Richard Wolff and Glenn Diesen on the accelerating decline of US global power
Glenn Diesen interviews economist Richard Wolff on the structural collapse of American imperial dominance.
Summary
Economist Richard Wolff argues that the United States has entered a phase of systemic, irreversible imperial decline — not a cyclical downturn — driven by the unraveling of the post-World War II order that gave America its historically unprecedented global position. He argues that this decline is driven by the unraveling of the post-World War II order that gave America its extraordinary and historically unprecedented position. He presents specific economic mechanisms showing how US sanctions and military adventurism are generating cascading unintended consequences, including currency crises in Japan, rising mortgage rates, and a collapsing domestic political consensus. Wolff contends that the war against Iran is widely understood — across the political spectrum — to have failed, that tactical nuclear weapons are now being discussed inside the US military out of desperation, and that the only political force in America currently offering anything resembling a positive program is the progressive left — not because Americans have turned to socialism, but because everything else has visibly collapsed.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Unintended Consequences of Sanctions and the Cascading Global Crisis
Glenn Diesen: Professor Richard Wolff joins us today to discuss the United States and its attempt to find a new position in the world. Thank you for coming back. Trump has announced what he called economic D-Day against Iran, and shortly thereafter Scott Bessant made a comment that he can't understand why oil prices are going up. It all does seem absurd, but it made me think about the unintended consequences of economic sanctions — because sanctions these days are thrown around quite carelessly. And this is happening at a time when the US economy itself is in big trouble, not just the economy but the entire economic model that allows the US to have such an exorbitant privilege in the world. Other alternatives are being set up in other parts of the world to prepare for a possible economic crisis in the US, or simply to prepare for being subjected to sanctions themselves. What do you think are the possible unintended consequences of all these sanctions?
Richard Wolff: My guess is that the metaphor that best captures what's going on — and I don't even know if this is a true representation or not — is the metaphor of the dikes that hold back the sea in the Netherlands, and the story of the young child who discovers a hole that's letting some water through and puts his finger in to prevent it. Then he notices that the very result of putting his finger in is that another hole opens up a few yards away. Now he has to reach for the other hole, and then it's too much.
That's what's happening here. What people don't understand is that the world has now reached a point where we have a genuine global economy in which literally every part is complexly linked to every other part — by imports, exports, capital movements, one thing or another, directly or indirectly. Therefore, any kind of major disruption anywhere ramifies because it is linked in incredible ways all over the world. This should have been understood, but it wasn't.
If, for example, the world multiplies indebtedness — the indebtedness of a government, of the corporate sector, of households — and money is flowing in from all over the world through the banking system into the borrowers, then a default anywhere ramifies right away to far-flung people who may be holding disproportionate amounts of that kind of security affected by that default. And then there are many other ramifications.
Let me give you one from recent days. With the rising price of oil and the disruption of the oil passages out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, places like Japan and South Korea and other Asian nations have been having trouble getting oil and paying high prices for it. That happened to hit Japan at a time when its overall situation was making it more and more dependent on funding through the yen. The higher costs coming out of the trouble in Iran meant they couldn't really manage with their current finances. So they began to do something which, in a way, could have been predicted — but I think falls under your heading of unintended consequences.
A declining yen confronting rising oil prices — which they would have to pay for by converting yen into dollars or whatever currency the oil is sold in — would depress the yen beyond its already low level. That would have disruptive effects. Japan remains the third or fourth largest economy in the world. It is an export-driven economy. A declining yen raises all kinds of problems elsewhere in the world.
This led the treasurer of the United States, Mr. Bessant, to arrange a bizarre loan — $22 billion, if I have the numbers correct — to Japan in the form of euros, to enable the Japanese to buy the high-priced oil without further depressing the yen. He fixed it. But now there are new problems. Inside the politics of the United States, this can be portrayed as not having the money to take care of thousands of local problems that are very urgent here. We don't have the $22 billion for that, but we do have it to bail out the Japanese thousands of miles away from a currency problem. For most American voters, this is not good for Mr. Trump's reelection, which is only a few weeks away at this point.
