Rebalancing Revisited
Image: James Mitchell, When They Only Dream. 1984
Scenarios about tomorrow tell us the shape of present concerns.
This note emerged from an idea I had last spring, for World Futures Day, to post an archived scenario every hour for twenty-four hours, for no reason other than to create a collage of tomorrows.
In 2020, Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, writing in World Futures, explored how US power might rebalance in the future. Among the seven American weaknesses they identified as potentially reshaping global order, huge and constantly increasing national debt and large and persistent foreign trade deficit caught my attention.
Five years of change now allow for an assessment of not just the accuracy of these projections and contingent scenarios, but what they reveal about futures research. I want to take a close look at what these particular scenarios say.
Grinin and Korotayev are academics writing from Moscow's Higher School of Economics. Their 31-page analysis looks at seven actual and potential weaknesses of the US, and the idea that global political structures (a.k.a. "The World System") periodically reorganise to catch up with economic changes, often through turbulent periods of crisis and realignment.
The authors suppose that these seven weaknesses will inevitably cause a crisis that makes it more difficult for the US to maintain its influence. Despite the deterministic undertones they stop short of predicting outright loss of American hegemony, instead outlining how vulnerabilities create pressure points.
With section titles like "How to Exacerbate the Weaknesses?" a suspicious reader might take their paper as a set of instructions. But, importantly, they emphasise that some of these weaknesses double as strengths. More on that shortly.
The seven American weaknesses selected by Grinin and Korotayev are: 1) large and persistent foreign trade deficit trending upward, 2) large and chronic fiscal deficit which is impossible to drastically reduce, 3) huge and constantly increasing national debt, 4) declining dollar, 5) peculiarities of the healthcare system especially given the country's ageing population, 6) growing demographic disproportions, 7) the weakness of the American political system in the context of globalisation.
Their rationale centres on the premise that vulnerabilities accumulate over time and that America's imperial obligations increasingly conflict with its republican political framework. In other words, imperial appetites clashing against a creaking republican machinery and grinding down until something snaps.
They position current policy chaos (writing in 2020) as symptomatic of deeper structural disease, a real web of decay where each weakness feeds the others, within what they term the ongoing global reconfiguration process.
While they've produced a bit of a skewering, the authors are straightforward in their position. They begin by asserting that the world's destiny largely depends on America's development vector, a starting point that shapes how they read these scenarios, and one I basically agree with.
Of the seven selected vulnerabilities, trade imbalances and mounting debts deserve examination. I am not an economist, so what follows is not economic analysis but an attempt to read what these projections reveal about anticipating change from their particular moment.
Five years after the authors published their ideas, I watched a livestream of the US Senate and House of Representatives sign into law the so-called big beautiful bill, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will increase federal deficits by $3.3 trillion over the next decade. The authors remind us: this isn't money from thin air; these are debts future generations will have to pay. Simultaneously, the US has engaged in international trade warfare. Grinin and Korotayev's scenarios prove prescient.
That their underlying pessimistic certainty seems to be bearing out in 2025 makes revisiting their declarations feel like watching tomorrow's news from yesterday's broadcast. Ah… the strangeness of prediction. Structural pressures in 2020 have moved from theoretical concern to active policy terrain.
The authors suppose that the constantly increasing fiscal deficit will be one of the most important causes of a future crisis (italics theirs). A trillion dollar deficit has become usual. But that represents only planned spending. Actual deficits can, and often do, exceed projections.
As an aggregate, these seven weaknesses conjure multiple pathways to American fracture. A reader of futures (a field concerned with uncertainty) might be intrigued by how certain such statements feel. Fiscal deficits are described here as "impossible to drastically reduce" and demographic shifts as inevitable drivers of conflict. Very little, perhaps nothing, can be done.
Declarative confidence that penetrates policy discourse is no bad thing, if that's the goal. Perhaps certainty functions as a rhetorical strategy, making complex probabilities digestible by collapsing multiple contingencies into clean predictions. The authors sketch several scenarios for how American lives will deteriorate:
A persistent fiscal deficit has become an immanent feature of the United States' contemporary reality. It allows the country to live beyond its means, serves as the most important social mitigator empowering implementation of the largest social programs (pensions, medical care, etc.), and also supports the country's important institutions. If budget expenditures were brought in balance with incomes, social relations would sharply worsen, the standard of living would sharply decline, and the most important sectors of economy (such as health care, pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, etc.) would be in crisis.
The large trade deficit (combined with the fact that consumer goods are produced in low-wage countries) is one of the reasons for low inflation in the USA. In general, this deficit is profitable for Americans. They get much more from trade than they give. However, it still weakens the already de-industrialised U.S. economy in many respects, making it less competitive and increasingly dependent on this deficit.
The recipe for collapse, or mitigation, depending on how you look at things, continues:
Many in the U.S. are concerned about this, which has led to extravagant actions to address the issue with the introduction of import tariffs and increased pressure on trading partners.
