◯ The American Empire Does Not Exist. But It Is Falling

We are writing these lines at a singular moment in contemporary history. The United States continues to be a formidable power. It possesses the most powerful military force on the planet, the dollar continues to occupy the center of the international monetary system, its companies lead some of the most advanced technological sectors, its financial markets continue to attract capital from around the world, and its capacity for political, economic, and cultural influence continues to have almost no equivalent. If we were to observe only this snapshot, speaking of the fall of the American empire might seem premature and even contradictory.

But history is not understood by observing snapshots. It is understood by observing trajectories. And when we broaden the time horizon, what appears before us is a movement much deeper than a simple competition between the United States and some other great power. The world that emerged from the Second World War, that consolidated American hegemony after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and that for a few decades seemed to turn the United States into the almost undisputed center of the world order, is transforming. We do not yet know what architecture will ultimately replace it, but we can observe an increasingly clear trend: a growing part of the world is building the capacity to make decisions, trade, finance itself, guarantee its security, develop technology, and establish alliances without the United States necessarily having to be at the center of each of these processes.

This change has a particularly significant characteristic: many of the countries moving in this direction are not becoming enemies of the United States. They continue to trade with it, maintain diplomatic relations, buy American technology, and some host military bases or form part of its traditional alliances. The change consists precisely in something else: progressively, they can relate to Washington without depending exclusively on Washington. They can maintain a military alliance with the United States and simultaneously expand their economic relations with China; they can use the dollar and at the same time develop alternative payment mechanisms; they can preserve their traditional ties and meet, negotiate, or reach regional agreements without an American presence. The world does not need to break with the United States in order to begin living, when it suits it, with its back turned to the United States.

An important part of this process has been favored by the very way Washington has managed its hegemony. For decades, the advantages derived from being at the center of the international system have provided the United States with extraordinary returns and, progressively, the temptation to use this position to preserve and expand those same advantages has increased. Economic sanctions, legal and financial extraterritoriality, trade pressures, technological controls, military interventions, demands on allies, or the use of the monetary and financial system as an instrument of foreign policy have had immediate effects, but they have also created incentives for other countries to seek alternatives. Each alternative may seem insignificant on its own; accumulated over decades, they may ultimately modify the architecture of the system.

This is the process we are interested in observing. We will not attempt to determine the year in which China will surpass the United States, nor construct a ranking of powers, nor announce an imminent American collapse. The perspective of this article is longer. When we speak of the future, we are not thinking only of the next ten years, but of the decades that will shape this century and, wherever possible, of the processes that may project themselves even further. A power can preserve extraordinary material superiority for a very long time while the international order that sustained that superiority slowly transforms around it.

The decisive question is not whether another power will replace the United States in the same place it has occupied either. Perhaps that will never happen. The world that is emerging may not need a new single center, but multiple centers of power, interests, and decision-making. In this scenario, the decline of American hegemony would not necessarily depend on someone defeating the United States, but on more and more actors having sufficient alternatives not to need it. An empire can begin to disappear long before it runs out of armies, money, or technology: it begins to disappear when the power it retains progressively ceases to be indispensable to others.

And here appears the question we really want to explore. The United States may continue for many decades to be one of the richest, most advanced, and most powerful societies on the planet. The end of its hegemony does not necessarily imply the end of the United States. But we are speaking of a country with less than three centuries of history, whose trajectory has been marked, in general terms, by expansion, growth, and the progressive accumulation of power. After generations of building part of its national identity around exceptionalism, leadership, and the conviction that its country occupies a singular position in history, a very different question remains open: what will happen when they discover that they can continue to be immensely powerful and, nevertheless, no longer be indispensable?

Because there is a paradox at the center of this entire process. The United States has never formally recognized the existence of an American empire.

The American empire does not exist. But it is falling.

1. The Empire That Officially Never Existed.

The United States of America is not formally an empire. It was born as a republic after a war of independence against an empire, it has no emperor, it has not incorporated any imperial claim into its name, and its national narrative has been built precisely upon principles apparently opposed to those of the old colonial empires. The expansion of its external influence has usually been presented under other concepts: defense of freedom, democracy, security, stability, cooperation, alliances, free trade, or preservation of the international order. This distance between the formal designation and the actual exercise of power constitutes the first paradox that we must accept in order to understand which empire we are talking about when we state that the American empire is falling.

An empire, however, does not necessarily need to directly administer distant territories or formally turn them into colonies. What functionally defines an imperial structure is the capacity of a center of power to project its will in a sustained manner far beyond its borders and condition the decisions of others. For decades, the United States has possessed a worldwide network of military bases and installations, an unparalleled capacity for intervention, a currency situated at the center of the international financial system, a determining influence over multilateral institutions, extraordinary technological, industrial, and cultural power and, above all, the capacity to turn all these instruments into rules, incentives, dependencies and, when necessary, coercion.

