As Free Trade Unravels, Empire Returns

The age of free trade is closing, and empires are coming back. That is the unsettling argument economist Richard Wolff made on Glenn Diesen's channel on October 3, 2026, in a conversation that passed 82,000 views on its first day. Wolff contends that the American-centered economic and political order is coming apart, and that Washington is answering with a return to old-fashioned imperialism. The thesis grabs attention because it folds tariffs, debt, and war into a single frame.

A word on the speaker: Wolff is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founder of Democracy at Work, known for his Marxist critique of capitalism. He has sat down with Diesen before; in a June 2025 conversation on the economics of collapsing empires (braveneweurope.com), he sketched the predictable sequence of imperial decline: economic decay, denial, scapegoating, manipulation of a disenfranchised public, and senseless foreign wars that deepen the fall. The new interview builds directly on that template.

Tariffs: not a bargaining chip, an imperial tax

The first mechanism is tariffs. At the G20 trade ministers' meeting in Milwaukee on October 1, 2026, Washington urged its allies into a common front against Chinese trade practices, with trade representative Greer listing four priority demands. The result, as Politico reported (politico.com), was open rebellion: allies said American tariffs were poisoning cooperation, a ball and chain on any joint agenda. In Wolff's frame this is no surprise; the tariff wall is not a negotiating chip but the tax that seals off a sphere of influence.

The numbers back the reading. World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala warned in September 2026 at a Semafor summit (semafor.com) that tit-for-tat tariffs could split the world economy into hostile trading blocs at a cost of 7 percent of global output. The WTO's 2026 World Trade Report calls the trading system a landscape at a critical juncture. When even the institutional guardian of free trade records the unraveling, Wolff's verdict of an ending reads less like prophecy and more like diagnosis.

London's Economist Intelligence Unit points the same way (eiu.com): in its August 2026 assessment, US trade policy overtook even the disruptions of the Iran war as the top risk to the global trade outlook. The collapse of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding in July pushed up energy prices, insurance premiums, and transit times for shipping. So the bill arrives through two channels at once: tariffs fragment trade while wars make transport expensive.

Debt, war, and the bill coming due

Wolff put a date on that bill in a September 2026 interview with Democracy Now (democracynow.org): with the Iran war entering its sixth month, he said, the pass-through into consumer prices was still ahead of us. In the same interview he noted that US national debt had topped $40 trillion, calling it one of many signs of decline. Combined with surging inequality, the picture forms the economic leg of the empire thesis: a center that wages war, borrows heavily, and passes the cost to its citizens.

Across from the hollowing center, a rival construction site is busy. Wolff argues China is building a parallel system, and in a July 2026 Jacobin essay (jacobin.com) he wrote that faltering American hegemony and the crises around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz mark capitalism entering another era of historic upheaval. Countries along the BRICS axis are testing swap lines, development banks, and payment channels that bypass the dollar order. For Wolff this is not a cyclical wobble but a change of order.

The continuity of the Diesen-Wolff conversations matters here. Their earlier exchanges on sanctions and war economies served as the laboratory for today's return-of-empire thesis: sanctions exhausting the sender more than the target, military spending hollowing out the industrial base while feeding financialization. The new interview compresses that record into a single sentence: free trade is ending because the power that carried it can no longer sustain it.

What the return of empire means in practice

Translated into everyday terms, the return of empire means three practical things. First, trade organized by spheres of influence rather than rules: who trades with whom, and at what tariff, gets decided by the balance of power, not at the negotiating table. Second, resource diplomacy stretching from critical minerals to energy, with supply chains built for security rather than cost. Third, alliances themselves put up for bargaining: as the G20 showed, nobody signs up for a common front for free.

Three indicators will test the thesis in the coming months: the fate of court challenges to American tariffs, whether WTO reform moves forward, and how much of the US budget gets eaten by interest on the $40 trillion debt. If Wolff is right, all three will point the same way: rules thinning out, blocs hardening. If he is wrong, the tariffs will come down after a bargaining round and the institutions will recover. The healthiest stance for the viewer is to read the thesis not as prophecy but as a falsifiable map.