By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Strange Triumph of a Broken America

By all appearances, the United States is a mess. Two-thirds of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, and nearly 70 percent rate the economy as “not good” or “poor.” Public trust in government has fallen by half, from 40 percent in 2000 to just 20 percent today. Love of country is fading, too, with only 38 percent of Americans now saying patriotism is “critical” to them, down from 70 percent in 2000. Congressional polarization has reached its highest point since Reconstruction, and threats of violence against politicians have surged. Former U.S. President Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts en route to reclaiming the White House, winning the popular vote even though many Americans believe he’s a fascist. Some scholars draw parallels between the United States and Weimar Germany. Others liken the United States to the Soviet Union in its final years—a brittle gerontocracy rotting from within. Still, others argue that the country is on the brink of civil war.

Yet such undeniable American dysfunction has had remarkably little effect on American power, which remains resilient and, in some respects, has even grown. The country’s share of global wealth is about as large as it was in the 1990s, and its grip on global arteries—energy, finance, markets, and technology—has strengthened. Internationally, the United States is gaining allies, whereas its main adversaries, China and Russia, are increasingly embattled. Inflation, massive debt, and sluggish productivity remain serious concerns, but they pale in comparison to the economic and demographic headwinds facing other great powers.

This is the paradox of American power: the United States is a divided country, perpetually perceived as in decline, yet it consistently remains the wealthiest and most powerful state in the world—leaving competitors behind.

How can such dominance emerge from disorder? The answer is that the United States’ main assets—its vast land, dynamic demographics, and decentralized political institutions—also create severe liabilities. On the one hand, the country is an economic citadel, packed with resources and blessed by ocean borders that shield it from invasion while connecting it to global trade. Unlike its rivals, whose populations are shrinking, the United States enjoys a growing workforce, buoyed by high levels of immigration. And despite political gridlock in Washington, the country’s decentralized system empowers a dynamic private sector that adopts innovations faster than its competitors. These structural advantages keep the United States ahead—even as its politicians squabble.

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Yet these same strengths also create two major vulnerabilities. First, they deepen the divide between prospering urban hubs and struggling rural communities, intensifying economic disparities and fueling political polarization. Although cities have largely benefited from an increasingly globalized, knowledge-based economy powered by immigration, many rural areas have been left behind as manufacturing and public-sector jobs have dwindled, breeding resentment and fraying national unity. Second, geographic insulation and wealth foster a sense of detachment from global affairs by shielding the country from external threats, leading to chronic underinvestment in military and diplomatic capabilities. At the same time, its vast power, diverse population, and democratic institutions drive the United States to pursue an array of ambitious interests abroad. This tension between detachment and global engagement results in a hollow internationalism in which the United States seeks to lead on the world stage but often lacks the resources to fully achieve its goals, inadvertently fueling costly conflicts.

Together, these vulnerabilities—domestic fragmentation and strategic insolvency—threaten the United States’ stability and security, creating dualities that define its power. An economic boom coexists with a civic bust. Unmatched material strength is often squandered by a feckless foreign policy. Trade and immigration enrich the country yet strain its social fabric and devastate working-class communities. The challenge for American leaders is to navigate these contradictions. If the United States can balance its ambitions with its resources and bridge its internal divides, it could not only preserve its power but also contribute to a more stable world order. Otherwise, the paradox of American power may one day bring it all crashing down.

 

Still the One

The United States remains an economic powerhouse, accounting for 26 percent of global GDP, the same as during the “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s. In 2008, the economies of the United States and the eurozone were nearly equal in size, but today, the American economy is twice as large. It is also roughly 30 percent larger than the combined economies of the so-called global South: Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A decade ago, it was just ten percent larger. Even the Chinese economy is shrinking relative to that of the United States in current dollar terms—the clearest gauge of a country’s purchasing power in international markets—and that measure flatters China, since Beijing inflates its numbers. In reality, China’s economy is smaller than the Communist Party claims, and it is barely growing. That dismal performance is backed up by the behavior of China’s citizens, who increasingly vote with their money and their feet. From 2021 to 2024, Chinese citizens illicitly moved hundreds of billions of dollars out of China and became the fastest-growing migrant group crossing the U.S. southern border, with their numbers surging 50-fold over this period.

