Ray Dalio：債務、分裂と無秩序、アメリカは衰退を逃れられるか？

Original Title: A Legendary Investor on How to Prevent America’s Coming ‘Heart Attack’

Original Author: Emily Holzknecht and Sophia Alvarez Boyd, the New York Times

Original Translation and Compilation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: Amid soaring U.S. fiscal deficits, escalating geopolitical conflicts, and a renewed scrutiny of the dollar’s creditworthiness, discussions about the United States are shifting from “Is it still the world’s strongest economy?” to “Are the institutions, debt, and international order underpinning American hegemony still stable?”

But when “America is still powerful” and “America is unraveling” are both true, a more critical question emerges: Is the U.S. facing a routine cyclical adjustment, or a loosening of its long-term order?

This article is compiled from an interview with Ray Dalio on the New York Times podcast “Interesting Times.” Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has long observed macro-order changes from the perspective of debt cycles, reserve currencies, and the rise and fall of empires.

In this conversation, Dalio breaks down America’s problems into a set of more fundamental structural variables: how debt accumulates, how politics becomes polarized, how the international order fails, and whether technology can still provide a new productivity outlet.

First, the debt cycle is changing national capacity. In the past, relying on strong fiscal credit and the dollar’s reserve currency status, the U.S. could finance itself at a low cost for a long time, maintaining military spending, welfare, and global commitments. But now, with spending persistently exceeding income, debt and interest burdens are rising, and fiscal space is being continuously compressed. This means debt is no longer just a number on a balance sheet but will gradually translate into constraints on national action: the ability to protect allies, sustain welfare, and bear the costs of war will all be limited by fiscal reality.

Second, domestic political division is increasingly tied to the issue of wealth distribution. In the past, U.S. political divides could be partially absorbed by growth, taxes, and welfare expansion. Different groups had conflicts of interest but still shared a degree of institutional trust. Now, the wealth gap, value conflicts, and left-right antagonism are superimposed. Any plan to reduce deficits inevitably touches on the question of “who pays more taxes and who receives fewer benefits.” This means fiscal adjustment is no longer just a technical issue but a question of political legitimacy. The more reform is needed, the harder it is to build consensus.

Third, the international order is shifting from rules back to power. After 1945, the U.S. led the establishment of a world order centered on multilateral institutions, a rules-based system, and the credit of the dollar. In the past, even during the Cold War, the U.S. held overwhelming advantages in finance and institutions. But now, geopolitical conflicts, the reorganization of blocs, and supply chain security issues are eroding the stability of this order. Analogies with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and even the Suez crisis all point to the same problem: when rules cannot be enforced, markets will eventually reassess the relationship between power, credit, and security.

Fourth, pressure on the dollar doesn’t mean the renminbi will directly take over. Dalio’s assessment is more nuanced: the renminbi may increasingly become a medium of exchange in more trade scenarios, but this doesn’t mean Chinese debt will become the world’s most important store of wealth. The real question is, when all fiat currencies face devaluation pressure, where will capital seek safe assets? Gold’s resurgence as a significant part of central bank reserves is a reflection of this uncertainty.

Fifth, AI could either alleviate or amplify the crisis. In the past, technological progress was often seen as a key outlet for the U.S. to fix its debt and growth problems. If AI can significantly boost productivity, it could indeed improve income, growth, and debt-servicing capacity. But now, AI is also creating new wealth concentration, job displacement, and security risks. It could be a buffer for fiscal pressure or a new amplifier of social division and geopolitical competition.

If this conversation were compressed into one judgment, it would be: America’s problem is not a single crisis, but a simultaneous revaluation of debt, politics, the international order, and technological variables.

In this sense, the subject of this article is not just whether America is in decline, but a larger structural question: when the old order is still functioning, but its underlying conditions are loosening, how should markets, nations, and individuals reinterpret “security” and “credit”?

The following is the original content (edited for readability):

Source: The New York Times

TL;DR

·Dalio’s core judgment: The U.S. is not just weakening in the short term, but entering a downward phase of a major cycle.

·America’s real risk isn’t a lack of money, but excessive debt that will slowly drain national capacity.

·The deficit is the hardest to solve because it inevitably becomes a political conflict over “who pays and who concedes.”

·The underlying cause of U.S. political division isn’t just values, but an imbalance in wealth and interest distribution.

·The rules-based order the U.S. led after WWII is failing; the world is reverting to power politics.

·The dollar won’t be immediately replaced by the renminbi, but the world will pay more attention to safe-haven assets like gold.

