Adm. James Alexander “Sandy” Winnefeld, Jr.
11 minutes
Long-Wave Geopolitical Cycles
For millennia, humans have lived within long-wave geopolitical cycles that are hard to discern within a single human lifetime. Inherent in these cycles are systems of laws, rules, standards, agreements, and customs established by a lead entity that enable nations to cooperatively achieve relative stability and prosperity. Though some call this “the rules-based international order,” I prefer to call it “the global operating system.” These systems have a natural tendency to exist in long-wave geopolitical cycles that end in devastating convulsions, leading to a new cycle.
The most important question facing us today—looming over other challenges such as climate change or how we manage the emergence of artificial intelligence—is whether the leaders of Western free market democracies can summon the wisdom required to recognize and then counter the factors that tend to end these cycles. Failure to do so could result in a catastrophe far worse than previous cycle-ending events due to the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Cycles Start . . .
There is considerable academic work on this subject. Among others, theorists such as George Modelski (Long Cycles in World Politics), Hal Brands and Charles Edel (The Lessons of Tragedy), and Ray Dalio (How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle) argue that world politics shows recurring waves in which a leading state rises, organizes a global order, is challenged, declines internally, and is eventually replaced.
Long cycles typically start in the wake of a catastrophic event—usually a war—when a victorious state converts a new techno‑economic base (naval power, industrialization, digital networks) into structural capabilities (sea control, trade finance, global reach) and begins building institutions and imposes rules others must accept. The lead nation sets the agenda and leads the formation of institutions, and offers benefits such as alliances, freedom of navigation, a reserve currency, and open markets.
A self-sustaining group of major actors find it in their interest to align with the leading nation, and the cycle enters a mature phase during which that nation enjoys economic and technological superiority, relative military overmatch, and institutional authority, which stabilizes the system and suppresses great ‑power war.
However, eventually the cycle reaches a peak and begins to unwind, for several overlapping reasons.
And Cycles End . . .
A rising power. Over time, highly ambitious rising states emulate the leader, start to catch up technologically and economically, and begin to challenge the existing order. This is amplified when the rising nation is authoritarian in nature. These regimes are adept at obeying international norms and laws only when it is convenient for their interests. They weather suffering on the part of their populations due to highly effective controls over internal dissent. And because they rig their elections (should they even hold them) their leaders are not subject to serious electoral threats. These factors enable authoritarian regimes to think more strategically than democracies do in the long term.
Today, an angry and resentful Russia still poses an existential threat to its perceived antagonists, but that nation is weakening and is only a peripheral factor. Rather, it is widely recognized that China is the rising, ambitious power bent on overthrowing the existing global operating system in its own favor.
A declining power. As the cycle progresses, the leading nation tends to over-extend itself militarily, assume increasing fiscal burdens, and experience deep internal political divides that gradually erode its relative edge. This is especially true of democracies, whose elected officials err towards short-term strategies to preserve their political capital and chances for re-election. Policymaking aligned to constituents’ desires rather than thoughtful, often difficult, long-term choices exacerbates the factors that lead to decline and distract from the impending danger.
Militarily, over-extension on the part of the United States over last two decades, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, crept beyond its truly vital national security interests. That in turn sapped the investment and innovation (in the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical aspects of war) required to outpace a technologically proficient rising power. This is problematic when the Western Pacific, where conflict could occur, is so far away, and the opponent has such strategic depth.
Economically, the U.S. national debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 120 percent compared with China’s 90 percent. The U.S. now annually pays more in interest on its debt than it does for defense. The most recent U.S. budgets point to a chronically large structural deficit, rising interest burdens, and a debt ratio that is drifting higher rather than stabilizing, which together signal deteriorating fiscal health over the medium to long term. There is no sign yet of a policy turn that would meaningfully change that trajectory, even though year-‑to-year deficits have edged slightly down from their pandemic peak as a share of GDP.
Politically, rising ideological differences between the two parties in Congress and the near disappearance of moderates in each party are reminiscent of gaps during the 1850s and the Gilded Age. Polarization has risen sharply since the 1970s and is now at historic highs, mostly due to ideologically aligned 24-hour news media and the rise of social media echo chambers. Voters and elites increasingly “sort” so that liberals are overwhelmingly Democrats and conservatives are overwhelmingly Republicans, with little room for compromise at the edges and a vacuum in the center. As a result, it is difficult for Congress to pass existing required budget and policy legislation, much less laws designed to counter downward cycle trends. There is little credible prospect for a third party to emerge that could bridge the gap.
As the competition heats up, the lead nation can fall into the trap of drifting towards same contempt for law exhibited by the rising nation, in which the rule of power begins to triumph over the rule of law. Symptomatic of this trend, America’s contemporary drift away from international (and even domestic) law began before but has accelerated under the Trump administration.
Generations forget. As John W. Gardner once said: “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” Recollection among populations of the terrible cost of cycle-ending disasters decays over succeeding generations, gradually diluting the urgency of countering the trends that lead to disaster. It is difficult for societies, with their capacity for taking things for granted, to recognize when a cycle is reaching its end. It often seems that only historians are sensitive to the danger. Even when alerted, people fall into the trap, described by novelist Herman Wouk, of “the will not to believe.”