Let me give you another example. One of the things Japan was doing to cope with the declining yen was selling its accumulated US Treasury bonds. They are the world's largest creditor of the United States — over a trillion dollars in US Treasuries. They started selling them. To sell them quickly, which they had to do, they dropped the price. If you drop the price of US Treasuries, up go the interest rates on 30-year bonds. A rising interest rate on 30-year bonds puts them in stiff competition with the only other 30-year instrument in this country — long-term home mortgages. A rising interest rate on the Treasury damages the housing market, which is one of the most important markets in a consumer-driven economy like the United States, and is therefore a recessionary cause.
You begin to get the picture. You're solving one problem and doing something that in fact worsens another, between politics and economics. And these are typical dilemmas of a declining empire. It has arranged its affairs over the years, each time solving a problem but not being aware that by doing so it has created a new vulnerability, so that the next problem will be a little more difficult because of its ramifications. We are now at a point where this is literally crashing in on us.
The Stock Market, Political Disintegration, and the Progressive Surge
Richard Wolff: We have a stock market that is so far rising out of control. But the gap between that and the mass of the people who don't own significant amounts of shares — or none at all — is becoming a political problem. So the very success of the stock market is a failure in the larger political system.
The only thing comparable in this country — and it is related to all of this — is the fact that in recent elections, it has become clear that being supported by the number one financial lobby in this country right now, AIPAC, the lobbying connected to Israel, has become the kiss of death. It is now becoming possible for progressive candidates to build their campaigns against conventional Republicans and Democrats alike on the grounds that their opponent is supported by AIPAC. They then win the election because the people want to vote against all of that.
It's a remarkable disintegration going on in this country, and it is picking up speed — as you can tell by the number of progressives who are in the socialist DSA or not in it. It varies, but they are winning election after election, and more and more in places where this was not foreseen. The result is obvious politically all around us. And I should say it's not only on the left — the right-wing support for Trump is also cracking and fracturing around many of the same issues.
Glenn Diesen: What you're describing sounds like the breaking point is already here, that there is no reversal. But it appears that the main efforts by Trump are to reorganize the global economic system because it no longer sustains American dominance. The US is weakening — there are no more ways of stopping this water. What was done in the past, and how could the US try to restructure things in a way that would allow it to still hold the position it used to enjoy?
Richard Wolff: I'm afraid at this point the conversation is becoming remarkable in its level of depression — I don't know any other word to use. So you have a peculiar political irony beginning to emerge. Let me describe the irony and then go back and answer your question.
The irony is that the progressive left — and for reasons of transparency, that's what I am, so you are getting a perspective from that part of the population — but I try very hard, as best I can, to separate what I wish from what I think is going on. If you ask me what is the success of the progressive democratic socialists — is it a turn of the American population to socialism? No. Absolutely not. Is it a clear-headed disengagement from capitalism? No. The closest you get is a kind of disaffection from capitalism. Yes, if you use language like that, you'd pick that up. But when it comes right down to it, the progressives still assume a capitalist system. They can't really think beyond that at this point. They don't like how it's working, but if you make an appeal that we can fix it, that would probably be interesting to them.
So then what is the appeal? Why are they winning elections? Here is my answer. The left is the only one who has anything to say that sounds like it might be a solution — vague, unworked out, yes, but there's a certain positivity about it. We can go out and get the government to do all these good things, and we will vote, and we're full of young people, not old people. This becomes important. And that's an effective politics because of the depressed condition of MAGA, of the president, of all the defensive, old, tired politics.
Now, this answers your question as follows. I know, because I come out of the same elite university system that the people running the government do — and some of them are my friends because we were schoolmates together — they are very depressed. They talk like this: we lost in Vietnam, we lost in Afghanistan, we lost in Iraq, and now we may lose in Ukraine. The story militarily is very depressing.
