By TADEU VALADARES*

The hegemonic transition between the United States and China is not a mere geopolitical situation, but the most recent chapter in an 800-year-old historical capitalism that has reached its two-pronged stage: productive versus financial-warlike.

“When walking, you make the path/ and when you look back,/ you see the path that you will never take again”
(Antonio Machado).

1.

Analyzing the geopolitical situation requires going beyond it. It requires a prior reflection on what sustains it, on the foundation that allows us to reach another vision of the current situation, different from that limited to the incessant flow of daily events. Fleeting by definition, situations tend to disorient us.

But, inserted in a larger context, they give rise to interpretations that, without straying from the immediate, allow for a better understanding. This context that takes into account the circumstances, but gives priority to the structural dimension and its dynamics, essentially constitutes for me the time of the long term.

Adopting this perspective, we can then conceive of this quarter of a century as the most recent stage in an extended process of genesis, affirmation and incomplete exhaustion of something new 'vis-à-vis' previous history. Something that began to emerge in Europe in the 800th or XNUMXth centuries. This novelty – XNUMX years old, but which reaches us and largely determines us – is called historical capitalism by historians who work with the long term. Despite their internal debates, they generally agree that the profile of the new world took shape more clearly from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries onwards.

I confess that I thought about giving you an outline of the dynamics of historical capitalism, which in my view is marked by four major stages: commercial, manufacturing, industrial and two-faced capitalism as its most recent avatar. I gave up on the project, as our time is short for that kind of talk. I chose to focus mainly on the problematic current stage of two-faced capitalism and the current geopolitical situation.

When I speak of two-faced capitalism, I have in mind the conflicting coexistence of two profiles of capitalism.

On one side, the productive, in some way heir to the industrial revolution. On the other, the variant that emerged in the last century, a kind of 'diminished capitalism'.

This diminished capitalism is the financial and crafty one that lives off the tricks of finance, interest and exchange rates, state tax exemptions, the highs and lows of the stock market, share prices, treasury bonds,bonds' and much more that inhabits the tangled forest of finance, a wild jungle inhabited by bulls, bears and smart alecks.

This is a capitalism that has something surreal about it. A capitalism that, in addition to its own economic, political, media and ideological power, is umbilically linked to the military-industrial complex.

Capitalism, therefore, of another strain. A mixture of an unproductive economy, focused on services, not on the production of tangible goods, with its other side, the irremediably warlike, the incessant creation and use of means of destruction.

For about 50 years now, wherever this variant has come to predominate, there has been a dilution of what remained of the welfare state promised by Keynes and Roosevelt. At the same time, historians have noted, over the course of this half century, the continued expansion of the warmongering state, the 'warfare state', the raison d'être of the military-industrial complex.

Let us not forget that Keynesian economic theory sought to harmonize these two dimensions. The crisis of exhaustion of this Janus, this two-faced entity, in which social well-being at the domestic level was reinforced by recourse to international war, is visible to this day. In fact, what was New Deal was overtaken by full financialization. What was its Archimedean lever – war capitalism as an instrument to overcome the Great Depression – became a relatively autonomous sector or department within the totality that Ernst Mandel called late capitalism. The proposal that at the limit promised to finally leave behind the cycles of threatening economic crises has become a kind of Ares, the Greek god of war.

2.

Let us remember that 1914 was the year in which the 'war to end all wars' broke out. In fact, the First World War and the subsequent twenty-year crisis served as a prelude to the greatest and most destructive of all military conflicts. Ironically or cunningly, the First World War ushered in the time of opportunity that, well seized by the United States, led the imperial Republic, thirty years later, to the status of an almost completely hegemonic power.

For me, the international geopolitical situation that concerns us so much can be adequately understood if we take into account the entire trajectory of historical capitalism in Eric Hobsbawn's brief 1947th century. But from XNUMX onwards, the greater geopolitical dynamics were imposed by the Cold War until the fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

It is also worth noting that in 1944 (Bretton Woods) and 1945 (San Francisco), a new international order was created by the victorious powers under the leadership of the United States. This order was a substitute for the one established in 1919, institutionalized by the League of Nations. On the other hand, it should never be forgotten that 1945 was the shocking year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the imperial republic, a crime and nightmare whose shadow haunts us to this day.

