Making America Second Rate

America has held a leadership position politically, economically and militarily for a number of years now.  We are now seeing that dominance, in economics and politics start to diminish.

We clearly maintain the largest military structure and it doesn't seem like it is going to be reduced any time soon.  However, we are seeing our economic leads and our political leads fading.

We are challenged to a large extent economically by rising economic powers as well as some older European ones.  Clearly China has the second largest economy and is likely to surpass us in the not so distant future.  To some extent this is simply due to the enormous population advantage they have so as they modernize the economy has tremendous growth potential.  We on the other hand are not helping ourselves by starting to restrict some trade opportunities and focusing on old industries instead of the industries of the future.

We also spend more of our GDP on the military than any of our rivals.  This is not the most productive use of those funds as it is not creating much in the way of new industries or opportunities.

Part of this dominance is tied to our leadership role in world.  We are clearly seeing that slipping.

Our wild accusations, failure to live up to international agreements and our imposition of tariffs and sanctions that are seemingly arbitrary are causing more and more countries to reconsider their relationship with us.  We have to some extent alienated our closest allies and emboldened our enemies.  Our policies are proving ineffective and self defeating.  In the areas we have initiatives, ongoing we seen effectively no positive results.  North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, the Middle East, the Ukraine are all either the same or worse than they were a couple of years ago.

Our approach, as apparently inspired by conservative media, is to bully these countries into submission.  There is no evidence that it is working and there is evidence that it is causing them to bypass some of our influence.

We are simply not in as strong a position today as we were two years ago despite propaganda on the right.  Nothing is better and much is worse.  Debt is soaring, our prestige has suffered and we are seeing attacks on our assets.  The one area that seems positive is our attacks on ISIS but that started before the administration and their policies have simply ceded the area to Russia.