By TADEU VALADARES*

The rise of China and the return of Russia to great power status have blocked the ultimate imperial, imperialist, Western goal

“Thus the world expires \ Not with a bang, \ But like a sigh”
(T.S. Eliot).

“The sky also sometimes falls down \ And the stars fall to the Earth \ Crushing it with us all \ That may be tomorrow”
(Bertolt Brecht).

“My people do not believe in the good faith of the winner”
(Rene Char).

My intention is to present a perspective on the transition of hegemony from the United States to China from a perception that is partly realistic, partly distanced, and partly disenchanted. If utopianism appears, I cannot see it.

This is the perspective of someone who does not experience the university as a professional space, of someone who is not a journalist specializing in international issues or a social scientist. The perspective of someone who, today, is at most just an attentive reader. The perspective of someone who is not a member of any political party, institutionalized or not. Therefore, this is just one perspective. The perspective of an ambassador who retired in 2014. From someone who, in the jargon of the Itamaraty, served the institution for almost half a century.

These brief indications are sufficient to illuminate my limitations. But, on the other hand, they also serve to affirm that this speech is the result of professional experiences and a somewhat varied academic background. What I bring you is schematic: a mere overview of our long geopolitical moment, there is a paradox in this expression.

I will talk to you taking into account what we have experienced since the hopes of the West concentrated in the North Atlantic, a West long hegemonized by the United States, were centered on ensuring that this century would be even more American than the previous one.

That 'hubris', so well formulated by Francis Fukuyama in a liberal-Hegelian register, derived from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the bureaucratic-Stalinist socialist camp. Excessive ambition that is part of the irremediably failed.

In fact, the rise of China and the return of Russia to great power status have blocked the ultimate imperial, imperialist and Western goal. They have moved it into the territory of manifest impossibility. That is why many analysts emphasize: we are witnessing the end of the American empire. But others, and there are also many, prefer to speak of a transition of hegemony.

Anchored in paradigms that demarcate what is largely produced from sophisticatedly conservative international relations theories or discreetly favorable to small course corrections, others, many other analysts, are certain that there are no unquestionable signs of American decline. At most, for them, Washington would be facing operationally surmountable difficulties in a not very long time.

For me, knowing whether we are living the end of the American empire or whether we are immersed in the long period of transitions of hegemony is not the most relevant.

In my opinion, establishing differences of all kinds between the 'end of the American empire' and the 'transition of hegemony' may even be crucial, especially because attributing 'conceptual hegemony' to one of these two notions affects the prism that in each case allows for elaborate hermeneutic exercises. The debate between schools and the internal disagreements within each of them are clear proof of the importance of methodological, epistemological, conceptual and categorical discussions.

But as a simple citizen, what really matters to me is to try to understand what the United States of America and the People's Republic of China are today. To try to understand how these powers relate to each other, and how the vectors of this complex, immensely difficult and increasingly conflictual relationship contribute to reinforcing the long-term trend that has been eroding the order created in 70 since the 1945s.

What I intend to do: sketch, just sketch, the geopolitical and historical framework that explains the decline of the 'hegemon' and, on the other hand, the rise of its only and challenging rival.

Throughout the exercise I will attempt to elaborate a precarious deciphering of this double movement, which inevitably implies speculation about what the dynamics of the transition could be indicating. The common thread: the idea that we are going through a process that signals the replacement of Bretton Woods by something new. Something new that, up until now, remains practically undefined.

It is worth noting: what I bring you is the result of a somewhat heterodox perspective. Something scientifically fragile, more like 'doxa' than for 'episteme'. A very risky effort, not all that fruitful, but one that could be timely as a stimulus for discussion, especially since in five weeks Donald Trump will begin his second and final presidential term.

That said, let's get started.

The current geopolitical panorama is marked by at least two certainties. My first certainty: yes, we are in the midst of a long period of potentially unusual transformation of the international order established almost 80 years ago.

Roughly speaking, the beginning of this transformation dates back to the 70s. With each passing year, as it becomes more visible, the change seems less uncertain. At the same time, it seems more and more dangerous, and its end remains invisible, hidden beyond the horizon.