This model has been particularly effective because it has required less direct territorial administration than the empires of the past. It is not necessary to govern a country in order to decisively influence its options; it is not necessary to turn it into a colony if its security depends on your protection, a substantial part of its trade uses your currency, its financial system needs access to your markets, its defense is integrated into alliances that you lead, or the cost of challenging certain decisions of yours is greater than the benefit it could obtain by doing so. American imperial power has resided to a large extent in this capacity to turn the centrality of the United States into a necessity for others.

This characteristic also explains why its eventual decline may be very different from that of the classical territorial empires. There is no need to wait for a succession of independences, the formal loss of colonies, or a ceremony that makes it possible to mark on a calendar the exact day on which the empire ceased to exist. An architecture built on dependencies can begin to unravel when those dependencies diminish; a hegemony based on centrality can recede when other centers appear; a capacity for influence that previously obtained almost automatic adherence can weaken when it increasingly needs to resort to pressure to achieve the same results.

For this reason, we are not particularly interested in resolving a terminological discussion about whether or not the United States has been an empire. We are interested in observing the system of power it has built and the mechanisms that have sustained it. From this perspective, the contradiction disappears: the American empire does not exist legally, but it exists functionally. And it is this empire that is falling.

Its fall also does not require the United States to cease being powerful. It can occur while it continues to possess an enormous military, a formidable economy, a dominant currency, advanced technology, and extraordinary international influence. The essential change will begin to become visible elsewhere: in the capacity of others to make decisions without necessarily taking Washington into account, to establish relationships that do not pass through the United States, and to build alternatives where previously almost none existed. The decline of this empire can therefore advance without great proclamations and almost without ceremonies, as a transformation much simpler to formulate and much more difficult to reverse takes place: when the world progressively learns to live without it.

• 1945: Building a World That Needed the United States.

The end of the Second World War places the United States in an extraordinary historical position. Europe has been devastated, the great European powers that for centuries had contested world power emerge from the war weakened, Japan has been defeated, and a considerable part of the planet’s industrial capacity has been destroyed or needs to be rebuilt. The United States, by contrast, has fought without the war having devastated its continental territory and possesses enormous industrial, financial, scientific, and military capacity. The Soviet Union also emerges as a great power and will soon become its principal counterweight, but the center of gravity of the Western world has definitively shifted to the other side of the Atlantic.

The architecture of the new order had already begun to take shape before the war ended. The Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 established the foundations of a new international monetary system articulated around the dollar, convertible into gold at a fixed parity, while the other currencies maintained exchange rates linked to the dollar. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank also emerged from that system. Then would come the Marshall Plan, the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, the consolidation of an increasingly broad international trading system, NATO, and a network of American military presence that would eventually extend far beyond the American continent. Different pieces, created at different moments and under different circumstances, but which would progressively shape a world in which the United States occupied a central position.

That system contributed decisively to rebuilding destroyed economies, providing security to Western allies, and creating conditions of stability that favored decades of growth. Reducing it to an operation of American domination would be as simplistic as interpreting it exclusively as an exercise in generosity. Interests could converge: Europe and Japan needed reconstruction, capital, markets, and security; the United States needed stable allies, economies capable of trading, containment against Soviet expansion, and an international order compatible with its interests. The strength of that architecture resided precisely in the fact that for a long time it provided sufficient benefits to many of those who formed part of it for American centrality to be accepted, and often desired.

For the United States, however, the returns were extraordinary. Its currency became the central piece of the system, its companies gained access to expanding markets, its financial system gained centrality, its military capacity was transformed into political influence, and its political influence contributed, in turn, to preserving an economic and strategic architecture favorable to its interests. The functional empire that we described in the previous section was not built solely because the United States could assume the costs of sustaining it; it was strengthened because this centrality produced enormous economic, monetary, political, and strategic returns for the center itself. Power and returns reinforced each other.

For almost half a century, however, this power faced a formidable limit: the Soviet Union. The world was divided, there were areas where Washington could not impose its will, and a large part of international politics was conditioned by the balance between the two great powers. When the USSR disappeared in 1991, the United States was left as the only power with the capacity to simultaneously project its military, monetary, financial, technological, and cultural power on a global scale. Thus began the American unipolar moment, an exceptional situation in contemporary history that, as the years passed, would eventually come to be perceived within the United States itself almost as the natural order of the world.

It is then that perhaps one of the most important transformations for understanding what would come afterward takes place. An exceptional situation in the history of power begins to be perceived as a natural condition. The centrality of the United States seems permanent, the unipolar world seems to have arrived to stay, and American leadership progressively ceases to be understood as the result of certain historical circumstances and becomes, within an important part of the national imagination, an almost natural expression of American exceptionalism itself. The power accumulated over decades had reached its culmination; the risk was beginning to confuse the summit with an endless plateau.

• 1971: When Trust Replaces Gold.

The monetary architecture born from Bretton Woods placed the dollar at the center of the international system and established a fixed relationship between the American currency and gold: 35 dollars per ounce. Other countries articulated their currencies around the dollar, and foreign monetary authorities could convert their dollar reserves into gold. This structure granted the United States a privileged monetary position and, at the same time, linked the issuance of the system’s central currency to a material reference situated outside the currency itself.

