I have a lot of respect for Fareed Zakharia. In this excellent article, he makes the point that Paul Kennedy made in the outstanding, cautionary book, " The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (1987) – that dominant nations decline when military overspending outpaces economic growth.

Imperial overreach is deeply Macroeconomic. Great powers, especially powers that are the overwhelming superior power of their age, believe that their economic resources are bottomless and overspend to maintain empires that eventually drain the source of their power.

washingtonpost.com - Britain empire trump iran decline


Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.

Trump’s decision to return to the Middle East echoes the strategic folly that undid Britain.

by Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post (and the Peninsula Daily News), March 13, 2026

For around 15 years, many American leaders — including all three presidents in that period — believed that the country was too deeply entangled in trying to reorder the societies of the Middle East. They felt the more pressing challenges included rebuilding America’s industrial base and confronting the rise of China. Yet here America is, once again, fighting a war to reorder a society in the greater Middle East. And like in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, this war seems unlikely to turn out quite as its proponents may hope…

<snip comments on how regional wars are peripheral to America’s strategic interest but divert attention from the core>

The primary, indispensable role of the U.S. is to anchor the global system against the revisionist ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. China is not getting bogged down in Middle Eastern quagmires; it is relentlessly investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, solar and wind power, batteries and robots — the technologies that will determine the balance of global power. Russia remains fiercely committed to disrupting European security and undermining Western democracies through hybrid political-military warfare that has proved hard to detect and even harder to defeat…

Even if the intervention in Iran succeeds, it would require that America get deeply involved in the fate of that country. Is that ultimately where America’s time and energy would be best devoted over the next decade? The lesson from Britain’s role is clear: Great powers do not usually fall because they are conquered by foreign armies. They fall because they overextend themselves on the periphery while neglecting the core. [end quote]

The collapse of Great Powers is Macroeconomic. The source of the power is economic and the loss of economic power leads to loss of imperial power.

This is the clearest reason I have seen for the U.S. to pull out of Iran as soon as possible. Don’t we ever learn?

Wendy