Only Father Kolakovic recognized the coming darkness and prepared his church through mock interrogations and surveillance tactics training.
However, many of his policies to improve the lives of ordinary citizens were failures. In his speech on November 18, , Nikita Khrushchev backed up his bold prediction about the downfall of America with his reasoning.
For Khrushchev fealty to the Communist Party shaped his beliefs. In another one of his speeches, he gives a clear example of the Marxist ideology he exported all over the world as the leader of the Soviet Union.
At the time of his prediction, many in the United States perceived his words to be a threat of nuclear war. Only 6 years later, the Cuban Missile Crisis rocked the free world over in anticipation of a real nuclear war with Soviet Cuba.
Los Angeles World Affairs Council. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August found that 65 percent of Americans believed the country was now "in a state of decline. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates.
Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let's use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.
While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future. Today, three main threats exist to America's dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.
By , the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent for the European Union.
There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself. Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In , the U. A harbinger of further decline: in the U. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U. Add to this clear evidence that the U.
After leading the world for decades in to year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U. By , in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists. Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency.
Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end "the artificially maintained unipolar system" based on "one formerly strong reserve currency. Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency "disconnected from individual nations" that is, the U. Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued , "to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in , as long expected, the U. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget.
Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U. By now, however, it is far too late. Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues.
Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence. One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.
Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will "set the pace in shaping our global future.
By , Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned , in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could "emerge as energy kingpins.
They time travel in a way. These monuments were constructed in the past and exist in the present. They are physical manifestations of this long history, that goes back in this particular case to the early 20th century, nostalgia for the Lost Cause and the Confederacy.
I see the reclamation of the Robert E. Lee statue as a piece of what the Project has done too. Both have made us talk about American History in a very different way now. Amid an unprecedented national movement for racial justice in the summer of , we witnessed one of the most important political statements in the history of American sport. On Aug. These protests against racism and police violence soon inspired similar actions in the majority-white Major League Baseball and National Hockey Leagues.
The sports demonstrations are profound expressions of a new, multiracial coalition of Americans calling for racial justice and an end to inequality. A century after the 19th Amendment, Kamala Harris finally broke the glass ceiling. Mink and Chisholm both ran for the U. We should recognize Harris as a woman whose personal and political lineage stems from anti-imperial circuits of migration and activism.
Along with Mink and Chisholm, Harris is a first. Even in , secessionists acknowledged Lincoln had won the election as they tried to break the nation in two. Ever since the defeated John Adams gave up power willingly in , no American President has refused to acknowledge defeat. The subtext is text; a radical acceleration of the antidemocratic impulse means power is all that matters to the GOP and there is not even lip service given to the will of the voters.
With baseless claims of fraud, our democratic system has been further eroded even after the election is over. The GOP has abandoned a strategy of attracting some voters while disenfranchising others and moved to undermining democracy as a system entirely. I fear what happens as the party continues to abandon a fundamental bedrock of democracy in new and more dangerous ways.
Hostile historians may come to regard Donald Trump's presidency as an aggregation of the lesser traits of his predecessors. The bullying of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who demeaned White House aides and even humiliated his Vice-President Hubert Humphrey - forcing his deputy once to recite a speech on Vietnam while he listened, legs akimbo, trousers round his ankles, on the toilet.
The shameless lies of Bill Clinton about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The paranoia of Richard Nixon, who in his final days railed, King Lear-like, at portraits hanging on the White House walls. The incompetence of George W Bush, whose failure to master basic governance partly explained his administration's botched response to the aftermath of the war in Iraq and also to Hurricane Katrina.
The historical amnesia of Gerald Ford, whose assertion during a presidential debate that Eastern Europe was not dominated by Moscow was a forerunner of Trump's recent endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The strategic impatience of Barack Obama, whose instinct always was to withdraw US forces from troublesome battlefields, such as Iraq, even if the mission had not yet been completed.
Even the distractedness of John F Kennedy, who whiled away afternoons in the White House swimming pool with a bevy of young women to sate his libido, a sexualised version, perhaps, of Donald Trump sitting for his hours in front of his flat-screen TV watching friendly right-wing anchors massage his ego.
At the midpoint of Donald Trump's first term, historians have struggled to detect the kind of virtues that offset his predecessors' vices: the infectious optimism of Reagan; the inspirational rhetoric of JFK; the legislative smarts of LBJ; or the governing pragmatism of Nixon.
Last year, a poll of nearly political science scholars , which has routinely placed Republicans higher than Democrats, ranked him 44th out of the 44 men who have occupied the post for those wondering why Trump is the 45th president, Grover Cleveland served twice. Though the president has likened himself to Abraham Lincoln, who posterity has deemed to be greatest of all presidents, this survey judged him to be the worst of the worst. Even the conservative scholars, who identified themselves as Republicans, placed him 40th.
Were it not for his braggadocio, Donald Trump might receive a more positive historical press. A recurring problem, after all, is that he gets judged against his boasts. He can point to a significant record of right-wing accomplishment. Tax reform. Two Supreme Court nominees safely installed on the bench. The travel ban. The bonfire of federal regulations. Criminal justice reform. Legislative action aimed at ameliorating the opioid crisis. Nato members ponying up more cash. Annual wage growth is at a nine-year high.
Many of his campaign pledges, such as the renegotiation of the Nafta free-trade agreement and the relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, have been kept.
Promise made, promise kept is one of his boasts that regularly rings true. Often, though, he blunts the impact of authentic good news with inflated claims. US Steel is not opening up six new plants. He is not the author of the biggest tax cut in American history. Besides, the trade war has penalised US manufacturers and farmers, and in the stock market suffered its worst year since the financial meltdown. This market volatility highlights other Trump tendencies contributing to his poor reviews: pointing to a buoyant stock market as a metric of personal success, the downside of which is the downswing; and blaming others when things go south, in this case the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.
Trump sits in the Oval Office behind what's called the Resolute desk, hewn from the timber of an abandoned British warship and first used by John F Kennedy, a former navy man himself. This America First president is himself an American first.
0コメント