The United States is also widening its lead in per capita wealth. In 1995, Japanese citizens were, on average, 50 percent wealthier than Americans, measured in current dollars; today, Americans are 140 percent richer. If Japan were a U.S. state, it would rank as the poorest in average wages, behind Mississippi—as would France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. From 1990 to 2019, U.S. median household income rose 55 percent after taxes, transfers, and adjusting for inflation, with income in the bottom fifth seeing a 74 percent gain. Although most major economies have suffered declining wages since the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. real wages have kept rising, showing a modest gain of 0.9 percent from 2020 to 2024. Many Americans, especially renters, and citizens without stock holdings, feel they are losing ground because of persistently high housing and food prices, but the majority are wealthier than before the pandemic, with low-income workers seeing particularly strong gains. Since 2019, wages for the lowest-paid decile have grown nearly four times as fast as for middle earners and over ten times as fast as for top earners, helping reverse about a third of the wage inequality accumulated over the past 40 years. Today, American millennials earn roughly $10,000 more on average than previous generations did at the same age (adjusting for inflation) and are similarly likely to own homes. Many U.S. middle-class households rank within the richest one to two percent of global income earners.

This combination of individual wealth and sheer economic size sets the United States apart. Unlike China and India (which are populous but poor) or Japan and western European countries (which are small but wealthy), the United States combines scale with efficiency, generating unrivaled material power. Size alone can yield vast output, but without high per-person productivity, much of that output will be wasted or consumed domestically, leaving little for global influence. History has proved this: in the nineteenth century, China had the largest population and economy in the world, and Russia had the largest in Europe, yet both were bested by more efficient powers such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Although the United States has economic weaknesses, they are generally less severe than those of other major economies. For example, U.S. total factor productivity growth (which measures how efficiently a country translates all its resources—labor, capital, and technology—into economic output) has been sluggish over the past decade, but it remains positive, unlike the negative rates plaguing China and European countries, according to data from the Conference Board, an economic research organization. Total U.S. debt, including government, household, and business debt, is massive, at 255 percent of GDP in 2024, with interest payments on the federal debt climbing to 14 percent, approaching the 18 percent spent on the country’s defense budget. But it still falls below the average for advanced economies, remains well under China’s ballooning debt of over 300 percent of GDP, and has declined by nearly 12 percent from its peak in 2021. Meanwhile, other major economies are seeing their debt burdens continue to mount.

The United States has also expanded its military alliances and its control over financial systems, energy markets, consumer bases, and technological development, increasing its ability to shape the system in which other countries operate. Consider the dollar. The currency now accounts for nearly 60 percent of global central bank reserves—down from 68 percent in 2004 but equivalent to its 1995 share. It is used in roughly 70 percent of both cross-border banking liabilities and foreign currency debt issuance—up from 2004—and almost 90 percent of global foreign exchange transactions. The dollar’s dominant role allows Washington to impose sanctions, secure lower borrowing costs, and bind other countries’ fates to its own. Foreign governments holding large dollar reserves are effectively vested in a system in which the economic health of the United States underpins their prosperity, making them hesitant to take actions—such as currency devaluations or sanctions—that could ultimately harm their interests.

The U.S. energy transformation has further bolstered Washington’s global influence. Once the world’s largest energy importer, the United States is now the leading producer of oil and natural gas, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Simultaneously, it has adopted energy efficiency and renewable technologies, bringing per capita carbon emissions down to levels not seen since the 1910s. This energy boom has kept U.S. oil and gas prices low, even during international conflicts. European companies, for example, currently pay two to three times as much for electricity and four to five times as much for natural gas, prompting some foreign manufacturers to relocate to the United States. Energy production has also helped Washington insulate itself and its allies from foreign coercion. After Russia invaded Ukraine, for instance, the United States was able to help Europe, heavily reliant on Russian energy, make up its shortfall by sending it oil and gas. Meanwhile, the huge American consumer market, equivalent to China’s and the eurozone’s combined, pressures foreign companies and governments to align with U.S. trade policies to maintain access to the world’s most lucrative revenue source.

