America Remains Dominant If It Stops Defeating Itself

Stephen Kotkin rejects the claim that the United States is replaying Britain’s imperial exhaustion. The United States, he argues, remains an economic, scientific, technological, energy, immigration, soft-power, military, and alliance superpower. The problem is not that American power has disappeared. The problem is that American commitments still reflect an anomalous postwar moment when the United States briefly had far more relative capacity than it has now.

Kotkin’s benchmark is economic share. For roughly 150 years, he says, the United States has sustained about 25% of global GDP with about 5% of the world’s population, a position he calls “unheard of in global history.” A chart shown alongside the discussion traced the U.S. share of global GDP from 1850 to 2025: a long rise into industrial power, a post-World War II peak near 40%, a later dot-com-era high, and a recent level around 25%. For Kotkin, the continuity matters more than the dips. A quarter of global output for that long is not decline in any ordinary sense.

The exception was the period after World War II. From 1946 to 1960, Kotkin says, the United States held about 40% of global GDP and 50% of global manufacturing because Europe and East Asia had been devastated. That was the world in which John F. Kennedy could speak of “bearing any burden.” It was also the world in which the United States accepted responsibility for the whole world.

The postwar order, in Kotkin’s telling, was designed to reduce that exceptional American share. The Marshall Plan, the reintegration of Germany and Japan, and the rebuilding of former enemies into major allies were not failures because they made other countries richer. They were the point. The United States built a system to revive others in the belief that their recovery would support American peace and prosperity. That succeeded “beyond our wildest dreams,” Kotkin argues, but Washington did not adjust its commitments when the U.S. share returned from the abnormal 40% to the already extraordinary 25%.

This is where Kotkin parts company with both simple decline narratives and triumphalist ones. He agrees with Victor Davis Hanson’s view, quoted by Peter Robinson, that the United States still leads China by large margins in major measures of power. But he says the United States must still rebalance its commitments. The Cold War military doctrine assumed the ability to fight two major wars in two theaters simultaneously, as in World War II. Then, under John Deutch, the formulation became two wars “nearly simultaneously.” Under President Obama, Kotkin says, it became 1.5. Under Trump’s first term, it became one major war in one major theater.

That doctrinal reduction matters because the United States still behaves as though it can absorb every theater at once. If Washington chooses to fight in the Middle East, Kotkin says, that may be all it can do under its own doctrine. A war against Iran is not separable from deterrence in the Indo-Pacific if it consumes the munitions and attention needed to make China perceive high costs over Taiwan.

The rebalancing Kotkin thinks is necessary is already happening, but he is uneasy about the way it is happening. Allies in Europe and East Asia are concluding that they must do more for their own defense. That is good in principle. Japan’s decision to acquire long-strike capabilities, including Tomahawk missiles, is one example he praises as strategically important. But he warns that the method—tariffs, threats, gratuitous insults, delayed weapons deliveries, and uncertainty about American commitments—risks damaging the very alliance system that is one of America’s rarest forms of power.

The United States, Kotkin says, has two forms of strength that no prior great power possessed in the same way: an immigration superpower and an alliance superpower. He recounts an anecdote in which Xi Jinping supposedly told Lee Kuan Yew that China would win because it could draw talent from 1.3 billion people. Lee, in the anecdote, replies that the United States can draw from 8 billion. Kotkin treats that as a warning: legal immigration, skill selection, border control, and scale are all legitimate matters for debate, but surrendering the immigration advantage would be difficult to justify.

The same applies to alliances. Europe, in Kotkin’s view, is “fed up” and wants an alternative, while East Asian allies are also frustrated but are still betting on the United States. Japan, the Philippines, and others remain committed to the American alliance despite grievances. The “remain allies” part of rebalancing cannot simply be assumed.

Europe’s diminished economic weight sharpens the problem. Kotkin says Europe was 30% of global GDP as late as 1992 and that Europe plus the United Kingdom is now 17%, with a trajectory toward 10% under current trends. Japan, he says, fell from 18% of global GDP in the early 1990s to 4% today. “Somebody’s in decline,” he says. “It’s just not us.” China’s rise, facilitated by the U.S.-led order, took share from Europe and Japan. The United States held its share, but its allies’ relative decline makes the alliance burden heavier and the alliance system more important.

