Richard Wolff and Glenn Diesen discuss the Trump-Xi meeting and the decline of US global power
Glenn Diesen interviews economist Professor Richard Wolff on the geopolitical and economic implications of the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing.
Summary
Glenn Diesen hosts Professor Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, to discuss the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, the trajectory of the US and Chinese economies, and the broader question of imperial decline. Wolff argues that the meeting revealed a fundamental asymmetry: China knows time is on its side, while the United States is engaged in increasingly desperate attempts to reassert imperial dominance. He contends that the US military campaign against Iran was not merely a tactical failure but a strategic turning point — one that has damaged American influence over Gulf states, accelerated global realignment toward China, and exposed the limits of energy-control fantasies driving US foreign policy. Wolff frames China's hybrid economic model — roughly half private, half state-owned, governed by the Communist Party — as having demonstrably outperformed Western capitalism and the Soviet model alike, making it the most compelling development template for the Global South.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The Trump-Xi Summit and What It Reveals
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined again by Professor Richard Wolff to discuss the developments in the US economy, the global economy, and also how we can make sense of the meeting that has just taken place between Xi and Trump. Thank you — it's great to see you again.
Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, Glenn. I'm very glad to be here.
Glenn Diesen: I was wondering what your main takeaway was from this meeting in Beijing between the American president and the Chinese. I think Trump wanted to come there from a position of strength, but instead it does reveal that the US is in a weaker position now — and again, it's not stable either, not for the US or the world. What did you see from this meeting, and what can we expect to come from it?
Richard Wolff: I think everything now is coming together in my mind to underscore that we are watching a transition moment in human history. It's a transition from the dominance of the American Empire, which has been pretty much the case since at least the Second World War. That's now over. The American Empire is in decline. I would argue that the American economy is being pulled down by that fact also.
Whether or not you agree with that — and that the Chinese are riding the upswing, rather like the United States rode the upswing of its capitalism in the second half of the 19th and much of the 20th century — it became the dominant power with World War I because all of its potential competitors, including the British, destroyed each other. It is a cautionary tale that if you allow a system to develop the way Western capitalism did, you culminate in a destruction of all by all. A kind of Hobbesian horrible moment in global history. The United States escaped it because it had the protection of the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. Absent that reality, they would have been caught up as fully in World Wars One and Two as all of their potential competitors were in fact destroyed by that.
So that empire — which should have been clearly advertising its temporariness when it happened — in other words, Americans and others should have understood: this can't last. The United States standing and everybody else prostrate on the ground. The United States should have known it didn't. The second half of the 20th century will go down historically, I think, as a moment of an almost hysterical pro-Americanism in which the United States led the way for many around the world to begin to believe that hooking yourself up to the United States was betting on a horse you knew would win. When you should have known that this horse was doing very well, but pretty soon the other horses would catch up. You didn't see it. And you're going to pay a heavy price for that.
And now the next winner of this game — the Chinese — are showing you that for the last 30 or 40 years they have outperformed the West in terms of economic growth by a lot: two to three times the American average rate of GDP growth, about two to two and a half percent annual for the US and the Chinese three times that annually. That's then only a matter of time.
And if the meeting of Trump and Xi showed anything, it showed that one side knows it has time on its side and the other one doesn't. One side now wants free trade, multilateralism, open everything — nice guy, let's work it out. And the other side is trying to smash the Chinese down every chance they get, and is undeterred in that project by the failure of every effort to slow or stop the Chinese. It is glaring.
China's Hybrid Economic Model
That's one level. Here's the second one — and stop me, Glenn, if I'm talking too long. China is — and here I put on my hat as an economics professor — China is a unique developmental program that has to be understood. Whatever the phrase "socialism with Chinese characteristics" means, and it means different things to different people, it has meant for me, watching the following: they are not capitalist in the way that we normally define the United States, Britain, Western Europe and all of that. Why? Because private enterprise is not the nearly universal form of producing and distributing goods and services. On the other hand, China is not the Soviet Union. The government does not own and operate all industry and much of agriculture. No, it is not that. It is determinately neither the one nor the other.