Pretty accurate for 2025, and I don't think I need to explain how. An ominous seed is planted, and we are left to our imaginations:
In the long-term, given a loss of confidence in the dollar or the U.S. national debt (which is more realistic), it would be impossible to preserve the existing volume of imports into the country. It is easy to imagine the possible consequences.
They go on to predict nearly impossible-to-solve financial quagmires and defaults, escalating civil conflicts, enormous systemic crisis in the US, high death rates, and various economic emergencies. They stop short of predicting the end of globalisation as a long historical process, but do foresee the end of the American phase of globalisation.
The article collects known problems in and of the US, scans their interrelations, and from this makes generalised forecasts, all unpleasant for America. It obviously has no aim to cover everything under the sun, but scanning their 2020 writing reveals intriguing absences. Climate disruption barely registers, despite reshaping everything in the world system from migration to infrastructure, and energy transitions get little attention.
This isn't a flaw but how anticipating works. We view tomorrow through the amber of today's concerns, frozen by understood fears and values. What could we do differently?
It follows, then, that this article locks the reader in an industrial framing, where global dominance flows from shipping containers and currency exchanges rather than entirely new categories. The delight of a close reading isn't in catching thinkers being wrong or incomplete, but observing how ideas become specimens of their moment. What seemed peripheral in 2020 has become central by 2025.
Digging through old scenarios uncovers assumptions buried in their time and place. From 2025, we can see how quickly those assumptions became partial. Again, not wrong, but incomplete in ways that weren't visible from their original position. This gives us a clue that scenarios can work as prediction engines as well as diagnostic tools for making sense of change.
(I'm essentially doing a case study with n=1. One 2020 article about American decline doesn't necessarily prove broader claims about how scenarios function. But I soldier on.)
The authors' "World System reconfiguration" theory attempts to contain a whole lot, from Arab Spring to demographic shifts, pandemics and geopolitical tensions, through one grand framework. It's an attempt to find patterns and discern which phenomena evidence civilisational rebalancing. Sweeping theories can hold curious blind spots, and I’m aware of how much I don’t know: there is reasoning in their research-backed framework that isn’t apparent to me from close reading one paper.
The question the article leaves me with isn't whether America will decline, but whether America as a meaningful category of analysis is adequate on its own.
The scenarios the authors write assume nation-states remain the primary units of influence indefinitely. But the governing systems of 2025 operate through additional logics. Consider the daily reality: Apple processes more transactions than most central banks, while Google shapes information access for billions, and Amazon and Walmart want to launch their own digital currencies. When Apple's market cap exceeds France's GDP, that is an example of authority reorganising around a different principle.
Grinin and Korotayev mapped American vulnerabilities within a familiar framework: competing nation-states. Yet influential entities transcend geographical borders. They own our data, shape our reality, and increasingly determine the conditions of daily life.
The authors are writing at a moment when the nation-state is transforming into something else entirely. They analyse American vulnerabilities using familiar categories like trade deficits and fiscal policy, but capacity is already accumulating in different, overlapping layers of territory and sovereignty. This is why their scenarios feel partial despite their accuracy.
Yes, corporate influence still depends heavily on state infrastructure, military protection, and legal frameworks. I think of the company town scaled to planetary dimensions, or what happens when corporations become the primary organising principle of our existence. Power will continue to flow and imbalance in new old ways.
When we read predictions of American decline, fiscal collapse, or systemic crisis, and there are a lot of them, the question isn't whether they will be correct, but whether the frameworks that generate them will, in the future, capture how power works.
Accepting this, there are at least two ways to go. The first way is philosophical, and the second is actionable.
First, the 2020 analysis mapped vulnerabilities within familiar containers such as nation-states, currencies, trade balances. A "radically futuristic" question would ask whether reorganisation of power will flow through different logics entirely. Perhaps the most subversive response to doom scenarios is to take them seriously enough to identify where their logic breaks down, then imagine what emerges in those cracks.
Old scenarios (and the boundaries of old are debatable) remind us that writing them is an act of creative constraint. The challenge isn't to predict better, but to hold our frameworks very lightly.
The second, actionable, escape hatch from bleak scenarios might be recognising where their assumptions constrain our imagination. What if the real story isn't American decline, but the emergence of entirely new organising principles?
While I don’t think the authors intended to imply or explain a dystopia, in general a productive response to dystopian predictions isn't to argue with their methods, but to see where those methods become a trap. Some might call this a conceptual crisis. Instead of asking "Will America decline?" we might ask "What new forms of governance are emerging?" and then place ourselves as operators within new forms. The scenarios we write today will look as partial from 2030 as the 2020 predictions appear now.
July 11, 2025—
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. - John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
References
Grinin, Leonid, and Andrey Korotayev. 'Seven Weaknesses of the U.S. and the Future of American Hegemony'. World Futures 77, no. 1 (2021): 23-54.
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