An autopsy of American empire

Oped from Asia Times written by Alfred McCoy

For those who may not know the name?

Alfred W McCoy is the Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.

An interesting read.

Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf—dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating their publication.

Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience.

With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.”

Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold.

Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.

Writing in a May 2026 edition of The New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of US global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago.

Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”

To the US, presently

At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.”

Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”

To test the probability of Caldwell’s prediction coming true, we need to go beyond the immediacy of the Iran crisis to explore both the deeper causes of US global decline and its likely long-term consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world.

Explaining US imperial decline

Since most Americans came late (if at all) to the realization that their country was indeed an imperial power, and a stunningly powerful one at that, they have generally remained oblivious to its aging and the inevitable erosion of global power that accompanies such aging.

Please do read the rest at the link provided