The exposure two weeks ago of the condition of the bathrooms on the USS Abraham Lincoln for the sailors to use spoke directly to this sense of everything falling apart. The president's physical disintegration, which is a constant topic of interest in this country — referred to by nighttime comedians in constant talk — has led to a notion that the war in Iran is lost. That is now widespread. Left and right agree on that. Even the middle is grudgingly acknowledging it. No one has any faith that the latest iteration of sanctions will deal with what all the earlier iterations failed to deal with.
So it's depressed. It's a kind of slogging through. The only thing that animates the right wing now is symbolic gestures feeding the worst among them, because those are the only ones he has left — the white supremacists, the gun people, the anti-abortion activists.
Symbolic Politics and the Head Start Program
Richard Wolff: The headline in today's news here in the United States was the following story, released by the United States Navy — currently in the doghouse because of the Abraham Lincoln exposé. What did the Navy do today? They announced that there's a new huge naval ship nearing completion, which was scheduled some time ago to be named after Doris Miller — an African American sailor who was a hero when the bombing of Pearl Harbor opened World War II. A decision made several years ago. What did the Navy announce? They are considering changing the name, not using Doris Miller, and replacing it by calling the ship Trump.
The level of ridicule, the level of horror that this provoked — even among many Trump supporters — only the most white supremacist among them liked it. For them, this is exactly what they want to hear. The rest of the government's big announcement was ending the Head Start program. That was a program developed about 50 years ago to give young children from poor neighborhoods special support in public school — funding teachers and programs to give them compensation for the otherwise poor school they were assigned to. My father was active in the United States helping to build the Head Start program 50 years ago.
So that disgrace in this anti-African American move, and taking away the remainder of the Head Start program — this is what we had. It depresses the population more than anything else. It makes politics ugly and dirty and disgusting and repulsive. If you add to that the endless speculation about the somewhat disturbed young woman who is now very close to Trump all the time, every day — it is a spectacle of dysfunction.
My guess is that if they don't pull the proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat, they do risk a terrible defeat in November as all of this comes to a head. Because in the last weeks of the race, the Democrats will find the courage to say some of these things that they have lacked up until this point — if not to win the election, then to reduce the appeal of the more progressive wing, which is now basking in the limelight of being the only ones with some sort of positive attitude.
The Debt Crisis and the Tax-Cut Trap
Richard Wolff: When it comes to the economy, which I specialize in, the levels of problem are just spectacular. The budget for next year, which has to come out in the next few weeks, will be another deficit — probably larger than the last — at a time when the ability of the United States to borrow money is a problem. If they borrow at the normal 30-year range, they will have to pay over five and a quarter percent interest rate. That will kill the mortgage market. They can't do that. So they're going to go to shorter term, but shorter term is becoming up over four, four and a half percent. We already spend over $1 trillion on interest.
So the American people are going to be told — the progressives for sure, because I'll write some of it, so I can assure you — they will say: what does it mean that every one of you Americans is paying money in interest? And where does the interest go? To the people who lend to the government. Well, who are they? They are the richest people and the biggest corporations in the country. And then comes the clincher. The corporations and the rich have the money to lend to the government because the government doesn't tax them. The big tax cuts of Mr. Trump's first term, and then again the second term, give them the money. Having not had to pay taxes, the same money that they would have had to pay in taxes they've lent to the government — and so we get to pay the interest. When I'm done with that speech, you should see these audiences. And these are often people who are not sympathetic to the left at all. As it becomes clearer, the struggles that can't be resolved in an acceptable way — you get in the economic sphere something not so different from the war in Iran's sphere, where everything the president tried seems not to work. We were bombing them, we were missing them, we were blockading them. Nothing at all seems to happen. The president says everything is fine in the Strait of Hormuz, and then other agencies of his government explain that nothing's happening in the Strait. This is impossible to sustain as a longer-term position — and by that I mean six months to a year.
Conceptualizing America's Structural Decline
Glenn Diesen: I'm wondering how to best conceptualize the problem, because it doesn't seem like only a left-right issue. This is quite a transformative time, not just for the world but for the United States as well. We see that the adversaries of the United States are building all these economic alternatives — their own technologies independently of the US, their own industrial bases, their own transportation corridors, their own development banks and payment systems, starting to trade in their own currencies, forming new security arrangements independently of the US. That's the adversaries.