The United States’ lead in global innovation further strengthens its structural power. U.S. firms generate over 50 percent of the world’s high-tech profits, whereas China captures only six percent. This innovation edge positions U.S. companies at critical points in supply chains, enabling Washington to twist production networks, as demonstrated by its coordination of multinational semiconductor restrictions on China. Additionally, the United States has expanded its military alliances, strengthening its ability to encircle rivals and project power across Eurasia. NATO has welcomed Finland and Sweden, while in the Indo-Pacific, initiatives such as AUKUS and the Quad, or Quadrilateral Dialogue, have deepened ties among Australia, India, and Japan. Previously strained relationships—such as those between Japan and South Korea or between the United States and the Philippines—are improving, paving the way for greater defense cooperation and U.S. military base access.

 

Built to Last

Critics contend that the United States is a house of cards, its towering strength masking a faltering foundation. They point to government gridlock, eroding public trust, and deepening societal divides as cracks spreading through the civic bedrock—fractures they claim will inevitably undermine the pillars of U.S. wealth and power.

Yet U.S. history shows no straightforward link between internal turmoil and geopolitical decline. In fact, the United States has often emerged stronger from political crises. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction and an industrial boom. After the financial panic of the 1890s, Washington became a world power. The Great Depression spurred the New Deal; World War II marked the beginning of the “American century,” an era of unprecedented U.S. primacy. The malaise of the 1970s, marked by stagflation, social unrest, and defeats in Vietnam and Iran, eventually gave way to a resurgence in economic and military strength, a  Cold War victory, and the tech boom of the 1990s. In the early years of this century, disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the Great Recession, fueled predictions of U.S. decline. Yet nearly 20 years later, the American century rolls on.

The uncanny resilience of U.S. power lies in its structural strengths. Geographically, the United States is both an economic hub and a military fortress. It boasts abundant resources, with plentiful natural navigable rivers and deep-water ports. These features keep production costs low and stitch together a vast national market, linked to the wealthiest parts of Asia and Europe via ocean highways that also serve as protective moats. This geographic insulation shields the United States from foreign threats, allowing its military to roam abroad while enhancing the country’s appeal as a safe haven. Consequently, capital tends to flow into the country during global crises—even when those crises were made in America, as was the 2008 financial crash.

The United States also attracts human capital, drawing thousands of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from around the world each year. Although the immigration of low-skilled workers has depressed wages in some sectors, it has also helped staff essential industries such as retail, food services, agriculture, and health care, ensuring that these sectors continue to operate during supply chain disruptions and public health crises. Coupled with higher birthrates, the average annual influx of over a million immigrants makes the United States the only great power whose prime working-age population is projected to grow throughout this century. In contrast, other leading powers face steep declines: by the end of the century, China’s population of workers between the ages of 25 and 49 is projected to drop by 74 percent, Germany’s by 23 percent, India’s by 23 percent, Japan’s by 44 percent, and Russia’s by 27 percent.

Although the U.S. political system often seems gridlocked, its decentralized structure—distributing authority across federal, state, and local levels—empowers a workforce that is more educated than those of China, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Unlike most liberal democracies, which developed strong states before democratizing, the United States was born a democracy and only began building a modern bureaucracy in the 1880s. The American constitutional system, designed to maximize liberty and limit government, constrains state capacity but facilitates commerce. The mainstream media focus on presidential horseraces but often overlook the dynamism of local economies and the private sector. The United States consistently ranks at or near the top globally in innovation and in the ease of doing business, requiring roughly half the steps and time needed to register property or enforce contracts compared with European countries. Consequently, Americans start businesses at two to three times the rate of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia and one and a half times the rates of China and the United Kingdom. They also work 25 percent longer than German workers, produce 40 percent more output per hour than Japanese workers, and hire and fire more frequently and productively than any other major labor force. This industrious, adaptable labor market helps the United States recover from crises: for instance, the U.S. unemployment rate bounced back to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 and has remained at around four percent—the longest sustained period of low unemployment since the 1960s—while the G-20 average lingers near seven percent.

The decentralized U.S. system also excels at adopting and scaling innovations across industries, a capability more crucial for long-term growth than invention alone. Compared with their counterparts in other developed countries, American localities—like American businesses—face fewer constraints from central government red tape. Federal agencies set broad guidelines, allowing states to tailor regulations to local needs, experiment with different approaches, and compete for investment. As a result, successful ideas tend to spread quickly. This diffusion advantage is reinforced by the United States’ deep venture capital markets, which account for about half the global total. Close partnerships between businesses and universities enhance this ecosystem, with the United States hosting seven of the top ten universities worldwide and about a quarter of the top 200.