I stated that the Cold War period was one of incomplete American hegemony. Let me clarify: incomplete hegemony due to the power of the Soviet Union, its decisive military action in the defeat of Nazifascism, and the ideological appeal of Marxism-Leninism at the time.

3.

Now that the frame is in place, let us paint the picture. The Bretton Woods and San Francisco order is an arrangement that has been slowly disappearing for half a century, despite or even because of the unilateralism fully exercised for just one decade, from 1991 to 2001.

Will this undoing be partial or will it be complete? The answer to this question will hardly be given in the coming years, but certainly in the coming decades.

Since the beginning of the century, the geopolitical scene has been marked by a double feature: one, the continuation of the prolonged relative decline of the United States. On the other, the spectacular nature of China's rise. In this ultimately bipolar contrast, the most powerful play the tough game of transitioning hegemony. The present time and what can be glimpsed on the horizon point to the emergence of another 'hegemon' and of another international order. But this is merely an indication. The game has only just begun and is being played amidst worsening differences and disputes that threaten to reach a disastrous extreme. Its outcome is completely uncertain.

In a somewhat optimistic key, it is expected that the transfer of power from a 'primus inter pares' on the other hand, although marked by low or even medium intensity clashes, it will not slide into a scenario marked by major armed conflicts. In another interpretation, the dispute could degenerate into a gigantic conflagration between the country that is currently militarily more powerful and the People's Republic of China, the only great power, in fact a superpower, capable of assuming a central role within another possible order.

Certainly, the ideal outcome of this impasse would be a peaceful and civilized transfer of power. This Panglossian solution seems to me a generous analytical bet that in itself reiterates the Hegelian distance between the wishes of the heart and the real course of the world.

The range of possibilities necessarily includes the worst-case scenario because the 'hegemon' and the 'counter-hegemon'have all the conditions in nuclear terms to, in a limiting situation understood as an existential threat, opt for the irrational ascension to the most extreme of extremes. In that case, all of humanity will be in danger. In other words, the nuclear nightmare that has been with us since 1945 could materialize as an absolute disaster.

There are therefore many uncertainties.

But in the midst of all of this, what can we perceive with reasonable clarity today? My answer: that the imperial republic is experiencing the most serious internal-external crisis in its history. More serious than the one overcome with the Civil War. More serious than the one exposed by the economic collapse of 1929, the Great Depression that resulted in the so-called 'revolution of the New Deal'.

This crisis has been unfolding since the final three decades of the last century. It has become a phenomenon of such magnitude that the international order created in 1944/1945 no longer has the functionality to cope with it.hegemon' declining. Donald Trump's second term is the most brutal and manifest sign of double exhaustion: that of the order established after World War II and that of its main architect. The old order is slowly perishing, in a zigzag pattern and with ups and downs. Donald Trump reflects the disorientation, turmoil and imperial arrogance in the face of the sphinx embodied by historical capitalism in its current phase.

Still, I believe it is impossible that the American decline is coming to an end in just a few years. On the other hand, five months into his second term, Donald Trump has already become the most complete incarnation of everything that has long corroded the liberal-democratic-oligarchic experiment inaugurated in 1776.

4.

When comparing the revolutionary project that so fascinated Tocqueville and Marx with the gray imperial reality of the 21st century, what stands out is the strengthening of the oligarchic trait. On the other hand, we see the liberal-democratic side of the American Enlightenment fading at an accelerated pace. In other words: although very shaken, the proposal for organizing society and the state agreed upon by the so-called Founding Fathers still has its 'quantum' of validity.

He staggers with the drunkard's unsteady gait, but remains standing thanks to the efforts of the tightrope walker on duty. In this precarious balancing act, the foundational myths are weakened, beginning to function insecurely as the cement of society. So much so that the extreme points of the ideological arc continue to resort to the same fragile basic reference.

But the web of mythical values ​​is subjected to increasingly opposing, mutually exclusive interpretations. For me, this set of dire signs shows that, regardless of the government, be it Republican or Democrat, the weakening of the empire shows no signs of reversing. The process has probably already reached or is about to reach the point of no return.

