Those Brits are at it again! Over at teh BBC, they are asking if the United States with all of our financial difficulties of late are losing our status as a world superpower. Now, of course you know that only someone from a "foreign" place could ask this question. If anyone FROM the United States of America asked this very pertinent question, why that person would be an America Hater. Someone that hates the troops. Perhaps someone that would like to see the socialization of the financial industries in this country (oh, you say Bush and Co. already are working on that deal)?

From BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7645743.stm

The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower.

On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.

On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.

Well, yeah.... but what brings you to this conclusion, oh foreign journalist?

Pivotal moment?

Some see this as a pivotal moment.

The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: "Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.

"The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over... The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated."

"In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

"How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees."

Well, the Neo-Cons went and did it, didn't they? They turned a once great country that was built on the solid bedrock of hard work and brotherhood into a "profits before people" cabal of the haves and a downtrodden and bullied majority of the have-nots. They took what once was something beautiful that the entire world looked up to and tried with their very souls to emulate and from the ashes of their torching of our way of life what arose? A Phoenix, grand and formidable?

NO!

What arose was a country with a population of just over 300 million hard working citizens that was downgraded to junk stock status on the global market. What arose was a partisanship so deeply divided that brotherhood could no longer be described as a value held dear to each citizen.

What was left behind was everything that was once good and fair and wonderful about "America." What is pitiable and horrific is the knowledge that the bastards would do it all over again if given the opportunity.

No apocalypse now

Not all would agree that an American apocalypse has arrived. After all, the system has been tested before.

In 1987 the Dow Jones share index fell by more than 20% in one day. In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. Yet both times, the US picked itself up, as it did post Vietnam.

Prof Gray's comments certainly did not impress one of the more hawkish figures who served in the Bush administration, the former UN ambassador John Bolton.

When I put them to him, he replied only: "If Professor Gray believes this, can he assure us that he is selling his US assets short?

"If so, where is he placing his money instead? And if he has no US assets, why should we be paying any attention to him?"

Nevertheless, it does seem that the concept of the single superpower left bestriding the world after the collapse of communism (and the supposed end of history) is no longer valid.

Leave it to the Pornstache of the Right, John Bolton to come up with an arrogant and dismissive statement regarding that "foreigner" that dared take to task the Government of the United States and their dreadful actions under Mr. Boltons Party of Greed administration.

Multi-polar world

Even leading neo-conservative thinkers accept that a more multi-polar world is emerging, though one in which they want the American position to be the leading one.

Robert Kagan, co-founder in 1997 of the "Project for the New American Century" that called for "American global leadership", wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine this autumn: "Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion.

"The world today looks more like that of the 19th Century than like that of the late 20th.

"Those who imagine this is good news should recall that the 19th Century order did not end as well as the Cold War did."

"To avoid such a fate, the United States and other democratic nations will need to take a more enlightened and generous view of their interests than they did even during the Cold War. The United States, as the strongest democracy, should not oppose but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty".

My emphasis

Welcome a diminished national sovereignty? No problem Mr. Kagan. Brotherhood is for suckahs, right?