During the following decades, the expansion of the world economy, American spending, and the growing quantity of dollars circulating outside the United States progressively widened the gap between those dollars and the gold reserves available to sustain their convertibility. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon suspended the conversion of dollars into gold for foreign monetary authorities. That decision, initially presented as a temporary measure, opened the process that would lead to the disappearance of the Bretton Woods monetary system and to a world of fiat currencies.

The transformation provides the United States with extraordinary monetary freedom. From then on, the capacity to issue dollars and borrow in its own currency becomes essentially linked to the capacity of the American economy and, above all, to the trust that governments, banks, companies, investors, and citizens around the world place in that currency. The United States can finance deficits, issue dollar-denominated debt, and find international demand fueled by an exceptional characteristic: the same currency it uses domestically is also the principal currency of international reserves, financing, and exchange.

This allows us to better understand the enormous borrowing capacity that the United States would develop during the following decades. Money creation retains economic consequences—inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, asset values, and confidence—but the international centrality of the dollar extraordinarily expands American room for maneuver. Part of the world needs dollars to trade, holds reserves in dollars, buys dollar-denominated assets, and considers U.S. Treasury debt one of the principal safe havens in which to preserve capital. Monetary privilege and the global projection of the United States thus come to reinforce each other.

In 1971, trust progressively replaces gold as the ultimate foundation of the dollar system. This trust rests on the size of the American economy, the depth of its financial markets, the solidity of its institutions, its military and political capacity and, especially, on a reality that for decades has fed upon itself: the world uses the dollar because the world uses the dollar. This circularity provides the system with extraordinary resilience and helps explain how the United States has been able to accumulate deficits and debt while continuing to finance a global projection of a magnitude hardly accessible to any other power.

This architecture continues to be one of the great strengths of the United States. Precisely for this reason, the decisive question lies in its long-term evolution. Trust in the dollar can continue to be enormous while governments, companies, and economies progressively develop other ways to trade, finance themselves, or hold reserves. Each alternative expands the decision-making space available outside the American architecture. And thus we arrive at a question that will run through the rest of the article: what happens when trust in the dollar continues to be enormous, but the need for the United States begins to diminish?

• The Empire Had to Produce Returns

An architecture of power of this magnitude has enormous costs, but its historical logic is understood above all through the returns it generates. The global centrality of the United States facilitates access to capital, projects its companies and its technology, expands its influence over the rules of international trade, and turns the size of its markets into an instrument of power. At the same time, the centrality of the dollar allows it to finance itself in its own currency and transforms the American financial system into one of the great centers through which global capital circulates.

The different dimensions of power reinforce one another. Military capacity protects interests and strategic routes, provides security to allies, and generates political influence; this influence contributes to shaping institutions, rules, and economic relations; economic and financial centrality reinforces the dollar; and monetary privilege, in turn, expands the capacity of the United States to finance its global projection. The result is a circuit in which military power, political power, economic power, and monetary power feed one another.

This is one of the keys to understanding the duration of American hegemony. The imperial architecture was built and strengthened precisely because it returned power, wealth, and capacity for influence to the center. For decades, an important part of the costs necessary to sustain that architecture was offset by the advantages derived from occupying its central position. The empire could reproduce the conditions that contributed to sustaining it.

The nature of the problem changes when this circuit begins to lose effectiveness. If preserving certain positions requires more spending, more political pressure, more sanctions, more protectionism, or more coercion, while the countries that form part of the system develop alternatives and reduce their dependence, the relationship between cost, return, and power begins to transform. The sign of decline appears when preserving a position of privilege progressively requires more power than that same position returns.

• The United States Continues to Be Extraordinarily Powerful

Speaking of the fall of the American empire requires separating two realities that may evolve in very different ways. The United States continues to possess an enormous economy, armed forces with global reach, the central currency of the international financial system, capital markets of extraordinary depth, some of the most powerful technology companies on the planet, world-class universities and research centers, great scientific capacity, an immense continental territory, abundant natural resources, extraordinarily productive agriculture, and a privileged geographical position between two oceans.

This accumulation of capabilities provides the country with enormous resilience. The United States possesses the material, human, technological, and institutional resources necessary to continue occupying a central position in the world for a long time. Even a considerable reduction in its relative power may leave it among the great powers of the planet, with a capacity for influence that most states will hardly be able to attain. The fall of the American empire and the fall of the United States are different processes.

It is precisely here that the distinction that will run through the rest of the article appears. Hegemony describes something more than the amount of power accumulated: it describes the capacity to turn that power into centrality, to shape the rules of the system, and to ensure that the decisions of others are articulated around one’s own interests. The United States can preserve an enormous amount of power while this capacity progressively diminishes. It can continue to be rich, technologically advanced, militarily formidable, and politically influential while the world expands its centers of decision-making and learns to function with less dependence on Washington.

This places the essential question on a terrain different from the purely material one. The United States possesses sufficient resources to continue being a great power after the empire. The unknown is how a society that for generations has associated part of its identity with the growth of its power, global leadership, and its own exceptionalism will experience the transition from a hegemonic position to a shared position. The material capacity to adapt to it is enormous; the political, social, and psychological capacity to accept this transformation constitutes a much more open question.