And then we're seeing allies of the US becoming more worried themselves about dependence on not just a declining US, but one that's also becoming much more reckless. And even within the United States we see enormous economic problems. The US has a lot of economic resources and is immensely powerful, but all these resources are so concentrated. In terms of what the US is trying to do — the war against Iran is failing, the proxy war against Russia is failing, the economic war against China is failing. Within the US, the tech revolution seems to be a tech bubble, the plan to re-industrialize didn't work, reviving the dollar isn't working, the financial system is under stress, $40 trillion in debt. And on top of it, you see growing social desperation, political polarization where each side portrays the other as enemies, radicalization, culture wars.
And all of this is happening at a time when you would think there would be a wider conceptual discussion about what the challenges are and how the US can adjust. But the president is claiming the economy is great, the Strait of Hormuz is open, the USS Abraham Lincoln has no problems, the US is winning, it's the hottest country in the world — and meanwhile all the polls are showing that more and more Americans feel the country is on the wrong path. How can we understand America at this point in history? Because this isn't your average boom-and-bust cycle. This is something much bigger.
Richard Wolff: I hate to beat the same old horse, and you and I have discussed this before. For me, the conceptual framework that I find valuable is the notion that we are living through the decline of the American empire. I believe that captures the linkage — what connects all the things you just went through.
The number of references to a declining empire that I see around me in the American press and in American culture today is ten times what it was one year ago. Very small one year ago, and still small, but ten times what it was. I am no longer, as I was for a while, one of really very few writers who talked like that. For the others it seemed too much. But number one.
Number two: what was holding back people from seeing the decline of the empire was a view that is relevant to answering your question. The United States remains, of course, a very rich, very resourceful economic and political system — military as well. It would be foolish, and that is not my intent, to suggest otherwise. But that very wealth and that very resourcefulness — because it is now a good hundred years or so old — has, if you'll pardon my Hegelianism, become its own opposite. It is becoming a terrible burden, because it fuels particularly in the leading politicians of both parties a notion that we should never be deterred by the problems. Yes, of course we have the problems, but we have all the resources needed to get through them. This is a terrible mistake.
You can have all the resources. Look: if you juxtapose Iran in February of this year to the United States as military adversaries, and then add the Israelis as allies of the United States, what is the prognosis one would come to about the probability of the outcome of that war? The answer is: poor Iran. But it would have been a mistake. Not because the United States isn't a military power many times that of Iran — it is — but it is a military power whose leaders are so used to muddling through, as the British used to say about their empire. We muddle through. Somehow our wealth and our resources have been able to get us through. And there's some truth to that. American capitalism collapsed in the 1930s — it really fell apart for a decade — and yet it came back. It had the resources to rebuild, despite the world war, partly because of it. They were able to do it.
This time, I don't think so. I think the uniqueness of the United States and the wealth it was able to create, particularly after World War II, is unprecedented in its roots and therefore in its vulnerability.
How America Inherited the European Empires
Richard Wolff: Allow me to summarize it. World War II was the end of the European and Japanese empires. India left Britain. Africa left Germany, France, and so forth. They held on economically — yes, I understand that — but basically they lost their empires. And who gathered those empires into its hands? The United States. The United States emerged able and eager to replace the Europeans. Who becomes the big friend of India once they disconnect from Britain? The United States. Who becomes active all over Africa as the French and the Belgians and all the others have to withdraw? The Americans. The Americans therefore got the benefit of being the inheritor of European colonialism while positioning itself as the ally of the colonies — because after all, it was an ex-colony itself. What a wonderful position. And all of that wrapped up in the notion: we deliver democracy. We are the bringers of democracy. Remember the Suez Canal fiasco in 1955 — we will take care of that.
