Historian warns America could face apocalyptic destruction because of controversial policy that both Biden and Trump have backed

America’s status as the world’s greatest power will end for the same reason its predecessors did: crushed by a mountain of debt that politicians can easily ignore, historians warn.

And the United States’ century at the top could come to an end sooner than expected, with countries in Asia increasingly likely to pull the plug.

Interest payments on debt exceeded defense spending earlier this month, but historian Professor Niall Ferguson says gun violence will not bring down the country.

“Any major power that spends more on debt service than on defense will not remain great for long,” he said.

‘That goes for Habsburg Spain, that goes for the French ancien régime, that goes for the Ottoman Empire, that goes for the British Empire. This law will be put to the test by the US early this year.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated this week that another $1.9 trillion will be added to the national debt this year alone, bringing it to an eye-watering $36 trillion.

That’s equal to the total value of goods and services the US produces over the course of a year.

Rising health care costs and bank interest rates rising to a 23-year high are among factors that will push interest rates to $56 trillion within the next decade, pushing interest rates to a record 122 percent from GDP will come true.

And there appears to be little to choose between the two presidential candidates, as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump added $7 billion to the figure during their terms, the newspaper said. WJ.

JH Cullum Clark, of the Bush Institute-Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, has studied the history of previous superpowers and sees disturbing parallels with America’s current situation.

He says this pattern was established as far back as the Roman Empire, when excessive spending tempted third-century emperors to debase the currency, creating endemic inflation that ultimately destroyed the country’s power to defend itself.

The wealth pouring in from the New World blinded Spain to its dependence on foreign loans to maintain its empire abroad and ended its dominance in the 17th century.

Ultimately, “the country managed to go bankrupt seven times in the 19th century alone, after going bankrupt six times in the previous three centuries,” economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wrote in their book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

A hundred years later it was France’s turn after a series of intermittent defaults, before Britain lost its place to the US in the 20th century, causing debts to skyrocket during and immediately after World War II.

The British pound had been the international reserve currency between the wars, helping it finance its far-flung empire, but it decisively lost that status to the US dollar in the aftermath of the war.

The US debt ratio fell during the prosperous 1990s, reaching a low of 32 percent in 2001.

But the rate has since risen to 99 percent, boosted by the Great Recession of the 2010s and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The largest contributor to the cumulative increase was the passage of recently enacted legislation that added $1.6 trillion to projected deficits,” the CBO wrote in its report.

“That legislation included additional emergency appropriations that provided $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and countries in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The world’s need to buy dollars used in international trade has protected the US from high debt burdens, but there are increasing signs that the US’s status as the world’s reserve currency is under threat.

Credit rating agency Fitch downgraded US debt from the highest rating of AAA to AA+ in August last year, citing “a steady deterioration in governance standards.”

And in November, agency Moody’s warned it could remove the government’s AAA rating while downgrading its outlook from stable to negative.

“Even if a country issues the leading reserve currency, even if a country is the dominant geopolitical power, that just doesn’t help countries,” Cullum Clark told the WSJ.

‘They will lose that status.’

Yale historian Professor Paul Kennedy warns that Asian countries, including China, are holding large amounts of US debt in the form of government bonds.

He said they now have the power to trigger a seismic threat to America’s status if “for some reason, because of a political falling out with the US, they decide to dump large amounts of government bonds.”

“I’ve been asking my economist friends about this conundrum… of a very, very large and in some ways overextended great power being able to issue more and more currency-denominated bonds without, shall we say, punishment. ,’ he said.

His 1987 book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers helped draw politicians’ attention to the dangers of debt, which paid off in falling debt-to-GDP levels in the 1990s.

And other countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Canada, have also managed to reduce their debt spending in recent years, despite the impact of the pandemic.

But the national debt has taken a back seat in the presidential race so far, with Republicans promising tax cuts and Biden promising no federal tax increases for families making less than $400,000 a year.

Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire next year, but Biden has said he will extend at least some of them for low- and middle-income people.

Trump himself has said they will all be extended when he returns to the White House, potentially costing another $5 trillion over 10 years.

“The damaging effects of higher interest rates, which fuel higher interest costs on a massive existing debt burden, continue,” said Michael Peterson, managing director of the tax think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

‘It’s the definition of unsustainable.’