I am, actually, a BIG rah-rah Go USA type of guy. My family has been in NA since 1630, fought in all the wars, blah blah blah.Repatriate wrote:The difference between the U.K. and the U.S. is huge though. I can't think of anything England can do now that the developing and developed world can't do but the U.S. still has quite a strong comparative advantage when it comes to corporate branding, heavy industrial, and military tech. Not to mention that overall U.S. industry, infrastructure, and resources availability is still quite good.globetrotter wrote:The UK is No. 15 or No. 19 on GDP PPP; they used to be Number One. I seriously doubt that the USA will decline as gracefully. Just look at the past 8 years for a hint.
Eisenhower was correct when he said that America had to beware that the industrial military complex would govern a lot of America's foreign policy. Look at who the biggest arm's traffickers in the world is..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_deali ... _exporters
Is that list any surprise?
There's a reason U.S. led foreign policy has this paranoid bent and why countries are always eager to exploit non-aligned political stalemates like the China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan, or S. Korea/N. Korea rift.
Yet, even I can see the blind bias that so many Americans indulge in.
What you have posted is EXACTLY what has been written and said about all empires. The British simply could NOT envision a world where the British Empire was not supreme, even up to 1941 when they fought the Germans to a stalemate and saved civilisation from a horror beyond compare. Yet fall and contract it did from 1945 to 1960 as the Empire all became independent. Britain had the navy, the industry, the reserve currency, the immensely strong currency (look up the 1928 value of the Pound Sterling...), the financial sector, the publishing, the media, the language, the universities...on and on and on.
Like all citizens of all Empires past and present, and I am willing to concede that the USA is empire-like, not a true Empire, you cannot imagine a world where your/our country is NOT "Number 1!".
We, you and I, right now, today, this moment, 2000-2010, are living through the peak and initial gradual decline of USA influence as a unilateral global force. It behooves you to adjust your outlook accordingly.