That gave the United States the position that the Europeans had enjoyed. Little Belgium enjoyed the resources of the Congo — arguably the richest part of Africa, an immense country with immense resources — funneling all that wealth into little Belgium. Of course Belgium could become wealthy, have a high standard of living, enjoy all that wealth. And the same with France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and on and on. All of that is now — I'm exaggerating, of course — funneling into the United States, which in the second half of the 20th century is reeling from the wealth cascading into it. Even if the wealth pulled out of Africa was cut by half of what the Belgians did, when you add up all the Belgians, the French, the Germans, and so on, it overwhelmed the United States. It literally gave it an enormous boost.
So it produced in the second half of the 20th century the absurd position of the United States: number one political power, number one exporter, number one importer, number one capital source. Dollar is the global currency. All of it. But it was inherently vulnerable to the absurd circumstance that those two oceans exempted them from the horrors of World War I and II — which is how colonial Europe destroyed itself along with Japan.
Iran as a Symbol of Imperial Overreach
Richard Wolff: What we are living through now is the withdrawal of all the parts. And look at Iran — it's like a screaming symbol of all of this. We begin our story with overthrowing Mosaddegh in 1953, a lame operation undertaken by the British but basically orchestrated by the CIA. And who gets put into place? An American choice — the Shah, that old family, pleasing to the Dulles brothers in Washington. So they put him in there, the way the State Department selected Zelensky to stick him in as the leader in Ukraine a few years ago. And then you have Iran a generation under this crazy dictator, the Shah. He's eventually overthrown by the only social force he couldn't destroy — the Islamic religious community. So who overthrows him? That community, the Ayatollah and the community. And then the United States declares: well, that's not acceptable. We didn't pick it. You overthrew our man. The Shah, by the way, was whisked out of Iran and ended his life in the United States, where he was given asylum — as if the symbols weren't obviously organized.
But here's the point. The oppressed, the overthrown — the perfect example of what I'm trying to sketch as history coming full circle — Iran has stymied the United States. It finally figured out how, by putting its missile silos underground in its mountains, to get out from under the danger. And every other country is doing that too. Friend and foe alike are trying to figure out how to get out from under.
The irony is that it now looks like the whole world is against Mr. Trump, and he looks like he's against the whole world — which he is, because the whole world is withdrawing from the position given to the United States. It's over. For the rest of the world, that is in many ways positive news. For the United States, it's awful. And you get a Trump who acts it out. He's going to tariff everybody. He's going to sanction everybody. And he's confident because the wealth of the United States is so out of proportion with the rest of the world that the mere threat of its displeasure should do the trick — because it always did over the last 75 years.
We are living through the dismemberment, the dissolution of the world economy built around the United States. And I don't think there is anything that can be done to stop it — with one caveat. Recently, there have been a number of statements leaked out of the American military that there are some discussions about tactical nuclear weapons. Now, why would you want to do that? Our adversaries — at least some of them, like Russia and China — have all the wherewithal to deliver such weapons here to the United States. I'm sitting in New York, a prime target. Why would the Americans want to do that? Well, they are looking at a situation that is disintegrating and they don't know what to do. They're desperate, and nothing suggests itself that they can come up with other than nuclear weapons. They talk specifically about using nuclear weapons in Iran. They are so much at the end of what they can imagine doing that that's where their heads are.
America's Allies and the Transition to Economic Nationalism
Glenn Diesen: One gets the impression that America's adversaries are able to find their role and their place in a post-American world — currently discussing and developing an alternative international economic architecture with their own tech, transportation corridors, finance, new security arrangements, new political institutions, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, all of this under the umbrella of a post-hegemonic movement. You see them adjusting to new realities enthusiastically.
But America's allies — you mentioned the former European and Japanese empires — after World War II, when they lost their empires, they found a new role as junior partners of the United States, as nodes in the US empire. If you were the British, the Germans, the Japanese, you could have a very privileged position in the US empire. But now with US decline, there are two consequences: the US has fewer resources to begin with and has to make new priorities, and also the relationship is much more extractive. We see tendencies to cannibalize allies, to needlessly humiliate them as Trump did with the South Koreans. In terms of their economic position, security, the ideology which has defined them, their identity — where do they go from here? What is their role in the new world as the US empire reaches a breaking point?