In other words: based on what we know today, it is not possible to say with any reasonable degree of certainty what the outcome of what geopolitically surrounds us will be. It is not even possible to intuit when the dynamics of the transition will begin to take the form of a new, relatively lasting structure.

After having expressed so much caution, I now turn to a radical speculation. Since the turn of the century, international tensions have grown to such an extent that either the transition of hegemony will be completed by the second half of this century at the latest, without the use of tactical nuclear weapons, or the future world will be indescribably more violent than the present one.

I continue to speculate. If the transition of hegemony is not successfully negotiated, the coming century could be shockingly regressive: a completely dystopian world, in which all states and societies will be subject to an iron logic, simultaneously capitalist and Hobbesian. A world geopolitically characterized by frequent conflicts, by intermittent struggles of all against all or, at the very least, almost permanent struggles between the great central powers, their warmongering accompanied by the systematic imposition of absolute submission on peripheral and semi-peripheral peoples.

Either some kind of agreement will be reached in the coming decades from which a reformed international order will emerge, itself the result of a negotiated transition of hegemony, or all states, peoples and societies, whatever their relative state and economic power, will be condemned, in such a limiting situation, to the search for survival as imagined by Hobbes in the state of nature. A nauseating, brutish and brief life.

Let's leave my apocalyptic side aside. Let's move on to the other side, to my more or less integrated side. From there I will explain my second certainty.

Yes, over the last 50 years, the United States has been gradually declining, step by step, step by step. It is progressively losing its hegemony, which at first was almost just a sketch, a hegemony envisioned as the result of the great European war of 1914-1918. This sketchy hegemony became almost complete 27 years later, guaranteed as it was, on the multilateral legal-political level, by the Bretton Woods agreements. I say almost complete hegemony because the Soviet Union, China, still in the midst of a revolution, and the bureaucratic socialist camp were opposing it. Even so, this hegemony carried with it liberal hopes that were somewhat bordering on the utopian, hopes that were abolished by the course of actual history.

Let's make an abrupt cut, but an important cut to understand the dynamics that since the beginning of the century have led to the expectation of a transition of hegemony in which the United States is the threatened superpower. Much of this has to do with the New Deal.

I propose a certain periodization: if we privilege the period that began in the 30s of the last century, we can say that it took about 40 years for the American state and society to create and destroy the experiment called the Welfare State.

The decay or undoing of welfare state It required four decades of extraordinary efforts, sparked intense debate, much apology and varied criticism. Among the left-wing critics, I remember James O'Connor, an economist and sociologist for whom the enterprise promoted by Roosevelt had two faces.

One, its celebrated democratic progressivism. The other, its external face, denounced by O'Connor as Warfare State. Through it, the progressive and democratic superpower showed itself, in its external projection, to be bellicose and domineering. In any case, what ultimately interests us most: since approximately the 70s, neoliberalism began to prevail. New Deal with two faces, a kind of imperial Janus, it became a chapter in American and world history.

If we were to take a step back and consider the 1929 crisis as the great shipwreck of classical American economic and political liberalism, with the liberal order being replaced by the Welfare State, then we would clearly see how radical Roosevelt's break with the previous situation was. I would note, however, that this break is formally related to the other one that, more or less 40 years later, was imposed on the Welfare State by triumphant neoliberalism.

In other words, we can, in a terribly abstract way, summarize the trajectory of the United States in three cycles: that of the American classical liberal order, economic and political order; that of the double-faced New Deal; and that of triumphant neoliberalism.

That said, let us move on to neoliberalism. If we focus on international relations and the geopolitics that have been intertwined with them since market absolutism began to predominate in the United States, then it is relatively easy to see that the external face of neoliberalism that has become the world is the unfolding of globalization itself as the most recent stage of planetary capitalism that took its first steps at the end of the 18th century and in the first half of the XNUMXth century.

To get an idea of ​​the significance of the neoliberal victory over the previously prevailing Rooseveltian-Keynesian scheme, let us recall that liberal capitalism and its other, political liberalism, together asserted themselves as the land of the great promise called laissez-faire.

