United States, an economic and military superpower in recent decades, has entered a phase of fiscal and imperial crisis that could bring forward the end of its global hegemony before 2045. The combination of explosive debt, insufficient revenues, rising mandatory spending and costly wars for strategic resources creates a scenario that recalls the decline of Rome and the British Empire. Official projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), combined with more recent interventions in Venezuela and the established pattern in Ukraine, suggest that the “American empire” may fall less because of a military shock and more because of fiscal mathematics and unsustainable imperial ambition.
In real time, the U.S. Debt Clock and other trackers show gross US federal debt surpassing 38.5 trillion dollars by the end of 2025, ticking upward second by second. This amount is equivalent to about 125–130 percent of GDP in 2025, with projections around 131–134 percent of GDP for 2026–2027, according to models such as those from Trading Economics.
It is important to distinguish between two measures of debt:
Debt held by the public: what the government owes to investors, funds, foreigners and other non‑federal holders.
Gross federal debt: debt held by the public plus what the government owes to itself (trust funds, Social Security and other intragovernmental holdings).
Today, debt held by the public is around 98–100 percent of GDP, while gross federal debt is approaching 125–130 percent of GDP, with this internal gap made up mainly of securities held by government funds themselves.
In fiscal year 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025), the deficit hovers around 6 percent of GDP, with 6.2 percent projected for the year, reflecting federal revenues close to 17 percent of GDP and total spending around 23–24 percent of GDP. Most of the growth in outlays comes from mandatory programs (such as Social Security and Medicare) and from rising interest on the debt, whose servicing is already nearing one trillion dollars per year.
This structural mismatch – long‑run revenues around 19 percent of GDP versus spending climbing above 26 percent of GDP – is the heart of the crisis: an automatic consumption of budget space that leaves little room for defense, infrastructure, science and innovation, the traditional pillars of American power.
CBO projections: From 100% to 156% (and beyond)
The CBO works mainly with the metric of debt held by the public, which it considers more relevant for gauging market risk and pressure on interest rates. In its long‑term outlook (2025–2055):
Debt held by the public rises from about 100 percent of GDP in 2025 to
107 percent in 2029
118 percent in 2035
136 percent in 2045
156 percent in 2055.
The annual deficit grows from roughly 6.2 percent of GDP in 2025 to 7.3 percent of GDP in 2055.
Total spending rises from 23.7 percent of GDP to 26.6 percent of GDP, while revenues drag along around 19–19.5 percent of GDP.
Today, the difference between debt held by the public (100 percent of GDP) and gross debt (125 percent of GDP) is just over 20 percentage points of GDP, but this gap tends to narrow over time as intragovernmental funds lose relative weight. This means that:
If debt held by the public reaches 136 percent of GDP in 2045, it is reasonable to expect total gross debt in the 150–160 percent of GDP range in that period.
By 2055, with debt held by the public projected at 156 percent of GDP, gross debt could approach or exceed 170 percent of GDP, even if the CBO does not highlight this aggregate figure as prominently.
If tax cuts are extended without offsets and new “populist” spending measures go forward, analyses indicate that debt held by the public could surpass 170 percent of GDP by the mid‑2050s, implying an even higher level of gross debt. In parallel, interest payments alone are likely to consume more than 8 percent of GDP by 2055, adding up to tens of trillions of dollars over 30 years – more than today’s annual US GDP.
Empirical studies suggest that every 10‑percentage‑point increase in the debt‑to‑GDP ratio reduces potential growth by about 0.2 percentage point per year, which means that a path toward 150–170 percent gross debt‑to‑GDP will tend to compress private investment, stifle productivity and drastically reduce the capacity to respond to crises.
Resource wars: From Iraq and Afghanistan to Ukraine
In parallel with the structural problem of mandatory spending, the US has accumulated wars and foreign interventions that are sold politically as “investments” in security and access to resources, especially oil, gas and minerals. Recent experience shows that these conflicts rarely “pay for themselves”; on the contrary, they add layers of debt and interest that drag on for decades.
The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that the post‑9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq and related theaters) have already cost at least 8 trillion dollars, including direct military outlays, reconstruction, veterans’ care and future obligations. Iraq and Afghanistan alone are estimated in the trillions of dollars and, spread over many years, have contributed significantly to the escalation of American debt.
In the case of Ukraine, from 2022 to 2025, total US support – military, economic and humanitarian aid, plus indirect costs of replenishing stockpiles and mobilizing forces – has easily surpassed the hundreds of billions of dollars. While the official narrative speaks of “defending democracy,” independent analyses also point to interests in gas routes, Europe’s energy balance and access to Ukraine’s strategic minerals.
These wars and prolonged commitments put pressure on the defense budget and push the deficit to elevated levels (3–4 percent of GDP in some years just for military spending), while simultaneously increasing perceived risk and, therefore, the cost of rolling over the debt. Rather than “investments that pay for themselves,” the record reveals a kind of fiscal snowball fed by external strategic decisions.
Venezuela 2026: The new Iraq?
The American offensive in Venezuela, which began with sanctions and escalated into bombings and special operations, marks a new chapter in this pattern of resource wars in the twenty‑first century. In January 2026, US forces carried out strikes on targets in Caracas and strategic regions, culminating in the capture of Nicolás Maduro in an operation officially presented as a fight against “narcoterrorism” and a corrupt regime.
