The United States: The High Point Passed

We are witnessing one of those great moments in history when the balance in the tectonic plates of state power shifts,and thereafter everyone sees the world differently. The United States, as fashioned by Abraham Lincoln and on an upward trajectory since 1865, is now indisputably in decline. This is a good thing for the world. More to the point it is an even better thing for America.

There have been several elements to the combination which has brought the juggernaut to a stop. The first was the half baked notion of Reaganomics with its fantasy vision of wealth cascading down from an ever richer elite to fund a middle class whose taxes would in turn fund whatever wild expenditure the Federal Government chose to indulge. The result is national indebtedness on a scale almost beyond comprehension.

The second was an interventionist foreign policy post cold war, which led to Iraq, Afghanistan and finally Libya, all of which campaigns offered tactical victory and strategic defeat. The third was the idiotic war on terror. The concept was incoherent akin to declaring a war on the weather. The application of the campaign fed the source of terrorism, stoking recruitment and fanning out its strongholds. Al Qaeda was at the start holed up in Afghanistan. It is now active in Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia in all its various guises. Its leader, Osama Bin Laden, was killed. It now has several with a never ending pipeline in reserve.

The fourth was the public demonstration to a world audience, that the much vaunted and evangelically proclaimed American system of democratic government is, in fact, dysfunctional and peppered with politicians who are irresponsible. This is clearly a style not to copy but to avoid. It is the inevitable outcome of trying to create at Federal level an omnipotent state, to preside over the affairs of a collection of states who believe themselves sovereign and whose founders intended they should be. The Union was designed to manage the currency and provide security from attack. It was not organised to be a big brother set to build a world hegemony.

All at once the threat to attack Syria was neutered by the desertion from the project of the Parliament of its closest ally (also its oldest enemy), which caused the American people to rebel against their masters and shout no more war; this led to the US finding itself backed into a corner by Russia on the wrong side of international law and condemned by all the world except the failing French Presidency. The nail in the coffin came with the game of chicken over the prospect of default. That was playing with the lives and livelihoods of a wider world in a shocking display of political immaturity.

China said it; the time  has come to de-Americanize the world. This would be a good thing for everyone, but best of all for America, because its future lies not in domination but in community just as its founding fathers ordained. The era of the United States is is over. In future it will more and more become the United States are. First, however, the states have to find consensus and unite. That was the whole idea of the project in the first place and why their institutions are designed the way they have been. These are institutions of an are. They do not work as an is. That is why they were made that way.

Meanwhile Britain has turned its attention to China, with a high profile visit from Boris and George and announcements of lots of Chinese investment in Britain including airports, nuclear power and water. Herein lies another hint of the shape of things to come. Where were David and William?

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