Cyclical trap: How America is repeating history's fatal mistake in Iran

History's great powers rose on innovation, dominated through trade, then crumbled under peripheral wars. As US strikes on Iran escalate costs and nuclear risks, the familiar pattern emerges.

Writing in the Washington Post on Friday (March 13), Fareed Zakaria argues that America has walked again into the Middle East, and that this walk echoes the strategic folly that undid Britain. "Great powers do not usually fall because they are conquered by foreign armies," he wrote. "They fall because they overextend themselves on the periphery while neglecting the core."

It is a persuasive argument because it reflects the arc of history that suggests all great powers follow a cyclical pattern: rise, dominance, struggle and eclipse because of similar mistakes.

The idea that great powers rise and fall in cycles is an old observation.

Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab historian, is famous for his theory of the three generations. He used it to explain the rise and fall of dynasties and empires, arguing that they collapse because of a predictable psychological and social decay that happens over three generations.

The modern version arrived in 1987, in two books published almost simultaneously. George Modelski's Long Cycles in World Politics identified a recurring pattern. He suggested that global politics operates in 100-year cycles, where a dominant power emerges after a major global war to provide world leadership.

Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers explained the pattern. The empire expands because expansion is profitable. Then expansion becomes a habit. Then the habit becomes an obligation. Then the obligation becomes a burden.