He says he returned home one day only to find his property sealed off behind barbed uniforms standing guard and refusing to let him step inside the house he once called his own. In a single moment, he says, the life he had worked for was gone. “It was the end of the world. The end of the world.” “I felt imprisoned.” “They took my freedom.” “They took my livelihood.” “They took my land.”

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith once reassured his compatriots at a moment of British defeat.1 But how much? American elites have wondered this periodically for most of the last sixty years. At irregular intervals, voices from the left and right of center raise the question of American decline. What can we learn from this march of failed predictions? Will the doomsayers always be wrong? Or just early?

In the Winter 1988–1989 issue of Foreign Affairs, political scientist Samuel Huntington attacked the question as the world stood on the precipice of the new unipolarity. Despite the impending Cold War victory, this was an anxious period for American capitalism. The malaise was summed up by Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas: “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won.”2 Huntington rejected this defeatism. He deflated contemporary fears by reminding readers that similar decline panics had recurred since the 1950s in a series of waves symbolized by Sputnik, Vietnam, the energy crisis, and now, in the late 1980s, Japan.

In each instance, the foretold decline failed to materialize. In hindsight, we see their fantasies and projections for what they were. Who now remembers bestsellers like The Coming War with Japan?3 But Huntington, while rejecting the decline thesis, refused to condescend to the declinists—even misguided fears were worth taking seriously, he maintained. True, the US had survived countless supposedly terminal diagnoses. But even a hypochondriac might benefit from regular visits to the doctor. Would the imperial republic have endured without the recurring panics? Could a hallucinatory discourse (Khrushchev will bury us) actually produce its own reality (continued American primacy)?

This is just what Huntington concluded. American structural power had endured not despite, but because of the doomsayers. In his words, “the declinists play an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.”4 This pattern held across the waves of post-Sputnik discourse. It also gave rise to a slyly confident prediction: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.”5

This is what Plato might have referred to as a noble lie. In order to win their backing for policies to prompt renewal, American voters needed to be persuaded of the possibility of US decline. To whom would it fall to mislead the public for their own good? In the immediate sense, the declinists would do the persuading. But behind them there had to be someone capable of consciously inflating the crisis discourse. This sounds cynical, but it is appropriate when reading Huntington, who once wistfully reminded readers that Truman “had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers”6—a rare admission of the sources of political power in the American Century. A radical who wrote the same sentence would be crucified for crudeness.

Call it cynical or reductionist, Huntington’s point of view has long been common in Cambridge, Manhattan, and Washington. Similar quotes, from men more powerful than Huntington, could be reproduced endlessly. One worldbuilding investment banker, the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pioneer Ferdinand Eberstadt, said that “the country was always run by crises.” He added: “if one was not evident, it had to be created to get things done.”7 Such strategies became the stuff of banter among insiders. In March 1950, one New England congressman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Cold War rearmament could not be sold “without some domestic crisis.” In the event that “Stalin did not come through with his assistance in precipitating crises,” Acheson should “not hesitate to create the crises himself.”8

(...)

Huntington’s anatomy of declinism was passed like an heirloom from one generation’s best and brightest to the next. Until relatively recently, US elites turned to Huntington as a source of reassurance. In 2014, former Obama National Security Advisor Tom Donilon observed that recurring declinism was “in our DNA, and it helps drive our renewal.” He quoted Huntington’s Foreign Affairs article directly: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.” Any real challenge—the weak recovery from 2008, the Tea Party, Piketty, China—could be handled by homeopathic doses of crisis rhetoric. 28

But just over two years later, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump, and the limited purchase of this view of American resilience became a generational problem for elite politics. The shock was extreme. Coupled with the surprise primary challenge of Bernie Sanders, the Trump victory was understood as a legitimacy crisis for liberal capitalism and, in particular, its globalized variant. Jake Sullivan, the hawkish Clinton protege assigned to dive into the wreckage, concluded that Trump’s victory “reflected the exhaustion of a post-Cold War economic model,” as if there were no warning signs. 29 (...)

We like to think in Washington that we are the only thing standing between the region as it is and something even worse. I used to write policy reports and opinion articles trying to make things a bit better. But I think at some point after 35 years, we should acknowledge that we bear considerable responsibility for the sad state of the region. So, the catharsis I suppose came from stepping back and taking an honest look not just at one policy gone wrong, but at an entire structure built to sustain domination and the immiseration of the region. And it’s really striking if you think about it: For the most part, everyone knows this. They just choose to not take the kinds of actions that might change it.

Part of it is simply that primacy is generally bad. You remember Lord Acton’s saying, to the effect that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? I think that applies in the Middle East—to the United States and Israel alike. They are accustomed to acting with impunity, standing outside the rules and demanding that their self-interest take priority over anything else. And what that means is that even if Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese suffering is sad, it’s not important enough to them to warrant changing policies. It really only matters if it can be weaponized to justify action against an adversary; if our friends do it, we look the other way. And in the absence of real external costs or peer competitors forcing policy change, our policy tends to be locked in place in ways that are not responsive to what’s happening on the ground.

My book is in large part about the triumph of structure over agency, in political science terms. Every single American president since Bill Clinton has come into office promising to change U.S. policy and draw down from the region, and every one of them has ultimately been drawn back into the same set of unpleasant policies. However they start, they all end up ignoring democracy and human rights, promoting Arab normalization with Israel while ignoring Palestinian rights, putting pressure on Iran, and waging wars on terror. And that’s partly because they work in terms of protecting self-defined interests. Think about Biden officials arguing that their policy in Gaza was a success because we supported an ally, didn’t lose any Arab allies, and didn’t allow China to make any inroads. That’s all true on its own terms, but it completely ignores the almost unthinkable human costs and the degradation of international order.