·AI might save growth, but it could also further tear apart employment, wealth, and security orders.

·Whether the U.S. can recover depends not on the market, but on education, social order, and avoiding war.

Original Content

I feel we are currently in a moment that could be described as the “end of the American Empire.”

Part of it is the stalemate in the conflict with Iran; part of it is Donald Trump pressuring America’s alliances; and part of it, I think, is a growing sense that America’s biggest rival, China, is watching coldly, waiting for its collapse.

Our guest this week has been thinking about this for a long time. He has a grand historical theory predicting America’s decline. In a way, he is an atypical Cassandran figure—constantly warning, but not always taken seriously.

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, from scratch. But today, what he most wants to talk about is not just markets and investing, but the decline of the American empire, and whether we can pull this “American Empire” back from the brink.

The following is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” For the full effect, we recommend listening to the original audio. You can listen via the player above, or on the New York Times App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio, and other podcast platforms.

The Cyclical Logic of the American Crisis

Ross Douthat (Host): Ray Dalio, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Ray Dalio (Founder of Bridgewater Associates): Thank you. It’s certainly interesting to be on “Interesting Times” in these “interesting times.”

Douthat: Everyone says that. You’ve spent your career making bets, and many of your judgments have paid off over the past few decades. Lately, you’ve been suggesting that the United States of America at this moment might not be a particularly good bet.

So, for someone observing the U.S. now, trying to decide whether to bet on the “American Empire” remaining dominant in the 21st century, what are the important forces or key factors they should be watching?

How Debt Drains National Capacity

Dalio: I want to correct that premise first. I’m not saying the U.S. is a bad bet or a good bet. I’m just describing what’s happening.

In my roughly 50 years of investing, one thing I’ve learned is that many events very important to me had never happened in my lifetime, but they had happened many times in history.

So, I started studying the last 500 years of history, trying to understand the rise and fall of reserve currencies and the empires behind them. You see a certain pattern repeating. There is indeed a “big cycle,” and the big cycle usually starts with the formation of a new order.

There are three types of order: monetary order, domestic political order, and the international world order. These are three powerful forces that are constantly evolving.

Look at the first force, monetary order. There’s a debt cycle within it. When debt rises relative to income, and debt service payments rise relative to income, whether it’s a country or an individual—

Douthat: Or an empire.

Dalio: Any entity!

Douthat: Yes.

Behind Political Division Lies Money Distribution

Dalio: This squeezes other spending. That’s the problem. For example, the U.S. now spends about $7 trillion a year and takes in about $5 trillion, so spending is about 40% more than income. This deficit has persisted for a while, so the U.S. has accumulated debt about six times its income—by income, I mean the actual money the government receives.

Right. But the result of this is that the currency itself gets devalued. That’s the mechanism at work. That’s why there are long-term debt cycles, short-term debt cycles, monetary cycles, and economic cycles—they drive the economy from one recession to overheating, and then to the next recession.

Related to this is the domestic political and social cycle, which is intimately connected to monetary issues. When a society experiences large wealth gaps and value differences—

Douthat: You mean the gap between rich and poor?

Dalio: Between rich and poor, and between people with different values. When these differences become irreconcilable, you get political conflict, and this conflict becomes severe enough to risk the entire system.

So, I think the first cycle is happening. I also think the second cycle is happening—the irreconcilable divide between the political left and right. We can discuss these in more detail later.

The World Order is Returning to Power Politics

Douthat: And how do international factors come into play?

Dalio: The logic is the same internationally. After a war ends, a dominant power emerges, and that dominant power establishes a new world order. An order is a system. This current order started in 1945.

Douthat: For us, yes. America was the dominant force that built that system.

Dalio: Exactly. America built a system, and it was largely a reflection of American institutions, because it was intended to be representative. For instance, the United Nations was a kind of multilateral world order. Different countries could operate within it, and theoretically, there was supposed to be a rules-based system.

But the problem is, without an enforcement mechanism, the system isn’t truly effective. It was an idealistic system, and it was a good system while it could be maintained. But today, we no longer have a truly multilateral, rules-based system.

We are reverting to a state that existed before 1945 and for most of history: geopolitical differences will keep emerging, like what’s happening now around Iran.

How are these differences resolved? You don’t submit them to the International Court of Justice, wait for a ruling, and then have it enforced. Ultimately, what matters is power.

Douthat: Right. But even at the height of what we understood as the “rules-based international order,” for most of that period, America was in a conflict with the Soviet Union.

