“The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organisational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another.” So wrote the British-born Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers published in 1988. It had an astonishing success, selling two million copies worldwide, principally because of the 20-page postscript added at his publisher’s prompting.
Entitled The United States: The Problem of Number One in Relative Decline, it compared the management problems facing the US to those of imperial Spain and Britain and asked whether it was adequately prepared for the imperial overstretch that faces great powers when uneven growth shifts their relative position.
It stimulated a fevered debate about how the US would balance its wealth, economic base and worldwide strategic commitments, as it faced competition from the Soviet Union, Japan, a reviving EEC and an emerging China. That it happened just before the Soviet bloc exploded and its regime collapsed and Japan peaked before a long relative decline took some credibility from Kennedy’s analysis. But this does not undermine its continuing salience for understanding great-power rivalry and positioning.
In a 2023 retrospective essay Kennedy reflected ruefully on his main arguments. Listing current world powers, he said the US must prioritise its worldwide economic interests and military resources faced with China surpassing its output; the EU with great regional potential; Russia attacking Ukraine and India and Japan with uncertain futures. It would be “a folly to claim to know where the next big change is going to take place, and what the first harbinger of a future hegemonic war could be. But it will arrive.”
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Trump was not mentioned, even though the shifting pivot to Asia and China’s growing power were clearly identified. Other historians, including Alfred McCoy, are reviving the comparative analysis of US imperial decline, contrasting its high state debt, deindustrialisation and carbon energy dependencies to China’s command of solar and wind alternatives, electric cars and Trump’s soft-power self-destruction. He too warns how dangerous such power transitions can be.
Kennedy foregrounds the EU’s potential. That makes it instructive to compare his great powers to Trump’s National Security Strategy. In a section cut from the final published version of the NSS, it advocates a core of five great powers – the US, China, Russia, India and Japan.
Conspicuously absent is the EU. The published NSS document makes clear its hostility to the EU as a threat to US power, along with warnings of Europe’s potential “civilisational erasure” if its white Christian culture is lost. The cut portion talks of separating Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland from the EU and is more explicit on US solidarity with its far-right Eurosceptic parties, movements and intellectuals.
[ Trump’s disturbing National Security Strategy should be required readingOpens in new window ]
Luuk Van Middelaar, political theorist of European integration, previous aide to former European Commission president Herman Von Rumpuy and now director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, says this shows Trump’s movement is revolutionary, like the Jacobins or Bolsheviks, and seeks to export its gospel.
The politics of identity and culture matter in this more multipolar world.
If enough attention is not paid to people’s sense of political identity, efforts to strengthen the EU’s security and economy will only prove populists right – because they will reinforce technocracy, or rule by distant experts and officials.
This is wise advice from an influential liberal democrat alert to the sudden and deep US geopolitical shift combining strategic abandonment with ideological attack. It is a valuable addition to Mark Carney’s electrifying Davos speech which frankly recognised the consequent rupture in transatlantic relations.
Van Middelaar says the EU must respond to US decline with a story smaller than its previous normative universalism of values but larger than the imperial, sovereigntist and racist nationalism Trump wants to revive. White Christian essentialism is not the EU story; its civilisation is inter- and multi-cultural. Unless that is expressed in a unique post-imperial politics of reciprocity, particularly with the Global South, the EU will lose the opportunity to go beyond Trump’s “language of power by reclaiming the power of language”.
European intellectuals from the left including Etienne Balibar, Justine Lacroix, Thomas Piketty and others write that the EU story needs to change profoundly, beyond domination. It cannot be contained within an obsolete liberal-federal logic, they say. “As empires grab resources and discard international law, the EU must forge a new social federalism – or become a vassal”.
[ Ireland’s EU presidency will underline how out of touch we areOpens in new window ]
Such thoughtful accounts of imperial decline, global shifts and intellectual and political renewal should inform next Wednesday’s EU leaders’ retreat for reflection on its preferred direction and beyond that the Irish EU presidency from next July to December.
