The USA is “a dying empire.” If so, can it be healed?

By Jean Baptiste Ndabananiye.

While different sources diverge on whether the United States of America constitutes a dying empire, it is generally agreed that this superpower number one is facing decline, because it is grappling with mammoth challenges likely to ruin it, if it doesn’t carefully address them. People consequently ask themselves the right person who is to heal this nation. The USA’s revitalization or demise means a lot to the entire world.

Sources affirming the demise of the United States of America

Fair Observer forms a multimedia platform and publication founded to furnish diverse perspectives and analysis on global issues. On 27 March 2024, it published an article which reads “The United States, like past empires, faces crises — Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan — amidst domestic division. Mismanagement, particularly in NATO expansion and Israel–Palestine relations, weakens global influence. Russian, Chinese pressures intensify. Republican isolationism adds strain. Trump’s potential return signals further decline, posing a threat to American hegemony.”

“Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America. Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.”

The metaphorical phrase “Great Britain plunging headlong into the Suez Canal” suggests the Suez Crisis of 1956. Then Great Britain, along with France and Israel, carried out a military intervention in Egypt following Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The phrase “plunging headlong” implies that Britain rushed into this conflict recklessly or without fully examining the effects.

The Suez Crisis marked a significant moment in British history. This crisis exposed the decline of British imperial power and its inability to act independently on the global stage without the support of the United States. The crisis culminated in political humiliation for Britain and is often viewed as the moment when Britain lost its status as a global superpower. The phrase emphasizes Britain’s hasty and ultimately disastrous involvement in the crisis.

Fair Observer notes that America’s post-Cold War era has experienced its own crises early in this century, with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. “Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse. As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline.”

“After World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended.”

Fair Observer additionally raises the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam, as incidents that became “too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s”. This media organization further states “Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, ‘win’ the Cold War and become the lone superpower on this planet.”

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union. America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals.”

Fair Observer contends that the Washington of President Joe Biden is undoubtedly failing to manage domestic political constituencies and the “empire’s international interests”, as far as Gaza, Ukraine and even Taiwan crises are concerned. It adds that in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been aggravated by blunders backlogged in decades since the Cold War’s end.

This has turned each crisis into a difficulty without “an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all”. “Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.”

Sputnik figures among the most prominent Russian media organizations. According to its 18 July 2024 article, the USA is a dying empire. The Nation constitutes a leading American progressive biweekly magazine concentrating on politics, culture, and current affairs. In its 21 January 2021 story, it stated “The US empire is crumbling before our eyes. With unprecedented economic inequality and massive overspending on military expansion, America now looks a lot like 476 CE (Christian Era) Rome.

This empire will fall sooner or later. They all do. So, this crisis, just at the start of the Biden and Harris years, is a fine time to begin thinking about what might be built in its place.”

Sources contradicting the demise

Though the above sources maintain that the US is on her path to collapsing, two other chief media houses in the world oppose the point that the US stands as a dying empire. These are The New York Times and The Guardian operating in the US and the United Kingdom respectively.

The New York Times ran an opinion by John Rapley on 3 September 2023. Rapley and Peter Heather have authored the book “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West.” This opinion is entitled “America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.”

The opinion reads “America likes to think of itself in garlanded terms. The shining city on a hill. The indispensable nation. The land of the free. There’s something to each sobriquet, to be sure. But, there’s another phrase, not always so flattering, that also applies to the United States: global empire. Unlike the other notions, which originated in the birth struggles of the Republic, this one dates to the final stages of World War II.

At the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the United States developed an international trading and financial system that functioned in practice as an imperial economy, disproportionately steering the fruits of global growth to the citizens of the West. Alongside, America created NATO to provide a security umbrella for its allies and organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to forge common policies. Over the second half of the century, this system attained a degree of world domination no previous empire had ever known.”

Rapley nevertheless points out that this empire sank into decline in the past two decades. “At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths and falling. While Western countries struggle to restore their dynamism, developing countries now have the world’s fastest-growing economies. Through institutions like BRICS and OPEC and encouraged by China, they are converting their growing economic heft into political power.”

