Tuesday 14 / July / 2026
History shows that transitions in leadership among great powers have never been sudden events or the result of a single crisis.
Rather, they are the culmination of a long historical process in which internal transformations interact with international developments. Empires do not lose their status because of one military defeat or a temporary economic slowdown. They decline when their ability to convert economic, military, and technological resources into sustainable political influence weakens, and when the foundations of their domestic and international legitimacy begin to erode.
From this perspective, the central question in strategic studies is no longer whether the United States still possesses the world’s most powerful military or one of its largest economies. Instead, it is whether America can preserve the structural foundations that have underpinned its global dominance since the end of the Cold War. Hegemony is not based solely on possessing instruments of power; it also depends on the ability to use them effectively, maintain the legitimacy of international leadership, and balance external commitments with domestic stability.
When Francis Fukuyama published his thesis on the “End of History” in 1992, the United States was at the height of its strategic supremacy. The collapse of the Soviet Union had created a unipolar international system, and the liberal democratic model appeared to represent the final framework for organizing international relations. Yet that period proved to be an exceptional historical moment rather than a permanent law governing the evolution of the international order.
Over the following three decades, global power dynamics underwent profound transformation. China emerged as a formidable economic, technological, and geopolitical competitor.
Russia regained a significant measure of its military and diplomatic influence. At the same time, regional powers acquired increasing capacity to shape developments within their own strategic environments.
Foremost among them is Iran, which, despite sanctions and sustained international pressure, has established itself as an influential regional power by expanding its military and missile capabilities and strengthening its political and security influence across several Middle Eastern arenas.
As a result, Iran has become an indispensable actor in many of the region’s strategic calculations. This reality reflects the growing autonomy of regional powers and the declining ability of any single global power to monopolise the management of international balances.
Nevertheless, the most significant challenge to America’s future lies not only in the rise of its competitors, but also in its own internal structural transformations. Political polarisation has evolved beyond conventional partisan rivalry into a deeper conflict over the nature of the state, constitutional interpretation, the limits of federal authority, and the meaning of national identity. This reflects a weakening of the political and social consensus that has historically been one of America’s greatest sources of strength.
These developments coincide with a rapidly growing national debt, the rising costs of maintaining a global military presence, intense competition in advanced technologies, the restructuring of global supply chains, and broader shifts within the international economy. While these trends do not necessarily signal an imminent economic collapse, they indicate that maintaining global leadership has become far more costly and complex than at any previous time.
At the same time, traditional instruments of hegemony are no longer producing the same outcomes they achieved in previous decades. Economic sanctions, military interventions, and political pressure are increasingly encountering limitations in a world gradually moving toward multiple centers of power. Moreover, the excessive use of force—or the abandonment of the legal and institutional commitments that the United States itself helped establish after the Second World War—erodes the legitimacy of American leadership and weakens confidence in the international order it has long championed. History demonstrates that legitimacy is no less important than power itself; when power becomes detached from legitimacy, it gradually transforms from an instrument of dominance into a source of strategic exhaustion.
From a theoretical perspective, the ideas of Ibn Khaldun remain remarkably relevant in interpreting this stage. He argued that states reach the height of their strength when they possess a unifying social cohesion (asabiyyah) that binds society around a common political project. Decline begins when those bonds of solidarity weaken and internal divisions outweigh national consensus. This perspective resonates with Oswald Spengler’s theory of the life cycle of civilizations, Arnold Toynbee’s argument that civilizations endure only when their elites successfully respond to historical challenges, and Paul Kennedy’s thesis that imperial overstretch transforms the very sources of power into burdens when external commitments exceed the economy’s capacity to sustain them.
Viewed through these theoretical frameworks, the United States faces a historic test that is not defined by the magnitude of its current power, but by its ability to renew the foundations of that power, restore domestic cohesion, and redefine its international role within a strategic environment characterized by multiple centers of influence and the growing independence and influence of both global and regional powers.
Accordingly, the more important question is not whether the United States will collapse—a question that cannot be answered with certainty—but whether it can adapt to the structural transformations reshaping the international system, renew its institutions, and reconcile power with legitimacy in the conduct of its foreign policy.
The future of the international order will not be determined solely by the extent of American power, but by the ability of both major and regional powers to forge new strategic balances. If the United States succeeds in renewing its domestic project and adapting its strategy to this changing reality, it may well remain the world’s most influential power, even if it is no longer the sole dominant one. If, however, current structural trends continue without meaningful reform, the world may gradually evolve toward a genuinely multipolar order in which major powers, alongside rising regional actors such as Iran, play increasingly significant roles in shaping global security, politics, and economics.
Ultimately, the issue is not predicting the collapse of the United States, but understanding whether it has entered a phase of imperial decline—a stage in which a state transitions from unchallenged hegemony to competition within a more balanced and multipolar international system. History grants no nation permanent supremacy, but it does offer every great power the opportunity to rebuild the foundations of its strength before international transformations impose a new reality.
