America at the edge: Lessons from Rome, warnings from history

Empires rarely recognize the moment their power begins to slip. The Romans didn’t. The Ottomans didn’t. The British certainly didn’t. The causes differ – corruption, revolts, economic stagnation – but as Edward Gibbon wrote in his majestic book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the through-line of imperial collapse is almost always the same: “the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” The borders extend, the armies swell, the debt mounts, and the center buckles under the weight of its ambitions.

For decades, the United States had believed itself immune to such laws of history. It emerged from World War II as the single unrivaled power, and the Soviet collapse in 1991 left Washington not just unchallenged but unaccustomed to challenge. American leaders repeated for years a comforting fiction — that the post-Cold War order was permanent.

It wasn’t.

Today, China’s rise is no longer theoretical. It’s measurable, visible, documented, and in many domains already realized. The only honest debate in Washington is whether Beijing surpasses the United States in 2050, 2060, or, as Harvard’s Graham Allison bluntly argues, “in many critical metrics it already has.”

The empire is overextending. The question is whether it will learn from history before history renders its verdict.

A Warning from the Past

In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The thesis was unsettling: great nations fall when military commitments outpace economic strength. He termed it “imperial overstretch,” and his evidence cut across continents – Spain in the 17th century, France under Napoleon, Britain in the 20th.

And this conclusion was directed at Washington: no nation, however rich, can long spend more on defence than its rivals spend on everything else.

Four decades later, Kennedy’s warning reads like prophecy.

• The United States maintains more than 800 military bases in over 70 countries — more than any empire in history.
• It spends more on defense than the following nine countries combined.

Its national debt now stands at $37 trillion, a sum larger than the combined economies of China, Japan, Germany, and India.

Such a trajectory is unsustainable. As Gibbon would put it, the “resources of the state” are being drained not by invasion, but by the cost of preparing for one everywhere at once.

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The debt clock and the moment I understood

I remember the November afternoon in 1982 when this reality first dawned on me.

I was standing in Times Square, freezing wind cutting across Seventh Avenue. Above me loomed a vast electronic counter — spinning numbers at a dizzying pace. I asked a shop manager what it was. He glanced up and shrugged: “That’s the national debt. Those are zeros being added.”

It read $1.142 trillion.

That seemed astronomical at the time. These days, the United States adds that much debt roughly every nine months. The counter has gotten so big that the full number no longer fits on the original sign.

A country does not drift from $1.142 trillion to $37 trillion by accident. It does so by making monumental erroneous choices—political, strategic, and imperial.

The China challenge

Americans tend to think of China as an ambitious challenger. But in several key areas, Beijing is already ahead:

• Industrial capacity: China builds more ships, steel, solar panels, and electric vehicles than any nation in history.
• Purchasing power: According to the PPP, China’s economy surpassed America’s years ago.
• Infrastructure: China has 26,000 miles of high-speed rail; the U.S. has none.
• Diplomacy: The BRICS bloc is preparing to launch its own currency—a direct challenge to the dollar’s dominance.
• Trend: China has reduced its U.S. Treasury exposure gradually over the past decade, from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to $784.3 billion in February 2025.

Washington still leads in technology, finance, and the global reserve currency system. American universities remain unmatched. Silicon Valley is the world’s innovation engine. The U.S. Navy still commands the seas.

But China is not trying to be the mirror image of the United States. It’s building a different form of power: patient, economic, infrastructural, and increasingly diplomatic.

Beijing isn’t asking whether it will overtake the U.S.

It wants to know how the U.S. will react once it acknowledges the shift.

Will America Step Back — or Fight to Stay Relevant?

History shows two paths for a declining power.

1. Graceful recalibration

The British, exhausted from the economic stress of World War II, ceded global leadership to the U.S. They retrenched, divested, and prospered.

2. Desperate confrontation

Other empires fought ruinous wars to cling to the status they could no longer sustain: Spain in the Americas, France in Indochina, Russia in Afghanistan.

Allison calls this dynamic, in his book Destined for War, the Thucydides Trap: When a rising power threatens to displace an established one, war has often followed.

His warning is not abstract. It is aimed squarely at Washington.

A choice the United States faces is whether its future lies in sustainable leadership or in unsustainable dominance, whether it wants to be a nation or an empire. Whether it will adapt—or repeat the mistakes of the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, and every empire that believed itself historically exempt.

A Choice for the next president — and Congress

The decline of America is not inevitable. Neither is its continued primacy.

The choice isn’t whether China rises-it has. The choice is whether the United States continues a strategy of permanent global deployment, blank-check defense budgets and debt-driven supremacy… or whether it takes up Einstein’s mantra, “imagination is far more important than knowledge,” and recalibrates before the weight of its commitments crushes it.

Empires fall. Historians explain why. Leaders rarely listen. The next president — and the next Congress — still can.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.