As the political scientist Jeffrey Ding has shown, the dynamic U.S. system has consistently gained more from new technologies than even the countries that invented them. During the First Industrial Revolution, the United Kingdom developed the steam engine, but Americans applied it more extensively in factories, railroads, and agriculture, creating what became widely known as the “American system” of mass production—a model that propelled the United States’ economy past the United Kingdom’s in the 1870s. In the Second Industrial Revolution, Germany led in chemical research, but the United States excelled in chemical engineering, applying advancements across industries such as petroleum, metallurgy, and food processing. Overall, the United States’ economy grew 60 percent faster than Germany’s from 1870 to 1913 and was 2.6 times as large as Germany’s on the eve of World War I. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union invested a larger share of its GDP in research and development and employed nearly twice as many scientists and engineers as the United States. Yet the hulking communist system drained resources and stifled innovation. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was still stuck in the analog age, producing only a few thousand computers annually, while American firms were manufacturing millions and spearheading the digital revolution. Likewise, Japan led in semiconductors and consumer electronics, but the United States integrated these innovations more broadly across its economy, boosting productivity while Japan stagnated in the 1990s.

Today, the United States continues to set itself apart when it comes to innovation. Although the U.S. government sometimes engages in industrial policy—for example, through recent investments in semiconductor manufacturing and renewable energy—it generally relies on incentives and public-private partnerships rather than direct control, allowing new discoveries and technologies to spread organically across sectors. By contrast, China’s subsidy-driven, authoritarian model creates isolated pockets of innovation without enhancing productivity across the economy. China prioritizes what it thinks of as internationally important sectors, such as the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries. But these two industries make up only 3.5 percent of the Chinese economy, too little to offset declines in the bloated property and construction sectors, which account for roughly 30 percent of GDP and have erased $18 trillion in household wealth since 2021. China’s tech industries have also failed to create sufficient jobs for millions of recent college graduates, leaving nearly one in five young adults unemployed.

The costs of China’s subsidy-heavy model are enormous. The electric vehicle sector alone has received $231 billion in subsidies since 2009, with government support composing a significant portion of its revenue. This spending has propped up politically connected firms, but it, too, has drained household wealth, as well as stifled consumption and fueled overcapacity, debt, and corruption—all at the expense of investments in China’s citizens, particularly in education and health care. In rural areas, where a little less than half the population lives, this neglect has left around 300 million people without the education or skills needed to work in a modern economy, as the economist Scott Rozelle has shown. Heavy regulations and political crackdowns have further limited innovation, with new tech startups dropping from over 50,000 in 2018 to just 1,200 by 2023. As a result, China’s high-tech revenues remain a fraction of those in the United States, highlighting the limitations of its centralized model.

 

One Country, Two Systems

Despite its exceptional prosperity, the United States has significant socioeconomic disparities. Although the U.S. poverty rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to ten percent in 2023, it remains higher than in western Europe, and violent crime is four to five times as common. Social Security and Medicare help seniors, but working-age Americans receive far less support, with the United States spending only one-fourth of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average on job training and just over one-third on childcare and early education. This disparity creates a stark contrast: the wealthiest Americans are the richest people in the free world, yet the poorest Americans are among the most likely to go hungry. Even with the recent narrowing of economic and racial inequality (the wages of Black and Latino workers are rising faster than those of white workers), the disparities remain pronounced and have engendered bitter political divisions.

The most contentious of these divides is the urban-rural split, which is, ironically, driven by the same factors that have created U.S. prosperity overall: continental scale, decentralized institutions, and immigration-fueled growth. Urban centers have largely reaped the benefits of globalization, immigration, and the shift to knowledge- and service-based industries. In contrast, most rural areas have been left behind. Many still rely on shrinking sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and public-sector jobs. Yet despite this declining economic base, rural regions still wield political power disproportionate to their population and economic output through the Senate and the Electoral College. The U.S. system has thus impoverished rural areas and empowered them politically, threatening the stability of American democracy.