• The Strength of the Present Can Hide the Weakness of the Future.

An important part of the current power of the United States rests on very real strengths. Energy is a good example: the capacity to produce enormous quantities of oil and gas provides energy security, economic activity, export capacity, and geopolitical influence. In the immediate horizon, having an abundance of the resources upon which a substantial part of the world economy still operates constitutes a considerable advantage. The question changes when we broaden the time horizon.

This article observes processes that unfold over decades and that may shape the whole of the 21st century. From this perspective, the amount of oil or gas that a country can produce today explains part of its present power, while its capacity to build the infrastructures of the next energy system tells us much more about the power it will be able to exercise tomorrow. Electrification, renewable generation, nuclear energy, storage, smart grids, new materials, critical minerals, and technologies that have yet to emerge will progressively modify an energy architecture built for more than a century around fossil fuels.

The same perspective can be applied beyond energy. Artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, industrial automation, new materials, biotechnology, and digital infrastructures form part of a much broader transformation of the sources of economic and technological power. The United States maintains extraordinarily strong positions in several of these fields and possesses an enormous capacity for innovation. At the same time, the future will also depend on the capacity to turn innovation into infrastructure, industry, mass production, supply chains, and effective transformation of the economy and society.

Here appears one of the paradoxes of accumulated power. The abundance of the resources that have provided prosperity and influence for decades makes it possible to continue exploiting them with enormous effectiveness and may, at the same time, reduce the urgency of replacing them. A society can continue obtaining great returns from the system it dominates while other actors concentrate their efforts on building the next system. A power can appear extraordinarily strong because it perfectly dominates the world that is disappearing.

The capacity of the United States to adapt continues to be enormous, and its history offers multiple examples of technological and productive transformation. Precisely for this reason, the determining factor will be the direction in which this capacity is deployed over the coming decades. The power of the future will be built upon the structures that replace the current ones, and the position occupied by each country will depend on its capacity to anticipate, develop, and integrate them. In the long term, decisive strength belongs to whoever builds the world that is coming.

• The Empire Begins to Fall from the Periphery.

The transformation of a hegemonic system can be observed from the center, by measuring the resources, military strength, or economic capacity of the power that leads it. But it often becomes even more visible by observing the behavior of those around it. Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America today offer signs of the same evolution: governments that for decades had articulated an important part of their foreign policy around their relationship with Washington are progressively expanding their margins for decision-making and building simultaneous relationships with different centers of power.

This process takes different forms. A country can maintain close military cooperation with the United States and at the same time deepen its trade relations with other powers; it can continue to use the dollar extensively while developing alternative payment mechanisms; it can buy American technology and simultaneously build other supply chains; it can participate in institutions created under the Western order and at the same time join new spaces of political, economic, or financial cooperation. Each of these decisions expands the range of available alternatives and, accumulated, they gradually transform the nature of dependence.

This is a fundamental difference from the bipolar logic of the 20th century. Multipolarity makes it possible to combine relationships according to the interests of each moment. A government can find in Washington its principal security partner, in another country its principal market, in a third an energy supplier, and in a fourth a source of technology or financing. The capacity to articulate these relationships simultaneously provides autonomy, and this autonomy turns alignment into a decision that is made on a case-by-case basis. The automatism of alignment progressively gives way to the autonomy of self-interest.

This change is particularly important because it can advance while formal alliances remain intact. Military bases can continue to operate, treaties can remain in force, and diplomatic relations can continue to be excellent. The profound transformation occurs when each country has sufficient alternatives to decide how far it accompanies Washington and from what point onward it follows its own path. American power continues to act, but it does so upon actors with a progressively greater margin for decision-making.

The periphery of a functional empire does not need to proclaim its independence either because it is already formally independent. The change consists in expanding its effective independence: diversifying partners, building its own capabilities, distributing dependencies, and having more than one door open. Each new alternative reduces the cost of making a decision different from the one Washington prefers and turns hegemony into an increasingly negotiated relationship.

It is here that the fall of the American empire may acquire its most silent and, at the same time, most profound form. Countries can continue to maintain close relations with the United States while developing the capacity to act independently of it in a growing number of areas. They learn to live with their backs turned to the United States when it suits them. And each time they can do so, the world incorporates a little more of the autonomy that defines the system that is emerging.

• When Allies Acquire Autonomy

For decades, one of the most solid foundations of American power has been its network of alliances. The United States has provided security, military capacity, technology, intelligence, and a shared defense structure to countries that, in return, have integrated an important part of their security policy within an architecture led by Washington. This relationship has multiplied American projection capacity: the power of the United States has also been exercised through the sum of the territories, bases, resources, and capabilities of its allies.

But this same architecture is undergoing an interesting transformation. Washington increasingly insists that its allies assume a greater proportion of their own defense, increase military spending, and develop their own capabilities. From the American perspective, this evolution makes it possible to better distribute the costs of a security system built over decades. From the perspective of the allies, however, acquiring their own capacity also means expanding their capacity to define their own interests and act in accordance with them.