Already welfare state arising from the disaster that was the 1929 crisis, proved to be an antonym. By colliding with the old liberal world and breaking with it, Roosevelt at the same time innovated and revolutionized in a systemic and surprising way what had predominated since the end of the struggle of the industrial North against the slave-owning South. But throughout this development, the founding myth of the great promise, the ideology of American exceptionalism, was maintained. More than that, it was reinforced.

With the New Deal, a series of innovations came to life: (i) social security was instituted; (ii) the minimum wage was created; (iii) 3) unemployment insurance was established; (iv) 15 million people were employed by the government, something previously unthinkable; and (v) the costs of creating the Welfare State were borne, 'nolens volens', by the richest Americans and by large corporations, both forced to accept the imposition of very high taxes.

This list is not exhaustive, but it gives an idea of ​​why Roosevelt – by astutely embodying the demands 'from below' – he served three consecutive presidential terms and to this day competes with Lincoln, in the imagination of the 'indispensable country', as to who was the most popular of the American heads of state.

This is the solar dimension of the New Deal. On the other hand, while most American historians continued to celebrate the 25 glorious years, a significant portion of the wealthiest and the large corporations that paid for the New Deal, that is, a fraction of the most economically powerful, in alliance with their political representatives, reacted vigorously. They dedicated themselves with zeal, in terms of economic ideas and in the political, legal and institutional register, to weakening what had been established by Roosevelt. The exemplary dedication of this group of interested parties was magnificently rewarded in the long term.

Decades after the effort to impose market absolutism began, the fraying of the Roosevelt experiment became evident. It is true that the point of no return only began to become visible in the 1970s, when American capital began to move en masse abroad.

This flow of resources was directed in particular to East Asia, especially to China, which was recreated after the great turnaround of 1972. But these investments also went to the rest of Asia and to the so-called emerging countries in Latin America and Africa. Let us think of Nixon and Kissinger. Let us also think of Pinochet (1971-1990), Thatcher (1979-1990) and Reagan (1981-1989). Let us not forget, in the course of this remembrance, that for us the 1980s became the decade of the debt crisis, the lost decade.

Most importantly, the process that had begun in February 1972 received a decisive boost under Reagan. His policy of incorporating China into the Bretton Woods order was continued by all subsequent presidents, both Republican and Democrat. A fragile exception, a slight outlier, was Trump in his first term.

In conjunction with this shift of productive investments outwards, the elites clung even more tightly to neoliberalism, which quickly became an internal-external totality. Ultimately, it ended up emerging as the specifically American, but also global, variant of the Weberian steel cage.

When I speak of the Weberian steel cage, I indirectly raise two questions. Has the United States today become irreversibly neoliberal or not? How inflexible is this steel cage? These are two direct questions that open up room for much joint reflection.

What seems obvious to me is that for several decades the state has played an ancillary role as a productive economic agent. For decades the economy has been undergoing an intense process of deindustrialization. One of its expressions: the loss of 30 million jobs, according to estimates by political economist Richard Wolff.

Something remarkable in terms of long-term impact: the flow of large investments from the United States to China, originally driven by Nixon and Kissinger, led to the People's Republic, after careful negotiations, joining the WTO almost exactly 20 years later.

China's entry into Bretton Woods reinforced the hopes of interventionist liberals. For this type of liberal, China was destined to become even more of a neighbor, much to Marco Bellocchio's surprise.

Advocates of this policy aimed at drawing the People's Republic into what they now call the 'rules-based international order' took it for granted that Beijing, after transitioning from Mao and the Cultural Revolution to the Bretton Woods order, would be a reliable partner, a geopolitically cordial partner, a large market linked to the Global North with the strong glue of solid shared material interests.

Thanks to the beneficial influence of the West, China would gradually metamorphose into a prosperous market society, ideally supported – even by the enchanting power of elective affinities – by a democratic political regime as understood in the Western liberal way. The distance between these wishes of the pious heart and the course of actual reality became infinite.