BRICS represents a bloc consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, is an intergovernmental organization consisting of some of the world’s major oil-exporting nations. Formed in 1960 in Baghdad by five countries: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela; the organization has expanded to include additional members.

According to Rapley, some people-based on this decline- infer that the US is a dying empire and this is untrue. But, he concurs on a crucial thing moreover mattering to this planet. “From this view, it can seem that the United States is following the course of all empires: doomed to decline and eventual fall. America, it’s true, will never again enjoy the degree of global economic and political domination it exercised in the decades after the war. But it can, with the right choices, look forward to a future in which it remains the world’s pre-eminent nation.”

“To call America an empire is admittedly to court controversy or at least confusion. After all, the United States claims dominion over no countries and even prodded its allies to renounce their colonies. But there’s an illuminating precedent for the kind of imperial project the United States forged after the war: the Roman Empire.”

The phrase “There’s an illuminating precedent for the kind of imperial project the United States forged after the war: the Roman Empire” suggests that the United States’ actions or policies after World War II resemble imperial ambitions and strategies of the Roman Empire. An imperial project means a systematic effort or endeavor to extend political, economic, or cultural influence beyond a country’s borders, often involving territories or regions under its control. This applies to both Rome and the USA.

Rapley says “Like modern America, Rome attained a degree of supremacy unprecedented in its day. But the paradox of great imperial systems is that they often sow the seeds of their own downfall. As Rome grew rich and powerful from the economic exploitation of its peripheries, it inadvertently spurred the development of territories beyond its European frontiers. In time, the larger and politically more coherent confederations that emerged acquired the ability to parry — and eventually roll back — imperial domination.

In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.”

For instance, the USA has played a significant role in China’s rise as an advanced nation, particularly through economic, technological, and educational interactions over the past few decades. This involves USA-China trade relations, foreign investment with U.S companies investing heavily in China, technological transfer and collaboration, and educational exchange, among others. For example, thousands of Chinese students have studied in the U.S., particularly science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Several of these students have returned to China, carrying advanced knowledge and skills, which have been instrumental in China’s development.

Rapley argues that, despite this, the West still possesses the potential to remain robust. “Today’s situation is completely different. Its (Rome) economy was primarily agricultural and steady. If one power rose, another had to fall, since you could not simply expand the resource base to support both. When Rome proved unable to defeat the new contenders, it lost a source of taxes from which it could not recover.

Thanks to technological change, economic growth is no longer a zero-sum game, possible in one place but not another. Although Western countries no longer dominate manufacturing and services, they still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries like artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals or where they’ve built brand value, such as in luxury goods, sports and entertainment. Economic growth — even if more slowly than in the periphery — can continue in the West. But, it will require workers. ”

Rapley recognizes that Western societies suffer declining birthrates and aging populations, so that they are not producing enough workers. “They (workers) will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains.”

A 30 November 2023 article published by The Guardian and titled “America’s undying empire: why the decline of US has been greatly exaggerated” reads “For more than a decade, people have been saying that the era of US dominance is coming to an end. But, in reality there are still no other global players to rival it.

In recent years, the idea that the United States is an empire in decline has gained considerable support, some of it from quarters that until very recently would have denied it was ever an empire at all.”

For a compelling case, The Guardian furnishes an example of The New York Times’ columns that described a “remarkably benign” American empire being “in retreat”, or “even at risk of decline and fall. Yet the shadow American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.

 The US has military superiority over all other countries, control of the world’s oceans via critical sea lanes, garrisons on every continent, a network of alliances that covers much of the industrial world, the ability to render individuals to secret prisons in countries from Cuba to Thailand, preponderant influence over the global financial system, about 30% of the world’s wealth and a continental economy not dependent on international trade.”

 According to The Guardian, as the 2022 National Security Strategy said, “Prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past”. “This time the effort may be in vain. The risks of a Sino-American confrontation and the Russo-American nuclear standoff implied in the war in Ukraine are considerable. Whatever is to come, the fact remains that global power at present remains unipolar.”