Stephen Kotkin’s analysis of Iran begins with an admission of strategic discomfort: “If I were going to Dublin, I’d never start from here.” The United States is negotiating from a position he would not have chosen. The problem is not simply leverage. It is that Washington needs things the Iranian regime either refuses to deliver, cannot deliver, or cannot sustain.

The immediate divergence, as Kotkin frames it, is between Israel’s needs and America’s. For Israel, Iran had become an existential threat through the combination of its nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and proxies surrounding Israel. Kotkin names Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria, “and one could go on.” After October 7, he says, Israel was not going to allow that threat environment to persist. Its goal was to degrade Iran’s capabilities: missiles, proxies, nuclear capacity. Kotkin calls the Israeli and American tactical operations “remarkable” and “stunning,” and says Iran has been degraded on an immense scale.

But he distinguishes that from an American grand strategy. Israel’s approach is “mowing the lawn”: weakening the enemy for now, then returning later if the enemy rebuilds. Kotkin calls the phrase a “terrible euphemism,” but says it captures the logic. For Israel, buying time and reducing the immediate existential threat can count as success.

For the United States, he argues, mowing the lawn is insufficient. Washington needs Iran to stop being the kind of regime it has been in the region. That matters not only for Israel, but for Gulf Arab partners, Indo-Pacific partners dependent on Gulf energy, and Americans’ gasoline prices and affordability. Kotkin says the Iranian regime has been at war with the United States for 47 years. A temporary reduction in ballistic missiles or nuclear capacity does not solve that.

He criticizes the apparent premise that a sufficiently forceful attack would compel Iran’s successors to negotiate and hand over enriched uranium. If the nuclear question was truly first and foremost, he says, the United States would have planned a commando raid to extract the nuclear material while Iran was distracted by strikes on its leadership compound. That would not have been easy, but it would have put the United States in possession of the material. Instead, the assumption appears to have been that decapitating or intimidating the regime would produce compliance. Now, he says, such an operation would be much harder because Iran is no longer distracted.

Donald Trump’s instinct for a bargain, in Kotkin’s account, runs into the nature of the Iranian regime. Peter Robinson frames the issue as a possible mismatch between a business dealmaker’s expectation—oil through Hormuz, uranium turned over, rebuilding assistance offered—and a revolutionary authoritarian regime willing to absorb or inflict enormous suffering. Kotkin says Robinson is “spot on.” In his view, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards do not live to restore Persian greatness or to make Iran prosper. They live for the destruction of U.S. power and Israel. If they were “pro-Iran,” he says, they would have different policies.

That makes an ordinary bargain nearly impossible. A normal deal involves reciprocal concessions. Kotkin argues that American negotiations with Iran have repeatedly been limited by a failure to understand what the regime is. He stresses that this does not make him a “regime change type,” but it also does not make him a “capitulation type.” His preferred strategy is to turn such regimes against themselves.

To explain why decapitation is insufficient, Kotkin invokes his own work on “uncivil society.” A regime is not merely a few leaders at the top. It is also a society. Iran may have tens of millions of people who detest the regime, but Kotkin estimates there are still at least 10 million, perhaps 20 million, who are pro-regime and willing to die for it. The Basij and similar formations are not only ideological instruments; for many participants they are also paths of social mobility. They offer status, income, and advancement to people with few alternatives. Some are also ideologically committed to the death of the United States and Israel. “Ten million loyalists with guns,” he says, “is a lot to overcome,” especially when civilians do not have guns and the United States does not want to commit troops.

The regime is nevertheless in serious trouble, by Kotkin’s assessment. He says the supreme leader position has likely been destroyed “forever” by the strikes, even if a son or successor formally occupies it. He adds that no one has seen or heard from the son, and that even if he is alive, the position he occupies will not be the same. The office, in his judgment, can no longer function as the supreme arbiter among factions in the same way. What remains is “the scorpions in a bottle problem”: factions that distrust one another, jockey for position, and, as Kotkin puts it, cannot provide basics such as food, water, petrol, or money. He describes the regime as lacking legitimacy and basic governing capacity.