In short: the China of the late Mao and of Deng Hsiao Ping, supreme leader from 1978 to 1992, created its own path as it walked. Today, Xi's China is rightly regarded by the United States as a very strong competitor, a shrewd adversary, a challenging power and a major enemy.

Competitor China, adversary China, challenger China, enemy China. Depending on the situation, the qualifications rotate like a carousel. The categorization of China as an enemy tends to predominate, and with it gains strength what has been proclaimed since Obama: the United States must focus geopolitically on East Asia, no longer on the European peninsula.

How do I see China? My answer, I know, is somewhat provocative. For me, Xi Jinping’s China is an economic and social formation that embodies a specific variant of state capitalism. I see it as a country that is experiencing a long cycle of extraordinary dynamics of capital accumulation, wealth, extraction of economic surplus and concomitant expansion of its military power. Something of dimensions never seen, I believe, since the formation of original capitalism.

I clarify that by original capitalism I understand the modality of production of goods that was implemented in the West through a triple revolutionary route: the industrial revolution (1760), the uprising of the 13 colonies (1776) and the revolution that overthrew the 'ancien régime' French (1789). To put it brutally simply: the Western world was revolutionized at its roots in the course of just three decades. The spread of capitalism in its various forms, as we well know, continues to this day and as far as the eye can see.

Let us leave the era of bourgeois revolutions aside and return to China. Contrary to the global dominance of neoliberal capitalism, China distances itself from it, albeit partially. In other words, it continues on its own path by pragmatically combining a hybrid capitalist economy with the political dominance of a gigantic single party.

If this is the case, and for me it is, then you will not be surprised when I say that China, in terms of capital accumulation, is essentially governed by two different logics, implemented in different ways by two major actors.

They are different, yes. But they are not opposing logics. Both, up to now, function as if they were naturally complementary. Logics that, translated into human and financial actions, in work and stock exchange, are capable of generating powerful synergies.

On one side, the logic of state-owned mega-companies; on the other, that of private mega-companies, whether they are predominantly Chinese or 'transnational' in capital. The coordination of this hybrid and the arbitration control of any disagreements between those who embody the two logics in their actions are the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party, which in my view is something miraculous, an institution that goes far beyond political action as conventionally understood. An organization that has long seemed to me much more Chinese than communist.

I confess: I do not have precise data regarding the composition of the two most important wings of the Chinese economy. But those of you who have China as an object of scientific study will probably be much better informed than I am about this three-pronged scheme.

In what seems to me to contain a certain degree of impressionism, there are authors who claim that more than 40% of China's GDP is generated by state-owned mega-enterprises. A similar percentage would be the responsibility of large private companies.

To no surprise, at least not to me, the logic of Chinese private mega-companies is the same as that of the 'transnationals' operating in China. In this, both are similar to their counterparts operating in the center, periphery and semi-periphery of the global capitalist system. But the logic of large state-owned companies does not strictly mirror that of private mega-companies. I repeat: they are distinct, different, but not opposed logics. Cousins ​​are not brothers.

Having established this picture of American decline in contrast to China's rise, let us briefly look at the comparative performance of both experiments. On the one hand, globalist neoliberalism; on the other, hybrid capitalism under single-party rule.

Until the outbreak of the pandemic (2019), China's GDP was growing at very high rates, ranging from 6% to 9%. During the same period, the United States' gross domestic product fluctuated between 2% and 3% per year. After Covid-19, China's GDP growth has remained at over 4% per year. The IMF estimates that it will reach 2024% in 4,8. The IMF expects the United States' GDP to reach 2024% in 2,8. In other words, it remains at the historical average.

Some other very interesting parallel data: This year, the European Union's GDP is expected to grow by 0,9%; India's by 7%. Germany will enter its second consecutive year of recession, and 2025 will probably be its third. Its GDP, according to the IMF, will not grow at all. Pure 0%. France, for its part, is expected to grow between 0,8% and 0,9%. The UK's GDP will expand by 0,7%.