Richard Wolff: The biggest economic phenomenon that I see around me is the systematic transition — which is happening more and faster and with less opposition than I would have expected — from what used to be called neoliberalism to a very harsh economic nationalism. In other words: to hell with free trade, to hell with the market. The market doesn't behave properly, we intervene. Trump is buying positions in a dozen American corporations, particularly in the high-tech sector — Intel and others. He's buying huge blocks of stock. Bessant is intervening in currency markets, in the market for US Treasuries. He's doing all kinds of things premised on the notion that — contrary to the complaint of the Global South that the whole globalization neoliberal era since the 1970s came at their expense — Mr. Trump has outdone that. No, he says it came at our expense. He's going to outdo the Global South in denouncing that whole period, as the justification for the United States no longer allowing the Europeans and others to take advantage of us.
A rewriting of history that is remarkable in its boldness, given that the Chamber of Commerce here and every economics department — and I've taught in half a dozen of them in the United States — is committed to gross, simpleminded neoliberalism. Markets are the ingenious inventions of the human mind that give us optimal outcomes, efficiency engines. Stuff that is absurd on the face of it, violates the history we all know, is mathematically nonsensical — I did the math before I did the economics. It has been a religion here. That religion is being chucked in favor of a gross nationalism.
And it is exemplified by the decision — as a demonstration to the world of what we mean — the killing of those fishermen, now numbering over 200, in little boats in the Caribbean and the Western Pacific. No judge, no jury, no lawyer, no evidence. The government decides, without inspection of the boat: we know what they're doing, we're viewing them from satellites, and we kill them. This despite the fact that inside the United States, where we have laws against drug trafficking, if you are found guilty, you are never killed. It's not a capital crime. We are showing the Latin people. We are reimposing the Pax Americana big time, partly because we can do it in much of the rest of the world.
My expectation is that this is going to be blown apart when the Europeans either realize that after World War II, however understandable what they did was, they in retrospect bet on the wrong horse — and they're now suffering what happens when you bet on the wrong horse. You've hooked your fate to the horse that's losing.
Germany as the Pivot Point for European Realignment
Richard Wolff: At some point I expect the forces inside Europe to break out — whether it's the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the National Rally in France, or whoever — they are going to break out and make new deals with Russia and China, and that is going to force all of Europe. I frankly don't see how NATO survives that.
Years ago, when the Greek government in one of its periodic crises decided to put the port of Piraeus — the port city for Athens — up for sale, and the Chinese bought it, that seemed to me a remarkable sign. And now I follow the activities of BYD, the electric car company from China. It is now the owner of more and more German industry. This is just a matter of time. The Germans could have prevented that but didn't. It would have been costly and dangerous for them to try. They made the decision not to. I think that foreshadows the next decision. And I would not be surprised if the Germans are the ones to make it — that is, a German-Russian alliance. That confronts the rest of Europe with a set of choices they'll have to act on. And the United States will come out of it lucky to hold on to Britain when all of that dust clears. I think that's coming. I think you're going to see the literal physical dismemberment of the empire, because all the conditions to prepare that have now matured to the point that we see.
Glenn Diesen: It would be interesting to see such a shift in Germany. It might seem very unlikely now, simply because Germany has become one of the most militant and anti-Russian governments in all of Europe. But when they go that far into excess, the pendulum swing will come back. And I think that's why the Alternative für Deutschland is like the most powerful opposition in Europe that actually wants to do something different, that actually could do something different. It would be good to see it position itself in a way that could create a real economic model for Europe — one which would also have an interest in saving some of the institutions and rules that we actually did build over the past decades, because it seems everything is being thrown away now.
This whole open and connected world which we built over the past decades — with rules and institutions like international law under the United Nations, the rules of international finance — even that means nothing anymore if you're a country like Russia, Iran, or Venezuela. You see how easily that can be thrown away. The trade rules, as the Chinese experience shows, mean nothing. Freedom of navigation, as you pointed out, has been replaced by naval blockades and killing fishermen. It's quite extreme. And even principles considered to be the core of the liberal democratic West — like democracy itself — now if you're in Romania and you vote for the wrong party, they just cancel the elections. You hear the Germans doing the same. If you vote wrong, those states might lose a lot of their autonomous position. And even genocide is off the table now — a little bit of genocide in Gaza, maybe Iran. Everything's being thrown away. I would like to see something being salvaged, but I don't see it yet in Europe, except possibly, as you said, the Germans could be a key contender to reorganize this.