Former Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo has pointed out precisely this paradox: when allies develop their own military capabilities, they also begin to think more autonomously. His observation is especially useful because it shows the two sides of the same process. Washington needs stronger allies in order to share the costs of sustaining the security architecture; these allies, as they become stronger, also acquire greater autonomy to decide how, when, and in defense of which interests they use that strength.

Europe constitutes an especially visible example. The increase in military spending, the development of its own defense industry, and the desire to expand European strategic capacity can strengthen the Atlantic alliance under certain circumstances and, simultaneously, provide Europeans with more instruments to formulate their own policy. The same logic can appear, with different characteristics, among other allies of the United States: the capacity acquired to contribute to an alliance is also capacity available to act in accordance with one’s own interests.

Thus, sharing the cost of hegemony can at the same time contribute to transforming its nature. During the period of maximum American centrality, dependence in matters of security facilitated a high degree of political convergence. As allies build resources, industry, technology, and military capacity of their own, the relationship evolves toward negotiation among actors with greater room for decision-making. The ally that acquires its own capacity also acquires its own judgment; and its own judgment turns automatic alignment into a decision.

• Middle East: Learning to Decide Without Washington

The Middle East offers one of the most visible examples of the transformation we are describing. For decades, the United States has occupied a central position in the region’s security architecture: alliances with the Gulf monarchies, military presence, control of strategic routes, energy relations, direct interventions, and a close relationship with Israel. Washington thus possessed an extraordinary capacity to condition regional balances and became the central interlocutor in almost any significant reordering.

Today, the main regional actors are expanding their room for maneuver. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other countries maintain important relations with the United States while simultaneously developing economic, energy, technological, and diplomatic ties with other great powers. The capacity of the regional actors themselves to negotiate directly with one another, build their own balances, and explore agreements that respond primarily to their interests is also increasing. The relationship with Washington continues to be important; it now coexists with a broader range of alternatives.

This evolution is especially significant because, during much of the 20th century, oil contributed to turning the Middle East into a fundamental piece of the American global architecture. Security, energy, the dollar, and regional alliances formed different parts of the same system of power. As the Gulf countries diversify their economies, their markets, their partners, and their strategic relations, their capacity to determine what relationship they want to maintain with each of the major centers of power also increases. Washington remains seated at the table, but the table has more and more chairs.

Israel introduces another dimension into this transformation. The American commitment to its security has constituted one of the pillars of United States policy in the Middle East for decades. At the same time, the degree of political, diplomatic, and military support that Washington maintains toward Israel, especially in the face of the consequences of recent conflicts for the Palestinian population and for the region, generates growing costs in United States relations with societies and governments in the Arab world and with a significant part of the Global South. An alliance can continue to provide strategic value and, simultaneously, increase the political price necessary to sustain it.

What interests us here is precisely this relationship between power, return, and cost. During the period of maximum American centrality, many governments in the region had less room to build comparable strategic alternatives, and Washington could reconcile different commitments from a position of exceptional strength. The current expansion of alternatives allows regional actors to negotiate from greater autonomy and forces the United States to manage more carefully the consequences of each of its positions.

The Middle East thus shows, on an especially visible scale, the process that may be advancing in other parts of the world. The transformation arrives when regional actors have enough options to build their balances according to their own interests. The United States continues to be a decisive power in the region; the countries of the region are increasing, at the same time, their capacity to decide their future without necessarily placing the United States at the center of every decision.

1. The World Does Not Need a New Empire

The history of empires may lead us to imagine that the decline of a hegemonic power necessarily requires the emergence of another willing to take its place. This time, the process may follow a different trajectory. The world of the 21st century has multiple economic, demographic, industrial, technological, and political centers with a growing capacity to establish relationships among themselves. The result may be a progressively broader distribution of power, in which different countries and regions acquire the capacity to defend their interests and build their own networks of relationships. The successor to American hegemony could simply be multipolarity.

China contributes decisively to making this transformation materially possible. Its economic and industrial scale, its technological capacity, the infrastructures it builds and finances, its commercial presence, and its long-term strategic vision offer other countries options that expand their room for decision-making. Other powers and regional groupings also contribute to multiplying these alternatives. The fundamental phenomenon is the progressive density of an international system in which there are increasingly more paths for trading, investing, obtaining financing, acquiring technology, securing supplies, or establishing political relations.

The United States itself has contributed powerfully to accelerating this search for alternatives. For decades, the centrality of the dollar, the American financial system, its markets, its technology, and its alliances has provided Washington with extraordinary instruments for defending its interests. The increasingly intensive use of these instruments—economic sanctions, legal and financial extraterritoriality, trade restrictions, technological controls, pressure on governments and companies, or conditioning access to certain markets—at the same time increases the strategic value for others of having an alternative.

