During their heyday, empires seem permanent, so strong and their rivals so weak that it is hard to imagine them being displaced from their position of dominance.But empires do die and historian of empires Albert McCoy writes that all the signs indicate that we are witnessing the end of the American empire.

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 U.S. 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.”

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.”

He says that the Roman Empire that lasted 500 years was an outlier in terms of longevity and more modern empires have had shorter lives.

[T]he modern age, with its rapid economic and technological change, has only accelerated imperial decline. Britain’s sprawling global empire lasted just 90 years (1857-1947) and France’s African empire, covering a quarter of that continent, was about the same, while the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe barely lasted 40 years (1945-1989). So, for the U.S. global imperium to have survived for 80 years (1945-2026) should be considered the most anyone could realistically expect for a modern empire.
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As I explained in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, the U.S. achieved its global hegemony after World War II by maintaining an unwavering geo-strategic dominance over the Eurasian land mass. Through its military alliances at both axial ends of that vast continent — the multilateral North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West and five bilateral defense pacts with countries ranging from Japan to Australia in the east — the U.S. imposed an “Iron Curtain” of 5,000 miles of anti-communist containment across Eurasia. Using those axial ends as anchors, the U.S. encircled the continent with three naval armadas, hundreds of military bases, and thousands of jet aircraft. With Moscow geopolitically isolated and Beijing still a developing power, Washington could simply sit back and wait for the Soviet Union’s increasingly stagnant socialist economy to collapse and its dozens of restive satellite states to break free — as they all did between 1989 and 1991.

In the 35 years since that great Cold War victory, Washington’s foreign policy elites have pursued policies that might all too accurately be branded “bipartisan mismanagement” of the U.S. geopolitical position in Eurasia.

Trump, by acting impulsively and unilaterally to advance US interests at the expense of everyone else, has accelerated the undermining of all the alliances that enabled the US to maintain its dominance.

McCoy further argues that the changing energy environment shapes the changing fortunes of empires, and what is happening in the energy field now does not bode well for the US, since it seems to be going in the opposite direction to what is happening globally.

Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.

In the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal maximized the caloric output of the human body by developing the slave plantation, whose phenomenal profitability allowed a uniquely cruel form of commercial agriculture to spread from West Africa along the coast of Brazil to the Caribbean and then, of course, to the American South. A century later, the Dutch mastered wind power, using windmills to saw uniform planks to build efficient sailing ships that won them a commercial empire stretching from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the island of Manhattan. In the nineteenth century, Britain’s industrial revolution developed coal-fired steam engines for factories, trains, and ships that facilitated its conquest of colonies covering a quarter of the globe. After 1945, America’s ascent to global hegemony would be synonymous with the rise of petroleum, quickly supplanting coal as the world’s primary form of energy and leading to repeated U.S. interventions in the Middle East for the past 70 years.

In recent years, however, Beijing has launched a revolution in green energy from the sun and wind whose accelerating pace, driven by its sheer economic efficiency, has the potential to transform much of the global economy, while simultaneously making China the world’s preeminent economic power. With surprising speed, solar-powered electrical generation has become 41% less expensive (and wind 53% cheaper) than the least expensive form of fossil fuel. In addition, engineering innovations in battery design for both driving and electrical storage are likely to make the cost of carbon-fueled power prohibitively expensive within a decade or less.

Under the Biden administration, Washington invested a trillion dollars to fund America’s baby steps toward a green-energy future. However, as soon as Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he began working to smother that infant initiative in its cradle beneath a sheaf of executive orders — canceling coastal wind farms, voiding the tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs), and opening vast stretches of U.S. offshore waters for yet more oil and natural gas drilling.

Meanwhile, China increased its total power generation by 16% in 2025, with solar and wind energy accounting for half of its total capacity. And just as China already produces 80% of the global supply of solar panels, so its recent innovations in EV battery design have allowed it to rack up 70% of global electric vehicle production. While China’s auto industry surged in the last five years to capture 24% of global car production in 2025 (and is projected to reach 35% in just four more years), Detroit’s share has fallen to only 16%, driven in part by its costly retreat from EV production since Trump’s return to office.

Given rapid advances in battery range, charge time, and temperature range, it’s only a matter of years before the low-cost cars rolling out of China’s vast robotic factories supplant legacy brands and come to dominate the global auto market. With the Detroit vehicle industry, America’s largest manufacturing sector, now struggling to survive (along with other industries wedded to overpriced carbon-generated fuel), the future of much of U.S. manufacturing looks increasingly dim.

Americans have sensed for some time that the US has been in a state of decline, hence the appeal of Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again. Nostalgia to return to past glories can be a powerful factor. But while he was able to tap into that sentiment to achieve personal power, his policies have only resulted in a more rapid decrease of the global influence and power of the US.

A different kind of leader may have been able to manage the inevitable decline of the American empire, to slowly withdraw to a more manageable state where the US acknowledges the rise of other powers and arrives at some kind of arrangement with them, so that the American empire becomes a reduced but sustainable entity. It would be like the way that the British retreated from their own empire.

But Trump is not that leader. He has placed all his bets on the military power of the US, that that alone will enable the US to maintain global dominance even over its putative allies. But in the current times, raw conventional military power alone is not enough because of the rise of asymmetric warfare. This was the case with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and the US with Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Meanwhile, China has played a long game, refraining from getting involved in costly wars, focusing instead on increasing its economic strength and, with its Belt and Road initiative, using soft power to create a quasi-empire.

Trump will go down in history as the president who could have presided over an orderly decline of the US empire but instead, by pursuing policies that had outlived their time, ended up driving it to a chaotic end.