Well, then what is it? The answer is it is a hybrid. It is a hybrid because roughly half of its economy is private capitalist enterprises — both Chinese and non-Chinese — and the other half is state-owned and operated enterprise. And the whole thing is managed by a very powerful government, which in turn is supervised by the Communist Party of China. That is a remarkable structure. Not like the Soviet Union, not like the United States or Western Europe. It is sui generis — its own thing.
Just like Scandinavia could call itself socialist because of the government programs and so forth for decades — that's one kind of socialism. The Soviet Union had every right to call itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics because of what they did. And the Chinese have every right to define socialism in yet another form. Why is this important? Because what we have seen, without it being called that, is a contest over the last 70 years between private capitalism, state capitalism if you allow me — the Soviet Union — and then this bizarre hybrid. Nobody has the right to that name exclusively. There's no central bureau that decides whether you qualify or not. So Scandinavian socialism, Soviet socialism, Chinese socialism, and yet others.
But what we have seen, whether we want to face it or not, is that they're in a struggle, each of them. In that struggle, in that race, in that competition, Soviet socialism collapsed. It left Scandinavian socialism, if you like, or Western European socialism, or the socialism of Bernie Sanders and folks like that, and Xi Jinping's kind of socialism in China. And they have been competing.
And now I have to say what my economics hat teaches me: the Chinese won. At least at this point, they have proved that the economic development out of a condition of extreme poverty to a condition of an extraordinarily well-developed standard of living — an incredible economic dynamism — the Chinese have done it.
I want to remind people, and here's a personal note. When I was getting my PhD here in the United States in economics, the most popular subfield of economics that graduate students like me were attracted to was called economic development. It was all about how poor countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on could find their way up. And we had an extraordinarily arrogant approach, without being aware of it — our teachers should have been, but we were the students — that we had the monopoly of knowledge on how to do that, and we would be trained and then go off and be UN consultants or development specialists. Many of my colleagues in graduate school went on to do that. They became experts in it, which we thought we were. And the United States helped a lot of countries this way in Asia, Africa, Latin America. People from Norway and others did that also.
We didn't go to China because China was communist. So there was no Marshall Plan for China. There were no economic development missions sent by my university or by government — none of it. The Chinese got no help, and they did it better than all the countries who did get help.
What are we saying? We're saying that China won despite being basically on their own. Even the early help they got from the Soviet Union kind of petered out when they came to disagree in the 1960s. So the Chinese really did most of this organizing, planning, and structuring on their own. And however you understand the role played by the private capitalists who came in the last 30 years and who play an important role and have much credit for the growth too — you can't take away from the Chinese that they supervised the whole thing, they controlled and regulated the whole thing.
And so the bottom line is: Mr. Trump goes to China and is confronted by the defeat of the American model and its replacement by the Chinese. If I were an activist economist in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or for that matter Eastern Europe, it's the Chinese model I want to look at, borrow from, adjust for our circumstances. They're the great example, not the United States. And that is changing everything.
Even if there weren't a BRICS alliance — and there is, and it's interesting that it gets very little attention in India today while the big meeting in China gets all the attention — in the long run, BRICS is bringing the Chinese model to the rest of the world, and probably in the long run that is their historic function.
So I think enormous issues are at stake in this meeting, even if the actual things they discussed, given what's been reported so far, are relatively much less important.
Militarization, Liberal Democracy, and the Shifting of Roles
Glenn Diesen: It's interesting what you point out, because essentially political economy became an ideology — conceptually, you can either be more like us or more like them. I think this was cemented in the Cold War as well: one side is capitalist, one is communist, one is democratic, the other is authoritarian. It kind of cemented itself in terms of identities.
But there were some conditions around this. After World War II, the US was a massive economic power and was militaristic — that's just the way it was. But these are not permanent states. I'm thinking of Alexander Hamilton, who once made the point that if Britain had been a land power in Europe, it would be as authoritarian as the Germans or the Russians. The reasoning makes sense: if you're a land power with huge borders and many neighboring countries, you have to have a huge standing army during peacetime. And if you have a huge standing army during peacetime, that army can also be used against your own public. So there's not much push for reforms that benefit the public.
The whole thing was premised on the US and Britain essentially as de facto island states having a stronger proclivity toward liberal democracy and freedom. However, what happens if they militarize? There's no reason why they should remain the same. Over the past decades, with the heavy militarization of the United States, it would be predictable that some of the freedoms would begin to melt away. You can't have this massive military-industrial complex and still assume that voters will be able to dictate the future of the country.
