America Must Manage Its Decline -- Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”
No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy.
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My Comment: From the perspective of a non-American, what always attracted me about America was that it was a society that was structured to permit the pursuit of happiness without interference of class, government, and corporate elitism. In short .... America was great because the 2 or 3 million people that made it work .... the entrepreneurs/businessmen/investors/risk takers .... coupled with a government that set the rules/guidelines/and laws that promoted such activity .... had a culture that helped it to find a balance that made it flourished until now (notice my past tense). Today .... class warfare by many in the political class is promoted, corporate welfare and cronyism with the complicit role of government is now the rule, and taxation and wealth distribution (not wealth creation) coupled with a high debt strategy is the policy and not the exception. Like Britain that followed this scenario at the end of the First World War and accelerated after the Second .... the U.S. will eventually be pushed aside by countries that have embraced this American ideal while Americans themselves have abandoned it.