Decline of the American Empire? What current signs of it suggest

America’ biggest threat arises not from external but internal forces that may wreck its big advantage. Can it auto-correct?

- ALOK SHEEL

Even as US President Donald Trump imposes his will at home and abroad, there is talk about various stages of imperial decline and how the American Empire is now at one of its last few—fifth out of seven by one estimate.

Empires as commonly understood were based on force and political control. These, however, ended with the rise of civil society, nationalism and anti-imperialism. ‘Empire’ is now proxy for American global hegemony, referring to its power to enforce its will through a consensual global order of its own making. With that caveat, let us examine the proposition through the lens and arc of history.

Empires in the past ultimately yielded to superior powers beyond their borders. Rome fell to ‘barbarians’ from western Europe, Islamic empires to Mongols, the Chinese and Indian empires to newly industrialized Europe and an overstretched British Empire to the US.

Paul Kennedy argued several years ago that modern empires (since 1500) declined not through military collapse, but through ‘imperial overreach’ that stretched resources beyond fiscal breaking point. Attention is drawn to America’s tendency to repeatedly get entangled in wars overseas and to the dramatic deterioration in US public finances.

The rapid rise of China with its unstoppable trade competitiveness is seen as a symptom of US decline. A possible alliance of middle powers in response to the Trump onslaught, as proposed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, could also conceivably contain US imperialist tendencies.

But how much is history a guide for the decline of the American Empire?