This urban-rural rift, the widest among rich democracies, has roots that reach deep into the United States’ past. In the nineteenth century, a schism between the industrial North and the agrarian, slaveholding South culminated in the Civil War. The New Deal and World War II temporarily lessened these divisions by spreading manufacturing across town and country. However, in the late twentieth century, globalization and technological change sparked a divergence in fortunes. The North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s and what academics call the “China shock” in the subsequent decade, both sent jobs overseas and hollowed out American manufacturing towns. From 2000 to 2007, the United States lost 3.6 million manufacturing jobs, followed by another 2.3 million during the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. Rural towns, often reliant on a single factory for commerce and tax revenue, were hit hardest. As jobs disappeared, blue-collar workers were forced into lower-paying fields, such as construction, agriculture, warehousing, and retail. In these industries, immigration reduced the earnings of the least-skilled native-born workers by 0.5 to 1.2 percent for each one percent rise in immigrant labor supply, according to an exhaustive review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Making matters worse, rural areas depended heavily on local government jobs, which accounted for around 20 percent of employment, compared with ten percent in urban areas, and more than 30 percent of rural Americans’ earnings. As tax revenues fell, local governments eliminated many of these public-sector positions, such as those at schools and police departments, to balance the books. Whereas urban areas with diversified private-sector economies were able to recover within a few years of the financial crisis, nearly half of the country’s rural counties still hadn’t regained pre-recession employment levels by 2019: from 2000 to 2019, 94 percent of new U.S. jobs were created in urban areas. Rural Americans have also suffered in other ways. Because rural Americans must drive longer distances to reach even limited options for food and health care and are thus more exposed to high fuel prices and local monopolies, costs for such goods and services rose nine percent faster in rural areas than in urban ones from 2020 to 2022.

The toll of these hardships is highly visible. All across rural America, there are empty main streets, closed schools, and shuttered hospitals. Rural counties have fewer births and more funerals. In 1999, urban and rural regions had similar mortality rates. By 2019, however, prime-age adults (aged 25–54) in rural areas were 43 percent more likely to die from natural causes such as chronic diseases. By 2018, rural Americans were 44 percent more likely to die from suicide, and by 2020, they were 24 percent more likely to die from alcohol-related causes. Today, life expectancy in rural areas lags two years behind that of urban areas, and 41 percent of rural regions are depopulating as young, educated workers relocate to cities in search of better opportunities.

These economic shifts are visible on the electoral map. During most of the Cold War and into the early 1990s, the partisan gap between rural and urban areas was relatively small; in the 1992 presidential election, for example, rural voters leaned Republican by just two percentage points over urban voters. In the decades that followed, however, that gap widened dramatically. By 2020, rural voters favored Republicans by a margin of 21 percentage points over urban voters—a tenfold increase. The 2022 midterms underscored this trend: 68 percent of urban voters supported Democrats, while 69 percent of rural voters backed Republicans. In the 2024 presidential election, exit polls suggest that Trump doubled his 2020 margin of victory among rural voters from 15 to 30 percentage points.

Sectional partisanship overlaps with race, age, education, and religion, transforming a political divide into a cultural clash. Rural areas are still largely home to white, older, less educated, Christian voters, a demographic strongly aligned with the Republican Party. Working-class men without college degrees now constitute a pillar of the Republican base, which remains primarily white but increasingly includes Latino men, a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2024. Working-class men have been hardest hit by reductions in decent-paying blue-collar jobs and wages over the past two decades. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt has shown, prime-age men currently suffer unemployment levels comparable to those of the Great Depression, with even higher rates among the least educated men. Meanwhile, Democrats primarily draw on a base of urban support from highly educated whites, racial minorities, women, younger voters, and secular individuals.

The cultural fissure between the parties increasingly threatens the United States’ democratic stability. Sensing demographic and economic shifts working against them, some Republicans introduced restrictive voting measures after the 2020 election, citing concerns over election integrity. Some Democrats, frustrated by what they viewed as an unfair countermajoritarian system, pushed for sweeping reforms—such as abolishing the Electoral College, reforming the filibuster, and expanding the Supreme Court. Instead of seeking compromise, each party adopted strategies to sideline the other, undermining national unity and democratic norms.

Trump’s 2024 victory, propelled by the emergence of a multiethnic working-class coalition, could realign party priorities. Republicans may now attempt to increase voter turnout, as Democrats might find themselves defending countermajoritarian institutions. More important, this shift could pave the way for Republicans to pursue policies aimed at helping working-class communities and bridging the urban-rural divide, such as expanding high-speed Internet in rural areas to enable remote work, building roads and clinics to boost commerce and health-care access, offering tax incentives to attract businesses, and establishing job-training centers tailored to local industries. But the urban-rural divide itself remains a powerful obstacle to reform, because it fuels political polarization and gridlock. This fault line is likely to define American society for years to come, threatening national cohesion in a dangerous world.

