President Donald Trump’s second state visit to Beijing occurs as a chastened display of the hard shell but also inner vulnerabilities of American primacy, and a symptom of crisis within the transatlantic hegemonic bloc that has dominated the world since 1945. Plummeting approval ratings – hovering in the low-to-mid 30s amid an unpopular, protracted and largely unsuccessful even humiliating conflict with Iran, surging energy prices, and domestic disillusionment – reveal the widening gap between the ruling class’s imperial ambitions and the consent of the governed, let alone the realities of global power. However, there is a raging fury within the halls of American power that threatens grave risks of wider conflict and warfare.China may hold an advantage at this time in the jockeying for position in competitive world politics. The bigger, broader picture, however, is one of interlocked capitalist economies, largely benefitting tiny proportions of the populations of the world, each locked into interdependencies that are completely vulnerable to instabilities, conflicts, blockades and wars that slow or halt the flows of goods, people, money, services. China’s upper hand, its current tactical advantage, is short term and temporary. So Trump and Xi will need to do deals, and they will do deals, because that’s the great game today.China needs the Hormuz Strait reopened in the medium term. It wants the US to say it “opposes” Taiwanese independence, not just that it “does not support” it. China’s economy needs feeding to keep its own people from rising up against inequalities and economic discontent. It has cards to play now but they do have to play – there is little mileage in watching and waiting.The American foreign policy establishment, which is used to doing more or less what it wants, and despite several coercive lessons at the hands of the peoples of several countries – Vietnam, for example – is furious that it has come to this. Their fury at loss of relative position, despite their fabulous levels of concentrated wealth, is out there for all to see. It is visible in the kidnapping of a president, the strangulation of Cuba, the arming of Israeli wars, threats against Greenland, Panama, Mexico and Canada, and the disastrous, hubristic war on Iran.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The American foreign policy establishment is trying to lay down the law of the jungle of which they have been master for decades but which is now changing. There are much bigger and more assertive beasts in that jungle now than ever before. The American dream, and reality, of global primacy is eroding largely under the weight of the US-led international order’s own successes in helping generate and build the globalised bases of emerging powers’ economies, state capacities, and growing assertiveness in an increasingly messy multipolar world.In 2017, Trump Was KingIn his first state visit to China, in 2017, Trump was given the royal treatment. He responded with trade wars, racist pandemic era claims, and even steeper tariffs in his second term. It will be interesting to see how Beijing treats Trump this time, on a visit that has already been reduced to just 2 days.Iran’s resistance to and significant military operations against US and its Gulf allies has sent an unmistakable signal across the world: the self-declared American King and his US elite allies, who heads an openly declared empire that kidnaps a foreign president, have feet of clay when up against a formidable foe that’s been preparing for this war for decades based on bitter experience.This visit is another attempt – more desperate than usual – at passive revolution from above to manage relative decline, even as the fury of significant sections of the US foreign policy establishment at this very decline renders the world order more volatile and dangerous.Relative Decline and the Fury of the EstablishmentThe United States faces undeniable relative decline in its material and ideological capabilities. China’s economic weight, technological ascent and diplomatic initiatives, such as the worldwide Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS expansion, diplomatic mediation efforts, have eroded – but not eliminated – the unipolar moment. The complete failure to swiftly defeat Iran, let alone “wipe it off the face of the earth”, despite Israeli-driven fantasies of regime change, has shaken and alienated Gulf allies, further strained European partners including in light of disputes over the Ukraine war, and exposed the limits of the US military-diplomatic leverage in West Asia. Iran has administered a hard power lesson in how global power works. Gaza’s protracted tragedy and Israeli’s lethal and illegal offensives in the West Bank and in Lebanon, compound this, eviscerating the moral and soft-power claims that once sustained liberal internationalist hegemony.Yet, decline is never accepted passively by any hegemonic ruling class. Their empires are built through bloodshed and are not given up lightly, if at all. The European empires as they decayed were extremely violent in Africa and Asia, and then handed the baton