Guam..... cough......
And who needs slaves when you move all your business offshore with workforces who work for less than 10$ a day.
The USA is an Empire by other means.
And The Chinese, I am scared of them, the fact my country is right next to them, and the fact that your country owes over 1 Trillion dollars to them, and the fact they comprise the majority of our manufacturing and service needs.
No one sees a danger there.
But we are off the topic here.
The USA underestimates its enemies dangerously.
I'm not so sure about that. Yes, the United States is on the decline. But thats more of an issue with weak leadership recently, not due to any inherent flaw in our country, or some natural progression of government.
I've never believed in all that crap about empire's naturally declining, or losing power or any of that nonsense. All the empires that have declined and fallen were either starting out technologicaly inferior to their opponents and were subjugated, had weak leadership that refused to face facts and admit that they WERE declining and needed to do something about it, or attempted to expand too far beyond their means of control.
Now the US is neither starting from a point of technolgical inferiority (quite the opposite infact), or attempting over-expansion. That leaves weak leadership as the biggest threat to the Republic, and its entirely upto us how things go from this point.
Furthermore, I doubt China is all ready and eager to start a war. As you said, we owe them trillions. For another thing, we're a major purchaser of their goods, and thats something that won't continue in the event of war. And lastly, war is expensive. They lose the money we already owe them, they lose future profits from us, AND they spend untold billions or even trillions on a war. That doesn't sound like its in their interests.
And finally, I doubt we'll cease being
a dominant power. We might cease being
the dominant power (as in the only one), as China and perhaps India join us as 'Superpowers'. Fact is that we're just too large, populous, and pushy to slip into the level of reduced influence held by many countrys such as France, Canada, the UK, etc. No matter what the current situation looks like, the power the United States can bring to bear will only be lying dormant, it won't have disapeared.
A simmilar situation can be seen in Russia. They have the potential to be a Superpower, the power the USSR had is still there in large measure, its simply lying dormant. The only reason that power is even decreased is that Russia lost many of its sattelite states, and a simmilar situation would have to occur in the USA for our power to even be reduced.
