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By Victor V. Motti
It is notoriously difficult to measure the rise, peak, and decline of empires in real time. Power does not disappear all at once; it changes form. What often looks like strength is, on closer inspection, a sophisticated effort at preservation. My conjecture is that today’s great powers are no longer primarily leveraging their advantages to grow, but to maintain—to delay structural reconfiguration in a world of diminishing returns.
This distinction matters. Growth is expansive and creative; maintenance is compensatory and energetic. In systems theory, as efficiency declines, a system requires increasing inputs just to sustain the same level of output. Entropy rises. What follows is not immediate collapse, but a phase dominated by leverage—financial, structural, cognitive, or narrative—used to stabilize an increasingly fragile equilibrium.
Seen through this lens, the United States, China, Russia, and Europe are not competing along a single axis of power. They are exploiting different leverage points in the global system, each consistent with their historical strengths and structural constraints.
The United States: Temporal Power Through Finance
The United States exercises power primarily over time. Its core lever is not merely money supply in a crude sense, but the ability to monetize the future through financialization. The dollar’s reserve-currency status allows the U.S. to run persistent deficits, recycle global surpluses, and fund military reach and consumption far beyond what its current productive base alone would permit.
This is an extraordinary form of leverage. By exporting inflation risk and absorbing global capital, the U.S. converts expectations about the future into present power. Yet this is also a maintenance strategy. When real productive growth slows, liquidity substitutes for capacity. The system does not collapse; it stretches.
The decline signal here is subtle. It is not inflation alone, but the growing divergence between financial valuations and material capability, and the rising share of economic energy devoted to defending asset values rather than generating new productive frontiers. The U.S. is borrowing time—and time, unlike money, cannot be printed indefinitely.
China: Spatial Power Through Structure
China’s leverage operates primarily over space and scale. Exchange-rate management is a tool, but the deeper mechanism is mercantilist industrial coordination: dense supply chains, massive infrastructure, and state-directed capital allocation that transformed the country into the core of global manufacturing.
This model excelled in an era of external demand. Its challenge now is internal. A system optimized for exports must be rewired for domestic consumption, social legitimacy, and innovation under constraint. That transition is not merely economic; it is political and cultural.
China’s decline signal is therefore not sudden collapse, but rigidity: rising internal debt used to absorb overcapacity, diminishing returns on infrastructure spending, and increasing difficulty translating industrial strength into household demand and trust. China’s leverage is formidable, but its risk is structural inertia—the difficulty of changing the rules of a system built for a different phase of history.
Russia: Cognitive Power Through Disruption
Russia’s leverage is asymmetric and psychological. Lacking the economic scale, demographic momentum, or technological depth of its rivals, it competes in the cognitive domain. Its instrument is perception: disinformation, unpredictability, and the deliberate injection of uncertainty into adversaries’ decision-making.
This is not expansionary power; it is spoiler power. Russia externalizes entropy, weakening stronger systems by corroding trust and coherence. In the short term, this can be effective. In the long term, it hollows out the very conditions required for partnership and development.
The decline signal for Russia is the fastest and clearest of the four: pariah status. When disruption no longer translates into influence, and chaos is seen only as liability, narrative warfare collapses into isolation. Cognitive leverage is powerful, but fragile—it depends on attention, credibility, and access to shared informational space.
Europe: Cognitive–Narrative Power as Planetary Leverage
Europe does not fit the traditional empire template, and that is precisely the point. Militarily and demographically, it is constrained. Economically, it is mature. Yet Europe possesses a largely under-exploited form of leverage: cognitive and narrative capital.
Europe concentrates an extraordinary density of historical cities, universities, legal traditions, philosophical lineages, and living cultural memory. This has long been treated as “soft power,” but it can be reframed as something deeper: the capacity to shape how global problems are defined, not merely how they are solved.
In a world facing planetary-scale challenges—climate, AI governance, bioethics, fragmentation—narrative and legitimacy become strategic assets. Europe’s potential role is not dominance, but convening: providing neutral ground for science diplomacy, ethical debate, and the framing of norms that others must operate within.
Europe’s decline signal is not economic collapse, but narrative incoherence. Fragmentation, loss of internal confidence, and failure to articulate a unifying story would cause its unique leverage to atrophy. Unlike others, Europe’s relevance depends less on force and more on meaning.
A Shared Pattern: Leverage as Compensation
Across all four cases, a common structure emerges. These powers are not primarily expanding surplus; they are compensating for its erosion. Each lever operates at a different depth of the system:
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The U.S. manipulates expectations over time.
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China manipulates constraints across space and scale.
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Russia manipulates beliefs and uncertainty.
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Europe has the potential to manipulate frames, norms, and mental models.
None of these are inherently signs of collapse. They are signs of maturity—and of systems approaching the limits of their original growth logic. The true competition is no longer about who grows fastest, but about who can delay reconfiguration longest, and who can shape the terms under which that reconfiguration occurs.
Comparative Table: Four Powers, Four Levers
| Entity | Core Lever | Primary Domain of Control | Technical Mechanism | What It Maintains | Key Decline Signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Financial / monetary leverage | Time & expectations | Reserve currency, financialization, debt recycling | Global reach, consumption, military primacy | Rising maintenance costs, asset–reality divergence |
| China | Structural / industrial leverage | Space & scale | Exchange-rate control, state-directed industrial ecosystems | Manufacturing dominance, employment, stability | Structural rigidity, debt-masked stagnation |
| Russia | Perceptual / cognitive leverage | Beliefs & uncertainty | Disinformation, unpredictability, narrative disruption | Strategic relevance despite material limits | Isolation, loss of credibility and partners |
| Europe | Cognitive–narrative leverage | Meaning & legitimacy | Culture, law, ethics, convening power, science diplomacy | Norm-setting relevance, planetary coordination | Narrative incoherence, internal fragmentation |
Closing Thought
Empires rarely fall because they run out of power; they falter because their levers no longer generate new order. We are entering a phase in which leverage replaces growth as the dominant mode of power. The decisive question is not which system is strongest today, but which can convert maintenance into transformation—and which can shape the story of what comes next.