The opportunity, then, is to force the regime to confront its own failures and illegitimacy before its own people. Kotkin points to Iran’s nuclear negotiations in Pakistan as evidence, in his reading, of distrust and factional conflict. He asserts that Iran “got the bomb from Pakistan” and then went there to negotiate over the bomb with the United States, which he found highly improbable as a path to Iranian surrender. He also says Iran brought a delegation of 70 people, which he interprets as a sign that they were watching one another. After the delegation leader, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, returned to Iran, Kotkin says hardliners reprimanded him merely for allowing the nuclear program to be discussed, even though he made no concessions.

That is the opening Kotkin wants Washington to exploit. The goal should be to make the regime own the consequences of its own rule, not to rescue it through a deal that gives it oxygen to fight another day.

Stephen Kotkin does not claim to know whether China will move against Taiwan soon. Ross Douthat’s argument, presented by Robinson, is that China’s power may be peaking and that Beijing may therefore plan confrontation soon. Kotkin resists the temptation to infer intentions from Western reasoning. One person is making the decisions in China, he says, and “we don’t know how that person thinks.” Xi Jinping’s information, indicators, and calculations may be very different from ours.

What can be assessed, Kotkin argues, is capability. China is obsessed with Taiwan, and not only at the leadership level. It is a societal fixation as well. Xi has displayed that fixation publicly, but Kotkin emphasizes that it would not disappear if Xi died. Mao wanted Taiwan. Deng Xiaoping wanted Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek wanted Taiwan. Taiwan is a fundamental issue regardless of China’s top leader.

Still, Kotkin does not believe China wants to pay any price for Taiwan if it can avoid doing so. Beijing wants to “win the war without fighting.” It wants Taiwan “for free.” That could mean coercive economic pressure, coercive diplomacy, or extracting symbolic and policy concessions from the United States—such as a public statement on Taiwan or slowing weapons sales—in exchange for concessions that are not real concessions. Kotkin jokes that President Trump might buy the same soybeans “for the third time” in such a trade.

China would fight, in Kotkin’s view, if Taiwan declared independence or if Beijing concluded it was clearly losing Taiwan permanently. It would also fight if the United States recognized Taiwan’s de jure independence. But short of that, its preference is to compel Taiwan’s absorption without war, whether through a freely elected Taiwanese leader from an opposition party negotiating entry into Communist China or through Washington pressuring Taiwan in that direction.

The practical American task is therefore deterrence: making China perceive that the costs of moving against Taiwan would be very high. This is where Kotkin links the Middle East directly to the Indo-Pacific. He says the United States expended large stocks of Patriot missile interceptors in the Iran war. According to Kotkin, the global inventory controlled by the United States before the war was probably between 1,800 and 1,900 interceptors, and more than 1,200 were expended in a month. He says the United States produces only about 600 or 650 per year.

The cost exchange is even worse in Kotkin’s account. He puts the cost of a Patriot interceptor at about $3.6 million, while an Iranian Shahed drone costs roughly $30,000. Using one to destroy the other may be necessary, but doing it a thousand times is not a favorable calculus.

Japan’s Tomahawk purchases illustrate the same problem. Kotkin praises Japan’s agreement to acquire 400 Tomahawk missiles from the United States in two batches by around 2028, calling it a major breakthrough because Japan accepted long-strike capabilities that can reach China from the Japanese mainland. But he says the United States has told Japan the missiles will not be delivered on time and will face significant delay. That delay reduces deterrent effect in the very theater where China’s capabilities are growing.

Kotkin’s proposed answer is to look to Ukraine, which he calls “the Walmart of defense tech.” Ukraine has built cost-effective anti-drone technology that Gulf Arabs are now buying at scale, he says, and those systems can knock Iranian drones out of the sky at far lower cost than Patriot interceptors. Washington, in his view, should buy Ukrainian systems, invest in Ukrainian production, license Ukrainian technology, expand underground production in Ukraine, and build licensed production elsewhere.

