Accelerating American Decline

fpif.org · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

Some tales can cross cultures, continents, and even centuries to arrive in our own era with their timeless truths pretty much intact. That’s particularly so for the immortal story of “an appointment in Samarra.” It first appeared in the fifth century in the Babylonian Talmud, that ancient repository of Jewish rabbinical wisdom. Then it crossed over into Islamic literature for reiterations in a thirteenth-century Persian version and a fifteenth-century Egyptian text, before popping up on the London stage in Act III of William Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppy. In Maugham’s retelling, the tale is rich in irony. Once long ago, he wrote, there was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to shop in the market. But the servant soon returned home in a panic and told his master about a woman in the crowd there who stared at him angrily. “It was Death that jostled me,” the servant announced, pleading with his master for a horse to flee to the town of Samarra. There, said the servant, “Death will not find me.” Riding hard and spurring the horse’s flanks, the servant raced across the desert and made it to Samarra by nightfall. That evening, the master himself went to the market and spotted the woman, demanding to know why she had threatened his servant. “That was not a threatening gesture,” said Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.” More than anything else, that ancient tale testifies to the eternal human folly of trying to outrun fate. And if that’s true for individuals, it’s doubly true for one of their most ancient collective creations, the phenomenon we call “empire.” Ever since Sargon the Great of Assyria founded history’s first trans-regional empire in 2300 BCE, the world has witnessed a succession of some 200 empires, of which 70 were large or lasting. Over the span of those 4,000 years, each empire rose, reached a peak so powerful that it seemed eternal, only to fade and finally fall, giving way to the next imperial reality. Until January 2025 when President Donald J. Trump took office a second time, the United States seemed to be following that fateful journey. After nearly a century as the largest, most powerful empire in history, the country seemed to be on a gradual downward trajectory from the peak of power it reached around 1991 (when that other imperial power of the time, the Soviet Union, collapsed). But from the first day he took office the second time around in January 2025, President Trump assured us that his bold plans to “Make America Great Again” would save this country from that sad fate. To understand how and why our master, our president, is, in fact, leading America to its own appointment in Samarra at a remarkably rapid pace, we need to understand the way this country has exercised its global power and the dynamics underlying its long-term decline. The Cold War Legacy Throughout the 44 long years of the Cold War (1947 to 1991), Washington pursued an effective geopolitical strategy for containing its chief global rival, the Soviet Union, behind an “Iron Curtain” guarded by a chain of U.S. military bases and alliances that stretched for 5,000 miles across the broad Eurasian land mass. Whenever Moscow tried to break out of its geopolitical isolation by arming surrogates in Asia or Africa for war or revolution, Washington, as I explain in my latest book Cold War on Five Continents, sometimes sent troops, as in South Korea in 1950. Usually, however, it dispatched individual CIA officers to organize covert interventions to beat back any Soviet advance, as it did so effectively in Afghanistan in 1980. In the end, exhausted by one foreign adventure too many, Moscow was forced to acquiesce as its satellite states in Eastern Europe broke away and the Soviet Union shattered. By 1991, Washington had won the Cold War, emerging from that monumental conflict as the world’s sole superpower. At that hour of seemingly ultimate triumph, the signs of America’s military omnipotence and its overweening imperial hubris were both amply evident. Let’s start with Washington’s imperial hubris. At the close of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an article that became a veritable manifesto for Washington’s power elites. Not only were we witnessing the end of the Cold War, he argued, but we were also seeing — yes! — “the end of history” through the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Not only was there a “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism,” but there was also, he claimed, an “ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture” to the most remote corners of the globe, even into the shopping malls of our former enemies, China and Russia. And his viewpoint did indeed reflect a certain reality: Our nation’s leaders were fully convinced that their Pax Americana would become the final form of global governance for all of humanity for all time. While that unapologetic imperial hubris may now seem almost quaint, in the aftermath of the Cold War it became gospel. It guided Washington’s leaders who indeed seemed to wield ample enough power, both military and economic, to fulfill that bold vision for remaking the world in America’s image. Next, as for U.S. military omnipotence, while the Russian military was ravaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and China still couldn’t project power beyond its own borders, America’s armed forces emerged from the Cold War as a global behemoth. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. had more military forces than all the other major powers combined — with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,760 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of 600 ships, including 15 nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups — all linked by the world’s only global system of communications satellites. When Iraq’s military dictator Saddam Hussein occupied the small petro-state of Kuwait in 1990, Washington mobilized a coalition of 42 nations to obliterate the Iraqi army in the Gulf War with a show of overwhelming force evident in that conflict’s glaring disparity in casualties. The U.S.-led coalition killed an estimated 50,000 Iraqi troops and destroyed more than 5,000 of that country’s armored vehicles at a cost of just 292 of their own soldiers. A few years later, in 2002, imperial historian Paul Kennedy reviewed the relative strength of rival empires over the past 500 years, concluding: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” Given America’s “mind-boggling” dominance in finance, scientific research, and, above all, military strength, there was, he added, “no point in the Europeans or Chinese wringing their hands about U.S. predominance and wishing it would go away.” In sum, he concluded, any chance for a serious erosion of Washington’s global power “seems a long way off for now.” But to give Professor Kennedy his due, he did warn that China was “perhaps the only country that — should its recent growth rates continue for the next 30 years and internal strife be avoided — might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance.” Seeds of Decline Yet even at a peak of military supremacy not seen since ancient Rome, America’s asymmetric power was already starting to slip silently, slowly, but inexorably away. Part of that power loss was a tribute to the dynamic world order that Washington had created in 1945 at the end of World War II. Under its innovative system of free trade, low-cost development loans, and stable exchange rates (based on the U.S. dollar), the world dug itself out of the rubble of global war and enjoyed a half-century of unprecedented prosperity. As the rest of the world experienced a rapid economic recovery exemplified by Germany’s solid 6% annual growth rate and Japan’s sizzling 10%, America’s share of the global economy would, in fact, decline steadily from a formidable 50% in 1945 to 40% in 1960 to just 25% in 1995, and there it would essentially remain for several decades. Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic output, the International Monetary Fund calculates that, in 2026, China now leads the world with 20% of global economic output, the U.S. comes in second at just 15%, and the European Union places a close third at 14%. In effect, over the past 80 years, the United States has gone from a towering economic Titan, capable of dictating the terms of trade to the rest of the world, to just one among several major players that must bargain with its peer rivals, China and Europe. As this country’s economic superiority, the foundation for its global hegemony, slowly began to ebb, Washington’s leaders made some dubious decisions about the Middle East and also China that contributed to the erosion of their international influence. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to bring the Pax Americana with its “universalization of Western liberal democracy” to the oil-rich Middle East (and beyond). As President George W. Bush told the nation in 2004: “America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East” through “the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labor unions… in Afghanistan and Iraq, so those nations can light the way for others, and help transform a troubled part of the world.” While the U.S. was pouring its blood and treasure (an estimated $4.7 trillion worth) into those desert sands, China was enjoying a decade of warless economic growth. By June 2014, in fact, it had accumulated $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves — and in a major strategic miscalculation, Washington had even lent a hand. In deciding to admit Beijing into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Washington’s leaders proved bizarrely confident that China, home to a fifth of humanity, would somehow join the world economy wi