Could there really be a window of historical opportunity today for the introduction of a polycentric and nation-based international order that meets the needs of democratic, small-state, sovereign autonomy in an interconnected world? The most important relevant development -- the major world-political event of our time -- is likely to be the end of the US claim to global rule, combined with the rise of China, which consequently amounts to the emergence of a new global bi- or multipolarity. We may, therefore, currently find ourselves in a situation where, for the first time since 1945, the central condition for 'regional planning' as Polanyi described would be met: a Polanyi moment, as it were. If one puts present-day China in the place of the Soviet Union of the immediate post-war period -- two world powers with no missionary need to universalise their social orders -- it would no longer be necessary to worry about the peace-endangering, capitalist market-economic expansionism of the United States as Polanyi did in 1945. This problem has most likely been solved, whether in the coming years and decades the US is governed by Democrats or Republicans. Whereas the Chinese social order cannot even be exported within Asia -- any such attempt would meet with fierce cultural, ethnic, and nationalist resistance -- the US may be busy in the years ahead with the restoration, as far as possible, of its broken society; this will force it to curtail its imperial ambitions and the global presence they demand.

--Wolfgang Streeck, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (2021, English translation 2024) p364