The United States turns 250 this year, and the mood at the party is oddly gloomy. For all the fireworks, a familiar question hangs over the anniversary. Has America already passed its peak? The idea that the country is sliding into decline has become almost conventional wisdom, repeated in Beijing and Washington alike. Yet there is a case, quieter but persuasive, that the superpower is simply too young to be falling.
The distinction matters. A republic of 250 years is old by the standards of modern democracies. A superpower of that age does not exist. America has stood at the summit of world power for only a few generations, since it emerged from the Second World War producing close to half of everything the planet made. Measured against the empires it is so often compared with, Rome or Britain or Spain, its reign has barely begun.
The declinist case
The pessimists are not inventing their evidence. In relative terms the country has been shrinking for decades. Its share of the global economy has fallen from around half after 1945 to roughly a quarter today, as Europe rebuilt, Japan surged and then China arrived on a scale no rival had ever matched. Some long range forecasts place the United States third behind China and India by the end of the century, a junior partner in a world it once dominated.
China is the engine of that anxiety. Its economy, its factories and its growing military have turned the old assumption of American primacy into something that must be argued rather than taken for granted. For the first time since the Soviet collapse, Washington faces a competitor with the size and ambition to contest it across every domain at once, from trade to technology to the seas around Asia.
The strengths that do not show up in the mood
And yet relative decline is not the same as collapse. Beneath the gloom, the United States still holds a hand few countries could dream of. It leads the race in artificial intelligence, the technology most likely to define economic and military power for the next generation. Its universities still draw the world's talent, its companies still set the terms of the digital economy, and the dollar remains the currency the planet cannot do without.
There is also the harder to measure asset of attraction. For all the damage of recent years, America's culture, its openness and its capacity to reinvent itself continue to pull people and ideas toward it in a way no authoritarian rival has managed. A country that can still absorb the ambitious from everywhere carries an advantage that never shows up in a table of growth rates, and one that time tends to compound rather than erode.
Decline, if it comes, is far more likely to be chosen than imposed.
A wound that would be self-inflicted
The real danger, on this reading, is not that China overtakes America but that America trips over itself. The gravest strategic errors of the past decades have been unforced ones, above all the long failure of successive administrations to take the rise of Chinese power seriously until it was far advanced. A great power rarely falls because a rival pushes it. It falls because it stops watching its own feet.
The list of self-inflicted risks is long. Political division that paralyses decision making. A retreat from the alliances that multiply American strength. A drift toward protectionism that trades openness for a false sense of safety. Each of these is a choice, and each would do more to hasten a fall than anything an adversary could engineer from outside.
Destiny is not a schedule
History offers no fixed timetable for the end of a great power. Empires do fade, but they do so at wildly different speeds and for reasons that are rarely purely economic. The comforting story of inevitable decline, in which every superpower slides gently off its perch, flatters those who would rather not confront the specific, avoidable mistakes that actually bring nations low.
For the United States the message of its 250th year is therefore double edged. The declinists are right that the age of unchallenged dominance is over, and that a genuine competitor now shares the stage. But they are wrong to treat the outcome as settled. A superpower this young still has the resources, and the years, to shape what comes next. Whether it does will depend far less on China than on the choices America makes about itself.