This is why Kotkin rejects the idea that Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific are competing priorities. Ukraine is an Indo-Pacific asset because its defense technology can help solve the cost, scale, and speed problems that matter for deterring China. If the United States is moving toward a $1.5 trillion annual military budget, Kotkin asks, it should be buying “precision mass”: low-cost, battlefield-effective weapons in massive volume, not only exquisite systems produced too slowly and expended too quickly.

Stephen Kotkin’s argument on Ukraine has remained consistent on one point and changed on another. He still believes Ukraine needs an armistice, but he acknowledges that he underestimated Ukraine’s ability to reduce its own casualties while continuing to grind down Russia through drone mastery.

His starting point is that defining the war in territorial terms is a mistake. Russia, he says, won the territorial war in 2014 by taking Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine without Ukrainian military resistance and with European and American capitulation to the facts of the land grab. In 2022, Russia took additional territory, creating a land bridge between Donbas and Crimea. That territory is now in Russian hands.

Kotkin rejects the analogy to Munich. At Munich in 1938, Britain and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland. In Ukraine, he says, no one is giving Putin anything if they recognize that he already took territory by force. The question is what Ukraine can get back on the battlefield at acceptable cost. If it cannot retake the land now, continuing to expend lives and treasure while delaying national reconstruction may be the wrong priority.

The war’s larger stakes are sovereignty, not territory. Ukraine won the battle for sovereignty when it stopped Russia from seizing Kyiv. It lost territory in the east, but it preserved the state. Kotkin’s preferred approach is to consolidate that victory: stop the fighting at the current line of contact through an armistice, refuse to legalize Russia’s annexations, and rebuild the Ukraine that remains under Ukrainian control.

This is the South Korea analogy he has made since 2022. The armistice on the Korean Peninsula did not restore the North to Seoul. It allowed South Korea to build a successful democratic society. Kotkin wants Ukraine on a similar path, or on the path of Poland, which he calls the greatest success of modern Europe in our lifetimes. He also points to Sweden, the Nordics, and the Baltics as part of a transformed northeastern Europe that differs sharply from the stagnant, overregulated Europe many Americans imagine.

Ukraine’s eastern occupied areas, Kotkin says, are not the main prize. Much of the territory is now a “moonscape” and was rust-belt industry before the war. The valuable thing is Ukraine itself: its sovereignty, people, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and defense-industrial capacity. He wants that human capital used above ground in civilian industry, housing, schools, and national reconstruction, not only underground in wartime defense production.

Peter Robinson describes the implication as a huge growth in Ukrainian human capital during the war: a Ukraine that is richer in some basic sense, more modern, and more integrable with the West than it was when Russia invaded in 2022. Kotkin says yes. That is what Putin has lost. But precisely because Ukraine has achieved that, Kotkin wants to “take it to the bank.”

He is critical of Trump’s approach to Putin as though the war were a real-estate land deal. In Kotkin’s account, Trump offered Putin a lot, including the rest of the Donbas, and Putin did not take it. That suggests to Kotkin that Putin may continue until his last breath. Ukrainians object to simply handing over territory because Russia is paying a massive price for tiny gains. Kotkin says Ukraine is killing 15,000 to 20,000 Russians per month, with 30,000 to 35,000 Russian casualties, and that capturing the remaining space Putin wants could take years and perhaps another 800,000 to one million Russian casualties. Ukraine’s current strategy, as he describes it, is to exact the highest possible price for every inch rather than concede it.

Kotkin’s disagreement with that approach is not that territory should be handed over. He says his argument has “never been to hand over anything.” It is to stop the fighting where it is, preserve the non-recognition of Russian annexation, and build Ukraine into a successful society while leaving open the possibility that Russia may later collapse, retreat, or lose the territory through its own failures.

Where he admits error is on Ukrainian casualties. Earlier, he viewed attrition as an emergency for a country whose population had peaked around 50 million and now stands around 27 million, with six or seven million in exile, including children being educated for years in Polish, German, English, and other languages. He feared the loss of Ukraine’s young people and future human capital. What he did not anticipate was that Ukraine would drastically reduce its own battlefield losses through drone mastery, including aerial drones and autonomous ground vehicles that can attack or retrieve wounded and dead without sending soldiers into danger.