Here appears one of the great paradoxes of hegemony. The more return a power extracts from the dependence that others maintain on the system it controls, the more valuable it becomes for them to reduce that dependence. Each sanction can reinforce immediate discipline and, at the same time, increase interest in developing mechanisms capable of avoiding a future one; each technological restriction can protect a present advantage and stimulate the development of an alternative technological chain; each use of the financial system as an instrument of pressure can reinforce the desire to have complementary payment and financing channels. The intensive exploitation of privilege creates its own incentive for diversification.

This explains why the transformation of the global system can advance without the need for a great anti-American coalition. Governments can value their relationship with the United States, continue trading with it, maintain alliances with it, and consider it advisable to preserve many of the elements of the existing order, while incorporating a perfectly rational strategic decision: expanding the options available to preserve their own decision-making capacity. The objective becomes being able to relate to Washington by choice while simultaneously having other avenues available when their own interests require them.

For a functional empire, this evolution is more profound than the existence of declared adversaries. An enemy confirms the existence of the center because it organizes part of its policy in opposition to that center; a world of progressively autonomous actors simply distributes its relationships according to its interests. The decisive transformation arrives when countries turn diversification into a guarantee of sovereignty and build a world in which the relationship with the United States continues to be valuable, but dependence ceases to be necessary.

1. The Dollar: The Last Great Wall

If any piece of the architecture built over the last century still expresses the centrality of the United States with particular clarity, it is the dollar. It continues to be the principal international reserve currency, occupies a dominant position in global financial transactions, denominates a considerable share of international trade and assets, and provides American markets with an extraordinary capacity to attract capital. Its strength therefore continues to be one of the great walls sustaining the power of the United States.

The nature of this strength, however, is different from that of a wall built of stone. As we saw when discussing 1971, the system rests essentially on trust and on a network of needs that reinforce one another. Companies, banks, investors, and governments use the dollar because it provides liquidity, security, financial depth, and practically universal acceptance; this massive use, in turn, reinforces the very qualities that make it attractive. Centrality generates more centrality and provides the system with an extraordinary capacity for resilience.

The determining question, therefore, lies in the difference between dominance and indispensability. The dollar can continue to occupy first place for a long time while a growing share of global transactions has complementary channels available. Every trade agreement denominated in other currencies, every alternative payment system, every more diversified reserve, every financial market that gains depth, and every mechanism that makes it possible to operate outside American infrastructure expands the number of available options. The sum of these alternatives can progressively transform a system built around an indispensable currency into a system in which that same currency continues to be dominant among several effectively usable options.

This evolution acquires an even more important dimension when we relate it to United States debt. For decades, global demand for dollars and dollar-denominated assets has provided the U.S. Treasury with extraordinary conditions for financing deficits and accumulating debt. The world thus helps finance the United States because it needs an important part of the financial instruments that the United States itself issues. This relationship has made it possible to sustain simultaneously domestic spending, external projection, and a borrowing capacity far greater than that of a country forced to finance itself primarily in a currency controlled by others.

For this reason, the absolute magnitude of the debt explains only part of the problem. The underlying question is upon what architecture of global trust and necessity rests the capacity to continue accumulating it. As long as international demand for American assets remains extraordinarily high, this architecture provides immense room for maneuver. As other options acquire scale, liquidity, credibility, and usefulness, the world’s capacity to distribute a larger share of its capital among different alternatives also increases.

The decisive change may therefore arrive long before the dollar loses its primacy. Its evolution may be gradual: from indispensable currency to predominant currency, from an almost obligatory center to the principal center among several, from exceptional privilege to progressively shared privilege. The wall can remain standing while other paths are opening around it. And for the United States, accustomed for more than half a century to a global architecture that turns its currency into a necessity for others, this transformation would have consequences far deeper than a simple variation in monetary statistics.

1. Byzantium: Retreating in Order to Continue Existing

The fall of an empire can give way to the continuity, in a different form, of a substantial part of the power that had sustained it. When the Western Roman Empire disappeared in the 5th century, its eastern part, with its capital in Constantinople and which we would later know as the Byzantine Empire, continued to exist for almost a thousand years. A part of Rome survived, adapted to a smaller territory, a different center, and completely new geopolitical circumstances. The loss of a particular imperial architecture thus gives way to another form of continuity.

George Yeo has suggested a similar possibility for the United States: progressively assuming a more limited global role, concentrating resources and capabilities in its own hemisphere, and continuing to be an extraordinary power for a long time. From this perspective, the American continent regains enormous strategic centrality. Canada and Greenland to the north; Mexico, Panama, and the Caribbean as essential spaces of connection and security; Latin America as great continental depth. Protected by two oceans and with continental dimensions, abundant resources, enormous agricultural, scientific, technological, financial, and military capacity, the United States possesses an exceptional material base upon which to build a new stage after global hegemony.

Some current American behaviors may acquire a different interpretation from this perspective. Donald Trump’s repeated interest in Greenland, his statements about Canada, renewed attention to the Panama Canal, or the desire to reaffirm American primacy in the Western Hemisphere may form part of a perspective that once again places the immediate geopolitical space of the United States at the center of its priorities. A power that progressively concentrates its attention on its own hemisphere can continue to project enormous global influence while adapting the extent of its commitments to a new global distribution of power.

