Is the US Empire in Decline?

By Stansfield Smith  –  June 3, 2026

The US empire is in decline, we say. The Global South, the BRICS, and multipolarity are rising.  And yet the US attacks Iran, and the Global South, BRICS, the United Nations, do not stand up to the US. Twenty years ago General Wesley Clark said the US planned to take out seven countries in the Middle East. The empire has devastated six. Iran is the last one. But the US is in decline? The United Nations condemns the blockade on Cuba year after year for 33 years. The US not just ignores the world censure but suffocates Cuba more and more. This year Washington imposed an oil blockade on Cuba. Only Russia dared defy it and sent oil – one time. But we say the US empire is in decline? The US blockades Venezuela, steals oil tankers, bombs the country. BRICS and the Global South, sit by. The US kidnaps and imprisons President Maduro, a world leader of the Global South anti-imperialist movement. The world just wrings its hands. 

The US and Israel slaughter at least 73,000 and starve hundreds of thousands in front of the world’s eyes. The world does not intervene to end the genocide. But we say the US empire is in decline. The US regularly vetoes any UN attempts to restrain the mass murder. Do the UN, the rising BRICS and Global South sanction the US, expel the US, or restructure the UN? No, just more hand wringing, in effect conceding that over the UN and the world, stands the US. These are signs the BRICS countries, the Global South and multipolarity are rising and the US empire declining? 

The US blockades Syria and then helps Al Qaeda take over the country. No one steps in, not even Russia. The US shatters Latin America’s Pink Tide. South of the border US vassals now make up the majority. The US imposed tariffs on the world, allies and enemies alike. All but China and Russia capitulated. The US has turned Europe into captive nations. But it’s the US in decline?

The US instigated war against Russia in Ukraine, attempting to fracture it. So far it has failed, but has kept Russia bogged down in a World War I Western Front style stalemate lasting longer than the Nazi-Soviet war.  But we insist Russia will win, and the US empire is in decline. We say China has become a superpower, but does China stand up to the constant US foreign interventions, always partly aimed at driving China out of those countries? China has proven no more successful in reincorporating the US neocolony of Taiwan than it was 75 years ago. Yet China is the rising superpower, and the US empire is the one in decline? 

Every year the standard of living of US working people worsens. Even before the war on Iran made it worse, one in four households were living from paycheck to paycheck. The top 0.1 percent’s wealth has grown 60% from 1989 to 2024. The 905 US billionaires have amassed $7.8 trillion in wealth, almost double that of the bottom 50% of households, who hold $4.1 trillion. The tens of millions of working people here do little to fight back and turn this around. The number of workers in trade unions is down, real wages are down, decent jobs are scarce, housing has become a new form of robbery, benefits are cut. This is a class war being waged against us and we are taking a beating. Yet we Marxists repeat the prayer, “The US empire is in decline.”

The role of Marxists
If the empire is declining, then we would have to be asking and answering the question not even being asked: “How are we taking advantage of this promising opportunity?” Are Marxists focused on expanding the role we play in the working class, expanding our activist leadership in the working class? Do we discuss what working class movements are capitalizing on US decline, and our Marxist work accelerating these gains? No, we don’t. That shows that today’s Marxists must not actually think the US working class is the only force with the power to remake society. 

Our leftist isolation results from being purged from the working class in the 1950s Red Scare period. Before, we were central to working class struggles. Since then, no, and with a few exceptions in some teachers and health care workers unions, we have never sought to rebuild our place in the working class. We remain outside. And yet, a broad, but disorganized, willingness to fight the bosses and a hostile government does exist in the working class, inside and outside of trade unions. 

Part of our problem is that the left has become mostly an anti-war left, outside working class organizations, not part of the trade union left wing, as during its heyday in the first half of the 20th century. Unlike today, back then the left had real social weight as part of the organized power of the working class. 

One result is that anti-war movements show themselves mostly powerless to impede US invasions, regime change operations, even genocide. While there were mass protests against the war on Iraq and the slaughters in Palestine, they had little impact on limiting these wars. The anti-war movements proved unable to disrupt war preparations, let alone economic production. This had a demoralizing impact, as many came to see mass protests as ineffective. Now, while at least 60% of people oppose the war on Iran, and 40% see the US as losing, no anti-war movement has developed. The anti-war left is unable, even unwilling to reach this majority. 

This gives the ruling class freer hand to continue endless war – more and more their solution for maintaining world hegemony. By not focusing ourselves on expanding our power in the working class, by not organizing the class struggle forces that exist there, we are foregoing an opportunity to rebuild a left wing class struggle in the working class, where we would have real economic and political weight. We may console ourselves with the belief that the US empire is in decline, but we must admit we are failing in our mission as to why Marxists exist.

