The United States is a paradox that defies the typical categories of power analysis. Is the United States an empire on the brink of decline, or is it still the world’s greatest concentration of human innovation? The answer is perhaps both.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, written by scholar Paul Kennedy in 1987, remains the prism through which imperial decline is assessed to this day. “Military overstretch, and a concomitant relative decline are the consistent threats facing powers whose ambitions and security needs are greater than their resources can sustain.” The term “imperial overstretch,” coined by Kennedy, remains frightingly accurate in its analysis.

The arithmetic of decline adds up quickly. The United States’ gross national debt reached $37 trillion in August 2025. The current level of debt, at 100 percent of GDP, is higher than at any peacetime period in US history, except for the periods following World War II. The country is spending $1 trillion a year on interest alone.

Kennedy showed how military buildup and deficit spending contribute to decline. Today, America has more than 800 military bases worldwide. America has an unprecedented military presence. The manufacturing sector that made America the “arsenal of democracy,” with a total contribution to global production reaching 50 percent in 1945, has been depleted.

The emergence of multipolarity is a threat to American dominance that could be described as “existential.” Graham Allison’s “Destined for War” popularized the “Thucydides’s Trap” concept, a difficult structural stress that “is created when a rising power challenges a ruling power, potentially dissolving dominant positions and relationships.” This has happened sixteen times over the past five hundred years, and in twelve cases, there was a war. In the last 35 years, China’s economy, which was less than a tenth the size of the United States’ economy, has surpassed the US economy in PPP terms.

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