Despite US President Trump’s boasting of the trillion-dollar-deals he recently secured with Arab Gulf countries, which he believes could rescue the fragile economy of the US and hence its global dominance, the indisputable on-the-ground fact is that the global system is on its way to a new bi-polar order to replace American hegemony. Ever since WWII, and for the last 75 years, the US has been leading the world politically and economically. Today, the world is walking towards new horizons that promise bi- or multi-polar leadership, with hopes for global peace to be restored.
In this context, I today present excerpts of interviews conducted by Norwegian writer and political activist Glenn Diesen with American economist and public policy analyst, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, and economist and Professor Emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Richard Wolff, on 2 May and 28 April respectively. Following are highlights of both interviews.
Mr Diesen: It seems as if we’ve had a western centric world order now for centuries, and we now see this being contested… China is now outpacing the west.
Professor Sachs: “Most of the world population lives in Asia, about 60 per cent. Roughly 60 per cent of world economic output was once produced in Asia. But this changed decisively with the rise of Europe and the North Atlantic. In the 19th and 20th centuries the United States rose to become the largest economy in the world. Until 1820 or so Asia was still more than half the world economy but by 1950, after 150 years of industrial age dominated by Europe and the US, the whole Asian economy had declined to around 20 per cent of world output. China was eclipsed after losing many wars first to the West then to Japanese invasion. By the time of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China had gone through about 110 years of devastating defeats, what China calls the ‘century of humiliation’. Its share of world economy was estimated at some 2 per cent of world output whereas it roughly held 20 per cent of world population. It was completely eclipsed from its long historical role in the world for at least a millennium from 500 to 1500AD before the beginning of European ascendancy. The story we see today, taken from a very very long-term perspective in history, is the return of China to the front ranks of world power and economic productivity and technology. The rise of China in this sense should be understood as a rebalancing of what had become unbalanced: a world dominated by Europe. Now we’re at the end of that phase of history and one should understand it’s not only the return of China, it’s also the rapid development of India, Southeast Asia, parts of West Asia, the Gulf countries. All this is fundamentally ending the Eurocentric world, or what by the end of the 20th century became the American-centred vision of the world.”
How do you think China’s geopolitical mentality would make it different from the way the Europeans behaved?
“The decisive event in western political culture is 476AD which is the collapse of the western Roman Empire. It was a long process but, with the fall of the western Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into multiple political entities. Despite Charlemagne’s aspirations, Napoleonic aspirations, and despite Hitler attempts, Europe never became a unified political entity. Today’s European Union is still a very weak construct. China is very different in its history; China unified in 221BC… it is geographically kind of a box; the box has a dryland steppe region: to the north the Himalayas, to the west the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, to the south China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean to the east. One could say that for most of the last 2,200 years, China has been a centralised administrative State… China did not look for overseas territories… China had peaceful relations with its neighbours; China did not engage in almost any fighting with its East Asian neighbours, with Japan, Korea and Vietnam.”
With the historical background of the West and China revealed, Mr Diesen moved on to what sparked off today’s wars, a question he posed to his second guest. Dr Wolff replied: “This is very much an American policy, no one should be under any illusion, the Europeans don’t want this… The Chinese don’t want this… This is an American initiative and should be understood in that light… Having the dollar as the world currency gave the United States an enormous subsidy because central banks around the world added to their reserves not just gold but the US dollar.” Dr Wolff explained that the US could buy anything from countries of the world and pay them in USD, which he described as “pieces of green paper”, and “since you didn’t want to hold worthless pieces of green paper, you use them to lend money to the United States government which in turn used that money to pay for the empire” and to finance its debts. “The US in that manner got the rest of the world to finance the empire that dominated the world,” Dr Wolff explained, pointing out that US debt has now reached USD35 trillion, while its GDP is no more than USD27 trillion. The problem according to Dr Wolff is the declaration recently made by the Japanese, one of the most docile allies the United States has had since WWII: “It is too risky, you cannot ask us to lend you more money”. Dr Wolff reminded that the US is the world’s biggest debtor.
Mr Diesen asked Dr Wolff about current indicators of the collapse of American economy, to which he replied: “The GDP of the United States and its major allies, the G7, that’s the US, Japan, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, have together about 28 per cent of the global GDP… For most of the last 75 years, this was the centre of global economy, and the USD was the currency they presided over. I did the same calculation for China and the alliance they’ve built, called BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, plus another 15 countries that have joined BRICS since the original five… GDP of China and BRICS is 35 per cent of global GDP. In other words, and for the first time since WWII, we have a new world economy in which there are two big economic power blocs; the one that used to be dominant is now number two, not even close to number one; 28 and 35 per cent are far apart.”
Mr Diesen asked his guest if he could see a reverse to the economic collapse, to which Dr Wolff replied that if the Left arises, it will have to look at what the Chinese did and learn from it rather than try to destroy it, pointing out that the American government has designated China as its big problem for almost 20 years. He said that while the economic growth of G7 grew slower, and Germany went into recession after some 75 years when it used to be the engine of Europe, the IMF shows that last year China’s growth stood at 5 per cent, and India’s at 7 per cent. “So you’re not defeating the Chinese, you’re losing, you’re losing, and when you’re losing you have to face it so you can minimise your losses,” Dr Wolff explained.
So, the persistent denial of Western European and American powers can only lead to blindness to the new reality imposing itself on the world politically and economically, and can inevitably lead to the collapse of the American empire, soon to join other previous fallen empires.
Watani International
30 May 2025
