america

If America was a fine maiden, one as pretty as our nation is strong, would she now be in the twilight of her career? At 234 years of age, her face would no doubt show signs of ageing. She’d be slightly bruised and scratched up from a couple of recent cat fights – she doesn’t let shit slide, this America - but all in all, still in good fighting shape. Newly-formed bags under her eyes could be attributed to a bit of a recent rough patch; depression and anxiety prone, she struggles to maintain balance in a rapidly changing world. Problems she’s got a-plenty, from the financial to the medical. One amorphous black mass in particular, a mole of sorts, could really use a looking-at.

The United States of America, in global strategic terms, is tumbling down a series of misadventures, declining in a “step of sighs” through frustrating economic and military endeavours as it discovers that its superpower structures and massive capital wealth are insufficient to cope with a transformed world.

This transformed world was created by the very superpower capabilities and massive wealth of the West. Even the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is beginning to recognize that massive financial holdings are inadequate to address all challenges to national survival and wellbeing.

The question is whether this current process through which the US is going must inevitably be played to a conclusion which sees the US itself — as the Roman and Hellenic and Mongol and British and Netherlands and Soviet empires once were — broken apart or reduced to modesty among the ruins of grandeur? It is not. Nothing is written which cannot be re-written.