On the thirtieth anniversary of ASERI, it is appropriate to return to one of the central questions that I have asked throughout my teaching activity: why do great powers arise – and why, in the end, do they fall?
It is a question that spans the centuries, from the collapse of Rome to the decline of the British Empire. But it was Paul Kennedy, in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, who offered one of the most compelling and accessible analyses of this recurring historical pattern. His central thesis – that empires often collapse not because of weakness, but because of "imperial overextension" – found a deep echo at a time when American global supremacy no longer seemed to be taken for granted.
Kennedy wrote the book two years before the end of the Cold War, at a time when the United States was beginning to grapple with questions it hadn't seriously asked since the 1940s: Can a superpower decline? And, if so, how? His study, based on five centuries of world history, warned that no power, no matter how exceptional it may be, can escape the economic and strategic pressures that, sooner or later, invest every empire.
In the following years, Kennedy's thesis experienced mixed fortunes. The nineties, at first glance, seemed to contradict it: the United States appeared unchallenged at the top of international power, victorious and dominant. Globalization was advancing rapidly, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and American technological and cultural leadership was reaching unprecedented levels. The idea of a "unipolar moment" asserted itself in academic and political debate. Yet, as history reminds us, its course is never linear.
With the 2000s, the narrative changed. The interminable wars in the Middle East, the financial crisis of 2008, growing inequalities and the global backlash against liberalism all contributed to undermining the post-Cold War consensus. At the same time, China accelerated its rise, Russia reasserted its presence, and a new generation of leaders from the Global South began to question the rules of a system they had not helped to write.
Even within the United States, polarization deepened, trust in institutions eroded, and that old feeling of historical inevitability — the belief that liberal democracy and free markets would triumph — began to fade. If the liberal international order had ever been a coherent project, it now appeared less as the end point of history and more as a phase of it.
Kennedy never claimed to predict the collapse. What he offered was rather an interpretive framework – a way of looking at the world through the long perspective of history. He recalled that power is not static: it is relational, contingent, and often subject to forces that no government can control. The balance between economic capacity and strategic ambition is fragile, and when it breaks, the inevitable consequences follow.
This intuition is as relevant today as it was in 1987 – perhaps even more so. We live in a world marked by new uncertainties: artificial intelligence and climate change, changing alliances, demographic transitions and deep ideological disputes. The question is no longer just whether the United States will remain dominant, but whether a single state can still sustain a stable global system.
At ASERI, for thirty years, students have been confronted with these same questions. They study empires and their legacies, the changing logic of the world order, the fragility of institutions, and the deep intertwining of ideas and interests. They learn to read history not as a sequence of events, but as a series of recurring dilemmas – always different in context, but recognizable in structure.
This, after all, is what Kennedy's book continues to teach us: not that decline is inevitable or that America is over, but that history remains open – and that understanding the forces that move it is the first step to knowing how to deal with it.
In this sense, ASERI has never been just a school: it is, and must continue to be, a place of reflection on power, change and the permanent challenge of interpreting a world in motion.