Michael Cox, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE)

On ASERI’s 30th anniversary, it seems fitting to revisit one of the core questions I’ve asked throughout my teaching: why do great powers rise – and why do they eventually fall?

It’s a question that has echoed through the ages, from the collapse of Rome to the twilight 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 accounts of this recurring historical pattern. His central argument – that empires often collapse not out of weakness, but due to “imperial overstretch” – resonated deeply in an era when America’s global supremacy no longer seemed inevitable.

Kennedy wrote the book two years before the Cold War came to an end, at a time when the United States was beginning to confront questions it had not seriously entertained since the 1940s: Could a superpower decline? And if so, what would that look like? His study, grounded in five centuries of global history, warned that no power, however exceptional it believes itself to be, can escape the economic and strategic pressures that eventually confront all empires.

In the years that followed, Kennedy’s thesis experienced fluctuating levels of acceptance. The 1990s appeared, at first glance, to challenge his conclusions: the United States stood unopposed at the apex of international power, victorious and dominant. Globalization advanced rapidly, the Soviet Union dissolved, and American technological leadership and cultural influence reached unprecedented levels. The notion of a “unipolar moment” gained prominence in academic and policy circles. And yet, as history consistently reminds us, its trajectory is seldom linear.

By the 2000s, the story began to shift. Endless wars in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crash, rising inequality and a global backlash against liberalism all converged to undermine the post-Cold War consensus. At the same time, China’s rise accelerated, Russia reasserted itself and a new generation of leaders across the Global South began questioning the rules of a system they hadn’t written.

Even within the United States, polarization deepened, trust in institutions eroded, and that old sense of historical inevitability – the belief that liberal democracy and free markets would inevitably triumph – began to fade. If the liberal international order was ever a coherent project, it now looked less like the endpoint of history and more like a phase.

Kennedy never claimed to predict collapse. What he offered instead was a framework – a way of seeing the world through the long lens of history. He reminded us that power is not static. It is relational, contingent, and often subject to forces beyond any government’s control. The balance between economic capacity and strategic ambition is delicate, and when it tips, consequences follow.

This insight is as relevant now as it was in 1987 – perhaps even more so. Today’s world is marked by new uncertainties: AI and climate change, shifting alliances, demographic transitions, and deep ideological contestation. The question is no longer simply whether the United States will remain dominant, but whether any single state can sustainably anchor the global system.

At ASERI, for three decades now, students have grappled with these kinds of questions. They have studied empires and their afterlives, the shifting logic of world order, the fragility of institutions, and the deep interplay between ideas and interests. They’ve learned to read history not as a sequence of events, but as a set of recurring dilemmas – each shaped by context, but always recognizable.

That, in the end, is what Kennedy’s book continues to teach us. Not that decline is inevitable, or that America is finished. But that history remains open-ended – and that understanding the forces that shape it is the first step toward engaging it.

In this sense, ASERI has never simply been a school: it has been, and must continue to be, a place to reflect on power, change and the enduring challenge of interpreting a world in motion.