My Take | Forget the rise of China, it’s the fall of America you should worry about

Since the end of World War II, few major historical events have taken place without the United States being involved in one way or another. They may not have always turned out to Washington’s liking, but its influence was unmistakable.

That is why many people, especially Americans, continue to think China’s inexorable rise may still be subject to Washington’s will. Great powers rarely know the limit of their power; once-great ones realise, usually too late, that they are no longer great or powerful. Modern history is full of such lessons.

Of the great powers that took part in the congress of Westphalia in 1648 – the settlement that ended the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War and which came to define the modern nation state – Sweden, Holland and Spain lost their status as “great”, and Poland ceased to exist as an independent entity, by the close of the 18th century.

France under Napoleon III, Britain under Winston Churchill and Soviet Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t know they had already lost their empire until it was too late. The fate of the United States will be no different from those in the face of the irresistible rise of China. This has less to do with China and everything to do with America’s internal decay.

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World shocked by assault on the US Capitol by radical pro-Trump supporters in Washington

World shocked by assault on the US Capitol by radical pro-Trump supporters in Washington

Most great empires, Arnold Toynbee once argued, end by committing suicide rather than being murdered.

But with their exceptionalism and profound myopia, Americans think they are exempt from history’s merciless fate. They won’t be. There are four areas in which Americans have reigned supreme from the second half of the last century: the military, the capitalist financial system, medicine and disease control, and democratic institutions.