So my point is it seems more now like the roles have been switched a bit. China has its own problems with authoritarianism, but they have essentially pushed a policy of peace so as not to disrupt their development. Meanwhile, it's the US that has militarized too much. And even the Chinese economic model now seems more like the American one in the 19th century as opposed to what America looks like today. How do you see the shift in power between the US and China breaking up some of these ideological assumptions — the assumption of a universal path to development, that for China to develop they have to become more like us, when it seems they've essentially found a good formula?
Richard Wolff: I am persuaded at this point, given what I've experienced and what I'm looking at. I think the Chinese have demonstrated that this hybrid — state and private enterprise governed by a socialistically self-defined governmental and political party apparatus — is a very unique construction. But it has delivered the goods. And that is already very persuasive around the world, as well it should be. We are all groping in the end at how to do things, how to fix problems, how to move into the future. And the Chinese are saying, with all the confidence that now goes with it: we've figured it out. Maybe there's a better way, but if so, nobody's offering it. What alternative to our development is there out there that can boast what we have achieved?
The president of the United States goes home and in his crazy way writes on his social media account that he wants a ballroom as big in the White House as the lovely room in which he was entertained by Xi Jinping. It's like a script written by a not-so-good playwright. "I would like to have what he has." The whole world would like to have the economic growth that China has shown in the last 30 years. Not a single other country can do that. Even India, which wants to be that, has to show that it hasn't done that yet. It's made some progress. But it's China that sits there, and they can be very comfortable.
I want to hammer home also that China achieved this under the umbrella of the American Empire. One of the reasons it is in no rush and does not want to provoke the United States into doing anything catastrophic is: what's the hurry? The Chinese are doing spectacularly in a world in which the US dollar is the universal currency, in which the United States has 700 military bases around the world — and China has one, in Djibouti. They have no reason to agitate the global situation because they are doing very well within it.
If BRICS doesn't develop its own currency — and I don't mean to be critical of China, but it's because there's no great pressure from China, who dominates BRICS economically speaking — what's the rush? We're all doing pretty well. And if the United States were to decide to opt out and not be an empire, it's not so clear we would have the same smooth sailing. My guess is that in the decision-making halls of the Chinese, they are very aware of it. I have certainly spoken to enough Chinese intellectuals in my life to know that they understand what I just said. I got it from them. I had to be shaken into an awareness that it's precisely their experience that teaches them: take it easy. Let's work this out so we don't get caught in the Thucydides trap. Let's not replicate that story.
Britain had to fight two wars — I know I've mentioned this to you before, Glenn. Britain fought the War of Independence and then the War of 1812, trying to squash the independence of the United States. They failed, to their own surprise. They had a big British army and navy. The United States didn't have anything, or hardly anything, and the British lost after two wars. Then no more war for the next century and more. They escaped the Thucydides trap — it took them two defeats in two wars.
And the Chinese — what is their hope? To achieve the same thing minus the two wars, because we can't afford the wars now. And in the United States, war against China is an assumption of our political leaders. They simply assume it. It is sort of automatic. Otherwise they would have to admit that time and history and economics mean that the American Empire is now over, and that maybe the real issue Americans should engage is: is the next phase of human history another empire — in this case the Chinese — or will we finally be able to have 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? Will those horrors help us this time go in a new direction?
I notice the Chinese have discussions about that. We don't have any discussions about that here, because the notion that those are our options is so difficult for Americans that they still want to hold on to denial, to imagining that the American Empire is still alive and kicking.
So if you wanted to know why the leader of this country acts the way he acts — I know it's popular to ascribe to him narcissism and mental deficiencies of one kind or another. I don't believe any of that matters. He is playing a role. If it weren't him doing it, the other one would have done it — and by the other one I mean Mr. Biden, Kamala Harris, or any of the others. "We're going to take Greenland, we're going to take Panama, we're going to make Canada a 51st state." This is the gestural dynamic of someone whose ship is sinking and who has to flail around with imaginary conquests and expansions because the real ones are not available. The best he can do is snatch Mr. Maduro and his wife out of their bed at night and put them in a jail in New York City. It is a pathetic effort of desperation.
