The Sun Sets in the West
Like all empires, America thought it was eternal. But wars without victory and power without purpose proved otherwise. Decades of overreach, domestic decay & alienated allies ends the American Age
The Empire Didn't Fall. It Imploded.
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.” - Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, 19981
Once hailed as the ‘indispensable nation’, the United States now finds itself adrift—internally fractured, diplomatically isolated, and increasingly irrelevant to the architecture of the emerging global order. The decline is not sudden, nor is it the result of a foreign adversary’s cunning. Rather, it is the logical outcome of decades of imperial overstretch and short-sighted governance, capped by a presidency that turned dysfunction into spectacle. This is not a story of conquest but of collapse from within—a slow-motion act of imperial seppuku.
Few quotations better imbue the jingoistic swagger and evangelising spirit inherent in the U.S. project than Ms. Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. From sea to shining sea, America would manifest its destiny—to spread its political and economic system as an end in itself. But what happens when the system it evangelises is no longer credible, nor wanted?
Some will be asking themselves, ‘Is this the decline of American power, moral authority, influence, or legitimacy?’ I contend this is not merely the decline of military might or global GDP share, but the erosion of moral legitimacy, economic credibility, and the very capacity to inspire others to follow.
I. The Trump Acceleration: Hubris, Chaos, and Short-termism
Tariff Wars and Economic Nationalism
Trump's imposition of tariffs on China, Canada, and the EU weakened global confidence in the U.S. as a champion of free trade. These policies alienated key allies, provoked retaliatory tariffs, and disrupted global supply chains.
Worse, they undermined the very institutions the U.S. had created to manage global capitalism, including the WTO2.
"Big Beautiful Debt": Fiscal Irresponsibility as Imperial Suicide
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ballooned the deficit without spurring meaningful economic growth3. Military spending soared while tax revenues declined—a case of military Keynesianism without the returns. The result: spiralling national debt and growing international doubts about the long-term viability of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Alienating Strategic Allies
From public feuds with Canada and Germany to withdrawals from key multilateral agreements like the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran Nuclear Deal, Trump’s foreign policy fostered unpredictability and unreliability. Even NATO was described as "obsolete" before political pressure forced a partial backtrack.
Erosion of Soft Power
Trump’s nativism, anti-scientific rhetoric, and norm-breaking governance made the U.S. appear dysfunctional and unserious during his first term. Pew Research Centre surveys showed international confidence in U.S. leadership plummeting during his first tenure in the White House4. If Trump 2.0 is MAGA unleashed, what remains will surely not be admiration, but a kind of grim amusement—the U.S. had become a self-parody of empire.
Hollywood’s global sway is also diminishing. Blockbusters increasingly rely on Chinese co-production and box office approval, diluting American narrative control. How many even knew that between 2016 and 2024 China's Wanda Group owned Batman? Wanda bought Dark Knight movie studio Legendary Entertainment in 2016, giving them ownership of Batman until Legendary bought out Wanda's stake in a huge 2024 deal.
Meanwhile, the cultural prestige once attached to U.S. higher education is slipping, worsened by Trump-era attacks on elite institutions like Harvard and the vilification of international students. On platforms like TikTok and YouTube, multilingual influencers challenge the dominance of Anglophone media, while Confucius Institutes—despite controversy—have become bridgeheads for Chinese cultural diplomacy and language training abroad.
II. The Long Decay: Interventionist Overreach and Neoliberal Hypocrisy
Liberal Interventionism and the Crisis of Legitimacy
From Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, wars justified through the language of democracy and human rights ended in ruin, sectarianism, and mass displacement. What was presented as noble idealism now reads as cynical regime change, especially given the economic interests often at stake. American liberals like Madeline Albright saw exporting the U.S. political system as an end in itself, regime change conveniently packaged in the self-regarding language of ‘manifest destiny’.
America’s moral authority has never recovered. The Global South increasingly turns to alternative partnerships—including China and BRICS—not from ideological alignment, but from exhaustion with U.S. hypocrisy5.
Neoconservatism and Permanent War
Beyond the crusading instincts of American liberal jingoism, the neoconservative ideology plays a crucial role. An ideology which normalized endless war, with over 800 U.S. bases worldwide, American power increasingly resembles imperial encroachment. Far from spreading stability, U.S. interventions have fostered resentment and instability—notably contributing to the rise of ISIS after the Iraq invasion.
It is worth recalling that the leading neoconservative and chief Iraq war evangelist Bill Kristol lamented via his neoconservative think tank ‘Project for a New American Century’ (PNAC) that a great foreign policy reordering would require “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”6 He laid that out in September 2000, a year prior to the ‘catalyzing’ event of 9/11. Naturally, Kristol salivatingly declared in the immediate aftermath, “We've just been present at a very unusual moment, the creation of a new American foreign policy.”7
The normalization of unlimited objectives in a vicious cycle of endless warfare.
Domestic Blowback: Hollowed-Out Institutions
Trillions were spent on overseas wars while American infrastructure crumbled. Veterans returned disillusioned; civil-military trust eroded. Meanwhile, the post-9/11 security apparatus—from the Patriot Act to mass surveillance—was increasingly turned inward, undermining civil liberties and public trust.
Bipartisan Foundations of Collapse
From Clinton’s financial deregulation and Bush’s Patriot Act to Obama’s drone wars and Libya intervention, the arc of American decline was bipartisan. The myth of liberal order masked policies that hollowed out domestic resilience and global trust alike. NAFTA offshored manufacturing and gutted working-class communities. Deregulation of Wall Street under both parties set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. And the so-called War on Terror—sustained across four administrations—accelerated global resentment while militarizing domestic policing.