Let's move on to another important player in the global geopolitical game: the BRICS. The conglomerate continues to grow stronger. The number of its full members is expanding at an unexpected pace. The initial quartet has become a quintet and now has more than 10 members, the exact number still depending on whether the Saudis say yes.

Most analysts believe that the expansion of the BRICS will continue strong. It is not ruled out that in ten years, if at all, this number will multiply by four. The biggest beneficiary of growth of this magnitude is China. And some others, smaller ones, such as Russia and India. Brazil will not necessarily be one of the biggest beneficiaries. Perhaps we should even think the opposite: the more the BRICS expand, the less our importance tends to be.

I believe that geopolitically more relevant than the BRICS is the Chinese Belt and Road project, or the New Silk Road, which continues to be structured on a global scale. Even on what is the other side of the world for China, the New Road has already given rise, together with other 'causal factors', to the People's Republic becoming Latin America's largest trading partner.

The expansion of China’s already dominant presence in Latin America is a given. A few countries, such as Paraguay and others with ties to Taiwan, are temporarily excluded. Beijing is patiently waiting for those few to change their positions.

Brazil is not considering joining the Silk Road, and it has good reasons for this. In fact, what the Silk Road offers, in its radial scheme, is something like an adhesion contract. It is difficult for Brazil to think of China as an airline. It is better to preserve a reasonable degree of autonomy by resorting to what may be a certain distance. Very slight.

Let's continue comparing the economic performance of the two largest powers. The minimum wage in the United States is $7,25 per hour. It has been frozen since 2009. In other words, it has been frozen for 15 years, while inflation has been rising year after year.

All real wages have in practice stagnated. The increase was insignificant: 0,5% per year. Meanwhile, Chinese real wages have grown by 400%.

In 1945, the United States was the least unequal developed country. Today, when compared to all European countries, the United States is the most unequal. Let’s not forget that 10% of Americans – the wealthiest segment of the population – control 80% of the stocks and bonds traded on the stock exchanges.

When considered as a whole, these data suggest – to suggest is a delicate verb – that the validity of the globalist neoliberal model universalized by the United States, if viewed solely as an internal phenomenon of the imperial Republic, has benefited and continues to brutally benefit the economic, commercial and financial elites, plus the upper fringes of the middle classes and certain fractions of the 'managerial class' situated more or less close to the apex of the pyramid. In other words, a smaller fraction gains almost everything, while everyone else, the bulk of the population, loses.

It is taking this into account shape that we can try to develop some sustainable critical analysis of what Donald Trump and Trumpism mean, without falling into the most trivial impressionism.

At the outset, it should be emphasized that this picture was not painted today. In fact, the framework began to emerge when victorious neoliberalism ascended to the worldview of a large part of the American elite.

But in recent decades this scheme has been producing growing anguish, increased existential insecurity and even despair and disorientation that affect the daily lives of the majority of the population or, if you prefer, the people. It is important to consider the entire film, not a few frames. Only then will we be able to ask in a thoughtful way what decisive substantive difference, not in style or rhetoric, can the second Donald Trump and the 'new' Republican Party make, which has long since become the stage for Trumpism's relentless struggle against what remains of the more than exhausted traditional elitist Republicanism.

In my view, this is the big question at the outset. A question that can only receive a more or less adequate answer in two more years, when the results of the upcoming midterm elections are known.

On the other hand, even if we are unable, at this moment, to come up with an answer that satisfies us, the big question itself leads to other questions that in turn require reflection from us as Brazilians who are existentially interested in the direction of the world and the direction of Brazil in the world.

With this intention, I raised seven questions: (1) Has the globalist neoliberal decline of the imperial Republic reached a point of no return or is it approaching it at an accelerating pace? (2) Given China's continued rapid growth – albeit at lower rates, but so far far higher than those of the United States – what can Washington do in terms of 'containment' and 'rollback”? Can these categories inherited from Kennan and the Cold War apply to Xi Jinping’s China?