Dalio: Yes.

Douthat: The Cold War was ongoing. The window where the system truly operated without great power conflict was relatively short. And even then, American power was ultimately decisive, right?

Dalio: Of course. Because the Soviet Union didn’t have real economic power. It had military power, but at the end of WWII, the U.S. held about 80% of the world’s monetary wealth, half of global GDP, and was the dominant military power. So we had the capacity to provide funds, and the recipients valued that. The Soviet system was just a very limited part of that. Financially, it was almost bankrupt and certainly not a significant power.

Douthat: So, the military balance of power was real, but in the financial balance of power, it was essentially America’s world.

Dalio: Yes. Fortunately, under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, we didn’t actually use that military power. Nevertheless, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis—I was a kid watching it unfold, not knowing if there would be a nuclear exchange. But it didn’t come to that, and later the Soviet Union collapsed.

Douthat: In your cyclical view of history, what role do contingent events play?

Dalio: All events happen in sequence. I think the key question is: will they lead to disputes? And in a world without a court system to resolve disputes, both domestically and internationally, how are these disputes resolved?

Take what’s happening in the Middle East now, especially regarding Iran. There’s a conflict, and it turns into a war because there’s no other way to resolve it. And now the world is watching: can America win this war, or will it lose?

When we look at this, we almost measure it in black and white terms: who will control the Strait of Hormuz? Who will control nuclear materials? Can America win this war?

We should also see the alignments behind this. Russia and Iran tend to support each other more, just as there are supporting forces on the other side.

Douthat: Again, compared to recent decades, what’s most special about this moment is that the opposing camp is stronger, right?

Dalio: It’s a change in relative power, and the breakdown of the old order. Also, large creditor-debtor relationships are entangled in it. For example, when the U.S. runs large deficits for a long time, it has to borrow money. This becomes very dangerous in times of conflict. Interdependence is like that too.

In other words, in a riskier world, you need to be self-sufficient. Because history tells us you can be cut off at any time. Either side can be cut off.

Douthat: Yes. I’m very interested in how these factors interlock. Let’s say the final outcome in Iran is that people think America lost the war, or at least didn’t achieve its goals. Maybe the Strait of Hormuz is still open, but the Iranian regime remains in power, and there’s a perception that America tried something and failed. Do you think that perception would, in turn, affect people’s confidence in America’s creditworthiness?

Dalio: I just spent about a month in Asia, meeting with leaders and others from different countries. This event has a huge impact, very similar to the impact of Britain losing the Suez Canal—because Egypt controlled it. That was seen as the end of the British Empire. So, this is very significant.

Douthat: Yes, that was in the 1950s.

Dalio: Exactly. And that was precisely when people stopped wanting to hold British debt, among other things. Now, different countries are thinking: will America still protect us? Or is America no longer capable of protecting us? Because the American public doesn’t want to fight a long, protracted war, so the war has to be quick, low-cost, and—

Douthat: And popular, right?

Dalio: Popular.

Douthat: And our wars aren’t very popular these days. But I want to stay with the Suez analogy for a moment because I find it interesting. I hear many people using it. In the Suez crisis, Britain, France, and Israel essentially tried to retake control of the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized it.

So, the parallel with Iran is obvious: a key chokepoint for global trade, a conflict between Western powers and a regional power. But to me, the key in the Suez event was that Dwight Eisenhower and the U.S. essentially told Britain: No, you can’t do that.

Therefore, the crisis of confidence in the British Empire, the pound sterling, and everything else, came partly from the realization, as you said, that this was the post-WWII order, and America was the dominant player.

So, does China now need to play a similar role? Does there need to be a comparable moment before people truly lose confidence in America? Do people need to see a new hegemony emerge before abandoning the old one?

Dalio: By the way, I don’t think China will end up being that sort of traditional hegemon. We can discuss that later.

Douthat: I’m very interested in that.

Dalio: But what I’m saying is, it was the combination of Britain’s debt problem and its obvious loss of power. Britain’s decline had actually started long before the Suez crisis, because people already recognized that the U.S. was not only a world power but also in a much better fiscal position.

Douthat: So, if the analogy holds, what is the parallel today? If people decide America is no longer as trustworthy as we thought, that it’s less likely to pay its debts, etc.—and maybe this also ties into your point about China and whether it becomes a new hegemon—would people turn to China? Would they abandon the dollar as a reserve currency? Where would capital flow if people lose confidence in America?

Dalio: I