American decline

American decline is the idea that the United States is diminishing in power on a relative basis geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, and technologically.

[4][5][6] Shrinking military advantages, deficit spending, geopolitical overreach, and a shift in moral, social, and behavioral conditions have been associated with American decline.

"[15] Paul Kennedy posits that continued deficit spending, especially on military build-up, is the single most important reason for decline of any great power.

The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were as of 2017 estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion, which Kennedy deems a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to humiliate America by showcasing its casualty averseness and lack of will to persist in a long-term conflict.

[16] Kennedy made similar assessments about American decline in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which he projected "a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly.

[18] According to historian Emmanuel Todd, an expansion in military activity and aggression can appear to reflect an increase in capacity while masking a decline in actual power.

Weisbrode likens pre-revolutionary France and present-day America for their vulgarity, which he argues is "an almost natural extension or outcome of all that is civilized: a glorification of ego.

The first had come "with the 'Sputnik Shock' of 1957," the second with the Vietnam War, the third with President Jimmy Carter's "malaise" and the rise of Japan, and the fourth with the increased power of China.

"[29] David Leonhardt writes that "incomes, wealth, and life expectancy in the United States have stagnated for much of the population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions.

"[31] Jonathan Hopkin writes that decades of neoliberal policies, which made the United States "the most extreme case of the subjection of society to the brute force of the market," resulted in unprecedented levels of inequality, and combined with an unstable financial system and limited political choices, paved the way for political instability and revolt, as evidenced by the resurgence of the Left as represented by the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign and the rise of an "unlikely figure" like Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

[37] Some centrists believe that the American fiscal crisis stems from the rising expenditures on social programs or, alternatively, from the increases in military spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which would lead to decline.

Lachmann describes the real problem as "the misallocation of government revenue and expenditure, resulting in resources being diverted from the tasks vital to maintain economic or geopolitical dominance.

Daniel H. Rosen, a long-time analyst of U.S.-China economic relationship, said that it is natural that foreign investment would decline sharply in the U.S. under extraordinary circumstances due to its open market economy, a feature that China lacks.

"[47] According to American economist Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell, "China looks a lot more like 1980s Mexico or Turkey than 1980s Taiwan or South Korea.

[48][49] Rozelle and Hell warn that China risks falling into the middle income trap due to the rural-urban divide in education and structural unemployment.

According to Daniel Bell, "many of America's leading commentators have had a powerful impulse consistently to see the United States as a weak, 'bred out' basket case that will fall to stronger rivals as inevitably as Rome fell to the barbarians or France to Henry V at Agincourt.

Hudson adds that whenever history repeats itself, the cost increases; in this case, the U.S. is destroying itself due to bank debt with no way to forgive it, making collapse inevitable.

James ended the article by saying that the economic decline will continue even if there is a change in leadership, pointing to Mikhail Gorbachev's inability to prevent collapse despite coming to power just a few years after Leonid Brezhnev's death.

[55] Also in 2020, political commentator Julius Krein argued that the decline of the United States parallels the late Soviet Union vis-à-vis the "unmistakable" slide into gerontocracy.

Also, the survey says, a majority of the people thought the U.S. would be "a country with a burgeoning national debt, a wider gap between the rich and the poor and a workforce threatened by automation.