However, Sputnik affirms the emergence of a multipolar world and it is not the only source saying so. Other various sources contend that there now exists a multipolar world. A multipolar world refers to a global structure where power and influence are distributed among multiple countries or centers of power. In a multipolar world, power and influence aren’t dominated by a single superpower (unipolar) or two major powers (bipolar). In a multipolar world, several nations or groups of nations hold significant political, economic, and military power, and no single country can unilaterally dictate global affairs.

If the USA is to be rescued from decline, who will heal it?

The commentator, Ryan Cristian, told Sputnik “I think (Donald) Trump is the aim, the direction for the empire. Whatever the driving force – not Democrat versus Republican – Trump is kind of a selected choice for what’s happening next. That’s why that would be where this goes. It’s a large teeter-totter.”

Trump has also recently emphasized that he is the USA’ s right choice to bring the country’s glory back. Addressing some strategies to achieve it, he has told his campaign rally “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart. So, tonight, whether you’ve supported me in the past or not, I hope you will support me in the future, because I will bring back the American Dream, Love, it’s about love. With great humility, I am asking you to be excited about the future of our country.”

He has vehemently criticized Joe Biden who won’t run for a second term against Trump. “If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States, think of it, the 10 worst, added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once, Biden. I’m not going to use the name anymore, just one time. The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable.”

Promising to be president for all of America, not half of America, “because there is no victory in winning for half of America”, Trump declared “Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never before.”

His previous administration was marred by racial issues. But his promise seems to suggest that he may ensure such issues aren’t repeated, if elected president. “Rise above past differences and disagreements and go forward united, as one people and one nation.”

He stated that his administration would ensure a stronger military, drug research, energy independence, world peace, law and order, inflation control, patriotism in schools, tax reductions and tariffs, saving Social Security and Medicare. He also promised to upgrade foreign policy with countries like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. “We must first rescue our nation… under the current administration; we are indeed a nation in decline. It’s time for a change. This administration can’t come close to solving our problems.”

Meanwhile, there might reign animosity between Iran and Trump. U.S. officials told CBS News in July 2024 that U.S intelligence had recently noticed an Iranian plot against former Trump. Yet, intelligence officials hadn’t pinpointed any ties between the failed attempt on Trump’s life by 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks and any foreign or domestic accomplice. 

The Iranian government, through its  Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani, immediately rejected the claim. So, this raises doubt on how Trump will be able to normalize relations between his country and Iran. He underlined that Iran is, instead still resolved to prosecute Trump for “his role in ordering the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020”, according to Al Jazeera.

Up to now, no person surely knows which, between Trump and Vice-President Kamala Haris, will sit in the White House. However, Harris is regarded as the favorite of the US presidency. In its 9 August 2024 article, Forbes says “Vice President Kamala Harris has now emerged as the bookmakers’ favorite to win the presidential election, highlighting her campaign’s momentum as she rapidly cut into former President Donald Trump’s lead in the betting markets over the past two weeks.”

Rapley’s observation and splendid advice on America re-energization

Before giving the observation and advice, Life In Humanity is going to provide this quote which is closely related to the advice. “Figures within America’s foreign policy establishment have [has] suggested time is running out for the United States to secure its place as the global hegemon, with some suggesting the country must go to war with China within just a few short years. The influential RAND Corporation once warned the bloody showdown must occur by 2025.

With Israel struggling, the Ukraine proxy war stalling and de-dollarization continuing apace, perhaps elements of the Western ruling class are ready to once again take a chance on Trump, fully abandoning the pretense of belief in any rules-based order and brandishing US power in its raw and brazen form,” says Sputnik.

The advice lies in Rapley’ words which are found in The New York Times’ article. “The USA still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.

To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity.”

Rapley’s words suggest that the USA needs to stop being involved in any wars. It signifies that whoever will win the US election has to hold this into account, if he or she is to rescue this superpower.