In obvious contrast to the manifest decline of the United States, we have witnessed the extraordinary rise of the People's Republic of China in the relatively short historical period from Deng Hsiao Ping to Xi Jinping.

In a nutshell: for me, once Maoism was liquidated, and from the moment Deng assumed the leadership of the country, China chose to develop a form of state capitalism under the command of the single party, the armed forces and the high bureaucracy, both the traditional one and the one that runs the mega-state companies. This variant has proven capable of establishing and maintaining a remarkable rate of capital accumulation. And at least until now it has avoided the internal hegemony of big Chinese business and the fraction of the 'transnational' business community established in the People's Republic.

But the Chinese triad – party, armed forces and high bureaucracy – has gone much further. In what has something of Confucianism, it has reinforced its extraordinary economic performance by combining it with strategies aimed at national cohesion, social advancement and ideological harmony of all so-called national interests.

Amidst so much success, I would like to highlight a fact that, in my opinion, confirms the state capitalist nature of this successful experiment: in the People's Republic, the scandalous has also become naturalized, praised and valued as a healthy inspiration. In 2025, there were 516 billionaires in China. In the United States, there were 902. I am certain that this gap will be erased in a short time.

From the above, we can conclude that the unmistakable decline of the United States and the rapid rise of China constitute the central geopolitical phenomenon of the century. The competition, rivalry, animosity and enmity between the two superpowers are set to intensify, regardless of who is in the Oval Office of the White House or in Beijing, at the head of the party, the state, the military and the government.

The United States, China and all of us depend on how this opposition is managed, but no one can assume that Sino-American relations will be guided by a sufficient degree of rationality. Furthermore, as we know, peaceful transitions of hegemony that have occurred under historical capitalism do not actually exist. Perhaps the only and very imperfect case is that of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In general, thehegemon' in turn does everything, including or above all militarily, to maintain its solar position in the system.

5.

Let us think of the times when the United Kingdom was the hegemonic power, and Germany, Japan and the United States were strong competitors. It was only with the Second World War that the imperial republic came to the fore, although it was confronted, from 1947 to 1989, by the USSR and the bureaucratic socialist camp. It was confronted much more on the military and ideological planes than on the economic and scientific-technological ones.

In contrast, China is a completely different rival. In fact, something the American empire has never faced. The People's Republic is already capable of facing the 'hegemon'declining in all registers of power, especially the military, the productive economic, the commercial, the financial and the scientific-technological. In the ideological register, not so much.

Given this scenario, is a rationally negotiated transition to hegemony historically viable? There is no way to answer this question with certainty, but the alarming military history of the United States does not generate hope, especially if we take into account that, in addition to being the strongest military power, the empire has a network of more than 800 bases distributed throughout the entire planet.

This device is what makes its ability to project military power wherever it wants unique. Furthermore, the imperialist superpower has the voluntary servitude of explicit vassals and subordinate allies in the four corners of the world. But above all, it has them where it counts most: in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, in the two China Seas, the East and the South, in the Indian Ocean and Oceania. This has a name: it is called the expanded West.

To make matters worse, since 2011 the United States has been trying to ‘turn towards China’. In other words, it wants to substantially reduce its military commitments to NATO Europe in order to focus on the crucial effort: containing and pushing back China both in its surroundings and in the so-called rest of the world. Given this, the chances of a peaceful transition realistically tend to zero. On the other hand, the risks of widespread death in the event of an all-out war between the major nuclear powers are much greater than the general public realizes. We are living between Scylla and Charybdis.

I am sorry to bring you such a disturbing frame and painting, but the outlook is indeed bleak. Gloomy when considered in the long term. Gloomy when the analysis intertwines the structures and dynamics of the long term with the short time in which conjunctures fluctuate and follow one another. Even by candlelight, it becomes evident that historical capitalism in its current phase multiplies crises of various kinds. So much so that the term polycrisis, coined by Edgard Morin and Anne Kern towards the end of the last century, has long since been included in the dictionary. I will take advantage of this notion and summarize the current polycrisis.

We are always surprised by deep, recurring economic crises, some of them global. All of them point, at least in a tendency, to what scholars of critical political economy call a complete crisis, a definitive crisis, insurmountable in the Weberian steel cubicle that has become the most dynamic of all modes of production.

