by Bob Trowbridge

Created on: August 03, 2007

There seems to be an assumption here that the US has some choice about being the leader in world politics. It would be reasonable to question whether the US is the leader in world politics. The US is the world leader in wealth and the world leader in spending on the military. Because we have the most money and the biggest guns does not make us a world political leader. It just gives us the power to try to push our politics onto others.

And it is not the people of the US who shape our politics or our economy or our military. It is the corporations who run things in the US and who try to shape our politics as well as world politics.

There is no political power without economic and military power. When another superpower arises that has more money and bigger guns than us, there will be a new leader in world politics. Right now, that looks like China. We are already up to our neck in debt to China, Japan, and other Asian nations. If China suddenly decided to get rid of all of its US dollars, the US would be instantly brought to its knees financially.

The only reason China does not do that is because the US is still the biggest consumer of Chinese goods. Two things will change that. As the US economy continues to go down the drain, in spite of all of the talking heads telling us how wonderful the economy is, consumers will have less money to spend on those Chinese goods. The second thing is that more and more Chinese people will have the money to buy those goods and China won't need the US consumer any more.

The US has already lost its place as the world's economic power. The US economy is on life support just waiting for someone to pull the plug. It has also already lost its military supremacy. It still spends more on the military than all other industrial nations combined. (This is for the enrichment of "defense" corporations, including the Bush family.) So the US has more military toys than any other nation, but the military itself is being decimated in Iraq and Afghanistan and we are incapable of fighting a serious ground war anywhere in the world.

The Bush administration is setting the stage for an invasion of Iran, lying to the public just as it did for Iraq. It will likely be primarily an air attack, another deadly and illegal "shock and awe" operation. But the US cannot put troops on the ground in Iran unless Bush pulls them out of Iraq as he pulled them out of Afghanistan.

In short, we are already on the way out as a leader in world politics. The battles being

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