It is true that the US empire has declined from the height of power it held both right after World War II and again after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It is not foreseeable that it will regain that position. The US empire’s weakest point came during its defeat in Vietnam. Movements around the world took advantage and carried out revolutions – such as in southern and Portuguese Africa, Libya in north, Iran and Afghanistan in the Middle East, Latin America and Caribbean, in Southeast Asia, in Portugal, and in 1968 France. But by the 1990s most of these had been undermined. Today, are revolutionary movements around the world taking advantage of US “decline” to seize power? No. 

Since the Vietnamese victory, no socialist revolution has occurred in the past half a century. Instead, during this period socialism has suffered terrible defeats, not just with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but all socialist countries today have increasingly turned to private enterprise measures. Nor has any First World country progressed in building a mass working class party.   

Today the US rulers know they are losing ground to China’s economic powerhouse, its win-win trade, and its respect for other nations’ sovereign rights. So, US imperialism is fashioning new methods of world control, given old ones of past decades no longer work. It increasingly relies on crippling sanctions, blockades, overt and undercover coups, and military attacks to reverse this setback. It resorts to wrecking a country’s economic development, or even simply seizing its key resources. China can develop harmoniously with the world without resorting to brutality. The US cannot now, and wars of plunder are the best remaining option. 

The US empire possesses powers that China and Russia lack. It basically owns the world media, giving it power to shape how we see events. This media is not primarily geared to providing information, but to massaging it. US media control operates as a regime change weapon. It is even able to convince people on the left, who swear they know the corporate media constantly lies. Many leftists believed Syria used chemical weapons on its people, that Trump and Putin colluded to steal the 2016 election were true stories. Neither Russia nor China can compete in this media arena.

The empire has 750-800 military bases in at least 80 other countries (Russia has under 10, China 1). The empire has decisive influence over most nations’ political parties. This makes it extremely difficult for peoples to get out from under this control. 

Before the proposed jacking up of the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion, the US accounted for one third of the world military expenditures, and more than the next 6-8 countries combined. While the US did not win in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, it remains the world military power. Both Russia and China avoid challenging it.

Stories of De-Dollarization and US Empire Decline

China, Russia, BRICS, the Global South, multipolarity, and de-dollarization
BRICS and multipolarity are positive developments, and provide some protection against imperialism’s unequal trade, economic looting, and outright economic warfare. Marxist professor Richard Wolff could state, “the rise of BRICS is a fundamental alteration of the global economy we all live in… the US empire had absolute dominance until the BRICS.”  However, 16 years after its founding, BRICS poses no threat to US domination. BRICS is not an economic bloc, not a political bloc, not a military one. It remains a loose trading partnership. BRICS is presented as the pivotal force in the world’s alleged moving away from the use of the dollar. Yet BRICS has not established its own trading currency or money, nor its own banking system. That it presents a challenge to US world hegemony is, so far, a pipedream.

For instance, India, an original BRICS country, stopped buying oil from Russia, another original BRICS country, because the US told them to.  China, Russia, and India disregard the BDS movement targeting Israel, being the first, seventh, and eighth biggest importers of Israeli goods. The UN Security Council voted to condemn Iran for attacking neighboring countries – but not to condemn the US or Israel. Russia and China, BRICS members on the Security Council, did not veto this resolution, letting it pass. Russia and China could also have killed the US takeover plan for Gaza but did not. While China and Russia are powerful and helpful counterweights to US imperial power, they did little to defend Libya in 2011, Gaza after 2023, Syria in 2024, or Venezuela in 2026. These examples speak to the power of BRICS vs the US. 

Russia and China stand up to the US only when the US directly challenges their security sphere. Hyping US decline and the rise of BRICS and a multipolar world misleads people.

The future
To be of real substance in thwarting US imperial power – an actual measure of decline – the BRICS, multipolarity, South-South cooperation, and de-dollarization, would be able to impose real costs on the US for its aggressions. At home, if the US rulers were weakening, we would expect the working class to be engaged in vigorous trade union growth, in massive and victorious strikes, in raising the federal minimum wage, in national healthcare. We do not.

The previous methods the empire used to dominate the world are what has declined, and are being replaced by new ones more heavily based on economic and military warfare to stabilize its world power. Today the anti-war and left movement speak of US decline as if the empire is collapsing by itself. This attitude displays defeatism and resignation in the face of US power. The empire can only be defeated by a long, difficult, painful class struggle, something that we have yet to be mobilized for.

 

SS/OT