Societies survive and grow when they successfully manage their inconsistencies. Gradually, however, accumulating conflicts overwhelm existing methods of navigating them.
Therefore social problems arise that endure or worsen inside for societies because they are repeatedly navigated or go unsecured. Often, the strong conscious response to such cultural problems is rejection, a refusal to discover them.
Denial of domestic social problems consumes navigating the inconsistencies that produce them. The resulting cultural drop, like the set of internal conflicts it reflects, is denied and ignored. Instead, stories or rhetorics can occur that position for cultures as victims of abuse by foreigners.
The United States in 2025 illustrates this approach: its rhetorics of rejection aim to stop its abuse.
In today’s United States, one for speech refuses to permit continued abuse by immigrants “threatening our national security. ” This language blames poor US political management for its failure to set America first and thus make it excellent again.
Another rhetoric demands that “we ” refuse to allow “our democracy ” to be destroyed by foreign enemies ( and their domestic equivalents ): people who are said to hate, not understand, or undervalue “our democracy. ”
Still another rhetoric of refusal sees foreigners “cheating ” the United States in trade and migration processes. Most Americans embrace one or more of like rhetorics. However, as we propose to display here, for rhetorics are actually less effective.
One conservative rhetoric, Trump’s, movements toward previous greatness by absolutely renewing American imperialism. He threatens to recapture the Panama Canal, shift Canada into the 51st of the United States, win Greenland from Denmark, and possibly enter Mexico.
All those foreigners are said to harm national security or otherwise “cheat” the United States. Trump’s common bloviating off, this is amazing expansionism. For repeated colonial gestures serve broader conceptions of making America greater repeatedly.
Colonization consistently helped Western capitalism understand its internal conflicts (temporarily escaping the cultural problems it caused ). Later, however, it could no more do so. After World War II, anti-colonialism limited that leave.
The following European neo-colonialisms and the casual colonization of the American empire had shorter career encompasses. China and the rest of the BRICS nations are now outside closing that leave. Thus the disappointed hatred of Trump’s emphasis on refusing that ending by consciously reopening the idea of an exit hatch of imperial expansions.
It resembles Netanyahu’s idea ( if not yet his violence ) in trying to reopen that hatch for Israel by driving Palestinians out of Gaza. United States assistance for Netanyahu also associates the US with colonial violence in a world increasingly committed to finish colonialism and its undesirable legacy.
The United States boasts the world’s strongest defense formation. The strong language in the United States casts all it does as self-defense necessitated by foreign rivals.
That justifies the government paying much more on defence than on the few domestic social problems that speech yet recognizes. Yet the United States lost the war in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently Ukraine, and these places ’ military enterprises were far from the world’s strongest. It turns out that the development of nuclear weapons and professional rivals among nuclear power have changed military accounts around the world.
The United States’ total neglects of Russia’s war powers in 2022 illustrate the change quite significantly. They even illustrate that a speech stressing a unwillingness to get victimized by international army outbid or displaced calm assessments of a militarily changed world.
Today the world observes not only changed world military combinations but also the costly protestations of them by US frontrunners. Political and economic leaders anywhere else are now rethinking their techniques correctly. Rhetorics of rejection to be victimized can be self-destructive.
Another cause those officials are redesigning their expansion plans follows from the entangled drops of the US dynasty and the US capitalist system. What US officials deny, some foreign leaders have opportunities to observe, evaluate and take advantage of.
The BRICS members ( 9 ) and partners ( 9 ), as of January 2025, account for nearly half the world’s population and 41 % of the world’s GDP ( in purchasing power parity terms ). Four other nations have been invited and are likely to join in 2025: Vietnam, Turkey, Algeria, and Nigeria.
Indonesia just joined as a full BRICS partner adding its roughly 280 million population. In contrast, the G7—the world’s second-largest economic bloc—accounts for about 10 % of the world’s population and 30 % of its GDP ( also in purchasing power parity terms ).
Moreover, as data from the International Monetary Fund documents, recent years show a widening gap between the annual GDP growth rates of the G7-leading United States and the BRICS-leading China and India.
Across the history of capitalism from its earlier times in England through the American empire’s peak early in the 21st century, most nations focused chiefly on the G7 in strategizing economic growth, debt, trade, investments, currency exchange rates, and balances of payments. Large- and medium-sized enterprises did likewise.