Iran, the Gulf States, and the Limits of Energy-Control Strategy
Glenn Diesen: That's an interesting way of framing it. But given that the two sides have these different interests — China sees that time is on its side, the US holds on to this exorbitant privilege of ruling the international system, and the more it weakens on its own, the more China sees that all it has to do is manage the Thucydides trap — how do you see this producing specific demands in these talks? If you're looking at this meeting between Xi and Trump, what would each side specifically want from the other?
Richard Wolff: My guess is — and I see the logic of your question — what the Chinese want is what you just said: don't rock the boat. Let's try to put a damper on things. Let's try to resolve our problems. If we can agree that it would be better to have the Strait of Hormuz open than closed, let's agree that's our goal. You work on your side to get us closer to that. We work on our side. What's out of order — and I think the Chinese said this perhaps in relationship to Taiwan, but it covers many more issues — is: we don't want warfare. We don't want an issue that is explosive, either because you want to reconstitute your empire or because on our side we are going to hasten history by being unsatisfied with our rate of growth and wanting a bigger one. The kind of logic that lies behind Lebensraum — we need a larger space to live — or the Israeli version of Lebanon's realm, taking southern Lebanon and that kind of thing.
For the United States, I'm afraid, looking at our leadership now and the way they talk — taking them at their word — they cannot hear that message and they cannot hear that appeal from China. They do not want to work at that level. What they want is the freedom to try to resuscitate the empire. And they want the Chinese to help them do that. And the Chinese won't. The Chinese will not provoke them, will not attack them, but will not allow them.
Let me give you an example: Iran. What's the issue with Iran? In the fantasy life of the American leadership, Iran is a problem because, first, we don't control who they sell their oil to. Second, we don't control who they ally with — and so they ally with the Houthis, with Hezbollah, with Hamas, which is a problem for our ally Israel. We don't want them to do that. And we would like them not to be the ally of Russia and China, which they are.
So here's what we would like: we would like to get rid of the regime that's doing all these things, replace it with a client of the United States, and subdivide Iran into three or four other countries. If you know your history, you'll know that Iran was much bigger than it is even today once upon a time, and that there are quite a few countries in that part of the world which, if you look at their history, were once part of greater Persia. The United States wants to do what it already did with Britain — get rid of parts of Persia and make them the Gulf States and so on — but they want to go further.
And the Chinese are looking at this and saying: we can't allow this. And it's not just because of the oil — that's a mistake to think so. China has had oil in reserve ever since 2018. They have the largest strategic reserves of oil in the world, significantly more than the United States, which has reserves too, although they're about half used up now or more. So China is not in urgency about the oil. They don't want a long-term disruption, but they don't want any of what the United States wants in Iran. They want Iran to stay there, run the Strait of Hormuz the way they did before, be a good ally of Russia and China. They just want: leave it alone.
I think that's a microcosm of where we're at. And so the question becomes: where else in the world, once this Iran thing is put to bed? And notice we kind of all know what's going to happen, even if we can't predict the details. The United States cannot move forward on that project. That's over. They don't have the military means, the economic means, the political means — nothing necessary to win the fantasy that they had.
So they're going to have to go find their fantasy somewhere else. For example, in Cuba — they may make a nice theater of erasing the legacy of Fidel Castro and redesigning Cuba as the offshore gambling paradise it was before 1959. I don't know what China will do then. China has already hinted it might protect Cuba. That's the big decision. And it's not just about Cuba — it's wherever else the United States decides to make its effort.
But the one it just tried in Iran didn't work. That was a mistake. They misunderstood. And I don't think they'll learn the lesson. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see in the United States the awareness of what happened, even with the defeat — which, by the way, almost all political perspectives other than Mr. Trump's hard base of support, even the neoconservative conservatives in this country led by Mr. Kagan, have said it's a defeat. They get that they blew it. They will make a scapegoat out of Israel if they have to. They will make a scapegoat out of Mr. Trump if they have to. But have they learned the larger lesson I'm trying to draw here, in which China and Iran are important moments? I don't think so.