 

Loud Voice, Brittle Stick

The United States’ geographic, demographic, and political advantages create another vulnerability: a tendency to pursue global interests without committing sufficient resources to prevent conflict. President Theodore Roosevelt advised leaders to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” but Washington today often does the reverse: it talks tough but then underprepared, falling back on blunt tools such as sanctions or missile strikes when challenged. This “chicken hawk” approach demoralizes allies, provokes adversaries, and escalates conflicts that might have been contained with stronger engagement or avoided with better judgment. Worse, after being too passive in peace, the United States sometimes overreacts in war, plunging into quagmires, as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks.

These tendencies stem from the same qualities that make the United States strong. Americans often overlook global affairs because oceans shield their country from foreign threats and because the U.S. economy is largely self-sufficient. Exports account for just 11 percent of GDP, compared with a global average of about 30 percent. Most trade is discretionary for the United States because it leads the world in the production of vital goods such as food, energy, and technology. In addition, the country’s decentralized institutions give rise to a diverse array of priorities, making national mobilization rare unless a clear and present danger compels unity. As a result, foreign policy frequently becomes a partisan football, with issues tossed around to score political points—and serious threats ignored until they erupt.

Yet the same security, wealth, and freedoms that allow the United States to deprioritize foreign policy also drive it to assert global interests. With unrivaled power, the United States feels compelled to have a policy on everything. This impulse is amplified by the decentralized American system—especially its free media and raucous Congress—which empowers voices, including those of diaspora populations, businesses, human rights organizations, and the national security bureaucracy, to advocate for various actions overseas. Meanwhile, weaker countries lobby the United States for protection from stronger autocratic neighbors that in turn view the United States—and the example it sets as a prosperous democracy—as a threat to their rule and spheres of influence. In response, autocracies such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia militarize against the United States and try to divide its alliances and subvert its democracy. Even when Americans want to stay out of foreign conflicts, these forces often pull them in.

People watching an assault ship in New York City, May 2024

The structure of American power thus creates competing pressures for detachment and engagement. The result is a hollow form of internationalism that has sometimes resulted in disastrous failures of deterrence. In the 1920s, for instance, the United States opposed German and Japanese expansion but outsourced enforcement to treaties such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war, and the League of Nations, which Washington then refused to join. The United States withdrew its forces from Europe while demanding debt payments from allies, who passed the costs on to Germany, worsening its financial turmoil and hastening its slide into Nazism. At the same time, in Asia, the United States abandoned plans for naval modernization and regional fortification but imposed increasingly severe sanctions on Japan, intensifying Tokyo’s perception of Washington as both hostile and vulnerable—thereby paving the road to the attack on Pearl Harbor. A similar pattern played out in the 1990s and the early years of this century. While nearly doubling NATO’s membership to include 12 new countries, the United States halved its troop presence in Europe and shifted NATO’s focus to counterterrorism operations in the Middle East. In 2008, the United States suggested that Georgia and Ukraine might eventually join the alliance but offered no concrete path to membership, thus provoking Russia without effectively deterring it.

In other cases, hollow internationalism led the United States to neglect deterrence entirely. On several occasions, it convinced itself and its adversaries that it had little interest in a region, only to respond massively to aggression there, with catastrophic consequences. In 1949, for instance, the United States excluded the Korean Peninsula from its defense perimeter and withdrew its troops. Yet when North Korea invaded South Korea, the United States intervened forcefully, pushing up to the Chinese border and provoking a ferocious Chinese counterattack. This shock heightened Cold War fears of communist expansion and solidified the domino theory: the idea that if one state falls to communism, its neighbors will, too. This notion in turn propelled Washington’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam. Similarly, in 1990, the United States made no serious effort to deter Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait but then took up arms to repel the attack after the fact. The result was the Gulf War and a prolonged U.S. military presence in the Middle East, which in turn mobilized jihadi groups such as al Qaeda—an outcome that culminated in the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The world now faces converging threats: China is carrying out the largest peacetime military buildup since Nazi Germany’s, producing warships, combat aircraft, and missiles five to six times as fast as the United States can. Russia is waging Europe’s biggest war since World War II. Iran is trading blows with Israel, and North Korea is sending thousands of troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine while preparing for war with South Korea and developing nuclear missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland. Despite treating these regimes as enemies, the United States spends only 2.7 percent of GDP on defense, a level comparable to that of the post–Cold War 1990s and the isolationist 1930s and well below the Cold War range of six to ten percent. A military recruitment crisis compounds the shortfall, with 77 percent of young Americans ineligible for service because of obesity, drug use, or health issues and just nine percent expressing an interest in enlisting. In a potential conflict with China, U.S. forces would blow through their munitions inventory in a matter of weeks, and it would take years for the U.S. defense industrial base to produce replacements. Rising personnel costs, along with an endless array of peacetime missions, are stretching U.S. forces thin.

