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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (66255)	9/20/2010 2:22:56 PM
From: axial	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217617

It hardly makes any sense to discuss the virtue of a Great Power. Virtue is one quality none of them possess. They may have stirring morality in their constitutions, but that morality disappears when they pursue their interests. When the Berlin Wall fell, nobody was talking about the global rise of radical Islam. It wasn't on any nation's radar. Now we've moved from a bipolar world to a multipolar world where one of the threats doesn't even come from a single nation-state. The balance of power is shifting. We've seen the demise of the British Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now Pax Americana is at a tipping point. The US is still the world's foremost military power, but the lesson of history is that military power always comes from economic strength; without that, military power and spending can't be sustained. New economies are rising as we enter Peak Oil, and geopolitics will get slippery as the cost of energy escalates. Power is slipping away from white non-secular industrialized democracies to growing states populated largely by people of color. They have no particular allegiance to the United States, China, or anyone else. How, or even if they can work together without Great Power coercion remains to be seen. Thirty years ago it was unimaginable that China would be buying industries in the US and bringing jobs to unemployed Americans. The accelerating rise of foreign powers is a fact; the question is whether the United States can adapt to a world quite different to the one it wanted, or become isolated by a myth of power it can no longer sustain. Jim