The environmental crisis, in turn, is becoming increasingly intense. Many signs indicate that it could become irreversible in a few decades. This has led scholars to claim that we are in the geological era of the Anthropocene. Or, according to others who are even more critical, the Capitalocene.

On the other hand, geopolitical crises are constantly emerging, or at least remain dormant in different regions, areas or territories, including the 'critical zone' that stretches from the Arctic and the Baltic to the Black Sea, passing through Kaliningrad, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Moldova. And let us not forget the always tense Balkan region. The likelihood is growing that the war or special military operation in Ukraine will eventually encompass the whole of Europe. Just read the almost daily bellicose statements by the leaders of NATO and the European Union, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

We need only learn about the new European armaments. It is enough to take note of the reactions of the Russian Federation. What emerges is a kind of mini-Cold War that in principle, but only in principle, would be restricted to Europe and Russia. The recently concluded NATO summit in The Hague is yet another strong illustration of this strangely Western tendency to commit harakiri.

The United States’ turn toward China – apparently the central foreign policy objective of Donald Trump’s erratic administration – will further increase the risk of military conflict in the Far East. The Korean Peninsula and Taiwan are permanent hotbeds of high military risk. Not to mention the many internal and international wars that generally go unnoticed but that are a major part of daily life in much of Africa and Asia.

6.

Let us think above all about the greatest crime of all, the incessant genocide in Gaza, combined with the extremely violent mechanism of expulsion of the Palestinian population living in the other occupied territories, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In its daily martyrdom, Gaza is the blood-soaked denunciation of the double standards that guide the expanded West. Gaza, today the greatest mark of the state and social savagery of Israel, apartheid, colonial-Zionist, irredeemable.

Let us also recall what has happened and what is happening in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Let us think about the recent military clash, which threatened to escalate into a nuclear conflict, between Pakistan and India. Let us reflect on the Israeli-American war of aggression against Iran, now interrupted by a fragile ceasefire. Let us bear in mind that Israel has never complied with any agreed ceasefire for long. If it were to resume, or when it were to resume, the military expedition against Iran is doomed to generate enormous, unpredictable and, therefore, incalculable disasters.

Latin America, at the moment, in my opinion, is not going through this type of situation, but the scenario could change abruptly if there are heavier American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, a region in which

Cuba, Nicaragua, and even Panama are obvious targets. In South America, Venezuela has long been a victim of resistance to U.S. imperialism. In another context, the border between the United States and Mexico is one of these critical points.

I confess that I am sometimes overcome by the feeling that there are more than eight billion of us actors in the theater of the modern and post-modern world, a world in which the tragedy is being staged, the first act of which, pre-modern, was the emergence of historical capitalism. As heir to this long course of events, the 89st century alerts us, in our daily records, to the fact that we are living on the edge of the abyss. The clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists indicates that we are XNUMX seconds away from the terrible midnight that physicists call 'Judgment Day'. Since the creation of the clock, its hands have never come so close to the time of complete catastrophe.

Faced with so many obvious risks and so few encouraging prospects, it becomes essential, against the current of these regressive and apocalyptic trends, to do what each of us can. Before us, in opposition to us, barbarism shows itself in the multiplicity that is its apparent face. A multiplicity that functions as a veil or mask to hide its abysmal unity.

In the immediate future, and thinking about Brazil, I would like to emphasize in bold the danger of neofascism or neoauthoritarianism, which still has no precise academic name. Its hideous shadow – I will say no more than that – reaches us all, Brazilians. This is our greatest nightmare. Both in the short term of the electoral cycle and, even more worryingly, in the time that goes far beyond it.

I know that we are all, each in our own way, trying to stop the tsunami that is advancing here, there, in all these places. But I believe – this is my personal view, probably non-transferable – that a structurally transformative way out, faithful to the spirit of Antonio Machado's poem, that of making the path as we walk, demands, implies and requires, at least as hope without optimism, the overcoming of what emerged eight centuries ago: the world of historical capitalism.

I wonder if this is just a wish of mine, and I conclude my speech by leaving you with this question, which is also inserted in two historical times: the strictly circumstantial and the long-term.

Tadeu Valadares he is a retired ambassador.

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