Thursday's Edition: The Collapse from Within

What’s going to happen next in America?

What will become of America?

Ibn Khaldun answered this question 650 years ago. Not about America specifically, of course, but about empires in general. He watched empires across the Islamic world rise and collapse. He identified the mechanism: social cohesion, and the lack of it, which brought about their demise.

Ibn Khaldun was a 14th-century Arab histor…