Why do you think the neocons launched their PNAC plan to lock-in American hegemony forever? They are terrified. The whole PNAC idea is to use military power to compensate for decline.

The US manufacturing base has been disappearing since the middle 1970s. It is a neoclassical myth that you can run a large, modern economy on services alone, through the magic of comparative advantage. The middle class is disappearing. Most American parents with children still living with them are resigned to the fact that their children will have a lower standard of living than their parents did. The US is having a harder and harder time of keeping its allies (other than the UK and Japan) in line and a whole geographical region (Latin America) is slipping out of its sphere of influence. What is that if not decline?

The simple fact that the US political system could produce no better administration than the incompetent, predatory Bush administration—and could not even do so legally—shows that the system is in decline.

All empires decline sooner or later. The PNAC idea of an eternal empire is a Chimera, like the Nazi's thousand year Reich.

But this is not the place to discuss this issue. If the question of whether the US is in decline or not has not been diaried here, it should be.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns