The American Crisis: Structure or Individual? Walid Abd El, Hai. February 10/2026

The American Crisis: Structure or Individual?

Walid Abd El, Hai. February 10/2026

Since Paul Kennedy published his book “Rise and Fall of Great Powers” in 1987, in which he predicted a process of American decline led by the strategy of military overstretch, which began, according to Paul Kennedy, in the 1960s, and appeared in the drop of the United States’ share of the total global output and its total share in the total volume of world trade. He predicted that the last two decades of the previous century were the beginning of the clear features of this decline.

But the part that many did not pay attention to is that Paul Kennedy built his vision on a model he chose to track the decline of the great powers over 00 years; that is, he built his vision based on the “mega trend” rather than on milestone moments.

After that, the literature on American decline was followed in a one-cent way, and in this context, John Galting emerged, along with Frenchmanon Emmanuel Todd, the American Peter Turchinalong with Frenchmanon, the American Graham Allison, and Frenchmanalong with Frenchmanon George Friedman, along with Frenchmanon Stephen Walt, etc.

However, the point of convergence between all these literatures appears in the following features:

1. Focus on the general structure (military expansion, economy, military spending, distribution of wealth, rise of subcultures, etc.). etc.).

The rise of other powers (especially China) will reduce the American backyard.

1. Institutional confusion in addressing the decline.

This means that the transformations imposed by Trump in American politics are an expression of a structure that is “living in a predicament” and not just the frivolity of a president, his pharaoh and his arrogance in his behavior, the decline in the literature of dialogue with others and with the media, and even the great mockery of other presidents, as he does with Biden, Clinton, his wife, and Obama, is an expression of a structure that is cracking, not a structure that is collapsing.

The problem is not with Epstein, his anomaly, or his anomaly, or being a trap set by foreign intelligence services, whatever that intelligence is, and just as the Communists accused Gorbachev or some limited the Chinese crisis to Hua Jiu-feng’s attitudes after the death of Mao Zedong. The real problem is the structure and its complexities, which are manifested in bubbles on the surface, and not the individuals, but the building’s expression of its predicament.

This means that reading the current noisy American scene suggests that the structure is facing a difficult test, as the economic crises, the decline in the share of the United States in the volume of global production, the escalating rise in military spending under the pressure of the military-industrial complex, the rise in the intensity of social tensions among immigrants, the increase in the number of participants in protest demonstrations, and the expansion of injustice in the distribution of wealth to the extent that made the United States rank first in the poor distribution of income compared to the major industrial countries, and the imbalance of American alliances with the outside world, especially With Europe, the confusion in international trade, the shaky image of the American political system in the Western media in particular, the successive American withdrawal from international organizations, and then the blunt interventions that even European colonialists, including Britain, did not accept… All of this is an expression of a structural defect.

Many studies by prominent American intellectuals and political figures portray Trump and Epstein as nothing more than an expression of a penetrating structure by foreign lobbies and intelligence agencies, especially the Russian and Mossad, and this penetration was carried out solely because of the deep structure (political, economic, social, and international image). etc.) It has been infected by the virus of the law of regression that all civilizations, empires, and great powers have known. Still, this scientific view warns against conflating the desire for the collapse of the United  States with predicting its speed, as the collapse of major powers has a fluctuating rhythm. Still, it. Still, this is not linear in all its stages, as the contracyclic (long-wave) cycles for which Stalin executed him make the cycle time between 45 and 60 years.

My call to the Arab rulers is to reflect on the following manifestations:

At its peak, the British Empire was 35.5 million square kilometers, and now it is only about 244,000 square kilometers.

France fell from 13.5 million square kilometers to 644,000

 square kilometers. The Soviet Union reached about 22.4 million square kilometers and retreated to 17

The size of the Chinese economy in 1978 was 0.5% of the size of the S economy; now it is 64% (nominal), surpassing the United States in purchasing power parity, and China’s overall growth pace is six times that of the United States. The United States ranks among the largest debtor countries. At the forefront of the most significant deficit in the trade balance, two situations in which China stands at the top of the applicants, and these indicators do not come because of individual behaviors but from significant cracks in the structure, and what is individual behavior except Manifestations of the dysfunction of the structure.

Interestingly, structural crises often lead to the sacrifice of individuals who are, in fact, exposing” the defect of the structure because of their actions, especially if they are in high-ranking positions of power. I would not be surprised if the American Trump follows up with the French Sarkozy, or even the wife of Mao Zedong, but the philosopher Karl Popper’s phrase, and before him Hegel’s explanations of it, remain with me that “history is full of conspiracies, but history itself is not a conspiracy.”

The reinforcement of a fractured structure with the values of “power and pragmatism” may lay the groundwork for the structure’s disruption in a bloody way, geopolitical disintegration, or reconciliations that “numb” the decline for a while. But it will not prevent the greater trend… Maybe.

A Note, translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Ebeid.