By pairing diplomatic hostility with military unreadiness, the United States is once again sending the world a mixed signal, a yellow traffic light. Yellow lights, of course, often prompt aggressive drivers to speed up. American ambiguity won’t matter—until it does, when China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia decides it’s time to take what it has long claimed by force.

 

The Dangers of Declinism

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, experts have urged policymakers to prepare for multipolarity, expecting the United States to be challenged or overtaken by rising powers. But reality has taken a different course. The United States remains economically dominant while other contenders—both adversaries and allies—are slipping into long-term decline. Shrinking populations and stagnant productivity are eroding the strength of once dominant Eurasian powers. Meanwhile, populous countries such as India and Nigeria struggle to ascend global value chains because of poor infrastructure, corruption, and weak education systems. Automation and the commodification of manufacturing are shutting off traditional growth paths, leaving many developing countries mired in debt, youth unemployment, and political instability. Rather than triggering a rise of the rest, current trends are solidifying a unipolar world with the United States as the sole superpower, surrounded by declining great powers and a periphery of middle powers, developing countries, and failing states.

In the long run, a world without rising powers could foster stability by reducing the risk of hegemonic wars. Over the past 250 years, the Industrial Revolution caused economies, populations, and militaries to double or more in size within a generation, sparking intense competition for resources and territory. But that era is winding down. Shrinking populations, stagnant economies, and the concentration of wealth in the United States make the rise of new great powers unlikely. Some analysts characterize China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as an “axis,” but the world is unlikely to see a repeat of 1942, when Germany, Japan, and Italy seized half of the world’s productive capacity. Today’s fading challengers lack the strength to overrun Eurasia quickly, and once a great power falters, it no longer has the population growth to rebound, as Germany did between the world wars and the Soviet Union did after World War II. It’s hard to imagine Russia, for example, rising from the ashes of Ukraine to conquer large swaths of Europe. As rising powers fade, the world may become more stable.

But right now, several threats loom. Declining powers may resort to desperate wars of irredentism to reclaim what they believe are “lost” territories and avoid slipping permanently into second-tier status. Russia has already done this in Ukraine, and China might take similar actions in Taiwan or against the Philippines in the South China Sea. Although these conflicts may not match World War II’s scale, they could still be ghastly, involving nuclear threats and attacks on critical infrastructure. China, North Korea, and Russia face economic and demographic decline, but so do their most likely targets—South Korea, Taiwan, and the Baltic states—ensuring that Eurasia’s military balances will remain hotly contested. Even without sparking massive wars, China and Russia could gradually transform into gigantic North Koreas, relying increasingly on totalitarianism and military extortion to undermine an international order they can no longer hope to dominate.

Another threat is rampant state failure, particularly in debt-ridden countries with rapidly growing populations. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is expected to add one billion people by 2050, yet most of its economies are already in fiscal crisis. Manufacturing no longer provides mass employment, and governments are slashing social spending to pay foreign loan interest. According to the United Nations, an estimated 3.3 billion people live in countries where interest payments exceed investments in either education or health care. The stagnation of major economies is worsening the situation. A slowing China, for instance, has halted most of its foreign lending while reducing its imports from poor countries and flooding their markets with subsidized exports, delivering a triple blow to their economies.

