More on the current Leftist "downfall of America" gloat

Leftists both in America and abroad are portraying the financial crisis as the downfall of the American “empire”. A Yale history professor who knows all about the empires of the past has some more level-headed comments. Excerpt:

Well, slow down a minute. It is one thing to argue that the United States has been weakened by fiscal extravagance and military overstretch. It is a separate thing to recall that, regardless of regime follies, from century to century economic and military balances do shift gradually from one country or part of the world to another.

Right now both of those developments - American political incompetence and geopolitical shifts - have joined in time to make the world a less easy place for the United States. But one of the "rise and fall" lessons of history is that great powers (the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the British) take an awful long time to collapse. They take knocks on the head, they suffer a defeat and humiliation here or there, plus a bankruptcy or two. But they hold on, a trifle diminished although not mortally wounded.

Often they hold on because the rising powers don't know how to replace them. They hold on, too, because they have massive resources. The Hapsburgs held on because they had an army that could operate in 14 languages. The British held on because of the City of London and a lot of useful naval bases. The short-lived 20th-century empires - Nazi, Japanese, Soviet - had no such back-up systems. They came, they went.

America's back-up systems are enormous. It is a super-great-power, with about 20% of the world's product, 50% of its military expenditures and most of its top research universities, massive R&D spending, a highly sophisticated services industry to complement its industrial base, an extremely strong demographic profile and the best agricultural acreage-to-population ratio among all the large nations. This is not an imperium that will tumble into the sand overnight.

Still, one wonders whether Ozymandias - "whose frown and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" - might not deserve a contemporary thought or two. What Shelley was really commenting upon was how a great power is slowly eroded, by arrogance surely, but also by the passage of time. So far as we know, Ozymandias's enormous sandstone figure at Luxor was not pulled down by marauding Nubians or Arabs. It slowly fell apart, more from within than from without.

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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH (2). Email me (John Ray) here