http://tinyurl.com/yctoxs7b
.. George W Bush, whose response to international Islamic terrorism was to
attempt a late-imperial demonstration of unilateral military might, while
perhaps hoping to get more oil. It didn't work, all but bankrupting the
exchequer in Washington, while its rising rival China expanded its economy
without limitation.
With the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bills were due for
payment. The US economy crumpled and, despite Barack Obama's attempts to pull
back from expensive dead-end foreign struggles, the underlying global economic
shift towards Asia brought its predictable consequences in America. As incomes
failed to rise in the same way as they had over the past seven decades and the
great postwar US economic ascendancy approached its limit, suffering from
unsustainable national debt, the centre would no longer hold. ..
With a diminishing American economic share of the world pie and its citizens
fighting with each other to protect or increase their own share of the
remaining domestic pie, the US is unlikely to remain a willing or even able
guarantor of peace and trade abroad. ..
America, in other words, is hurtling today towards Second World status. It
lacks a leader who possesses any idea of how to prepare the nation for the
changing structure of the world; a world in which Americans will have to share
their relative decline more equitably at home, or face ever-worsening social
and political fragmentation and conflict and diminishing authority abroad. ..
President Trump may well be forced to resign under the 25th Amendment to the
US constitution, on the grounds that he is "unable to discharge the powers and
duties of his office". / That outcome will not, however, change the dynamics
of the global economy and the inevitable decline of the American empire. ..