How Will Capitalism End: Reflections on a Failing System – A Lecture by Wolfgang Streeck. Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Photograph Source: Center for the Study of Europe Boston University – CC BY-SA 2.0

Wolfgang Streeck, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, is in the front ranks of Europe’s social thinkers, having come out with some of the most penetrating analyses of the crises of neoliberal economics and the ills of neoliberal society over the last 30 years. No stranger to controversy, he has criticized the technocratic elites in Europe and the United States for placing adherence to so-called “universal values” rather than the democratic process as the basis of the right to rule, called for an end to Europe’s subjection to the United States, dismissed the Russian threat as a fiction manufactured by the Baltic states, and called for the transformation of Europe and the global order into systems of small states. Though a man of the left, he has distanced himself from both the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Die Linke (The Left Party) on matters of peace, immigration, and social policy and become identified as a strong supporter of the party (BSW) of the controversial Sahra Wagenknecht in the lead-up to the 2025 Bundestag elections. His latest book is Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism (2024)

Trump: Purveyor of Chaos and Uncertainty

WB: Let me turn to another issue. What do you think is going to happen with Trump and Europe?

WS: Before I address that issue, let me say that we have, in Germany, 40,000 American troops, the same as Okinawa. In addition, we have an unknown number of American nuclear warheads stationed in Germany. In Ramstein and Wiesbaden, we have the two most important command centers of the American military apart from the Pacific. Anything that is being done in the Middle East is being done out of the American military command in Wiesbaden, Germany. So, German foreign policy must always be seen in this perspective. And we have a political elite that over decades has been trained that Germany on its own cannot do anything unless the United States supports us.

Now to Trump, I’ve never been in a situation where it’s so difficult to make predictions. As a leader this man is a source of chaos—chaos means you don’t know what’s going to happen next. For this reason, one needs to look at the deep state in the United States. Trump is sitting on something. That something is the biggest military in the history of mankind and the biggest espionage and sabotage operation. In Europe, the two former fascist countries that were defeated in the Second World War, Germany and Italy, are still basically occupied by the United States. By the US military. Will they leave if Trump tells them to? I don’t think so. What they’ve dug into the ground in terms of technology, you can’t even speculate on this sort of thing. But there must be billions and billions worth of high technology on German soil, or underground. Will they pull it out? Career opportunities in the U.S. military have to do with their 750 military bases around the world. 750! If Trump is thinking about making “America Great Again” by rebuilding American society, finally building decent high schools and finally getting a decent health care system in place and ending the drug epidemic, then he would have to bring these people back into the real life on the American ground. They would have to learn to be decent policemen or decent doctors. Can you imagine this? This is what I think what Trump will have to get done to keep himself in office if MAGA is about the United States as a society rather than an empire.

WB: Let’s talk a bit about the deep state and how there might be dissatisfaction there with Trump’s policies. Do you think there are people in the US military who would be willing to move against Trump?

WS: It’s hard to think about someone in the U.S. military who would want to become a dictator. But J.D. Vance........

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