to even more violent American power. Vietnam is the exemplar here, with millions killed in the name of freedom, on top of the tens of thousands killed by French colonial armies.As Gramsci noted in his analysis of the interwar period (1918-1939), organic intellectuals and power blocs respond to structural crisis with strategies of re-articulation: trasformismo, he argued, meant elites absorbing potentially oppositional elements, and passive revolution aimed at top-down reform to preserve core power relations while making tactical concessions. Trump’s transactionalism – arriving in Beijing with CEOs from Boeing, Nvidia, Apple, and others in tow – embodies one variant of this. The establishment’s fury, however, is palpable and is the more destabilising dynamic. Neoconservative and liberal interventionist factions of the establishment, deeply invested in the post-1945 architecture of the American century of global primacy, view Trump’s pragmatism and the domestic constraints forcing it as betrayal. Their response is to push for escalation in Iran, double down on ‘defending’ Taiwan, and to weaponise US financial power. They are happy to risk shaking the world even in ways that are more likely to accelerate rather than arrest decline. This is Caesarism: authoritarian tendencies emerging when the ruling bloc can no longer rule in the old way, subordinate states no longer know their place, and the masses no longer consent.Trump’s visit, framed by the humiliation of the Iran quagmire, is thus a high-stakes manoeuvre. Beijing holds a lot of leverage: it can offer limited economic purchases especially agricultural goods and hundreds of Boeing aircraft to stabilise US markets and Trump’s domestic position, while refusing concessions on core strategic issues. China now looks to more strongly position itself as a pole in a multiplex order, rather than a junior partner in a US-led system.A World of Complex Critical MultiplexityWe are entering what Amitav Acharya has called a “multiplex” world – neither purely multipolar nor G2 condominium, but a fluid, entangled system of multiple overlapping orders with actors hedging, shifting loyalties, and pursuing issue-specific alignments. In this scenario, Gulf allies hedge between US security guarantees and Chinese economic opportunity, alienated by perceived US prioritisation of Israel’s maximum aggression and expansion over regional stability. Europe faces its own organic crisis, torn between Atlanticist instincts and the material costs of endless confrontation, whereas Global South actors pursue strategic autonomy, viewing US actions in Gaza/Iran as confirmation of selective, if not hypocritical, multilateralism. A rhetorical gift to postcolonial states, now emerging as significant international players.In this environment, US attempts to slow decline through military posturing or technology denial carry heightened risks of miscalculation. The “fury” manifests as a dangerous unwillingness to accommodate power diffusion. When hegemony erodes, the ruling group may resort to coercion over consent, risking broader counter-hegemonic blocs.The Trump-Xi meetings may well yield tactical deals – trade truces, photo-ops, CEO contracts – but they cannot necessarily and finally resolve the deeper contradiction: who will be the global hegemon. The US power bloc remains internally divided as Trumpian ultra-nationalist coercive primacists versus the Blob’s somewhat less unilateral primacists. This division itself is a sign of hegemonic crisis, where the historic bloc that sustained US leadership is fractured, as its domestic popular base.Dangers and OpeningsTrump’s Beijing visit is no triumph of deal-making genius but a compelled engagement born of weakness – domestic political erosion and international overstretch. The establishment’s rage at relative decline makes the United States more, not less, dangerous in the short-to-medium term, as it lashes out to preserve primacy or at least slow its erosion. Yet, this very fury may hasten the transition to a world of “complex critical multiplexity,” where loyalties are fluid, middle powers hedge, and no single actor dictates the script.Noting these dynamics is not to celebrate decline or demonise any state, but to advocate for a more plural, negotiated internationalism that prioritises peace and development over zero-sum primacy contests. The alternative is continued global turbulence, with the gravest risks falling on the Global South and ordinary people everywhere.In the end, ordinary people usually end up paying the price for elite failures. Count the bodies.Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column for The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire. He is the author of several books, including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing on the history of the US foreign policy establishment, and Trump and the crisis of American Empire.Bamo Nouri is a Visiting Lecturer at City St George’s, University of London, an independent investigative journalist and writer with interests in American foreign policy and the international and domestic politics of the Middle East.