No there isn't. I'm not having a go at you over this, because it seems to me that your position is more realistic than some others. But the idea that the US can rely on 'hard power' is absurd. (Again, I do not attribute this idea to you.) The truth is that the US is, in military terms, very weak indeed. I'm sure that this statement will raise eyebrows amongst most of you, but as someone else once said, you have to take everything into consideration, not just amount of money spent and amount of stuff. If you have the world's largest military, which happens to be staffed and controlled by morons and is strategically and tactically idiotic (see, e.g. William Lind's comments), then you have no 'hard power' worth talking about. The truth is that the US has all the military competence of Fascist Italy. Yes, they can nuke the whole world, but otherwise they can't fight their way out of a paper bag. Even the British despise US soldiers for their jittery nerves and utter incompetence.
More generally, I'm surprised at the polarization and lack of subtlety this aspect of the debate here has engendered. Everyone seems to think it will be China dumps its holdings and the US rolls up its sleeves and gets ready to whup some ass (as if it can actually do so ... ) ... instead, it will be China pointing out the obvious, and then everybody else in a panicky market dumping their dollars before China does. And the US will have no recourse.
The truth is that the US is, in military terms, very weak indeed. I'm sure that this statement will raise eyebrows amongst most of you,
We've been making similar arguments here for a while now, so you may be overstating the likely surprise.
But the real problem faced by the US is that it's politically split down the middle. In a bizarre way the neocons are right - if they could have set up their ideal fascist super-state the US could have walked into Iraq and taken the oil without being seriously challenged.
But that would have meant a draft, and a suspension of the Constitution, and not even 9/11 could make that plausible, partly because of that pesky liberal tradition.
So - because the neocons prefer inertia to reality, and can't be accused of flexibility or long-term creative thinking - they carried on with the original plan, pretending to the themselves that they had the mandate they needed.
As a result the US military has been bled dry for no useful outcome of any sort - unless you count the profiteering - and the whole economy is looking very crash-prone.
Nothing short of an all-out invasion on American soil can turn the US back into a single unified state now. The splits between the hyper-rich conservative exploiters and everyone else run too deep.
If inflation explodes and a wave of bankruptcy creates a new Depression, I think there's a real danger of a much angrier response from the dispossessed middle classes than happened in the 30s. People who grew up in the 00s, 10s and 20s lacked the entitlement culture that's been a staple in the US since the 60s. Living standards are also higher, and people have been conditioned relentlessly by advertising to expect them as their due.
If that expectation is snatched away, they're not going to be happy.
And while that drama is playing itself out, the US is hardly going to be in a position play leader.
