The American Empire Is Over – and Europe Is Paying the PriceA conversation with Professor Richard Wolff
Professor Richard Wolff, America’s best-known Marxist economist, does not mince words. The unique seventy-five-year period of American global dominance that followed the Second World War is finished. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What we are witnessing now — self-harming wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, extreme inequality, and Europe’s deepening crisis — are the classic symptoms of imperial decline. Wolff places the present moment in a long historical arc. Modern capitalism, from its beginnings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, has always required expansion. That expansion produced European colonialism, which reached its apogee and then its catastrophic end in the two world wars. The United States, largely spared the physical destruction of those wars, stepped into the vacuum and built an informal empire of unprecedented power and reach. For roughly three-quarters of a century it dominated the global economy, the dollar, and the military order. That special historical moment could never last. Germany and Japan recovered, China rose, and the rest of the world refused to remain permanently subordinate. American exceptionalism — the comforting belief that the United States was uniquely immune to the rise-and-fall cycle of empires — prevented elites from recognising the shift until it was too late. When empires decline, the costs are not shared equally. Those at the top use their political and economic power to protect their wealth, while the burdens are pushed onto the middle and working classes. The celebration of Elon Musk’s path to becoming the first trillionaire, Wolff notes, is a grotesque illustration of this process at a time when social needs are screaming for attention. The same logic explains the relentless demonisation of Russia. After the New Deal of the 1930s — Social Security, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and public employment programmes paid for by taxing the rich — the American corporate elite made “rolling back the New Deal” its central political project. Inventing an existential Soviet (and later Russian) threat provided the perfect justification for that project and for the permanent expansion of military power. NATO became the fort that locked American influence into Europe and kept any alternative order at bay. Europe, meanwhile, made a strategic error after 1945 by outsourcing its military security to the United States. Now that American willingness and capacity to underwrite European prosperity are fading, and cheap Russian energy has been cut off, the continent finds itself trapped. Military Keynesianism — spending on war preparation to stimulate economies — is being sold as a solution, with Russia cast once again as the necessary enemy. The result, Wolff warns, risks turning Europe into little more than a historically interesting tourism peninsula on the edge of Asia. The conversation ends on a note of cautious possibility. Political reactions to decline are already visible. The language of “peacemongering” is no longer an insult in the way it once was. Understanding that the American empire’s special moment has ended is the first step toward imagining something better — for the United States, for Europe, and for the rest of the world. You can watch the full conversation here: You're currently a free subscriber to The Peacemonger. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |