Are we now witnessing the end of the American empire?

"Sometimes cataclysmic change unfolds before our eyes", writes Michael Wood

A stylised, coloured illustration showing a large group of people gathered outdoors under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, tightly packed figures in period-style clothing stand shoulder to shoulder; most look downward or toward one another with subdued or thoughtful expressions. Above them, four older men stand elevated on a ridge. Each wears distinctive clothing and gestures upward toward the sky. One man holds a red heart in one hand and a yellow feather in the other. Overhead, several bright yellow birds fly among the clouds. The contrast between the quiet, inward-looking crowd below and the animated, sky‑focused figures above creates a sense of differing perspectives or states of mind.

Published: June 19, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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It’s often hard to see the significance of events when we are actually living through them.
But sometimes profound and even cataclysmic change unfolds before our eyes in real time. In the sun-baked streets of Hippo (today’s Annaba in Algeria) in that far-off summer of AD 410, St Augustine immediately saw that the fall of Rome was destined to be epoch making, as his sermons show, when the news came with the first refugees that September.

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Arriving in Peru in 1544, Agustin de Zárate foresaw nothing less than the coming of a new age in world history. William Wordsworth and the English radicals who went to Paris to observe the French Revolution felt the unstoppable forces of change in Europe. In the snowy streets of Dresden in the bleak spring of 1933, after elections that brought the Nazis to power, Victor Klemperer understood that catastrophe was coming.

And now, suddenly this spring, the wars in the Near and Middle East have created an entirely new situation. The international rules-based order – for all its faults, in place since 1945 – has seemingly collapsed. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, already shaken, is now cast aside. As Pope Leo has said: “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.” How are we to understand this? Where does this moment fit into history’s grand narrative?

The times are moving so fast that it is of course impossible to be certain which way things will go, but historians have immediately responded in ways we haven’t seen before. Antony Beevor, not a man to exaggerate, thinks we are now in a more vulnerable position than in 1939, and the world is totally unprepared for the threats it faces. Alan Lester speaks of “an end of times” feel. Peter Frankopan and Anne Applebaum, among our leading thinkers on history, agree that we are into new territory. We are no longer sure that, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends towards justice.

But the way was long prepared. To try to understand these events, we should go back into history. I have rehearsed this argument before in this column, but I think it bears repeating. Until the 15th century the weight of history – the growth of human population and civilisation – lay in Asia, in the Muslim world, India and China. The classical Greek and Roman world, of course, had great achievements in culture and ideas, and so did western Europe through its renaissances under Charlemagne, in the 12th century, and then in Italy. But the centre of gravity of history (if I can put it that way) was Asiatic.

Then after 1492 and the conquest of the New World, that changed. Small aggressive maritime powers on the Atlantic shore of Europe went out to conquer new lands. Never before in human history had continents been conquered, many of their peoples enslaved and their resources plundered. In the next 500 years, western nations seized much of the world’s wealth. Since the industrial revolution, they have consumed the Earth’s fossil fuels and plunged us into our present existential climate crisis. And now a US administration has precipitated a political emergency that may have done lasting damage to hopes of international solidarity.

With Asia rising again, there is indeed an end of days feel about the hegemony of the west. All this is reinforced by the growing corruption of public discourse by the control of media – an unparalleled assault on freedom of speech. A few billionaires now wield more money and more influence than several nations; many are invested in authoritarian rule, and the subversion of democracy – they use their wealth to buy up swathes of the western media and to obfuscate the forthcoming climate disaster. On their TV screens the public watches the world’s poorest and most vulnerable – the people whom Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth” – forced to leave their homes and their lands, in the face of war and famine.

The ramifications are wider than simply the war in the Near East, big as that is. As in earlier times in history, this traumatic moment is already seeing the shifting of the tectonic plates of history. Is the Gulf War America’s Suez, the beginning of the end of the American empire? All we can say for sure at this moment is that time is short, the climate disaster urgent, and cooperation on a worldwide scale is the only way out. Back in Hippo, St Augustine would have seen the writing on his sun-baked wall.

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This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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