That technological transformation strengthens his broader point. Ukraine is not merely a recipient of aid. It is a major U.S. asset. Taiwan’s value is obvious because of semiconductors. Ukraine’s value, he says, is defense technology. Anduril and Palantir are already working there, and Ukrainian firms are iterating battlefield software in a week or even a day. For Kotkin, that should change how Washington thinks about Ukraine: not as a charity case, but as a partner whose innovations matter to the global balance of power.

The contrast between Xi Jinping’s statement that the Chinese Communist Party has never wavered from communism as its ultimate ideal and the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal leads Stephen Kotkin to draw a hard line between Chinese civilization and the Chinese Communist regime.

China as a civilization, he says, is remarkable beyond easy description: millennia old, inventor of paper, the compass, printing, and more. But the political regime is dedicated to unfreedom, illegitimate because it has never submitted to free and fair elections, and guilty, in Kotkin’s words, of murdering its own people on a scale of tens of millions. It is afraid of its own people, and many of those people want to go elsewhere to be free.

Hong Kong is Kotkin’s example of the regime’s values in practice. British Hong Kong became a major international financial center grounded in rule of law and market allocation, and he argues that without Hong Kong there would have been no Chinese economic miracle. Once China regained control, he says, the regime strangled it. That, for Kotkin, reveals the nature of the regime.

The United States therefore cannot compete only by measuring the “correlation of forces.” It must use its legitimacy, values, institutions, and soft power. America is young by Chinese standards, but it is the oldest constitution-based republic on the planet. Kotkin treats the Declaration not as sentimentality but as a real source of power—provided the United States lives up to it.

That proviso is the hard part. American values and institutions are under siege, he says, though they have been under siege before. The United States has always had instability, factionalism, and what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk.” The difference now is visibility and amplification. Social media gives individuals a broadcast capacity that earlier eras did not have. The country assimilated radio and television after destabilizing periods; now it must assimilate social media and artificial intelligence without prohibiting openness.

Kotkin does not describe American polarization as a simple majority takeover by extremes. He estimates MAGA at about half of Republicans, with Republicans and Republican-leaning independents around 40% of the country, which makes MAGA roughly 20% of the country. On the Democratic side, he says Democrats and Democratic leaners are no more than about 40%, and the hard left is not a majority of them. Add the hard left and MAGA together, he says, and roughly 60% of the country remains. That remaining America recognizes that the farther right and farther left may have legitimate grievances and aspirations, and that democracy exists to adjudicate such differences peacefully.

The institutional damage he worries about is not abstract. He says social trust, solidarity, and “competent and compassionate leadership” have been disrupted. He also describes “epic corruption.” Kotkin says criticism of Hunter Biden’s grift was legitimate, then asks how those same critics assess current corruption by comparison. He refers to what he calls a “$1.8 billion slush fund to reward people who assaulted cops” as incompatible with the meaning of July 4, 1776.

Kotkin’s remedy is institutional renewal, not a partisan substitution. He says he wants Congress back. When he and Robinson were growing up, Congress mattered, including to the Reagan revolution, which occurred with a Democratic-controlled Congress. He says the judiciary is still functioning, but the media and public sphere are distorted by a business model of outrage, extremism, and conspiracy. He expresses cautious optimism that AI might help shift incentives toward the middle, despite the fakery, slop, and other dangers it introduces.

The deeper American story, as Kotkin presents it, is citizenship. The founding principle was “we the people,” a citizens’ government rather than a government granted by a king. At the beginning, citizenship was universal in principle but exclusionary in practice: men without property, women, slaves, and descendants of slaves were denied full rights. Over 250 years, through struggle, the category became universal in practice. Kotkin interprets the civil rights movement as an effort to make America live up to its ideals, not as a project of identity politics or race-based quotas.

If the United States can regain that kind of renewal, he argues, it is unbeatable. If it continues on its current “semi-self-defeating” trajectory, then China becomes a match despite its illegitimacy and false ideals. Renewal will not happen automatically and will not be achieved by one administration. It must come from citizens, communities, municipalities, states, and the federal level. The last renewal came from an unexpected place; the next may as well.