The Decline of Empire
What happens to a people whose identity changes from being the dominant force in the world to being one among a handful?
It’s rare in human history that we can so readily identify one man’s name with the decline of empire but at the current pace of American devolution, it’s clear that name will be etched in eternity and most likely in faux gold letters: Trump.
We have turned our allies into enemies and debased our reputation as fast as our currency is collapsing in the pursuit of regional, if not global, domination and ended up proving ourselves to be a menace. We are isolating ourselves when we should be reaching out and vacating global leadership and leaving China to seize the mantle.
No generation of Americans has experienced this feeling, so while there’s no written record it sure feels like decline. For most of my adult life the United States has been the global hegemon. The sole superpower. The top of the pyramid.
Doesn’t feel that way anymore.
While we can hope that we remain the leaders of the world I don’t think its too early to ask a question about a descent into multilateralism: What becomes of us? I mean that literally…how do we begin to view ourselves if indeed we are in a state of decline from the zenith of human history?
I’m not sure Americans will do very well slipping out of first place. It’s so culturally tied up in our national identity. Like a heavyweight boxing champ that loses his belt…sure some make a comeback but very few.
The collapse of empires follows predictable patterns across centuries and continents. What distinguishes one decline from another isn’t the trajectory, in fact that’s remarkably consistent, but rather how the declining power’s citizens process their loss of status. Some accept diminishment with grace, redirecting their energies toward building functional regional powers. Others, consumed by phantom limb syndrome of their former greatness, lash out in ways that accelerate their own destruction.
The Aztec Empire offers perhaps the most visceral example of this psychology. When Cortés arrived in 1519, the Aztecs commanded tribute from millions across Mesoamerica. Their capital Tenochtitlan dwarfed any European city in scale and sophistication. Yet within two years, it was rubble. What destroyed the Aztecs wasn’t Spanish military superiority, Cortés commanded fewer than 600 men. No it was a combination of disease and their subjects’ accumulated resentment of Aztec brutality.
The Tlaxcalans and other subjugated peoples eagerly joined the Spanish, not because they understood what European colonization would bring, but because they so desperately wanted the Aztecs gone. The Aztec leadership, unable to conceive of their empire’s end, chose scorched earth over accommodation, leaving their magnificent city in ruins rather than accept a diminished role. Dissension.
The American South after Appomattox provides a different but equally instructive case study. The plantation aristocracy had built an empire of cotton that dominated global markets and American politics. Southern senators controlled federal policy for decades through threats of secession. Then it all collapsed in four years of mechanized slaughter. Rather than accept their reduced status and rebuild, Southern whites created an alternative reality. The Lost Cause mythology transformed military defeat into moral victory, valorizing rebellion and reframing emancipation as Northern aggression. This fantasy required maintaining racial hierarchy through terrorism and Jim Crow, ensuring the South remained America’s poorest, least educated region for another century. The psychology was clear: if we cannot dominate, we will at least ensure others suffer more than we do. Denial.
Weimar Germany elevated this pattern to civilizational catastrophe. The Treaty of Versailles didn’t just end German military dominance—it humiliated a people who had viewed themselves as Europe’s cultural and intellectual pinnacle. The kaiser’s empire had produced Beethoven, Goethe, and Bismarck. Within a generation, Germany went from Continental powerhouse to a diminished republic blamed for a war it hadn’t solely caused, forced to accept guilt it didn’t fully own, and saddled with reparations that crippled its economy. The Weimar years became a festival of resentment. Germans didn’t ask how they might rebuild within their reduced circumstances. Instead, they asked who had betrayed them—Jews, socialists, the “November criminals” who had signed the armistice. Hitler’s genius was recognizing that a humiliated people craves not solutions but validation of their grievances. The result was industrialized genocide and a war that killed 70 million people. Germany’s inability to accept diminished status didn’t restore its empire—it obliterated what remained of it. Deflection.
The Soviet collapse in 1991 accelerated this pattern into mere months. A superpower that had terrified the West suddenly couldn’t feed its own people. Russians who had grown up as citizens of a global power found themselves in a kleptocratic backwater. Alcoholism, depression and suicide levels exploded. Vladimir Putin rose by promising restoration through projection of strength. He could restore the Soviet empire through might. The invasion of Crimea, interference in Western elections, the war on Ukraine…these are actions of a declining power trying to prove it still matters, each aggressive act further ensuring the very irrelevance Putin seeks to prevent. Destruction.
