Lisbon, May 31, 2026 (Lusa) – Australian historian Don Watson believes America is in decline and expresses pessimism regarding the upcoming US midterm elections, adding that restoring democracy will take time.
"America is in decline, if not absolute decline, relative decline, because China is getting bigger and bigger, and India is getting bigger and bigger," he stated from Melbourne, Australia. The interview marked the release of his book The Shortest History of the United States of America, published ahead of the country's 250th anniversary.
The historian, a former adviser to Australia's Prime Minister Paul Keating, said that hundreds of thousands of people rely on jobs within the weapons industry.
He said that the fact that the US manufactures more weapons and spends more on its armed forces than all other countries combined represents a relative weakness. To explain the country's relative decline, he said that the US is abandoning renewable energy and falling behind at the forefront of science and technology.
US President Donald Trump shares something profound with Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, the historian said. "Their backs are against the wall" and they "need to win personally", creating "a kind of desperate quality to them," he noted.
Trump and Netanyahu could both end up in prison, while Putin's fate remains entirely unknown, Watson said.
A Democrat-controlled Congress "what do they do? They impeach him? Well, they’ve done that a couple of times, it doesn't make a lot of difference," he said.
The current political landscape suggests a harsher outcome now. "He would be impeached in the Senate as well, and then you’d have a constitutional crisis; it might not be pretty," he said, noting that Trump would never accept being a weakened president.
He does not believe Trump’s support base will allow his downfall. Even if tech oligarchs switch their allegiance to a Democratic candidate, their arrival into the party "is going to look almost as toxic to Democratic voters as Trump."
The Democratic Party faces a major fundamental issue. "It needs to change, it can't go on being the alternative corporate party" because people detest that, he said.
He questioned whether democracy has changed permanently because of this event, noting that arguments usually suggest permanent alteration is inevitable due to the immense power held by the military, tech billionaires, and the oil industry, meaning the central challenge now lies in governing without falling under their control.
He suggested that Trump would attempt to dominate Brazil if given enough time.
"I don't think he knows quite where Portugal is," Watson ironised, while highlighting the extensive damage already inflicted on democratic institutions. He said that half of Project 2025 has already been implemented: "Departments have been gutted, Trump acolytes have been put in charge, thousands and thousands of public servants have been laid off, and with them goes a lot of corporate knowledge. He's politicised a lot of institutions which used not to be politicised" and "he's ripped money out of USAID and out of American cultural institutions."
Executive orders, tariffs, and declared wars add to this legacy, he said.
Reverting this situation will prove extremely difficult, he stressed, adding that JD Vance will not differ significantly from Trump.
"I think that democracy will take a lot of repairing, even in the best of all possible worlds," he added. "In the worst, God knows what will happen, because he is setting precedents that are going to stop the next president from moving forward."
"And it's very hard to see the Democratic Party finding the gumption, the strength of character," because the party" has to take a lot of responsibility for Trump." He acknowledged he cannot imagine how American democracy will return to a pristine state after Trump leaves.
American history is built upon massive contradictions. "A declaration of independence written by a man with 600 slaves, a Constitution written by men, all of whom own slaves, except maybe one or two," Watson said.
The first five US presidents owned slaves, and racial divisions persist to this day that will never disappear, he said.
Europe is certainly at a turning point, he said, noting that if Europeans take more responsibility for their own defence and unite around that common interest, it could prove beneficial.
He criticised Vance’s support for Hungary's former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as "very strange", though he noted it yielded two positive outcomes: "One of them is that Hungarians voted to remove Orbán from power" and the second was that "Europeans united enough to fund Ukraine for another two years."
Watson's book covers American history from the Declaration of Independence to the MAGA movement, detailing 250 years of achievements and setbacks. The United States began on 4 July 1776, when 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain.
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