Continuing the downhill slide
with the help of the ZioCons, pickin' up speed...
Bert Wolfe
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The American Century is OVER! The Only People Who Don’t Realize It are The Americans. The 21st century will be the Chinese Century.
The world grows weary of the United States of America’s insistent reliance on the “hard” power of military might in its foreign relations, as so strongly juxtaposed to the reliance on the “soft” power of financial and infrastructure aid that China uses so well and so skillfully to gain access and influence around the world, especially in the Third World. Even the United States’ greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, who understood the uses, strengths, weaknesses, and most importantly, the limitations of both hard and soft power preferred soft to hard power, as shown by his famous observation that “Right makes might.” Today’s policymakers in the councils of government in Washington, DC would be well advised to study Abraham Lincoln’s approach to politics and especially his use of soft power whenever possible during the American Civil War.
At the moment, the rest of the nations of the world are deeply wary of not only the United States’ military muscle, but also of its considerable economic power, and fear that either or both will be turned on them if they cross the American government. Because of this, they choose to either shelter like frightened ducks under the shadow of the eagle’s nest as “allies” of the United States or to keep their seeming “independence” as nonaligned countries, but who quietly and secretly genuflect before “Uncle Sam” and kiss our ring like supplicants.
In this sense, the United States dominates the world in much the same way a Mafia Don rules over the areas he considers “his” territory. However, while the United States with its current military and economic muscle seems invincible on the outside and thus able to throw its considerable weight around with seeming impunity in much of the world, in the meantime things at home in Stateside America are definitely NOT going well.
On the home front, the United States of America is rapidly becoming a “Potemkin Village” of a superpower; we appear strong and invincible on the outside, but more and more that is becoming a mere facade, the mask we present to the rest of the world, as internally the United States is quickly rotting, crumbling, decaying, and steadily weakening, and the American people are so bitterly at war with each other over what the rest of the world sees as trifling issues. Our once vaunted industrial capacity, especially in the heartland of the American Midwest has been largely liquidated and dismantled and sent overseas to low labor cost countries, chiefly and ironically, China. Today, the economically depressed American Midwest is sadly known as “the Rust Belt.” The American middle class wages and salaries have stagnated since 1973, and the middle class shrinks more and more with each passing year as more and more once middle class workers are forced down into the ranks of the working poor. America is cutting back on money and resources for its public schools at a time when the rest of the world is pouring money and resources into theirs. And America’s infrastructure has suffered from decades of neglect which is only now being addressed.
In the end, America’s power externally is only as strong as we are internally united and prosperous. As the internal structures and supports of “Fortress America” slowly, but surely buckle, then collapse, the “American Empire” will start to show cracks and weaknesses externally.
At that point in time, the other nations of the world, not only our adversaries, but also the nonaligned nations and many, if not all, of our ostensible allies, seeing and sensing our growing weakness and vulnerability, may join together to place the North American bully under a stringent set of economic sanctions that will only be lifted if we capitulate to a set of demands that we dramatically modify our attitude and conduct abroad, starting with the end of the American Empire, the end of the American dollar’s privileged reign as the “world’s reserve currency,” and the lifting of our economic sanctions against the handful of nations with the courage and temerity to defy the American government.
Thus, the American Empire may finally pass into history; not with a bang, but rather with a whimper. Our vaunted military power totally useless to prevent the end of the United States’ arrogant bullying and domineering behavior by a world tired of dealing with the United States’ immature, adolescent attitude in its foreign affairs.
