The decline of the U.S. empire began much earlier than when Washington’s downward trend in global influence became widely acknowledged. As far back as the middle of the twentieth century, the U.S.-led order that formed after the second world war began to come apart. In 1949, the empire lost China to communism, an event which would ultimately produce the current shift towards a new China-led multipolar order. The additional setbacks that imperialism had to undergo to reach this point began shortly after, with the Indochina wars that Washington would become embroiled in during the mid-twentieth century. Even as the empire garnered great victories during these decades, successfully carrying out numerous anti-communist coups which allowed for unprecedented exportations of capital to the peripheral countries, with each war there would appear more cracks in U.S. hegemony.

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