America at 250: Circuit Breaker — The Power to Stop Itself
Blog post description.
COMMENTARIES
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera
8/19/20266 min read
Pic: credit Rey Del Rio, US Department of War
There was Polybius, writing in the age of the Roman Republic between 200 and 118 B.C., trying to understand why republics rise, decay and eventually become prisoners of their own power. There was Machiavelli, writing Discourses on Livy in the early sixteenth century, looking back at Rome to understand the machinery of republican government.
And then, 250 years ago, across the Atlantic, another republic began an experiment that would alter the course of modern history.
The American constitutional experiment began with an unusual suspicion. Its founders did not entirely trust kings, presidents or even majorities.
They distrusted power itself.
The word “democracy” does not appear in the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence. The founders spoke instead of liberty, representation, republican government and the restraint of power. The architecture they created was built around limits: separated powers, competing institutions, elections, federalism and an independent judiciary.
The intention was not to create a perfect government, but to prevent imperfect human beings from acquiring perfect power.
John Adams understood the danger. In 1814, he warned that democracy, when unchecked, could consume itself: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”
The American answer was the circuit breaker.
When a president acts upon impulse, Congress can resist. When Congress overreaches, courts can intervene. When institutions fail, elections can replace those who govern them. A free press and civil society provide further restraints.
None of these mechanisms is flawless.
That is precisely the point.
A republic survives not because its institutions are perfect, but because no institution is supposed to be absolute.
After moving to the United States, I began to see something difficult to understand from outside. I write this not as an American, but as someone who has lived in the United States and travelled through 47 countries, observing the currents of geopolitics.
America is perhaps one of the most heterogeneous social experiments in modern history. Its identity was not built upon one ancient civilisation, language, ethnicity or religion. It is a nation of people who arrived from elsewhere and were asked to believe in a common political idea.
America's identity is, in part, an agreement among strangers.
It has never been complete. Its history contains slavery, civil war, racial injustice, political violence and inequality. The republic has stumbled, sometimes badly.
Yet it has also renewed itself.
Perhaps this is the deeper strength of the American experiment: not the absence of failure, but the capacity to recover from it.
For 250 years, America has attracted people, capital, scientific talent and ambition from almost every corner of the world. It has also projected military power across the globe on a scale without historical parallel.
An estimated 750 U.S. military base sites are spread across roughly 80 foreign countries and territories (see Graph 1).American power is not merely projected across the world; it is physically embedded in it. The same republic that built constitutional mechanisms to restrain power also possesses military capabilities few states can match. That tension is central to understanding America.
Graph 1: Overseas Military Bases, Quincy Institute, David Vine, IISS.
Some see America as the world's policeman. Others see an exhausted power in decline.
Both descriptions contain fragments of truth.
But if the United States were to retreat tomorrow from the strategic architecture of the world, who would replace it?
I once listened to scholars at a prominent think tank in New Delhi argue that a South Asia without American power might be more peaceful. It is an argument worth considering. Yet when the question came—who would fill the vacuum?—the room became quiet.
India? China? There was no easy answer.
The instinct to balance power, so deeply embedded in the American constitutional experiment, also found an echo in the international order America helped construct.
Whatever one's assessment of NATO, it has provided a framework through which European powers have managed strategic rivalries since the Second World War. Institutions, alliances and deterrence helped contain old tensions between powers such as Germany and France.
Another circuit breaker.
President Donald Trump's pressure on NATO produced one measurable consequence: European defence spending accelerated. European NATO members and Canada increased core defence expenditure by nearly 20% in real terms in 2025 compared with 2024 (see Graph 2). At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, allies went further, committing to a new 5% of GDP defence-and-security target by 2035. Whatever one's political judgment of Trump, the pressure produced a measurable strategic consequence: Europe began assuming greater responsibility for its own defence.
Graph 2: NATO Defence Investment Update — Record Spending in Europe and Canada.
American power has always carried a paradox. It has protected, intervened, sanctioned, destabilised, rebuilt and deterred. It has sometimes defended liberal principles and sometimes violated them.
China's rise presents another paradox.
Modern China did not emerge entirely outside the American-led international system. Deng Xiaoping's reforms opened China to markets, capital and technology. China became a great power partly by learning to operate within—and eventually compete against—the system America helped construct.
I once had a long dinner with a senior Chinese official who spoke almost without pause about American hegemony. Near the end, the conversation became personal.
I asked about his children. They were all studying in the United States. The contradiction needed no explanation.
I have encountered similar contradictions elsewhere. A former president of Sri Lanka, deeply critical of American policy and convinced that Washington had played a role in his political downfall, once told me that the United States would not even grant him a visa.
The irony was striking. Here was a former head of state criticising American power while, at the same time, measuring that power through his inability to enter the country.
There is a similar paradox among political elites elsewhere. The children of senior policymakers and diplomats, including those at the highest levels of government, often live, work and build their careers in the United States. One example is the son of India's External Affairs Minister, who lives and works in Washington as Executive Director of ORF America, the Washington-based arm of India's Observer Research Foundation.
And there are many more sons and daughters of diplomats and senior policymakers who have chosen the republic as their home.
The point is not the individual. It is the larger paradox. Even among those who question American power, the United States remains a place where influence is exercised, careers are built and ideas are contested. The attraction is not merely anecdotal. The United States continues to host the world's largest international migrant population, with 52.4 million international migrants in 2024, more than any other country.
This does not make America innocent. It makes America complicated.
The dollar provides another example. Sanctions and dollar dominance have transformed economic interdependence into a strategic instrument. Traditional warfare required armies to cross borders. Financial power can cross borders without a single soldier.
These are modern circuit breakers too.
They can protect an international order. They can also become instruments of immense coercive power. The American experiment also travels through people.
As I write this, career diplomat Eric Meyer has been sworn in at the U.S. Department of State in Washington as the new U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka. Beyond the military bases, the dollar and the machinery of power, this is another face of American influence: diplomacy carried across borders by individuals representing a republic still attempting to define itself.
What I have also come to value about the American republic is its capacity to act when individual freedom is threatened beyond its borders. I saw this personally in the case of my Harvard classmate, Félix Maradiaga, who was imprisoned by the Ortega regime in Nicaragua. His eventual release was a reminder that American power, at its best, can be more than military might or economic leverage. It can be used to defend the freedom of an individual facing the machinery of a dictatorship. Maradiaga was among the political prisoners released and sent to the United States in February 2023.
That, too, is a circuit breaker—not against power within the republic, but against power exercised without limits beyond it.
Power becomes most dangerous when the mechanism designed to protect an order becomes indistinguishable from the power to define that order.
For 250 years, these circuit breakers have been tested. Some have failed. Some have been bypassed. Others have held.
That is why the American experiment matters beyond America.
The question is not simply whether the United States is rising or declining, benevolent or hegemonic, exceptional or exhausted. Those arguments will continue.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the experiment remains unfinished. The founders did not create a perfect republic. They created an unfinished one.
Perhaps that is its greatest strength.
After 250 years, the more important question is not whether the United States will remain the world's most powerful nation. It is whether it can remain a republic capable of restraining its own power.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is a Senior Fellow at the Millennium Project and Executive Director of the South Asia Foresight Network (SAFN) in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Winds of Change: Geopolitics at the Crossroads of South and Southeast Asia (World Scientific, 2026).