(3) Are the Americans in a position to leave Europe in the background to focus on East Asia and their main adversary or enemy? (4) On the other hand, can an equally neoliberal Europe accept this forced relegation to the background? In other words: given its own decline, can the Europe of NATO and the European Union submit completely to Trump’s anti-China strategy without further weakening its economic future, which already looks more than mediocre, in fact disastrous? If Europe were to be submissive once again, wouldn’t this voluntary servitude – to recall de la Boétie – make the current political-electoral framework marked by the rise of the extreme right even more problematic?

(5) Without continuing with this relative abandonment of Europe, what is the real chance that the United States will weaken China and the network of relations that Beijing seeks to strengthen with all the states and societies that make up its problematic regional environment? (6) Given the success that the New Silk Road has been achieving, and given the expansion of the BRICS, what does the United States have at its disposal to become an attractive alternative to China in the economic and commercial spheres, both in Asia and in Africa and Latin America? (7) How can Washington react, going far beyond the 'América Crece' program, to the growing importance of the New Silk Road in Latin America?

One thing I am certain of is that Donald Trump's future government will promote a qualitative leap in the so-called 'economic war against China'. This dynamic is only in its initial phase, punctuated so far by almost daily skirmishes.

Let us not forget: Europe largely ruined itself by following Biden’s strategy vis-à-vis Ukraine without much thought, but as an obvious exercise of vassalage. In other words, European countries have been weakening themselves for three years on their own since, by adopting blockading economic sanctions, they gave up the abundant and cheap oil and gas that supported the growth of Germany in particular. Let’s not even talk about the destruction of Nord Stream.

This strategy of economic warfare has clearly failed, while on the military front Ukraine is on the brink of a defeat that may be imminent. The country has already lost more than 20 percent of its territory, and this figure could increase significantly after the northern winter. Furthermore, Ukraine does not have enough soldiers to continue the fight for years to come.

Donald Trump promises to end the war in the short term, and Kiev cannot continue it because it is completely dependent on the United States. On the other hand, Volodymyr Zelensky cannot count on firm support from NATO.

In fact, the European military-industrial complexes could not even if they wanted to supply the volume and quality of weapons supplied to Ukraine by Washington. These weapons actually provide a significant part of the profits of the American military-industrial complex. Most of the dollars transferred to Ukraine are resources that return to the United States for the purchase of military equipment. This confirms the importance of the production of means of destruction as a strategic factor driving the American economy. Keynes had already spoken of the strategic role of means of destruction in overcoming major capitalist economic crises. This is nothing new.

If we expand the circle of analysis even further, the difficulties of the Western superpower multiply.

This is because in the macro equation of the great Asian geopolitical game, the United States also has to worry about Indian economic dynamics and the strategic ambiguity that guides New Delhi's foreign policy, an ambiguity that even guarantees the stability and improvement of historic Russian-Indian relations.

Also crucial for the United States is to realistically calculate whether it can succeed in attempting to repeat, albeit in the opposite direction, Nixon and Kissinger's policy towards China.

Kissinger and Nixon managed to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. Will Trump and Rubio be able to strategically undermine the boundless friendship proclaimed by Xi and Putin weeks before the start of the war in Ukraine? I would be very surprised if that were to happen, although we know that love is only eternal while it lasts.

In a way that is too simplistic, perhaps, or perhaps excessively realistic, I anticipate that the United States will experience an intensification of the internal crisis over the next 4 years, which everything indicates will reach unprecedented levels.

At the same time, on the external front, there are no clear paths that would allow Trump to contain China, weaken what is already in practice an increasingly less discreet alliance between Beijing and Moscow, and turn the Europe of NATO and the EU into a geopolitical space entirely subordinate to Washington. This lack of paths is compensated by statements that, in my opinion, are circus-like. Trump certainly believes he is the boss of the circus.

Some points that seem to me to clarify a little what is happening in the midst of the thick fog: (i) the United States can no longer continue to follow in a linear fashion the neoliberal scheme that began with Reagan, passed through Bush and Clinton, reached Obama and had something a little different in the first Trump. But this Trumpian difference was ultimately small, it was worth almost nothing, and it did not move forward.

