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On Saturday, the United States celebrated its 250th birthday. By the standards of civilisational states like China, India, Iran or Egypt, America is barely an adolescent. Yet by the measure that matters most in the modern era, it holds a distinction no other nation can claim: it is governed by the oldest written constitution still in active use. That document drafted in 1787, famously emphasising the separation of powers, continues to run the affairs of the world’s most powerful state.

For well over the past century that has seen two World Wars, massive political and technological change, the United States has stood unchallenged as the world’s foremost military and economic power. From 1980 to date, it has commanded roughly 26% of global GDP, since 1991, its military budget has exceeded the combined defence spending of China, Russia, France and Germany. It remains the only state capable of projecting decisive force in any theatre on the planet.

Britain’s world-spanning empire was built on steam and the first industrial revolution; the US absorbed and then surpassed it by riding the second, which involved chemicals, telephony, pharmaceuticals, manned flight, radio, and above all the internal combustion engine. The American industrial output began its long ascent toward global dominance in the 1870s. By the end of World War I in 1918, the US was already the world’s leading economy.

Unlike every other major belligerent, the United States emerged from the Second World War physically unscathed. America now constructed a worldwide framework of alliances, institutions, and rules – NATO, the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs – that established the structure of its primacy. The Soviet Union did provide an alternative vision, and for four decades the contest between two superpowers defined the terms of global order.

The Soviet collapse between 1989 and 1991 produced what was termed the “unipolar moment”. For a brief period, American primacy appeared complete and unchallengeable. History, one commentator declared, had ended. But unchecked power led to its own hubris. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed staggering quantities of blood, treasure, and credibility over two decades. The unipolar moment became, in retrospect, an unipolar miscalculation.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The present chapter in American history is shaped by two parallel forces – the rise of China and the digital revolution. China has leveraged the same technological currents – artificial intelligence,........

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