Eventually, the prevailing order collapses, usually triggered by unanticipated events that lead unwitting politicians—with little sense of the danger—to sleepwalk into a catastrophic war. Historian Graham Allison aptly describes such cycle ending conflict in his book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
The length of succeeding cycles seems to have shrunk over time, potentially because of the increasing speed of information flows that accelerate the trends causing a cycle’s downfall. Indeed, in the Western context, the gaps between the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the combined World Wars of the 20th century are 150 and 100 years, respectively.
Today, we are 80 years into the latest cycle. Based on the evidence, it’s hard to argue that today’s geopolitical cycle is not trending towards an accelerating decline. Are we due for another disastrous end?
Can We Salvage This?
Although momentum towards decline seems to be gathering, it is not possible to know exactly how close the world is to the precipice of a major convulsion. We only know that every cycle eventually comes to an end. The end is usually sudden but unknowable until it happens. If indeed it’s possible to arrest or even reverse the descent, what actions might be necessary to accomplish that difficult project?
Perhaps the most important effort lies in better educating the American people and other like-minded nations’ publics regarding both the danger and the need for change. This would begin with more historical context presented in secondary education and beyond. It could benefit from an information campaign intended to expose social media echo chambers (including better awareness of the foreign trolls that amplify divisive messages), as well as more balanced media coverage that exposes harmful policy choices on both sides of the political spectrum.
Unfortunately, like a third political party, it will be very difficult to establish a truly independent, widely accessed, impartial media outlet due to the economics involved.[1] However, if the education effort is successful, it would enable the American people to understand and buy in to the need for near term belt-tightening for the benefit of our long-term prosperity and security.
Many politicians privately understand this need, but it is routinely eclipsed by the simple need to be re-elected and the influence of political primaries. However, should the political class recognize the American people are awakening to the dangers of a declining power, it could liberate them to close their ideological gaps and better work together to prevent the decline.
If so, more far-sighted legislation would involve both spending cuts and tax increases, relying on a balanced package of entitlement reforms, base ‑broadening tax changes, and selective discretionary budget cuts. Congress would also need to adopt explicit medium-term fiscal rules—a debt or expenditure anchor with operational deficit ceilings—so that, over time, primary balances could move into surplus and debt ratios would stabilize.
It the meantime we should refocus national security into more achievable strategies. For example, rather than going explicitly toe-to-toe in the “hot zone” with China militarily to prevent coercion of Taiwan, a more thoughtful strategy would be to target the Chinese leadership’s perception of its grip on power. This would require challenging China in new ways in the diplomatic, information, economic, and military domains—along synchronized and well-constructed escalation ladders—to energize their principal fear, namely, that of their own people. Thoughtfully done, this could lead to a more affordable military.
It would be helpful along the way to increase the collective ability, knowledge, and professionalism of government officials and workers tasked with designing and implementing policies intended to arrest descent. This would require enlisting capable, experienced people into government—including on short employment terms—which would in turn require vastly different pay rules.
On the international economic front, a shift from reactive containment policies and seemingly randomly applied tariffs to structured competition, alongside limited decoupling in critical technologies and supply chains, as well as carefully applied industrial strategies, could preserve managed interdependence that stabilizes the system while sustaining U.S. economic strength.
Within the current cycle, we have always been co-dependent with like-minded international partners for our collective prosperity and security (despite healthy competition). It’s all about trust. We should draw a lesson from the military leadership principle that “the leader does more than the led.” Rather than pushing our partners away, we should invest heavily in alliance systems, multilateral institutions, and rule-setting (including trade, finance, and technology standards) while holding our allies accountable for carrying their fair share of the load. The intent would be to channel China’s behavior and preserve a favorable balance of power without requiring unsustainable unilateral shows of force.
In practice, this kind of program is about both a series of disciplined “nos” (to extreme politicians on left and right, to unfunded permanent tax cuts, to marginal wars, to weak burden ‑sharing) and “yeses” (to better and somewhat smaller government, to domestic and allied renewal, to wiser engagement with competitors, and to greater social media awareness) that will underwrite long-‑term power.
Are these required actions feasible? I am personally skeptical but hopeful. They all hinge on the first imperative above, namely education.
There are a host of previous examples of a cycle declining and succumbing to a final catastrophe. The end is less about a single disastrous decision that ends the cycle than it is about the failure to thoughtfully act on the way down. Unfortunately, Georg Hegel tells us that “History teaches us that we do not learn from history.” Societies rarely recognize looming structural change, yet this decline is the central concern I carry into 2026.
We fail to take the difficult and painful steps required to preserve this cycle, whose end could include a nuclear exchange, at our grave peril. As Oona Hathaway, quoting Ernest Hemingway, reminds us: bankruptcy happens “gradually and then suddenly.”[2] Will we act to prevent events from suddenly getting out of hand?
