America is not yet declining but appears willing to let itself down

Many in New Delhi—from cabinet ministers to young officers—had misgivings about the relationship and argued that partnering with a superpower would undermine India’s strategic autonomy. With the exception of the formidable K. Subrahmanyam, very few were comfortable making the realist argument that a closer alliance with the United States was in India’s interest.

Towards the end of the George W. Bush presidency, it became fashionable in Washington—and helpful to Barack Obama’s election campaign—to talk about the decline of American power. Fareed Zakaria wrote a book about the post-American world in 2008. This played very well in New Delhi, both because the predicted shift in the global balance of power towards Asia was good news, but also because it buttressed the old claim that the US was on its way down. Time and again, I found myself in a minority pointing out that declinism was a favourite American pastime for decades and Americans have been lamenting the decline of their country for over 200 years.

I gave three reasons why fears of America’s terminal decline were exaggerated. First, the American political system is designed to recover from serious mistakes that its leaders (like all others) tend to make. Second, its higher education ecosystem is outstanding. And third, it has long been the magnet for the world’s most talented and enterprising people. As long as the US held on to these advantages, I argued, it will remain the world’s dominant power.

In the past 15 years, it is shocking how the US has inflicted serious damage on all three pillars of its strength. No, I still do not think you should short the US, but the harm it has inflicted on itself is perhaps unprecedented. Unless its self-correcting mechanism kicks in soon enough, a decline is possible. Even after the 2008 global financial crisis, I never thought I’d write this sentence.

Consider the first of my three reasons: political resilience. Frequent elections, presidential term limits, policy adversarialism and institutional strength created the conditions for the American system to change policies once it was clear they had failed. All political leaders and governments err, but not all systems can acknowledge errors and change direction. Mao Zedong and his policies are still not officially seen as wrong in China, but the mistakes made by the US from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden are not only discussed threadbare, but correctives are applied. 

Yet, in the past decade, extreme partisanship has wrecked its self-correcting mechanisms. The US Supreme Court has reduced itself from being a credible arbiter to just another player. The US Congress seems dysfunctional. The country is set for a highly controversial presidential election this year. There is, of course, a lot of resilience in the system at all levels, but it is under greater strain today than it has been in decades.

The US university system is still the world’s best, but it is caught in deep crises of its own. The ongoing campus protests expose the contradictions and dubious policies that the American university has come to embrace in the past decade. For years, a creeping climate of fear enveloped campuses as professors could be punished for falling foul of political correctness codes. 

Big donors and alumni groups became powerful. They abridged academic freedom, the single most important thing in education. As Timur Kuran wrote on X, “US universities should never have abandoned institutional neutrality. And they should never had allowed DEI to morph into a system that promotes identity politics. Sooner or later, these missteps would come to haunt them. That day has arrived." Students have noticed the gap between US ideals and policy. The pro-Palestinian protests could jolt the university ecosystem to rethink the path it is on, but I cannot say for sure.

America still attracts good immigrants, despite controversies over how to deal with illegal immigration. The ability to acquire high-quality human capital without spending a cent is an advantage few of its rivals possess.

The best analysis of the rise and fall of great powers is still Paul Kennedy’s 1988 book, which the assemblage of experts in Washington seems to have forgotten. He showed that powers rise with economic growth and decline due to military overstretch. While the constituents of US dynamism are beginning to flash amber, it finds itself embroiled in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine wars. Taiwan is an iceberg that lies somewhere ahead. With the Biden administration losing moral stature and undermining the rules-based world order, the US will have to rely even more on hard power in pursuit of its goals. This risks the overstretch that Kennedy warned of.