do you feel that america is waning?
yes, i do. basically, to me, it comes down to two crucial weaknesses:
1) debt. debty-debt-debt-debt. the Federal government is crippled with debt, though you'd never know it by how Congress is spending money. most state and local governments are in similar situations, and even personal debt loads (credit card debt, especially) are at critical levels. our entire economy is overleveraged at every level and we're due for a major economic collapse.
it's also worth noting that our massive military power is based on the fact that we're able to blow unlimited amounts of money on our military. once we can't spend anymore, our military advantage is going to crumble. also, huge swaths of the country are totally dependent on farm subsidies which are also going to dry up once our current bills come due.
2) oil. more than any other developed country, we're tied to our oil age infrastructure, which is going to be unsustainable soon. the suburban sprawl is just not going to be able to be maintained once we hit peak oil, and the urban cores are totally falling apart, totally car-dependent, etc etc.
these factors both play off each other in nasty ways: our economy is vulnerable to upward swings in the price of oil, leading us to more and more deficit spending, but the more debt we rack up, the less likely we'll be able to afford to sink money into building a post-oil infrastructure.
then there's leapfrogging. paradoxically, countries which are underdeveloped now have a significant advantage in that they aren't tied to an increasingly outdated fossil-fuel-driven industrial base, and can pour their development money into greener stuff.
sleazenation is right, the combined might of EU nations would not touch that of the U.S. It's not close financially and the U.S. is also more advanced when it comes to weapons and tech.
as Lurid points out, you're wrong on the economic point. a more closely bound EU would rival or exceed the US in economic power.
with regard to military power, you're right, but military power is less relevant now than it has been in the past, since any major power has more to gain from trade relationships than it does from war, and the latter tends to damage the former. as US libertarian Thomas Friedman puts it, two countries in the same global supply chain will never go to war.
major military forces are now, basically, police forces deployed primarily to maintain the level of global stability that best facilitates trade.
the fact that the US has the most uber-powerful military the world has ever seen is now a liability, not an asset, as its the result of a catastrophic misallocation of resources that is one of the biggest contributor to our fatal debt situation, as mentioned above.
I believe it is still US policy that the Military should be able to wage two large scale foreign wars and still have a reserve forces - I'm not sure of the details of this policy - anyone care to fill me in?
that's basically the doctrine that's held sway since 1991 or so, the idea being that we might need to fight wars simultaneously in two places at once. officially, those are any two hypothetical wars, but in real terms it's Iraq and NK we've been planning for.
that's still the doctrine on the table, AFAIK, with nudges in the direction of counterterrorism and asymmetrical warfare since 9/11. the degree to which the military is actually capable of performing to that level is up for debate, but recent manpower shortages seem to suggest that we're not. however, political support for a draft just isn't there, so that may not be changing anytime soon. |