This is the strength of Yeo’s hypothesis. The United States possesses the material elements necessary to transform planetary hegemony into an extraordinarily strong continental power. An orderly retreat could make it possible to concentrate resources, select interests, redefine commitments, and preserve an enormous capacity for influence for generations. But this adaptation could have an even more important consequence than preserving a position among the great powers: it could contribute to preserving the prosperity, stability, and very cohesion of the United States during the transition toward a new historical stage.

This is where the metaphor of Byzantium acquires its deepest meaning. Retreating can constitute a strategy of continuity. Accepting a more limited sphere of influence, adapting ambitions to the available resources, and building a new relationship with the world can provide the country with the time necessary to also transform its internal balances. The loss of hegemony, external retreat, and internal transformations can form part of a process that unfolds over many decades, perhaps over generations, because the great cycles of power follow a temporal scale much longer than that of the governments that administer them.

The decisive difficulty therefore appears in the capacity of the United States itself to accept this transformation. A society that throughout its history has known a general trajectory of expansion, growth, and accumulation of power will have to learn to build continuity within a different historical phase. The resources to do so exist. The territory, wealth, technology, and human capacity do as well. The question that remains open is how a society that has turned global leadership into part of its own identity will react when that leadership ceases to define its relationship with the world. To become Byzantium, Americans will first have to accept that Rome has fallen.

1. The Problem of the Empire May Ultimately Be the United States Itself

The United States is a young country. In less than three centuries, it has gone from being thirteen colonies that gained independence from the British Empire to expanding to the Pacific, becoming a great industrial power, intervening decisively in the global conflicts of the 20th century, and ultimately occupying the center of the international order. Its history contains a devastating Civil War, profound economic crises, social conflicts, military defeats, and periods of enormous political tension, but the country’s secular trajectory has followed an extraordinarily persistent general direction: territorial expansion, economic growth, accumulation of power, and an increase in its influence over the world. Generation after generation, with advances and setbacks, Americans have lived within a country that was expanding its power.

This trajectory has contributed to building a particular national identity. American exceptionalism, American Dream, Manifest Destiny, Leader of the Free World, Greatest Nation on Earth express different forms of the same conviction: the United States occupies a singular place in history and its progress is an almost natural part of the development of the world. For generations, this narrative has coexisted with a reality that seemed to confirm it. The country grew, became richer, expanded its influence, and ultimately achieved global leadership. Being number one, which initially could be understood as the result of an extraordinary accumulation of power, progressively ends up becoming an end in itself.

Here appears an essential difference between a crisis and a change of cycle. The United States has experienced many crises and has demonstrated an enormous capacity to overcome them. A crisis, however, can unfold within a generally ascending trajectory. The process we propose in this article has a different nature: the progressive loss of hegemony would introduce the United States into a secular phase that forms part of the history of all great concentrations of power and that, because of its historical youth, it has not yet experienced. Other long-lasting empires and civilizations have incorporated into their memory periods of expansion, maturity, decline, fragmentation, and reconstruction. The United States will have to learn for the first time to manage a stage in which the general direction of its relative power may cease to be upward.

The way it reacts to this transformation may accelerate it or make it possible to manage it. When returns, alliances, monetary centrality, and dependencies provide the desired results, hegemony can reproduce itself with a high proportion of consent and shared interest. As other countries expand their autonomy, the United States still possesses a formidable set of instruments with which to preserve its position: military force, sanctions, tariffs, financial control, technological restrictions, access to markets, and diplomatic pressure. All of them form part of the real power of a state. The issue arises when coercion progressively occupies the space previously occupied by centrality, dependence, and mutual return. The United States can accelerate the loss of its empire precisely if, convinced that it is entitled to preserve it, it attempts to retain by force what a growing part of the world prefers to decide for itself.

The loss of hegemony may then constitute the first stage of a much longer process. The retreat toward a more limited geopolitical space may progressively become a response to the new global distribution of power. And this retreat may coincide with a third transformation: tensions that during the expansionary stage coexisted with a powerful shared narrative of prosperity, leadership, and exceptionalism acquire a different weight within domestic politics. Territorial inequalities, different economic models, increasingly distant political identities, demographic divergences, and conflicts between the states and the federal government may begin to be interpreted within a new framework. The three stages—loss of hegemony, retreat, and intensification of internal tensions—may overlap and feed one another for decades, because great historical processes rarely wait for one phase to have completely ended before beginning the next.

At this point, a possibility appears that today may seem extreme and that, over a horizon of many decades, deserves to form part of the question. The United States is a continental federation made up of states with very different economic dimensions, productive structures, political cultures, and interests. California, for example, possesses on its own an economy comparable to those of the great world powers and often expresses political orientations profoundly different from those of other parts of the federation; other states present, in different directions, a strong awareness of their own interests. A sustained acceleration of internal imbalances could over time modify the way some of these societies assess the relationship between autonomy, belonging, and federation. The cohesion of the United States is also a historical construction and, like every historical construction, will depend on the capacity to continue generating sufficient shared interests, projects, and expectations among the parts that form it.

