America has the foreign policy and military structure of an imperial power, but lacks a direct mechanism to collect the tribute that historically supported empires. Instead, the system depends on the US possessing relative economic advantage in a free-trade system to create prosperity which can then be taxed, underwriting the enormous military budget. That system has been broken since the late 60s; globalization and radical antitax conservatism eliminated the financial foundation required to maintain such a vast military. In the end, a state that can't pay for its military ceases to have the ability to act as a hegemon.

I generally agree with you that there is no direct evidence of "tribute collection." However, if you look at the most recent example of Iraq, we could make the case that the U.S. has placed permanently placed its military in a country with a lot of oil reserves and could assure itself of cheap plentiful supply from not only Iraq but from the region. Putting my conspiracy theory hat on I would say that the Iraq war was not about WMDs but using it as a excuse to go after the oil reserves.

Well, I don't think China is living sustainably either. I see it more likely that south america and europe strengthen while the US wanes.

No country is perfect, and the US is still in great shape. But I think the basic issue that Americans are fat and entitled is a serious cultural hurdle that we need to get over. People need to put this into perspective that our global dominance and unprecedented prosperity of the last 60 years was basically served up on a platter by the worldwide industrial destruction of WWII. If we can just accept that we are not in fact smarter or better than any other country, and that sooner or later we will have to compete head on with hungrier nations like China and India, and we stop looking for answers with clever accounting and protectionist policies, or burying our heads in the sand and scapegoating illegal immigrants; if we can come to terms with all that culturally, then I think we will be able to stay in better shape than most countries in the world for the foreseeable future, but that's a big if.

"United States deployed force .... has done so in support of "worthy causes all over the planet," whether stopping genocide or promoting democracy in the Middle East.

Was this supposed to be ironic? The US like every other country has deployed force to get what it wants, to stop an enemy or to please it's own voters. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada (in fact most of central america), Cuba, Iraq (1 and 2), Afghanistan (1 and 2) were not about promoting democracy.

FYI, Korea is divided into two countries, North Korea and South Korea. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one is a dynastic totalitarian Stalinist state in which millions of its citizens have starved in the past 20 years, and which one has an ongoing US military presence.

South Korea was a often-brutal military dictatorship until the late 1980s. The US was there to stop Communism, not foster democracy. If South Korea is a better place today, it's because of the Koreans themselves far more than the US.

> If South Korea is a better place today, it's because of the Koreans themselves far more than the US.

Agreed. Which makes the inability of the North Koreans to escape from under their repressive regime all the more tragic.

Here's another exercise: In the past 20 years, how many millions of citizens has the US killed in the other 6 countries that were mentioned?

Was the war to prevent that or was that a result of the war ?

The UK left Hong Kong without a fight and handed it over to another undemocratic communist state - the result doesn't seem to have been quite as bad

Was the gap between HK and mainland China increasing or decreasing before the handover? What about now?

Warren Buffett has a good quote saying something like "when people are scared you should be brave and when people are brave you should be scared" and then elaborated by saying something like "It's never as bad, or as good, as people think, it's usually somewhere in the middle." Basically, Buffett says don't believe the hype.

The quote is: "Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

Yes that's the quote I was thinking of, I think he also said it during a talk with Bill Gates on CNBC during 'Keeping America Great' special: http://classic.cnbc.com/id/33604479