Dr. Haymanot Assefa Nadew argues that the United States now shows familiar signs of imperial decline: extreme inequality, militarized priorities, weakened democracy, and a widening gap between global ambition and domestic security
By Dr. Haymanot Assefa Nadew
How can you tell when an empire is crumbling? Sometimes the signs appear not on foreign battlefields, but outside an ordinary city window: a sidewalk shelter, a cross wrapped in Christmas lights, and a memorial to a woman who died inside the fragile structure she built. Her death belongs to a larger national failure.
Behind that shelter stood an empty schoolyard where unhoused families had once found temporary refuge. In one small scene, homelessness, public health, and social abandonment converged.
Such local signs point to national fractures: inequality, military overreach, corruption, civic division, and “barbarians at the gates” as both metaphor and political force.
What do any of these very local sights have to do with a crumbling empire? They’re signs that some of the same factors that fractured the Roman empire back in 476 CE (and others since) are distinctly present in this country today. The Roman comparison is not literal; it is a warning about elite capture, military strain, institutional decay, and collapsing civic legitimacy.
Imperialism: What Does the Word Mean?
Imperialism extends state power through territorial, political, or economic control. By that definition, U.S. history—from continental expansion and Indigenous dispossession to overseas intervention—has long followed an imperial path.
That path continued through annexations abroad and doctrines from Monroe to Bush that repeatedly justified intervention.
After 9/11, “forever wars” and the military-industrial complex embedded that logic even more deeply in national life.
An Empire in Decay: A 2026 Assessment
By 2026, five crises define the republic’s condition: inequality, militarized spending, corruption, civic fracture, and global overextension.
1. Grotesque Economic Inequality
U.S. billionaire wealth has surged since 2021. By March 2024, 737 billionaires held $5.53 trillion, and Oxfam later reported another $1.4 trillion increase in 2024 alone.
By 2025, the richest 0.1 percent held an estimated $22.48 trillion, while the bottom half lost ground as a share of national wealth. Billionaire political influence has also grown, blurring private wealth and public power.
Like Rome, American prosperity increasingly enriches a narrowing elite while leaving millions insecure.
2. Military Spending Without Domestic Security
The $741 billion defense authorization of 2021 now looks modest: U.S. military spending reached $860 billion in 2022, $916 billion in 2023, and $841 billion in FY2024 appropriations.
For FY2026, the Defense Department request approached $1 trillion when related funding was included, even as domestic needs remained urgent.
From 2020 to 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms. Military spending also creates fewer jobs per dollar than education, health care, or public investment.
3. Corruption and the Concentration of Power
The first Trump administration normalized self-dealing, norm-breaking, and contempt for democratic constraints. January 6, 2021, became not a shared warning, but a political dividing line.
Trump returned to office in 2025 despite felony convictions, and his administration moved to recast January 6 as grievance rather than rupture. Pardons for Capitol attack defendants folded once-condemned conduct back into ordinary politics.
The Department of Government Efficiency, associated with Elon Musk, became a symbol of federal retrenchment, raising concerns about conflicts of interest, due process, and privatized public power.
Other executive actions weakened anti-corruption enforcement, civil-service protections, rights agencies, and long-standing federal institutions.
Corporate donations to figures tied to election denial also rebounded; CREW reported more than $100 million in PAC donations to members of the so-called Sedition Caucus by 2024.
4. A Country Torn Apart
Confederate flags appeared inside the Capitol in 2021. Five years later, many attack participants have been pardoned or celebrated, hardening January 6 into a fault line of political identity.
Rising tolerance for political violence and competing realities now make shared governance harder.
Redistricting fights, immigration enforcement, and culture-war campaigns over race, gender, abortion, and elections have further strained democratic trust.
Lincoln’s warning still applies: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
5. Imperial Overextension and Global Retreat
Rome faltered when it could no longer sustain its commitments. The United States faces its own version of that strain.
The 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan exposed imperial exhaustion: 20 years, more than $2 trillion spent, immense human loss, and the Taliban’s rapid return.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine restored a major U.S. security role in Europe, yet later foreign-aid cuts weakened that commitment even as defense spending rose.
The contradiction is stark: a state that struggles to house, feed, and heal its people still defines security chiefly through military power.
Building a Country from the Rubble of Empire
The ruins of the empire are not only warnings; they are materials. From broken systems, people can build something more humane, more democratic, and more durable.
A different future would take the Constitution’s promise to “promote the general welfare” seriously—not as decoration, but as a governing obligation. It would replace imperial hunger with a politics of enough.
That means treating housing, health care, food security, education, clean water, and democracy not as benefits to be rationed, but as the foundation of real national security.
Every empire eventually confronts the limits of extraction, expansion, and denial. The United States can keep guarding the ruins, or it can build a republic worthy of its people. That choice cannot wait until the rubble is all that remains.
References and Source Acknowledgment
Written in June 2026 by Dr. Haymanot Assefa Nadew, this article draws on Rebecca Gordon’s 2021 essay “The US Empire Is Crumbling Before Our Eyes” as a foundation for an updated interpretation.
It also synthesizes public reporting and research from Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Federal Reserve, the Brown University Costs of War Project, the Partnership for Public Service, CREW, and related sources.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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