Alfred McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the author of many books and articles on the nature of global power. He has written an article chronicling four legacy empires (France, Russia, China, and the US) and their declines.

He starts with France. The details of its colonial heyday were relatively unknown to me.

Let’s start with the French neocolonial imperium in northern Africa, which can teach us much about the way our world order works and why it’s fading so fast. As a comparatively small state essentially devoid of natural resources, France won its global power through the sort of sheer ruthlessness — cutthroat covert operations, gritty military interventions, and cunning financial manipulations — that the three larger empires are better able to mask with the aura of their awesome power.

For 60 years after its formal decolonization of northern Africa in 1960, France used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate 14 African nations into a neo-colonial imperium covering a quarter of Africa that critics called Françafrique.

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From Paris’s perspective, the aim of the game was the procurement of cut-rate commodities — minerals, oil, and uranium — critical for its industrial economy. To that end, Foccart proved a master of the dark arts, dispatching mercenaries and assassins in covert operations meant to eternally maximize French influence.
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By 2020, however, nationalist consciousness against repeated transgressions of their sovereignty was rising in many of those relatively new countries, putting pressure on French forces to withdraw. As its troops were expelled from Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, Russia’s secretive Wagner Group of mercenaries moved in and, by 2023, had become increasingly active there. Just last month, the foreign minister of Chad announced that it was time for his country “to assert its sovereignty” by expelling French forces from their last foothold in the Sahel, effectively ending Françafrique after 60 years of neocolonial dominion.

In those same months, Chad also expelled a U.S. Special Forces training unit, while nearby Niger cancelled U.S. Air Force access to Air Base 201 (which it had built at a cost of $110 million), leaving Russia the sole foreign power active in the region.

He then looks at Vladimir Putin’s overreach that is leading to Russia’s declinee.

In recent weeks, however, Putin’s geopolitical construct suffered a serious blow when rebels suddenly swept into Damascus, sending Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Moscow and ending his family’s more than 50 years in power. After suffering a stunning 700,000 casualties and the loss of 5,000 armored vehicles in three years of constant warfare in Ukraine, Russia had simply stretched its geopolitical reach too far and no longer had sufficient aircraft to defend Assad. In fact, there are signs that Russia is pulling out of its Syrian bases and so losing a key pivot for power projection in the Mediterranean and northern Africa.

Meanwhile, as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte condemned the “escalating campaign of Russia’s hostile actions” and its attempt to “crush our freedom and way of life,” Western Europe began ramping up its defense industries and cutting its economic ties to Russia. If Senator John McCain was right when, in 2014, he called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country,” then the rapid switch to alternative energy across Eurasia could, within a decade, rob Moscow of the finances for further adventures, reducing Russia, now also harried by economic sanctions, to a distinctly secondary regional power.

He then takes on China, whose empire was less about territorial annexation and more about using its rapidly growing economic power to dominate countries and regions. But that growth has stalled leading to unrest, especially among the young.

But there are ample signs that its economic juggernaut may have reached its limits under a Communist command-economy. Indeed, it now appears that, in clamping an ever-tighter grip on Chinese society by pervasive surveillance, the Communist Party may be crippling the creativity of its talented citizenry.

After a rapid 10-fold expansion in university education that produced 11 million graduates by 2022, China’s youth unemployment suddenly doubled to 20% and continued climbing to 21.3% a year later.
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The country’s macroeconomic statistics are growing ever grimmer as well. After decades of rip-roaring growth, its gross domestic product, which peaked at 13%, has recently slumped to 4.6%… .. Seeking markets beyond its flagging domestic economy, China, which already accounted for 60% of global electric vehicle purchases, is launching a massive export drive for its cut-rate electric cars which is about to crash headlong into rising tariff walls globally.
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Even China’s daunting military may be a bit of a paper tiger. After years of cloning foreign weapons, Beijing’s arms exports have reportedly dropped in recent years after buyers found them technologically inferior and unreliable on the battlefield.

And finally he looks at the US.

When it comes to that other great imperial force on Planet Earth, let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.

However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.
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Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.

In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources, coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.

When I step back and try to take a long view, it seems the US is in the state of late-stage monopolistic capitalism, where the productive energies unleashed by early competitive capitalism have been exhausted and all that is left is an eruption of giddy wealth accumulation by a few monopolists who pick over the decaying ruins of the decaying empire before the system crashes.