Richard Wolff: Let me make the point about Germany a bit more strongly. If I understand the Alternative's position, they have said explicitly that if they come to power in Germany, they will reopen the German economy to cheap oil and gas from Russia — they will work a deal with Russia to buy it. And they will stop supporting the Zelensky regime in Ukraine.
Now, you're going to go to the German public and say: this is our program. You will no longer have to pay the taxes to fight a war in Ukraine. That's going to save you X euros a year. And I'm going to drop the disastrous oil and gas prices that have created the suffering you've had — the costly bills to heat your home and drive your car and all the rest of it. That's what I deliver to you. And I can deliver it literally overnight, instantaneous. And on top of it, if you're a right-winger, I'll keep out the immigrants. But keeping out the immigrants won't do it for them, and they know that. It's those other two arguments that will do. And you add that if we stop the war, we also stop the immigrant population — so you get another one that way.
And if you stop the war in Iran, if you stop the Americans from doing crazy stuff, that also will prevent more immigrants from coming, because they all come — not all, but you understand — from the Middle East. The Syrians and others all over Europe, these are the people that are coming. This is a very powerful argument for a German public.
Look at the polls for Merz. He is a wonderful indicator and a wonderful opponent for them, having been head of BlackRock — an American venture capital firm in Germany — before he becomes their leader. He is an American stooge, they present him that way, and he presents himself that way. And he's dropped like a stone in popularity, as I follow in Germany.
I don't know if I told you, Glenn — my mother was born in Berlin. I've spoken German ever since I've been a child. I learned it before I ever learned English. So I pay attention. And even if you add to them the disaffection on the far left — between the Linke party and Sarah Wagenknecht, the two left-wingers that used to be one party, now they're two — you put them together, you're talking 10 to 15% of the German population easily. And you're creating a difficulty for the middle that is going to be very hard, and they're not going to get much help from the United States. Elon Musk is going to fund the Alternative für Deutschland.
And as that happens, the middle that's to the left will join the Linke and leave the Social Democratic Party — which is hopeless — or join Sarah Wagenknecht, who is more popular as a speaker and as an event than anybody in Germany. It's extraordinary, really. An extraordinary kind of political situation.
I was born in the United States and have lived here all my life. The level of disaffection from the Republican and Democratic parties that I am surrounded by here in New York is beyond anything I have seen or felt or read about in my entire life. Nothing in the 1960s came close to what we have now as a level of disaffection. It's just incredible. And it is perfectly aligned chronologically — the older the person, the less they feel what I'm describing; the younger, the more. And so literally, time — the old people are dying off, being replaced by the young people. And for them, the Cold War is ancient history. They don't know about it, they don't care about it. They live in a capitalism which promised them a whole kind of life which is not available, and they feel it and they know it, and they are reinforced in it on a daily basis.
Glenn Diesen: I actually had Sarah Wagenknecht from the left on this podcast, and I also had several people from the Alternative für Deutschland on the right as well. That's kind of where I got thinking about the whole pendulum swing I referred to earlier — because the Scholz and Merz governments took Germany in such a militant and radical direction, with all this war enthusiasm and horrible economic policies, that a massive correction has to come. And it's either on the left or the right, but either way some correction is definitely coming. It is a bit strange to think about it this way, but the countries that go more overboard are perhaps the ones who are able to actually mount enough political opposition to actually make a difference after all. Anyways, I think we've run out of time. As always, I look forward to our talks and I always learn something. Thank you so much.
Richard Wolff: My pleasure. I value the conversations and I value the work that you're doing. More and more of my friends and colleagues here in the United States are familiar with your programs and look forward to them. So you're helping us very much. And if I can be of use to you, bravo. It's what we call here a win-win situation.