On Saturday, the United States celebrated its 250th birthday. By the standards of civilisational states like China, India, Iran or Egypt, America is barely an adolescent. Yet by the measure that matters most in the modern era, it holds a distinction no other nation can claim: it is governed by the oldest written constitution still in active use. That document drafted in 1787, famously emphasising the separation of powers, continues to run the affairs of the world’s most powerful state.For well over the past century that has seen two World Wars, massive political and technological change, the United States has stood unchallenged as the world’s foremost military and economic power. From 1980 to date, it has commanded roughly 26% of global GDP, since 1991, its military budget has exceeded the combined defence spending of China, Russia, France and Germany. It remains the only state capable of projecting decisive force in any theatre on the planet.Britain’s world-spanning empire was built on steam and the first industrial revolution; the US absorbed and then surpassed it by riding the second, which involved chemicals, telephony, pharmaceuticals, manned flight, radio, and above all the internal combustion engine. The American industrial output began its long ascent toward global dominance in the 1870s. By the end of World War I in 1918, the US was already the world’s leading economy.Unlike every other major belligerent, the United States emerged from the Second World War physically unscathed. America now constructed a worldwide framework of alliances, institutions, and rules – NATO, the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs – that established the structure of its primacy. The Soviet Union did provide an alternative vision, and for four decades the contest between two superpowers defined the terms of global order.The Soviet collapse between 1989 and 1991 produced what was termed the “unipolar moment”. For a brief period, American primacy appeared complete and unchallengeable. History, one commentator declared, had ended. But unchecked power led to its own hubris. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed staggering quantities of blood, treasure, and credibility over two decades. The unipolar moment became, in retrospect, an unipolar miscalculation.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The present chapter in American history is shaped by two parallel forces – the rise of China and the digital revolution. China has leveraged the same technological currents – artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, telecom, quantum computing – to close the gap with American power faster than most analysts anticipated a generation ago. Washington now officially designates Beijing a peer competitor. But that designation should not obscure the reality that America still leads on most indices of national power: innovation, higher education, capital markets, soft power, the depth of its alliance networks and military power.The deeper challenge facing the United States today is therefore not China. It is America itself.In an editorial comment, last week, The Washington Post laid out 25 reasons to be optimistic about America’s future. In the main, they spoke of America’s accumulated science and technology prowess, its educational institutions, its cutting edge genetic medicine and mRNA technology, the US dollar, the strength of its stock market, its venture capitalists, the human resources generated by migrants, its lead in AI, its space prowess and its democracy.But what the newspaper did not list were the downsides afflicting the country. The republic is celebrating its founding at a moment when its foundational institutions are under the most sustained internal assault in living memory. Today, we have a US where the power and influence of big money is increasing exponentially undermining the integrity of its political system. There is an erosion of its vaunted concept of separation of powers where the Congress remains a bystander, as a politicised Supreme Court greenlights a power-crazed executive. At the centre of this threat is the 45th and 47th President – Donald J Trump – convicted in 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in 2024 and whose family business has made over $1 billion in crypto ventures in the past year.Meanwhile, there is a marked erosion in the status of its vaunted “middle class”. Millennials born between 1981-1996 own less than two-thirds of the real estate Baby Boomers born between 1946-64 did at the exact same age.Decades after discriminatory lending practices were banned, the homeownership gap between Black and White Americans remains wider than it was in the 1960s. More than anything else, this gap is a major indicator of systemic social inequality.Also read: At 250, American Democracy is Under SiegeThe corrupt Donald Trump has treated the separation of powers not as a key governing principle but as an obstacle. Courts, independent agencies, universities, and the free press that had been designed to prevent the consolidation of power have all faced deliberate and sustained attacks. The civil service has been hollowed out. International commitments, accumulated over decades, have been treated as liabilities rather than assets. Scientific institutions that underpinned American economic and military advantage are being defunded and politicised. Immigrants who built the US are being asked to go away or stay home.The alliances that constituted the sinews of American power – NATO, the partnerships across the Indo-Pacific – are fraying as allies rework their assessments of American reliability. The erosion of alliances subtracts real capacity from the American strategic position. No adversary has managed to inflict on the US what its own government is currently inflicting on itself.For India, it is a fraught moment. Despite their geographic distance, India and the United States share a relationship that reaches back to the eighteenth century. In the mid-19th century, American ice, ferried across oceans, once chilled the drinks in British clubs in Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai. During the American Civil War (1860-1865), saltpetre imported from Bihar supplied the raw material for gunpowder. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance inspired Martin Luther King and the desegregation movement of the 1960s.In the past quarter-century, the two democracies largely buried their troubled Cold War history and built a strategic partnership of genuine substance: the Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2008, the Quad, defence technology-sharing, resting on a convergence of interests, a shared wariness of Chinese power, and a long-term bet that two large democracies had more to gain from each other than to lose.Today that structure is under stress. Tariff pressures, visa restrictions affecting Indian professionals and students, and Washington’s transactional turn have introduced friction into a relationship that had been carefully nurtured. More fundamentally, an India that has spent two decades calibrating its strategic autonomy between great powers now watches the most important of those powers become less predictable, less institutionally stable, and less reliably committed to the rules-based order that India and much of the world relies on.America at 250 is a nation deeply divided along political, cultural and ideological lines. Historic friction over race and white supremacy, inequality of wealth, and immigration continues to polarise the country. Within the US, bipartisanship is a lost cause. Today, the most conservative Democrat in Congress still routinely votes to the left of the most liberal Republican, virtually eliminating traditional bipartisan dealmaking.For the world beyond American borders, the stakes are scarcely less acute. The international order – imperfect, inequitable, but functional – was largely an American construction. Its persistence depends not just on American material power, which endures, but on American will and coherence, which are in question.The onset of the AI age makes the issues even more piquant. The Economist notes that the US controls the world’s leading AI models and commands fifteen times as much computing power as Europe. It has the capital, the technology base, and the infrastructure to convert the AI revolution into another surge of power, much as it did with the second industrial revolution a century ago.Alarmingly, America’s material foundations may be strengthening even as its institutional foundations weaken. A country can grow richer and more capable in absolute terms while becoming less predictable, less bound by its own rules, and less trusted by those who have built their strategies around it — indeed, that is closer to a description of where the US is now than either a straightforward decline story or a straightforward triumphalist one.For India, this is precisely the problem, not a separate one. New Delhi’s post-2005 strategic bet – the Civil Nuclear Agreement, the Quad, defence technology-sharing — was a wager that a rules-bound, institutionally stable America was a more reliable long-term partner than the alternatives on offer. That wager did not depend on America staying the world’s richest or most technologically advanced power; it depended on America staying predictable.Many assume the pendulum will swing back in the fullness of time, as it has after the Civil War, the Depression, and Watergate. That may still happen. But the mechanisms that produced past corrections – an independent judiciary, a free press, a professional civil service, a Congress willing to check the executive – are themselves the institutions currently under strain.What is emerging instead is a more self-centred America: richer, more technologically dominant, and less encumbered by the rules and alliances it once wrote for everyone else, including itself. The world will have to deal with that country – powerful, transactional, and no longer as open as it once was. That, more than any GDP statistic, is the real measure of what has changed at 250.Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.