In subsequent statements, Donald Trump was even more explicit: he said the US would “run the country” – that is, administer Venezuela – until a “safe, proper and careful transition” is possible, signaling a de facto protectorate under American tutelage. He also indicated that major US oil companies would be invited to invest billions in the sector’s “reconstruction,” arguing that it “will not cost anything” to taxpayers because Venezuelan oil itself would pay for the operation.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels, as well as important minerals such as coltan and gold. Since 2025, reporting has already stressed that oil was a central priority in US strategy toward the country, both in sanctions and in diplomatic pressure, even before the bombings.
In the short term, the military and logistical cost of this intervention can easily be estimated in the tens of billions of dollars – something like 50 billion dollars or more – including airstrikes, troop deployments, special operations, occupation and emergency measures. Even if part of that is offset by future oil contracts, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that the net result tends to be more debt, more long‑term commitments and more instability.
The empire in 2045: Between interest, oil and arithmetic
Taken together – population aging, expanding mandatory programs, rising interest rates and wars for resources – the CBO’s projected path is for debt held by the public to jump from 100 percent of GDP in 2025 to 136 percent in 2045 and 156 percent in 2055, with total gross debt potentially reaching something like 150–160 percent of GDP by the mid‑2040s.
The implications for the “American empire” are profound:
Military dominance: the defense budget competes for space with interest payments, pensions and health care, while rivals such as China expand military and technological capabilities on a relatively more solid fiscal base.
Economic hegemony: the dollar is increasingly questioned as a safe reserve asset as US debt moves further away from its historical average (around 50 percent of GDP in past decades), opening space for regional alternatives and financial arrangements backed by blocs such as the BRICS.
Soft power: the narrative of wars “for oil” and interventions framed as “running” other countries until a transition erodes the US’s moral legitimacy, echoing Britain’s post‑Second World War fatigue, when the burden of debt and the cost of empire hastened the decline of the pound and the United Kingdom’s global influence.
Without deep reforms – including benefit reforms, adjustments to Social Security and Medicare, higher revenues and, above all, restraint on new costly military adventures – both the CBO and independent fiscal watchdogs describe the US trajectory as “clearly unsustainable.” The intervention in Venezuela, like the expensive model of support for Ukraine with the expectation of “reimbursement” in resources and concessions, tends to feed rather than relieve this debt spiral.
If the American empire collapses before 2045, the trigger is unlikely to be a single military defeat, but rather an accumulation of fiscal and geopolitical decisions that ignored basic arithmetic: compound interest, anemic growth and resource wars may prove more lethal than any opposing army.
What if the US goes broke? The global shock of an American default
If this “clearly unsustainable” trajectory ends in a solvency crisis or even a partial default between 2045 and 2055, the impact will not be confined to the US: it would be a systemic earthquake for the global economy. US Treasury securities are today the backbone of the financial system, serving as the main “risk‑free” asset, collateral for transactions, a reserve asset for central banks and a benchmark for pricing almost every other asset. A collapse of confidence in those securities would trigger mass liquidation, failures of highly exposed institutions, a spike in global interest rates and a frantic flight to any alternative store of value – gold, commodities, other strong currencies or purely regional arrangements.
If the US were forced to slash spending after losing normal access to financing, the shock would spread through trade, employment and investment worldwide: deep recession, credit crunch and shrinking capital flows would hit both rich and emerging countries, including those that currently benefit from dollar liquidity. At the same time, the loss of fiscal credibility would accelerate ongoing de‑dollarization, with central banks reallocating reserves and blocs such as the BRICS and the European Union seeking to entrench alternatives to the dollar–Treasury axis, permanently eroding the American “exorbitant privilege” of financing its deficits in the very currency the rest of the world is compelled to use.
A world without an anchor: Emerging markets as shock absorbers, not saviors
Even if the American empire suffers a fiscal collapse between 2045 and 2055, the rest of the world does not start from scratch: emerging economies such as China, India, Southeast Asia, Brazil and others already account for more than half of global GDP and for a large share of recent world growth. Projections to 2030 suggest that China and India alone could be responsible for roughly 40 percent of global GDP gains and add trillions in annual consumption, creating a mass of domestic demand that did not exist in past crises such as 1929 or 2008.
This increase in consumption and integration among emerging economies could cushion part of the shock from an American collapse, maintaining South–South trade flows, supporting regional supply chains and offering some alternative growth anchor after the first wave of financial panic. However, a US and dollar debt crisis is by definition a systemic funding shock: it freezes credit, crushes global trade and forces a rush to any perceived safe harbor, affecting emerging markets as well, since they still depend on developed markets, dollar funding and integrated global value chains.
In practice, a scenario of American default or near‑default would likely unfold in two phases: first, an “earthquake” hitting all blocs – developed and emerging – through a collapse of confidence in Treasuries and a repricing of risk; second, a slow reorganization in which countries with strong domestic markets and regional ties (China, India, parts of Asia, Latin America) lead the recovery and speed up the transition to a more multipolar economic order. Emerging markets can thus shorten the duration and depth of the global crisis, but not eliminate the initial impact of an empire that ignored the basic arithmetic of its own debt for far too long.
Andre Limart
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