DreamWeaver

Csn China hold itself together to maintain such a position?

Lucius

OK. But the trouble is that Americans' thinking, expectations, has been conditioned by the half-hour sit-com format.

The only way we can avoid a crisis of confidence is to go from crisis to crisis.

Apparently.

JeanMoulin

If we factor in resource depletion, and a probable global war to command control of said scant resources, not to mention a "social engineering" response to overpopulation and food shortages, it is unlikely that any nation-state will "rebound" to dominate after the coming crisis.

Instead, multinational corporate entities with their globalist agendas, already trumping nation-states in terms of power, will rise much like the heavily fortified wealthy families in Rome of the disabitato, after the collapse of empire and floods and disease had significantly reduced Rome's population.

The US is collapsing, absolutely, but western corporations will sooner unleash a genotype-specific disease (as prescribed by PNAC's 2000 recipe for a new American century) on the especially overpopulated Asian hemisphere than prostrate themselves before the ascendant Chinese.

Corporations, not nation states, will dominate the depopulated latter half of the 21st century.

Paulinus

While I don't share quite such a bleak prognosis I agree that nation states are increasingly just one of many entities that compete for power in the modern world. We're in a multi-polar era. The US may be top dog militarily but that doesn't count for as much as it used to because so many states have the power to annihilate the others, or to at least make it too painful for anyone else to consider trying to conquer them. Corporations are rather a-national in that they don't care in which country they're based provided they continue to satisfy the demands of their ever shifting shareholder base. Other powerful bodies and institutions are increasingly interlinked and multinational (including us here on Historum), so the C19th optic of the world viewed as a set of hostile and competing nation states makes less sense than it ever did. Among the current nation-states, or more accurately economic powers, China, the EU, India and the US are in the first rank and Brazil, Japan (economic first rank, military 2nd) and Russia in the next rank with many others not far behind. The US is at liberty to play the world's policeman to the degree that it doesn't systematically irritate most of the rest of the world and as such it is able to exercise considerable power within distinct limits. IMHO its the failure to understand this that is the biggest risk to American predominance and ironically the day it will fall off its perch is likely to be when bellicose American supremicists take hold of the reins and alienate the rest of the world to the point that they put aside their differences and develop a new political alignment.

Lucius

I wouldn't worry about that. The US is all out of money. We'll be doing good just to cover the national debt.

So, we'll see what we shall see.

Dr Realism

Collapse:
Russia collapsed twice in the 20th century, 1917 and 1991. So badly that it went through a revolution both times. But it took Russia only about 20 years to get itself back upright both times. Two decades after 1917 Russia was one of the top militaries again. Likewise, after the Soviet Union collapsed Russia was and still is one of the top 3 militaries, or at least in the top 5.
It's influence in it's near abroad is still there and it even extends to Venezuela, Syria, and Iran. All with a GDP (PPP), of only about 2 trillion dollars.

The UK lost its empire in a matter of a few decades. It's government never collapsed and it didn't go through an economic crisis as big as Russia's but the UK doesn't have much influence anymore. And it probably never will because when the whole world is put on a level playing field, it doesn't have the geopolitical fundamentals necessary to be its own pole.

I don't think the US has come close to the point of either of those collapses by Russia.

Satuf

It is.

Why do you think Iran is building its nuclear program?

Paulinus

There's a tendency in many of these threads to see influence as being a matter of military power, but I think this is very misleading, not least because military power is not as effective as it once was because so many countries have the means of wiping out the others through nukes, or of just making military conflict too costly to be worthwhile. DR mentioned the relative power or Britain and Russia but despite Russia's military strength I would argue its influence is less than Britain's, as the latter has greater cultural, economic and political/institutional reach. In the current multi-polar world its economic and "soft power" which counts most .

mrknow

no they wont,every time it looks like the usa is down,they spiral upwards faster than a rocket blasting off

diddyriddick

To the OP....No.

The transition from an economy driven by material goods to one driven by service is simply a logical progression. Just as surely as America needs the material goods that it no longer produces, the rest of the world needs the services that America provides.

Britain's fall from empire is in no way comparable to the current status of the U.S. Britain's entire raison d'etre was to administer a colonial empire-The sun never sets on the British Empire. A vast amount of the resources that she controlled lay outside of the home islands, and were populated by non-anglos. America, by contrast, controls most of her resources within the boundaries of the 50 states. And aside from a wacko who wants to secede from time to time, there is no general movement toward breaking up the Union.

Making the transition from third world power to major power is a whole lot different than making the transition to THE world power. As alluded earlier, the Chinese are depleting their resources at an alarming rate.