III. A Return to the East: Multipolarity, De-dollarisation, and China's Endurance
A Historical Correction
The end of U.S. hegemony is not the fall of civilization, but the rebalancing of it. For 18 of the last 20 centuries, the world’s economic gravity lay in the East—in China, India, and the spice islands. The last 200 years of Western dominance were the anomaly, not the rule.
China’s resurgence is thus less a “rise” than a return. Far from an upstart challenger, China sees itself as reclaiming a central place in global affairs it occupied for centuries, but unlike the U.S., or the former USSR, Beijing does not seek to export a political system as an end goal. Its model of market socialism—state-led capitalism, paired with strategic industrial policy—has proved resilient in the face of American containment. Biden’s CHIPs Act, aimed at choking China’s access to high-end semiconductors, has failed to halt Chinese advances in AI, green tech, and telecommunications.
European Resetting
Even in the West, the logic of exclusion is faltering. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaking to the European Parliament recently, pointedly referred to U.S.-EU “shared values” in the past tense. That was no accident. She pledged a reciprocal tariff response to ongoing U.S tariff threats and, more tellingly, signalled a pivot: eastward. In January, von der Leyen declared that “breaking taboos” was now necessary.8 At Davos, she doubled down, vowing that the first trip of her new Commission would be to India. “We want to strengthen the strategic partnership with the country,” she pledged before adding the real zinger: “I believe we should also strive for mutual benefits in our conversation with China.”
The EU is clearly preparing to thaw China relations, with one eye on the long-stalled Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI). It’s a not-so-subtle way of telling Washington: if you’re going to treat us like adversaries, don’t be surprised when we explore our options. In short, Europe has realised it has agency and is no longer a passive partner under Pax Americana.
For those who do not remember, the CAI was politically agreed in December 2020, but quickly frozen in 2021—officially due to mutual sanctions over human rights. Unofficially? The Biden administration made its displeasure known. U.S. officials leaned hard on Brussels, furious that Europe dared negotiate with Beijing without Washington’s “consultation.” Jake Sullivan, then Biden’s national security adviser, tweeted that the U.S. would “welcome early consultation”—which European leaders read, quite correctly, as a patronising demand to fall back in line.
Washington got its wish. In March 2021, the U.S. roped in its loyal wingmen—the UK and Canada—to pressure the EU into joining sanctions against Chinese officials over Xinjiang. In response, Beijing hit back with counter-sanctions, including five Members of the European Parliament9. And just like that, the CAI was dead in the water—another casualty of America’s insistence on staying “at the head of the table.”
Europe lost. China lost. America got what it wanted: strategic stasis. However, Trump’s tariff madness is the catalyst breaking that stasis. With the U.S. increasingly seen as an unreliable economic partner, Europe is starting to revisit old questions with new urgency.
Yes, a full revival of CAI remains unlikely—political distrust and values-based divisions haven’t disappeared. But what’s on the table now is something more modular: sector-specific agreements in green tech, digital services, or electric vehicles. Something cautious. Something conditional. But something, nonetheless, to be strongly welcomed.
In the short term, expect more defensive trade policy from Brussels—tariffs for deterrence, diplomacy through selective engagement. But longer term? Trump’s economic aggression might just push Europe and China back to the table, one sector at a time.
The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) between China and the EU remains frozen, 2024 has seen cautious efforts to revive sectoral cooperation. European businesses remain keen to access Chinese markets, and Brussels is increasingly charting a path distinct from Washington’s decoupling strategy.
De-dollarisation and Financial Sovereignty
Nations are bypassing the U.S. dollar in energy deals, notably between China and Russia, and within BRICS-led trade discussions. The weaponization of the dollar through sanctions has even spooked allies. If the dollar loses reserve currency status, the consequences for the U.S. economy could be catastrophic.
IV. Conclusion: The Empire That Imploded
The United States was not defeated—it simply collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Trump accelerated the fall, but the groundwork was laid long before: in the hubris of liberal interventionists, in the neoconservative commitment to permanent war, and in the bipartisan refusal to invest at home while projecting power abroad.
What we are witnessing is not merely the end of American hegemony, but the end of a delusion. The idea that the U.S. could see further into the future, that it alone could remake the world in its image, was always a myth—but it was a myth with bombs, sanctions, and surveillance attached.
Madeleine Albright once declared America to be “the indispensable nation.” The tragedy is not that the world no longer believes this. It’s that America still does
Dean M Thomson is currently a lecturer with Beijing Normal - Baptist University (BNBU), formerly known as Beijing Normal - Hong Kong Baptist University, United International College (UIC).
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U.S. Department of State Archive "The Today Show" with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html
United Nations Comtrade & WTO tariff data, Global Trade Report 2021, https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/wtr21_e/00_wtr21_e.pdf
Congressional Budget Office, Budgetary Outcomes Under Alternative Assumptions About the One‑Big‑Beautiful‑Bill Act, May 2025 https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Pew Research Center, America’s Image Abroad Rebounds With Transition From Trump to Biden, June 10, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/10/americas-image-abroad-rebounds-with-transition-from-trump-to-biden/
Council on Foreign Relations, The BRICS Summit 2023: Seeking an Alternate World Order? https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/brics-summit-2023-seeking-alternate-world-order
Kristol, William (2000, September), “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”, A Report of The Project for the New American Century, https://web.archive.org/web/20130817122719/http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
“Frontline: The War Behind Closed Doors”, (2003, January 14), PBS interview with William Kirstol, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/interviews/kristol.html
European Parliament, EU‑China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), December 2020 state of play https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/01/21/von-der-leyen-now-looks-east-india-and-china-as-alternatives-to-trumps-america/
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-global-europe-leveraging-our-power-and-partnerships/file-eu-china-investment-agreement