Conservatives are in denial: America is no longer a superpower (and it hasn’t been for years)

Salon ^ | May 30, 2015 | Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, Blood and Oil

[lentulusgracchus]

Exactly. With this WH crowd, decline is a conscious choice. One that (I hope) that we will still have time to rectify

Truly great nations like ours, as opposed to temporary arrangements like the Etruscan city-league and the Athenian-led Delian League, are deep and wide and possessed of enormous powers of recuperation.

A hundred years after Justinian, the Byzantine Empire achieved a significant renascence that sent the invading Persians recoiling all the way to Mesopotamia. Even the Western Roman Empire, in death, fathered Merovingian and Carolingian (Charlemagne) kingdoms in France that defeated the Arabs at Tours and caused learning and prosperity to return to the French and Germans. (Only to be undermined by Charlemagne's three obnoxious sons.) As was shown later, these were not transitory, but fundamentally sound nations whose people knew who they were.

Knowing who we are is precisely what our enemies are attacking; and oh, by the way, anyone who attacks that knowledge and goodness and confidence is an enemy.