, in the South China Sea at the same time that we're fighting a war in Europe? Really? With countries that all have nuclear weapons? This is crazy. We can't afford to do it and we ought to stop trying. The wealth of the United States is a great incentive for other countries to meet us halfway. Let's use the wealth to have an attempt at least. Even if we fail, it's worth the effort to. To try to do this rather than the saber rattling that's scaring everybody in the world and not bringing the United States out of its decline. Its decline continues. You rattle your sword against Russia and China. The situation of the United States has not gotten better. The United States is more isolated now than it was five years ago. Russia is not the pariah nation that the United States and Western Europe would like to claim it to be. I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. It's not a moral argument or any of that. What I'm saying is let's be honest and look at this situation the way it is. We are fighting to the last Ukrainian and I don't think that's a smart move at all.
If these are God's chosen people then God chose them to test the rest of us.