Yet over the last 15–20 years, countries and enterprises have faced an altogether new, different global situation. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS countries offer an alternative possible focus. Everyone can now play the two blocs off against one another.
Moreover, in this play, the BRICS now hold better, richer cards than the G7. Rhetorics of refusal spin these changes in the world economy as the evil intentions of foreign others—who likely hate democracy.
The United States should righteously refuse and thereby frustrate those intentions, they argue. In contrast, far less attention is paid to how internal US social problems both shape and are shaped by a changing global economy.
The changing world economy and the relative decline of the G7 within it have turned US capitalism away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism. Tariffs, trade wars, and “America first ” ideological pronouncements are concurrent forms of such turning inward.
Another form is the call to bring parts of the outside of the United States inside: Trump’s unsubtle imperialistic threats directed at Canada, Mexico, Denmark and Panama. Yet another form is the advisory many major US colleges and universities are sending to enrolled students from other countries ( over a million last year ).
It suggests they consider the likelihood of great visa difficulties in completing their degrees amid increasing US government hostility toward foreigners. A reduced foreign student presence will undercut US influence abroad for years to come ( much as it fostered that influence in the past ).
US higher education institutions, already facing serious financial difficulties, will find them deepening as paying foreign students choose other nations for their degrees. “America first ” rhetoric risks the self-destruction of the United States’ global position.
Politically, the U. S. strategy since World War II was to contain perceived foreign threats by a combination of “hard ” and “soft ” power. They would enable the United States to eliminate communism, socialism, and, after the Soviet implosion of 1989, terrorism, wherever possible, overtly or covertly.
Hard power would be deployed by the US military via hundreds of foreign military bases surrounding nations perceived to be threatening and via invasions if, when, and where deemed necessary.
Hard power also took the form of implicit threats of nuclear warfare ( made credible by the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ) and by total US arms race expenditures on nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that no other countries, alone or in groups, could match.
“Soft power ” would serve globally to project particular definitions of democracy, civil liberties, higher education, scientific achievement, and popular culture. These definitions were presented as best and most exemplified by what actually existed in the United States.
In this way, the United States could be exalted as the global peak of civilized human achievement: a kind of partner discourse to other discourses that denied internal social problems. Enemies could then readily be demonized as inferior.
US soft power was and remains a kind of political advertising. The usual commercial advertiser promotes only everything positive ( real or plausible ) about his client’s product. Typically, everything negative ( real or plausible ) is associated by that same advertiser only with his client’s competitor’s product. One might call this “advertising communication. ”
In the 20th century ’s Cold War, US soft power entailed an application of advertising communication where the United States and its supporters, public and private, functioned as both client and advertiser.
The United States advertised itself as “democracy ” and the USSR as its negative opposite or “dictatorship. ” Cold War advertising communication continues today in the slightly changed form of “democracy ” versus “authoritarianism. ” But, like advertising, after too many repetitions, its influence lessens.
Unfortunately for the United States, economic problems now besetting its capitalist system—both those caused by accumulated internal contradictions and those caused by its declining position within the world economy—directly undercut its soft power projections. Brandishing tariffs and repeatedly threatening to increase them reflect the need for governmental protection for decreasingly competitive US-based firms.
US rhetorics that instead blame foreigners for “cheating ” sound increasingly hollow. Deporting millions of immigrants signals an economy no longer strong and growing enough to absorb them productively ( what once “made America great ” and showed that greatness to the world ). US rhetorics denouncing “foreign invasions ” of immigrants encounter growing skepticism and even ridicule inside as well as outside the United States.
The gross inequality of wealth and income in the United States and the global exposure of billionaires ’ power over government ( Musk over Trump, CEOs donating millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration celebration ) replace perceptions of the United States as exceptional in its vast middle class.
The record levels of government, corporate, and household debt alongside abundant signs that such indebtedness is worsening do not help project the United States as an economic model. The year 2024’s experience with a dominant US strategy denying social problems while rhetorically stressing the dangers of evil foreign forces suggests it may be approaching exhaustion.
The year 2025 may then provide conditions for a profound challenge to that strategy matching the challenges confronting the global position of US capitalism.
Richard D Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York.
Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update, ” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is “ Understanding Capitalism ” ( 2024 ), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: “ Understanding Socialism ” and “ Understanding Marxism. ”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. It is republished with kind permission.