The Streak is Ended!

[Kaitzilla]

Yes I know the Undertaker lost at Wrestlemania.

This is the biggest upset in human history!

Maybe when Hulk Hogan turned heel compares:

Link to video.

 

[Pegasus_77]

Yikes!a decent speech

 

[FriendlyFire]

Not really, at least not for me. I would actually welcome the idea of the United States settling into a sort of "UK status". Powerful enough that nobody really wants to mess with us, but not so powerful that the rest of the world comes to resent us for it.

Reduce your Army to 100,000 professionals and explode the size of the US Navy and US Airforce ? You would have 100,000 fully mechanized and elite forces for the Army, back up by I supposed national guard. Then the US would have an even more strong airforce and Navy.

Just push for the airforce to be disbanded as unconstitutional and absorbed by the Navy.
That would produce pax Britannia kind of power based on Navy strength alone.

 

[Commodore]

Reduce your Army to 100,000 professionals and explode the size of the US Navy and US Airforce ? You would have 100,000 fully mechanized and elite forces for the Army, back up by I supposed national guard. Then the US would have an even more strong airforce and Navy.

Just push for the airforce to be disbanded as unconstitutional and absorbed by the Navy.
That would produce pax Britannia kind of power based on Navy strength alone.

Well I wasn't talking about the UK during its heyday of the British Empire. I was referring to their level of power nowadays. I think they have dug out a nice little spot for themselves in the global power structure.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Is it taken for granted, in the United States, that a decline in the international power of the United States is a self-evidently bad thing?

Are you really a nation of megalomaniacs?

I don't think that you are. You don't really act that way, or at least most of you do not. Which makes it even more strange that, for the purposes of public discourse, you all feel obliged to pretend that you are

In my reading, it's not just in public discourse. There’s a genuine, felt anxiety. Americans don't know how they'll handle the complexities of being one player among many, multilateralism. It's too deeply ingrained in their thinking to be one, and the right one at that, of two (or one). We came into international power as the decisive and good military power in the morally unambiguous WWII. Through the Cold War, we were the one whose power checked the evil Soviet empire. From 1989 to 2001 we felt like we were the only ones with any power to speak of. Through all of this time our economic power was linked to our military power, and we sensed it to be the case: the military-industrial complex was a good thing.


Now who knows where the next threat is coming from. And our last war wasn't morally unambiguous. And maybe the threat is economic, and we're now losing because of our military spending. We’re just psychologically unprepared for multilateralism; we don’t know how we’ll do that well, and we sense (Friedman’s World is Flat) that our power might slip away quickly if we don’t have our old best-of-two framework of global domination.

That may well be a version of megalomania, I don't know. But I think it's why we can't easily stomach a drop in our international power.

USA#1 isn't just a jingoistic slogan. If we can't be #1 we don't know how to be USA.

 

[BvBPL]

Is it taken for granted, in the United States, that a decline in the international power of the United States is a self-evidently bad thing?

Are you really a nation of megalomaniacs?

We are a nation striving for excellence.

It keeps from getting from ending up with Tony Abbott in the driver's seat.

 

[Traitorfish]

In my reading, it's not just in public discourse. There’s a genuine, felt anxiety. Americans don't know how they'll handle the complexities of being one player among many, multilateralism. It's too deeply ingrained in their thinking to be one, and the right one at that, of two (or one). We came into international power as the decisive and good military power in the morally unambiguous WWII. Through the Cold War, we were the one whose power checked the evil Soviet empire. From 1989 to 2001 we felt like we were the only ones with any power to speak of. Through all of this time our economic power was linked to our military power, and we sensed it to be the case: the military-industrial complex was a good thing.


Now who knows where the next threat is coming from. And our last war wasn't morally unambiguous. And maybe the threat is economic, and we're now losing because of our military spending. We’re just psychologically unprepared for multilateralism; we don’t know how we’ll do that well, and we sense (Friedman’s World is Flat) that our power might slip away quickly if we don’t have our old best-of-two framework of global domination.

That may well be a version of megalomania, I don't know. But I think it's why we can't easily stomach a drop in our international power.

USA#1 isn't just a jingoistic slogan. If we can't be #1 we don't know how to be USA.

...Good post.

 

[Pegasus_77]

Are you guys impressed by the tension and seriousness of the ongoing and latent terrorist attacks presented in the TV series, Homeland?