Is there any hope for arresting the long term decline of the United States as a world power?

There’s always hope, without hope, there is no tomorrow.
I just made that up then, pure frontier bullshit.

I suggest that it’s time to re-read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – here’s a link

The book is a tough slog, I had to read it in college.

The only way we’re going to arrest this decline is to get rid of the small-minded politicians we have, for a generation or two – and start working with big ideas and the will to see them through.

I have little hope.

I would think a debtor nation could maintain influence as a premier world power only by force.

Military power has served empire builders for eons. However, the true power in more modern times is economic. Nations that expand their middle class and decrease their poor would be the dominant powers but unfortunately, with few exceptions such as Russia, it is multinational corporations not nations that are building empires.

Not with the kind of government “leadership” we continue electing to represent us.

Who is going to replace the U.S.? One of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries? I don’t see any one country having the influence that the U.S. currently does. The U.S. will play a significant, though not necessarily dominant role, for a long time. I also do not see the current political mess in the U.S. continuing indefinitely. At some point all those yahoos who vote in conservatives against their own interests are going to come to their senses.

By my guesstimates and observations, another country will not replace the dominance of the U.S. but global corporatists are gradually gaining control while hiding behind the farce of ‘government’ that the U.S. and much of the rest of the world is becoming.

You can call it fascism, you can call it corporatism, but the plain fact is that whatever levels of genuine democracy we used to have are getting replaced by bogus surrogates.We might get to vote in primaries and general elections, but the candidates for whom we can vote are all selected by just a handful of people.

The elephant in the room is that we have an appearance of having infrastructure. It all looks good on the surface but In reality everything is hanging together with bailing wire. There is no real plan to fix things either.

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk

Great question @stanleybmanly I will look forward to reading all the answers you receive.

A larger question in my mind is whether it’s important that the USA remain the supreme world power? And for whose benefit is it?

Well the oil companies ,and other large corporation benefit greatly from it @janbb .

@janbb I’ve been thinking my question over, and now believe that I should have left out the “world power” part. Is there any hope for arresting the long term decline of the United States?
It isn’t the waning of military dominance which worries me most.

@Bill1939 I agree wholeheartedly, and that is what I’m getting at. The evidence is stacking up faster than one can keep track that we face manifest difficulties. The latest news of the successful Chinese establishment of a new international bank is a genuine gun at our temple. The alarming eagerness with which the rest of the planet’s first world nations hopped aboard is rather terrifying.

@SquirrelEStuff Powerful scene from 1976! It was true then and it’s certainly worse now. i would take issue with the section of the speech on the elimination of war and famine. Those 2 items are far too profitable (for someone) to allow their demise.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Hollow and decaying infrastructure is merely one member of the rapidly expanding herd of elephants in our crowded room. In fact, the infrastructure rot is just the visible sign of the the country’s gangrene. It’s a superb analogy. It’s difficult to look at any item critical to the existence of the country and not find rust and tarnish concealing the true extent of structural rot.

In the long term I see many more countries having more and more economic power. It won’t be just a few very prosperous countries in the world, but rather many countries with high standards of living, more comfortable lifestyles, better opportunity for it’s citizens.

I do think the US is on a bad course right now. The imbalance that is being created by the rich getting richer and employees being paid low wages and doing the work of two people is coming close to a boiling point. However, the economy in the US is picking up, spending is up, unemployment is going down and overall it should help employees have more power. When companies have a hard time filling enough positions wages are more likely to go up, and employees can go to another company down the street if their company is treating them badly.

As far as military power. It would be nice to say that will be less important in the future. Unfortunately, I just watched 60 Minutes and it was a reminder of how horrible and homocidal groups and governments can be. Oy, I can barely think about it it makes me so upset.

I do wonder if the US had a weaker military what would happen? Would it be better? We wouldn’t go trying to “interfere” in other conflicts and wars? Would fewer countries hate us? Fewer target us?

Little.
I share your pessimism about the US being the world power.
China mounted an alternative to the World Bank that is popular with US allies. If the US and China are not headed into the same ‘state’, then China could prevail?