United States: Heyday or Decline?

Can one mistake a seemingly emerging period, like the supposed "new American golden age" proclaimed by Trump, for one that is actually a swan song? Of course: at certain times of the year, like this one in January, the velvety red of sunrise and sunset are identical, especially on windy days like those we had last week. Perhaps MAGA America is a pure optical illusion, more twilight than dawn. Perhaps even such a striking and militarily flawless success as the kidnapping of Maduro doesn't mean much. The history of empires is a succession of chance apogees and inexorable declines. Despite the diversity of contexts, cultures, and political structures, periods of decline share some recurring features from the earliest civilizations to contemporary powers. In the ancient world, one of the most common, though not the only, was the inability to maintain increasingly complex and expensive structures. The impossibility of effective territorial administration, suffocating tax pressure, and the need for gigantic armies were common features of the imperial declines of antiquity; the Roman case is the most studied and often the most emblematic. In the modern world, the agony of the Ottoman Empire, for example, is also significant: excessive bureaucracy, loss of military control, and an inability to adapt to changing times. In general, history shows that decline is not exactly an accident, but a structural process that inevitably accompanies the very logic of imperial expansion. Precisely for this reason, Emmanuel Todd accurately predicted the fall of the USSR a decade in advance, based primarily on demographic indicators.

Sometimes, moments of (apparent) brilliance coincide with underlying tensions that foreshadow decline; the aforementioned metaphor of the swan song aptly summarizes these situations. Periods of economic upturn or structural change can be deceptive: many empires have experienced phases of apparent growth or expansion just before collapsing. In the case of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the modernizing reforms masked a crumbling, exhausted structure. The same occurred with the changes that Mikhail Gorbachev proposed to the USSR around 1985. Contrary to what the well-intentioned Western armchair Marxists wanted to perceive at the time—a vigorous aggiornamento of real socialism that would be an alternative to American capitalism—the perestroika It was the swan song of a system that, in fact, never worked. The Trumpian political narrative can create the illusory feeling of vigor, and the ever-reliable narrative of "national rebirth" mobilizes, unites, and generates expectations both within and beyond imperial borders. In contrast, deep structural weaknesses, such as inequalities or demographic dysfunctions, are less conspicuous. Within the MAGA world, expressions like "new golden age" or similar ones are part of a political narrative, not an objective diagnosis. No one doubts the success of the Maduro operation, but a swan song is usually precisely that: a final burst of energy and power immediately before decline. Is this really the case for the United States? Perhaps the answer lies in the fixation on Greenland, which, incidentally, predates Trump by quite some time. When an empire depends too heavily on suppliers, raw materials, or technologies from other powers, something is amiss. In fact, the history of tariffs, in this precise sense, has an ambivalent interpretation. Having the upper hand doesn't guarantee what gets cooked or not cooked. I mean, hoarding all of Venezuela's oil doesn't mean much if your automotive industry is already rotten or if your agricultural production depends largely on the undocumented labor you paradoxically want to expel.

The Rome of Caligula (37-41 AD) was immense and rich, but also turbulent and unstable in every sense. Let it be clear that I do not intend to make a comparison that would necessarily be anachronistic, but merely to offer an illustration. The brief reign of that sinister figure combined a beginning of hope and optimism with a growing climate of fear, extravagance, cruelty, and tension among the people, the Senate, and the army. However, at that time the Roman Empire had no real rival: the Punic Wars had ended victoriously almost two centuries earlier. The Carthage of the United States, on the other hand, exists. It is called China, and it is the world's factory.