A spiral of state failure could magnify a third threat: the continued rise of antiliberalism in democratic countries. Many democracies are already struggling with demographic decline, sluggish economic growth, soaring debt, and ascendant extremist parties. A surge of refugees from failing states could further strengthen these antidemocratic movements. After the Syrian civil war sent more than a million refugees to Europe, for example, authoritarian parties made substantial gains across the continent. Liberal democracy has flourished in times of economic expansion, population growth, and social cohesion, but it’s uncertain whether it can survive an era of stagnation and mass migration.

The United States must contain these threats while continuing to harness its geographic, demographic, and institutional advantages. A crucial first step is rejecting the misperception that the country is doomed to decline. Nearly four decades ago, the political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in these pages that Americans must fear decline to avoid it. But fear risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. An exaggerated sense of decay is already starting to destabilize democracy, as some Americans lose faith in the system and turn to antiliberal solutions. Some are rallying behind white nationalism, propelled by fears of demographic shifts and “great replacement” conspiracy theories, which falsely claim that political elites encourage mass immigration to replace white Americans with minorities. Others are stoking minority grievances to mobilize voters along ethnic lines. Such cynical strategies have fostered harmful policies, such as defunding the police or mass deportations, eroding trust in democracy and potentially enabling demagogues to dismantle the republic’s checks and balances.

Fearing decline, the United States might lean toward protectionism and xenophobia, walling itself off rather than competing internationally, which would undermine its core strengths. The country has thrived on the free flow of goods, people, and ideas, soaking up foreign talent and capital like a sponge and building a global commercial order that attracts allies. But if the United States embraces a false narrative of decline, it risks becoming a rogue superpower, a mercantilist behemoth determined to squeeze every ounce of wealth and power from the rest of the world. Tariffs, sanctions, and military threats could replace diplomacy and trade, alliances might become protection rackets, and immigration could be sharply restricted. This nativist turn might yield short-term gains for Americans, but it would ultimately hurt them by making the world they inhabit poorer and less secure. Trade and security networks could collapse, sparking resource-driven conflicts and killing off any possibility for cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation, climate change, pandemics, and other global challenges—accelerating a descent into anarchy.

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., November 2024

The most immediate danger is that the United States will convince itself—and its adversaries—that it lacks the will or the capacity to counter large-scale aggression. To avoid asserting its interests without backing them up (thereby provoking aggressors without deterring them) or prematurely withdrawing from regions (forcing a rushed and costly reentry), the United States must rigorously reassess its core interests and determine where containing aggression is essential. The U.S. national security establishment believes this means preventing China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia from destroying their neighbors. This conviction—that powerful revisionist tyrannies should be contained—is as straightforward as it is hard learned. After World War I, the United States withdrew from Eurasia, a decision that contributed to the outbreak of World War II. In contrast, after World War II, the United States maintained peacetime alliances in Eurasia, ultimately defeating Soviet communism without triggering World War III, and providing the security foundation for an unprecedented surge in global prosperity and democracy. The key to success, then as now, is blending strength with diplomacy: building a credible military presence to deter aggression while offering revisionist powers a path to reintegration with the West if they renounce military conquest.

During the Cold War, the United States contained the Soviet Union until internal weaknesses forced Moscow to retreat. A similar strategy could work today. China’s economy is stagnating, and its population is shrinking. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and Iran has been battered by Israel. Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are aging heads of state whose reigns will likely end within the next decade or two. The United States doesn’t need to contain their regimes indefinitely—perhaps just long enough for current trends to play out. As their power declines, their imperial dreams may seem increasingly unattainable, potentially prompting successors to chart a new course. In the meantime, Washington should sap their strength by welcoming their brightest people to the United States through immigration and by strengthening connections with their societies through student visas, diplomatic exchanges, and nonstrategic trade.

China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, however, are unlikely to mellow overnight. The United States’ struggle against these countries may not last forever, but Washington must prepare for a contest that could last years. In this competition, domestic unity will be essential. Investing in jobs, infrastructure, housing, and education in neglected areas—and rekindling a spirit of civic duty—will be crucial not only to mend national fissures but also to fortify the United States against foreign threats. Calling on Americans to stand up to autocratic aggression doesn’t mean rushing into war; it means creating a future in which peace is secured through sustained investments in military strength and diplomatic outreach. It means rallying a nation to recognize its immense power and accept the responsibility to wield it, not in frenzied reaction but before the storm—with purpose and prudence.

 

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