The Empire's Energy Fantasy and Its Cascading Failures
Glenn Diesen: In this effort to revive the empire, what would be the strategy — how can this be achieved, even if it's not achievable? There has to be some battle plan going on. One gets the impression, looking at some of the activities over the past two years, that controlling energy is seen as an important source of power. You see this from the attacks on Russian energy, the attack on Venezuela, the attack on Iran. And even now there seems to be some recognition among some European politicians that gas exports might reopen from Russia to Europe after the United States gets control over that energy infrastructure — because again, the US is the one who destroyed Nord Stream, and now they want to essentially take over that infrastructure and then gas can begin to flow again. Besides the energy aspect, how else could the United States revive the empire?
Richard Wolff: I don't see any other path — and I don't even see the energy one working. It seems to me the mistake of overreaching and trying to control Iranian oil has had the utterly unexpected consequence of putting Gulf state oil into question.
I want to make sure everybody knows: during the height of the war, Benjamin Netanyahu went to the United Arab Emirates — and I have this from the Wall Street Journal and not left-wing sources — went to the UAE to line up the UAE to join Israel in pursuing the war against Iran. And then the Israelis tried to line up the rest of the Gulf States to join, and the rest of the Gulf States said: absolutely not. We will not do that.
That means the Gulf States have discovered that having an American base on your soil is not a protection but in fact makes you a target of destruction. You can't continue with that. You can't rely on the United States. And they also see what China is. They're already selling oil to China, these countries, in many cases.
So the United States not only did not get Iranian oil — it lost the influence it had, or a good bit of it, on the Gulf States. They're going to end up — it's not even clear they'll hold on to Saudi Arabia, which you can see is putting its fingers in the air trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing and diversifying its partners in the world, because it is adjusting to what you and I have been talking about here.
If I'm right, and if it's the Thucydides trap, then the whole world — every country — has to rethink how it relates to the United States. I would argue that this Iran misadventure is a crucial moment because it is that effort of the United States which not only didn't work but comes at a moment in which the results will cascade.
Let me put it another way. The war in Vietnam and the war in Afghanistan were both lost by the United States — cold stone losses. The war in Vietnam was fought against the Communist Party of North Vietnam under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. And who runs Vietnam today? That political party. The enemy of the United States is in charge. That means they won and the United States lost. The war in Afghanistan — the other side was the Taliban. Who rules Afghanistan today? The Taliban. They won. We lost.
But because world history hadn't evolved in the way it is now — at the time of the 1970s for the Vietnam War, and then much later in Afghanistan — those defeats could not play the role of shaking the consciousness of the world the way this defeat does. It's not that this defeat is larger or smaller. Those adjectives don't really apply. It's the context that makes the text speak the way it does. And it's that context which was more on display in the visit of Trump to Xi Jinping. It's that context that gives us the meaning of the defeat in Iran.
And that will survive no matter what Mr. Trump says — that he has a victory because of the regime change, which he tries to use as a euphemism for the assassination of one ayatollah who is then replaced by another one with the same policy. This is going to be called a regime change. It's a joke. And it's a joke that doesn't work. The worst joke is the one where the person telling it expects laughter and everyone looks at that person because no one got the funny.
Glenn Diesen: I remember when, in the early phase of this war against Iran, Lindsey Graham came on the news — he was part of the crowd doing the same talking points, that it was going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. Everyone saw those talking points being repeated every day. He was making the point: oh, we're going to make so much money once we're in control of Iran's oil. The assumptions they seem to have had — a collapse of Iran, all the oil ending up in the hands of the United States — it's quite remarkable. I'm not sure how one ends up with those assumptions. But what it achieved instead, as you said, was burning down the Middle East as a region, including the United States' own allies. And this is being seen by the Europeans and East Asians, all now questioning to what extent it is good strategy to make oneself a frontline state.
But this seems to undermine a wider strategy for the United States — a way it could have positioned itself after the rise of China. Because I assumed the United States would try, after globalization as a process of Americanizing the world, as China rose, if they can't defeat the Chinese, to split into an exclusive geoeconomic bloc — tell the Europeans you're not trading with China anymore, you're buying our technology — and essentially try to divide the world along these lines. But now that seems to be failing as well, if the lesson that comes from the war in Iran is that the Arab states should not have bet everything on the United States.
Richard Wolff: Yes, they shouldn't have — and the Europeans shouldn't have done it either. But that's always the wisdom of hindsight. That's the wisdom that's imposed on you by what has happened.