Thus, the problem of the fall of the empire may ultimately shift from the world map to the map of the United States itself. The process could take many decades or more than a century, experience periods of recovery, accelerations, and new forms of equilibrium. The exact timing matters less than the direction we observe. The final question is to what extent a society built throughout almost all of its history upon expansion will know how to transform the progressive loss of external centrality into a new source of internal cohesion. The continuity of the United States after the empire will ultimately depend on its capacity to build an idea of America that continues to make sense when being America no longer means leading the world.

1. Will the United States Survive the Fall of the American Empire?

We thus arrive at the question that has run through this entire article. The history of great concentrations of power shows processes that, with different forms, rhythms, and circumstances, follow recognizable trajectories: they are born, grow, expand, reach maturity, accumulate contradictions, transform the structures that had made them strong, and ultimately yield part of their centrality to other actors and to new forms of organization of power. Decline does not mean disappearance. It means transformation. Rome, the European empires, and many other structures of power continue to project consequences long after leaving behind the culminating moment of their hegemony. The United States forms part of the same human history.

For this reason, we can affirm that the main question is not whether American hegemony will be eternal. History already provides us with the answer. The uncertainty lies in the pace, form, and consequences of the process. It may last for decades, span generations, and extend through much of this century or beyond. It may contain periods of recovery, new expansions, crises, retreats, and adaptations. Great historical cycles rarely draw a straight line. But the signs we have examined point in the same direction: the world is expanding its centers of power, allies are acquiring autonomy, regions are building their own balances, monetary, commercial, and technological alternatives are appearing, and the relationship with the United States is progressively becoming an option that coexists with other options.

This transformation can advance while the United States continues to be immensely powerful. This is perhaps one of the keys to understanding the process. The dollar can continue to dominate, the American armed forces can continue to be formidable, its companies can continue to lead decisive technologies, and its markets can continue to attract capital from around the world. Hegemony transforms at another level: in the capacity of others to make decisions according to their own interests. The empire begins to retreat when the world develops sufficient alternatives to relate to the United States by choice and not out of necessity.

The American response will determine an important part of what comes next. The United States can use its extraordinary material base to adapt to this new reality, redefine its priorities, concentrate resources, preserve prosperity, and build a new form of power compatible with a multipolar world. This is the possibility we symbolized with Byzantium: turning retreat into continuity. It can also attempt to prolong hegemony by using with increasing intensity the instruments of coercion it still controls—military, monetary, financial, commercial, or technological—and thus accelerate the construction of alternatives by the very actors it wants to keep within its sphere. The way the United States manages the loss of centrality will form part of the very process that will determine the speed of that loss.

From here, the process can advance inward. The loss of hegemony, external retreat, and the intensification of internal imbalances may constitute successive and overlapping stages of the same long-term transformation. A society accustomed throughout almost all of its history to growing, expanding, and accumulating power will have to build, for the first time, a collective identity capable of sustaining itself within a different trajectory. And in a continental federation made up of states with increasingly differentiated economies, political cultures, social structures, and interests, this reconstruction of shared identity will acquire decisive importance. California, Texas, or any other territory with great economic scale and a strong political personality will continue to form part of the Union insofar as belonging to that Union continues to provide a shared project powerful enough to integrate the differences.

Here appears the deepest hypothesis of this article. The end of the American empire could ultimately put to the test something far more important than the position of the United States in the world: the capacity of the United States itself to continue existing as we know it today. This possibility may lie at the end of this century, in the next, or on an even more distant horizon; it may also be managed through institutional transformations capable of renewing federal cohesion. What matters is recognizing the nature of the process. When the external power that for generations had fueled prosperity, expectations, and a particular conception of its own exceptionalism diminishes, internal balances acquire a new weight and continuity ceases to rest on expansion and comes to depend on the capacity to build a new reason to remain together.

This will probably be the most difficult historical test American society will have faced since the Civil War. For less than three centuries, the United States has learned to expand, grow, innovate, accumulate wealth, project power, and reach the summit. Now a stage is beginning to take shape in which it will have to learn something different: to continue being a prosperous and cohesive society while sharing with others the power that for a few decades it came to regard almost naturally as its own. Its enormous capacity for adaptation constitutes its principal asset for achieving this; the identification between national exceptionalism and global supremacy constitutes one of the tensions it will have to resolve.

For this reason, after the entire journey, the question in the title acquires a different meaning from the one it had at the beginning. The fall of the American empire may extend over a very long period, and the United States may continue to be an extraordinary power throughout this process. The decisive question is what it will do with this strength while the world learns to organize itself around it in a different way, and what it will do with itself when the secular direction of its history ceases to coincide with the expansion of its power.

The American empire does not exist. But it is falling.

The great question of the century is not only what will occupy the space it leaves behind. It is whether the United States will be capable of passing through the fall of its empire and continuing to exist, united, on the other side.

Conversa CIATP

@…

Publicar comentari