On Civilizational Cyclicality by Ahmed E. Souaiaia, PhD Introduction Recent commentary in policy and journalistic circles, typified by essays such as The New York Times piece titled “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” interprets the contemporary geopolitical moment through the lens of strategic errors, imperial overreach, and episodic miscalculation. Within this framing, hypothetical or proximate conflicts, including discursive references to the 2026 war on Iran, are positioned as decisive inflection points that accelerate or reveal systemic deterioration. Such accounts capture visible strain but remain analytically confined to event-centric and state-centric logics. They presuppose that decline is triggered rather than emergent, that empire is an attribute of a nation-state rather than a structural condition of a broader configuration, and that capacity, whether military, economic, or technological, constitutes the primary metric of systemic vitality. When examined thr...
...in his own words and in the words of others who read his works