This is the pattern: when empires decline, those who most benefited from the previous order become consumed by restoration fantasies. They cannot accept that the world has changed. Rather than adapt, they double down on the behaviors that caused the decline. They purge moderates, reject expertise, embrace strongmen who promise to make them great again. They stop believing in the arc of trajectories and look back to restoration of the mythological.
America now follows this script with depressing precision. Trump’s appeal lies precisely in his promise that decline is reversible through will alone—that tariffs will restore manufacturing, that taking over our neighbors for their resources is our birthright, that walls will preserve demographics, that rejecting international institutions will somehow restore American dominance rather than accelerate its end.
Yet despite Trump pushing the United States from global hegemony into a multilateral paradigm, America’s standing and direction will ultimately be dictated by the character of its people, not the pathologies of one man or one movement.
A wide swath of Americans have lost confidence in the values and ideas of the founding of this country and chosen MAGA in its stead.
But the DNA of a people dies hard.
Yes, MAGA has lost faith and confidence in themselves, this country, and our Constitution. But that doesn’t mean America’s founding ideals need go with them.
The British accepted their reduced role and built a functioning social democracy. The Dutch transformed from global empire to successful small nation.
The path forward requires acknowledging reality and adapting to it—something Americans have done before and can do again. The faux gold letters aren’t inevitable.
The global trajectory we are on may be up to the current administration but who we are as a people is still the choice that remains ours.
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Interesting piece Mike, and we share plenty ideas and I'd like to add more to the discussion with my own ideas and opinions.
It is true that the US is losing influence in the world stage, while other nations and entities rise. Maybe this was always bound to happen eventually, even if Trump is accelerating the process. No country can have the nearly total dominant power the US possessed post-Cold War forever. Still, I believe the US will continue to be one of the Great Powers of the world with still tremendous influence, perhaps it would still retain it's number one spot in a more multipolar order. A bit like how the US was still the number one in the bipolar order of the Cold War, despite fierce competition from the USSR. Another comparison would be how Britain remain the number one power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the rise of new powers like Germany.
Whether the US actually retains the number one spot or not, it will still have great influence like Britain and France still do today, and arguably would still have greater influence than them. I guess the difference between them and the US is the kind of influence they exerted and the kind the US exerts. They controlled large swaths of territory that weren't populated by British or French people, like India or Algeria. Once those territories were gone, so did a large part of their influence. The US's influence is more related to soft power, with diplomacy. Things that Trump does not understand but can be clawed back by more serious administrations (emphasis on might be).
And, of course, while the US is declining somewhat, that doesn't necessarily mean another power will become as dominant as the US once was. China is the most used example, and while they are rising, they have some pretty significant problems as well that will stymie that rise. How much will they'll stymie is to be determined, but it's very possible that they will stymie enough to stop a rise to the top. From the aging and declining population, deflation problems, consumption rates not rising to desired levels, some industries leaving the country, economic slowdown, an arguably worse debt problem than the US etc., these problems cannot be ignored when talking about the rise of China, much like the US's problems cannot be ignored. Also China has a soft power problem, particularly with it's neighbors. They are terrified of China and Chinese aggression, much like how the US's neighbors are becoming terrified of American aggression.
So what to do in these times of decline? Like you said, adapt, or as I would put it, reinvent the US. It's what Putin and Russia seem to be unable to understand: The old glory of the USSR isn't coming back. So the best thing is to do is to give people something new. And of course that starts with fixing the US's domestic problems. I've talked about this a few days ago, but this is what the new candidates like Talarico are doing, or how new Virginia Governor Spanberger started doing in her first day in office. Reinventing doesn't mean tearing down everything that was already there, like the Constitution, but fixing what is broken, reforming what needs reform, creating new opportunities to do new things.
Thanks for this piece Mike, I love it when they help me think of things such as this large comment.
I feel like America is in a phase of life akin to that of an unruly teenager, when stupidity and bad decisions run amuck and consequences arrive from which you must learn before hitting your twenties and becoming more sane again, rebuilding a life with a mind that has the advantage of a more mature frontal lobe. I’m hoping we are more Japanese after our inevitable decline, though I’d happily take the British and Danish models. Instead of dissension, denial, deflection or destruction I’m hoping we can emerge intact with determined ingenuity.