Decline of America

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=35 BGCOLOR="#000099" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <B>Decline of America</B></div> <div>                                                   </div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=445 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <div> "Virtue and truth produce strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse" - John Anthony Froude</div> <bR> <div> "If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick..." - John Steinbeck</div> <bR> <div> <B>THE FIFTY-FIFTY NATION</B></div> <bR> <div> <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Verdana" >"</FONT><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="verdana" ><B>Secularists are more likely to live on the Pacific coast or in the north-east, in a city, have a college degree, be male, single, and either lean towards the Democrats or be politically independent</B></FONT>. <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#FF0000" FACE="verdana" ><B>Committed evangelicals are more likely to live in the south, vote Republican, lack a college degree, live in towns or rural areas, and be female and married</B></FONT><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="verdana" >. </FONT><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#111111" FACE="verdana" >In other words,</FONT><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="verdana" > <B>America looks like two tribes, one religious and one secular</B></FONT>"<FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#003300" FACE="verdana" > </FONT>(The Economist,<I> </I><I>Survey: America</I>, November 8, 2003, p.11).</div> <bR> <div> <B>WORLD STANDING</B></div> <bR> <div> "In terms of military power, the United States is the only country with both nuclear weapons and conventional forces with global reach. American military expenditures are greater than those of the next eight countries combined, and it leads in the information-based "revolution in military affairs". <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Verdana" ><B>In economic size, America's 31% share of world product (at market prices) is equal to the next four countries combined (Japan, Germany, Britain and France)</B></FONT>. <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#FF0000" FACE="Verdana" ><B>In terms of cultural prominence, the United States is far and away the number-one film and television exporter in the world</B></FONT>. <B>It also attracts the most foreign students each year to its colleges and universities</B>.</div> <bR> <div> "...Uni-polarity exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get results it wants in some dimensions of world politics, but multi-polarity implies, wrongly, several roughly equal countries.</div> <bR> <div> "Instead, power in a global information age is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chess-board, military power is largely uni-polar. To repeat, the United States is the only country with both intercontinental nuclear weapons and large state-of-the-art air, naval and ground forces capable of global deployment. But on the middle chessboard, economic power is multi-polar, with the United States, Europe and Japan representing two-thirds of world product, and with China's dramatic growth likely to make it the fourth player. On this economic board, the United States is not a hegemon, and must often bargain as an equal with Europe.</div> <bR> <div> "The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside government control... Those who recommend a hegemonic American foreign policy based on such traditional descriptions of American power are relying on woefully inadequate analysis. When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose focus only on the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them...</div> <bR> <div> "The real challenges to American power are coming on cat's feet in the night and, ironically, <B>the temptation to unilateralism may ultimately weaken the United States</B>. The contemporary information revolution and the globalization that goes with it are transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of this new century, these two forces have combined to increase American power. But, <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#FF0000" FACE="Verdana" ><B>with time, technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America's relative pre-eminence will diminish</B></FONT>..." ( Joseph Nye, <I>The new Rome meets the new barbarians</I>, The Economist, March 23, 2002, p.23).</div> <bR> <div> <B>FISCAL OVERSTRETCH</B></div> <bR> <div> "Thanks to fiscal profligacy, more and more voices are heard arguing that America is rushing headlong into severe economic decline. In a National Interest article late last year, Niall Ferguson, history professor at New York University, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, drew ominous parallels between fiscal overstretch in imperial Bourbon France and contemporary America.</div> <bR> <div> ""In the same way, the decline and fall of America's undeclared empire will be due not to terrorists at our gates nor to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, but to a fiscal crisis of the welfare state," they wrote" (BusinessWeek Online, <I>The Biggest Bomb in Bush's Budget</I>, @biz.yahoo.com, February 13, 2004).</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <A HREF="id57_m.htm" TITLE="Decline of America">Top of Page </A>       <A HREF="id53_manufacturing_and_trade.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="News, Current Events and the Future"> </A><A HREF="id53_manufacturing_and_trade.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="News, Current Events and the Future">News and Current Events Page</A><A HREF="id53_manufacturing_and_trade.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="News, Current Events and the Future"> </A>         <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Future Watch">Home Page</A></div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>