Hence my insistence: linear neoliberalism is exhausted with Biden. His attempt to mix it with some specific heterodoxy reminiscent of Roosevelt and Keynes, both extremely anemic, failed. The mixture of neoliberalism with Keynesian or Rooseveltian additions or tinctures, an incoherent recipe, was one of the factors that weighed in on Kamala Harris's defeat.

(ii) Harris' electoral failure itself also whispers: the time is long gone when a part of the Democratic elite, inside and outside the party, could mount a kind of 'Operation Lazarus' capable of structurally bringing back to life the essence of the New Deal. I do not believe that the Democratic Party and the billionaires who support it and demand due reciprocity from it have any permanent interest in this. I may be wrong, but I do not believe that I am.

(iii) If this is so, then the inevitable consequence becomes clear: as far as the eye can see, the United States is sending out signals that it is in an internal impasse. In this case, all the elements that make up the long internal crisis of the imperial Republic can only gain strength. They even tend to emerge as dangerous moments of intermittent fusions.

In other words, the immediate future of American society will be characterized by growing polarization, increasingly visible anomie, the proliferation of microphysics of violence, and a macabre reality exposed daily as 'faits divers'. In this, the United States resembles Brazil, or vice versa.

(iv) The crisis that permeates the social sphere is compounded by the mediocre growth of the economy and the distributive conflicts that are gaining weight, despite the neoliberal weakening of the unions. Meanwhile, on the ideological level, the myth of American exceptionalism is also beginning to show signs of obsolescence. At the very least, it is beginning to unravel before the naked eye. In short, a complete crisis or almost complete.

I recognize that in outlining how I see the transition of hegemony and the current moment of the United States, China, Russia, the global North and South, my presentation is at best somber.

But perhaps it is not my fault, but rather the fault of geopolitical reality, of the decline that is American, but also European, and of the near impossibility of the United States recognizing the reality of China's rise, an indispensable recognition for the hypothesis of a non-catastrophic transition of hegemony to gain momentum.

Trying to understand another complete crisis, that caused by the rise of Nazi-fascism, the young Bertolt Brecht wrote a short poem entitled “Those Born Later”. I extract five verses from it:

'The blind speak of a way out.
I see.
After the errors have been used
As the last company, in front of us
Sits Nothing.'

When trying to understand the rise and fall of the United States, the titles of the books that make up Eric Hobsbawn's tetralogy always come to mind: The Age of Revolutions, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire e The Age of Extremes.

I suspect that if Eric Hobsbawn were alive, we would all have read the fifth volume by now. Its title might well be: “The Age of Exhaustion.”

I conclude this panoramic journey through the desert of the real. For me, this is the era of the exhaustion of the expanded West. This is the era in which the periphery remains condemned, ultimately, to overexploitation and complete irrelevance. Varied overexploitation; perennial irrelevance. This is the era in which the semiperiphery tries to survive the exhaustion of the West, some of it even naively welcoming Beijing as the New Jerusalem.

My wishes as a citizen while the great transition continues: that the semiperiphery will be able to create its own, critical analysis of the rise of China as a new center. A new center as a specific incarnation. A new center as a Chinese variant of planetary two-front capitalism. A new center as an explicit victory of hybrid single-party capitalism over neoliberalism in crisis. The lack of this critical thinking from the semiperiphery while the hegemonic transition is taking place has all the potential to prove fatal for us.

From everything I have told you, it is clear to me that this era is far from over. Hence, the future will intensify what is already a strong presence in the present: the era accumulates extreme dangers, economic, social, environmental, military and scientific-technological. In one of them, or in an unpredictable combination, we may succumb.

I ignore for a moment the real course of the world to hope that the American decline and the Chinese rise will not result in the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust, but rather some kind of negotiated transition, absent a military conflict of gigantic proportions.

My pious vote? I don't know. Maybe. What is clear and certain is that a negotiated transition of hegemony will be something inaugural, a creation of the 21st century. An exception to the historical rule of transitions, says my realistic side.

Tadeu Valadares he is a retired ambassador.

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