I agree with VDH that China, for example, has little to offer the world outside of its borders, except cheap goods. Russia will always be focused just on Russia’s interests, etc...
BUT - America has no God-given right to world leadership and prosperity. Remain a free and moral nation, and the USA will be granted leadership over others - but let our Gov’t and the citizens of this country accept laziness, collectivism, tyranny and corruption - and it will, over time, turn us into just another sclerotic and declining country like those in South America or Europe.
“BUT - America has no God-given right to world leadership and prosperity. Remain a free and moral nation, and the USA will be granted leadership over others”
I’m going to have to ponder the assertion you made in sentence #2, esp in light of sentence #1. I think I have to doubt that.
If we don’t have any God-given right, then it’s probably not going to be a sense of morality and freedom that’s going to guarantee much of anything for us. We’re going to have to go to war, kill, and seize what it is that might support our standard of living. Or settle for a lot less.
During prior periods when we have gone through immensely challenging times, (GD1, WW2) my sense is that the US had a far greater depth and degree of advantage over others in terms of 1: Nationalistic sprit 2: natural resources 3: financial resources than we do now.
Now? We have a financial “rival” and potential military adversary in China whom we have largely financed and will certainly continue to. We are not especially at war with the ChiComs but we are not especially at peace with them.
We have a permanent intractable adversary in the form of radical Islam. Again, we finance them and we coddle them; in terms of the destructive technology they have absorbed, they have ceased being 9th century desert barbarians. (They still retain that perspective in all other respects) But my point is that they are a permanent enemy.
So when I total up the depletion in our overall resources PLUS the idea that we have a full-on enemy (or two) looking to damage us, I wonder if only say 70% of what the US had available to it remains available to generate our internal prosperity.
And now I add in the idea that traitoriousness is now a virtue, that roughly half of our elected leaders are looking to deteriorate our overall living standards, to shove the country back 70 years in technoogical status, and I wonder again, what’s left? (no pun intended) To scatter our wealth among low-wage intruders from Mexico to no end other than to achieve their own re-election, and to permanently disable our own poorer citizens from seeking any level of aspiration beyond...[insert blatantly racist charactierization here] and what do we have to work with?
Meanwhile, it’s corny to be patriotic, we’ve placed our energy resources out of our own reach and looted much of our savings to prop up the banksters.
I ask again, when does the guy holding onto the rail of the sinking ship heed his own internal “abandon ship” voice?