Thanks, Barack.

Thanks, Barack.

Disagree! After eight years of Bush ballooning the public debt, hammering down the dollar, and shredding U.S. credibility abroad, why . . . it’s Obama’s fault!

Slightly edited by Elf

no.1 why are you blaming someone who hasn’t even gotten in office yet? i gathered from this that they were basing their predictions upon past actions…please do tell what obama has done to diminish the country…

Azusa, you would be hard pressed to find someone less enthusiastic about Obama than myself, but get real. 

It’s bound to happen.  It only takes China getting to 25% of our per capita GDP to have as large of an economy as we do.  It isn’t terribly disimilar to our own overtaking of Europe.  I’ve known in my bones since I was 12 years old (the end of the Cold War) that the primary challenge of my generation would be adapting to a reduced margin of American power.  Maybe not “managing decline” in the postwar British sense, but something akin.  No one power has stayed on top more than a century or so since at least the Turks in the late medieval period, and really more like since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

#2: The article was looking forward to the future -after 4 or 8 years (heaven help us) of Obama. If you think Obama will reduce Bush’s terrible deficit, put an end to pork, strengthen the US military and disarm nuclear Iran, well….

If you think Obama will reduce Bush’s terrible deficit, put an end to pork, strengthen the US military and disarm nuclear Iran, well…. —-Azusa [#6]

Now you add balderdash icing: if Obama can’t work wonders in 4-8 years, then it’s all his fault.

The general responses here have been colored by present political realities not the fact that this has been a process going on for some time. Around 1990, Paul Kennedy, Professor of History at Yale, wrote a book entitled “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” and he traced the decline of a cross-section of the great empires prior to the rise of the USA. There were a variety of factors related to their decline, but at the core was what he called “imperial over-reach.” He saw the USA heading down that path, and the events since then, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, reinforce that those lessons from Kennedy have not been taken on board.

All this has been happening during one of the great chapter changes of history, and some of the present crisis is obviously a reflection that we have yet to take on board the implications of the changing reality. To set up presidents, past presidents, or future presidents as scapegoats is shortsighted, and misses the point. It may well be that the momentum of American decline is such that it cannot be stopped by anyone.