When the United States was once a unique family, no one dared to easily lure, but with the rise of diversity has become a situation, the U.S. hegemony is also becoming more and more unstable.37 trillion debt is high, government shutdowns have become normal, military families need to go to the streets in line for relief food, under such a premise, once the United States ends hegemony, what will those countries that depend on the United States?
How deep is the empire?
The decline of American hegemony is not the result of a single event, but a systematic internal friction. Just like a century-old house, it looks okay on the outside, but there are cracks visible to the naked eye in the three load-bearing walls of economy, military affairs and politics inside. It is this vulnerability from the inside out that has become the fundamental engine of global changes.
Let's first look at the engine of the economy. Does everyone still remember it? In 2000, the U.S. economy accounted for nearly one-third of the world's total, specifically 30.7%. But by 2023, this figure has shrunk to 23%, and this year's share is expected to officially fall below the 22% mark. This is not only a decline in numbers, but also ironclad evidence of the shift in the global economic center of gravity.
What’s worse is that the engine is still leaking oil. The total U.S. national debt has broken the $37 trillion mark to exceed $35 trillion by 2023. What does this mean?
In 2023, this debt-to-GDP ratio will climb to a scary peak of 120.8%. Debt requires interest repayment. Now, just paying interest on debt costs about 8% of the federal budget every year. This model, to put it bluntly, is living beyond what means and is simply unsustainable. It is fundamentally weakening the economic foundation for the United States to project influence around the world.
Yes, the U.S. military spending remains the world’s top, with more than 500 overseas military bases around the world, and it still looks like the “world policeman.” But there’s a huge paradox: its current military size has fallen to the lowest since 1940. It’s like a stand that’s too big, but the bosses in the store don’t use enough, highlighting the sharp contradiction between its global strategy’s excessive expansion and the reduction of actual capabilities.
Finally, and the most deadly, is the collapse of political credibility. This distrust, both from home and abroad. In the United States, the opposition between the Democrats and the Republicans has reached a point of unbearable fire, and the whole society has been severely torn by the rise of inequal wealth distribution and extreme ideas. Even Americans themselves have begun to become insecure, and a Pew poll this year shows that 52% of Americans believe their country's influence is declining.
Looking globally, the situation is worse, with 26 of the 29 major economies already viewing the United States as a “factor of instability.” In the Arab region, a poll showed that up to 78% of respondents viewed the United States as the biggest cause of instability in the region.
During the Trump administration, the use of tariffs instead of traditional military intervention has deeply shaken the confidence of allies.When your friends and opponents begin to feel that you are unreliable and irresponsible, your “leadership” is left with only one shell.
What should I do if my eldest brother is unreliable?
When the "world police" themselves are in a frequent situation, those nations that have previously relied entirely on their protection feel not a sense of security, but a cold spirit. For them, the hegemonic vacuum means a thorough subversion of the logic of survival, forcing them to go on some risks that could exacerbate regional conflict in the fear of being abandoned.
Ukraine is the most intuitive live broadcast of this tragedy, and the country’s survival is now almost entirely dependent on continued blood transfusions from the West. Since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian Total War, military aid provided by the United States alone has exceeded $130 billion.
Any voice about stopping aid is a fatal threat to Ukraine. The war has turned more than 6 million Ukrainians into refugees and devastated the country's infrastructure. This mode of pinning the national destiny entirely on external aid is fragile.
This sense of “abandoned” anxiety also spread in Japanese society, where the OU conflict looked like a mirror, allowing the Japanese to see their own shadow. The people’s confidence in the U.S. commitment to co-defense dropped significantly from 72 percent before the war to 64 percent.
They began to generally question that the once robust “American umbrella” was still unreliable at the critical moment, so the forced “self-armed” became the only way out.
Faced with the security vacuum, Japan is actively seeking to get rid of the shackles of Article 9 of the post-war constitution and turn the Self-Defense Forces into a truly regular army. This is undoubtedly an extreme self-protection choice, but it may also open the Pandopan box of the arms race in Northeast Asia.
In the Middle East, the situation is equally difficult for Israel, which has huge amounts of U.S. military and economic assistance since its founding, and the U.S. aircraft carrier has been deployed to the Mediterranean to deter its opponents.
But now, as European countries such as France and the United Kingdom have recognized the state of Palestine, Israel is becoming unprecedentedly isolated diplomatically. It is surrounded by hostile Arab countries and armed forces. Once it loses the unreserved diplomatic asylum and military intervention of the United States, it can only rely on its own stronger and more proactive military actions to survive.
These three countries are so similar in fate. They are all at the forefront of geopolitical conflicts-Japan is at the crossroads of East Asia, facing the complicated relations between China, Russia, North Korea and South Korea; Israel is an island in the Middle East; Ukraine is at the forefront of European confrontation.
Historical experience has repeatedly demonstrated that when hegemony declines, its allies tend to be abandoned or targeted by opponents.Once they lose the balance hand that comes only from the outside, their fragile geographical location will become an unavoidable curse.
conclusion
Looking back, this huge vacuum formed by the decline of American hegemony is by no means a static space passively waiting to be filled. On the contrary, it is a dangerous catalyst, which is actively stimulating all forces around the world and getting involved in a fierce race for survival and power.
A multipolar world seems to be an irreversible trend. The real challenge we face today is no longer how to save a passing unipolar era, but how to establish a new mechanism for coordination and checks and balances among major powers as soon as possible in this doomed multipolar world.
History tells us that the sudden collapse of any great power can bring unimaginable disasters to the world. How to smoothly pass through this dangerous transition and avoid global conflict from slipping into the abyss is a challenge that all nations face, an imminent and must be solved jointly.
Global Times 2025-10-14 "The U.S. government shut down for half a month, the impasse continues"
Xinhua’s client 2025-10-13 “Look at the world and the US debt sink is difficult to solve”