Let me go back a little bit on that oil. Lindsey Graham is a good person to turn to. He really doesn't know or care or understand much about international affairs, but he's a good spokesperson for the most aggressive, "we are the empire, nothing has happened to our empire, we are dominant and becoming more so" position. And it's important because he speaks for — as Mr. Trump does — a very significant portion of the employer class here in the United States. Their expressions may be over the top, they may exaggerate, but what they're saying is what is believed by an awful lot of people.
So it's not an accident that you had the seizure of the oil-rich Venezuelan government, then the attempted seizure of the oil-rich Iranian government. And I want to remind people that there was this bizarre bombing of a little corner of Nigeria between those two events. Nigeria is an oil producer. What you're seeing there is what you said a moment ago, Glenn — this fantasy: we can become the corner of the world's oil. That's a kind of empire fantasy. We are going to become able to control the world, in this case by controlling its energy, and in particular the oil. Because look, we could grab Canada — that's another chunk of oil. Doing stuff in the Arctic Circle — that's another attack on oil. And then maybe our allies the Europeans can have a war with Russia, and we can dismember Russia and control its oil. Then we've got enough to — these kinds of fantasies are crazy, but they're crazy in the way you wouldn't be surprised by, because it's actually the obverse that's happening. It's a decline of their control. That is the actual phenomenon we're living through.
And it has to be offset. In psychology, it's reaction formation — it's an attempt in the world of fantasy to compensate for, to offset, what is actually happening, and then to have your brain focused. So you can have a bombing in the middle of Nigeria at a time when that makes no sense to most of the world. You can't tell the world what you're doing, obviously. So you have to say: we're intervening to protect Christians. Yes, Christians in Nigeria — because anything is crucial if it can be used to sustain the empire.
So for me and for many like me in the United States, our worry is what the United States will do and what the so-called allies of the United States will do. I think, for example, that if there is much more European warmongering against Russia, you may be surprised — you Europeans — that Mr. Trump will be backing away from you and be hostile to you more and more. He doesn't want that. That's not a priority anymore. When they thought they could win in Ukraine and it would be the way to break Russia up — that fantasy played the game. But when it became clear to the Americans that it's not going to happen, I think they'll do the same in Iran. They don't have a stomach for war.
And that's not because of any lack of the fantasy I just described — that unfortunately is very strong. But they have this problem: the mass of the American people are not in it. I cannot overemphasize that. People should understand, particularly Europeans — this is the first time that from the first day of this war, the majority opinion in the United States was against it. It didn't take months or even years. It did in Vietnam. It did in Afghanistan. It did in Iraq. In the early weeks and months and even the early years of those wars, American public opinion did its patriotic song and dance. Only over time, when it cost too much money, when too many young men and women came back dead or hurt or wounded, did they understand.
This time there's no stomach for it. The demand of the American people is that the government help them economically, and they don't see it. So they have no patience now for grandiosity. The president is in trouble about the ballroom — the ballroom in the White House. That's a question of a few hundred million dollars, which in the United States today is nothing. It's like a coin in your pocket. If the coin falls out on the ground and you don't bother to pick it up, it will not change the experience of that day for you. Why are Americans upset? Because it symbolizes that the money they would like to have spent on their problems is going to something else. So they don't want that. And for sure, if they don't want a $500 million ballroom, they certainly don't want a $2 million a day war in Iran.
I want to remind you: most of my students here in New York City, where I still teach — if you give them a map, they can't find Iran. Most of my students. It's not part of their universe. They're not interested. No one has ever interested them in it. It's too far away. It's murky. They don't want government money spent on that. They don't. And if anything, that loses the midterm elections for Mr. Trump and the Republicans in November. That will be the issue.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. I think this will go down as — not to plagiarize Robert Kagan — one of the greatest strategic defeats for the United States. There's so much going down the drain with this one. But again, I tend to look at the US standing in the world, its economy, the empire, but of course domestically as well. There's a lot at stake, which is never a good thing when this much is at stake — politicians tend to do desperate things.
Anyway, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your thoughts on this. The world is spinning very, very fast now. Thank you for putting some perspective on it.
Richard Wolff: It's my pleasure, Glenn. And I know I speak for many people, including many of my students who watch your programs and learn a lot from them. It's a very important service, and on behalf of all of us, thank you.