Is America's future one of managed decline much like like Great Britain post Empire?

Question

China wiped the floor with the USA and the rest of the world in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China is undoubtedly going to overtake the USA in many fields to become the world's greatest economic superpower in the near future, with many other Asian economies determinedly following hard on China's heels.

With the ascendancy of Asia is the future of the United States one of slow, managed decline much like Great Britain after its once mighty Empire fell apart and dissolved?

Answer 1

You are mistaken if you believe this. America will remain at the top.

Answer 2

Excuse me but despite downsizing the UK is in GOOD health especially compared to the internationally flexable US. Don't forget your using English to perform most task's. Consider the size of the UK and that's quite impressive.

Managed decline is a bit of a negative. Try using Global Investmaent and perhaps America will see it's error in it's attempt to dominate. It's falure to learn the history of others and it's blind opinion that it is the HUB of the world. Wealth like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to me America is the poorest nation on Earth.

Answer 3

Since when was the British Empire wound down by managed decline?

In case you have not heard, it simply changed it's name from Empire to Commonwealth and continued running.

The USA is not in decline and on the Olympic medals table at Beijing, did extremely well, coming second.

USA has a pop of 300,000,000.  I'm not sure how massive the China pop is, but it's about a quarter of the total human pop on Earth.

Olympic Medals

CHINA

USA

RUSSIA

UK

Actually it was the British Empire - oops, Team-GB which actually did the best, considering we only have about 60million folk here in UK.

You wait until the London Games in 2012.  You ain't seen nothing yet.

Answer 4

The american people in the last 50 years have became a selfish nation.  Where one sexual pref. ranks among our energy issues. We are nothing but consumers, not producers, and we as a nation have became too top heavy. I remember reading somewhere that over 80% of our vocational work force will be retired in the next 20 years. We have become lazy. We are loosing our foundation, quick!

Our laws and goals as a nation focus more on the individual rather than the overall people. This mentality is found in most of us US citizens from the life guard at the pool to the politician running for President. Our ideaology, as a people, is so spread out at we can't even focus on a single problem for long enough to get it solved, and for the time we are focused on a topic, its nothing but a fight. This applies to our work ethics, education, politics, economy, foreign policies, etc.

All in all, i believe that the US will become a middle power in the years to come, with country like China and India becoming the next super power. We, as American, are digging our own grave. We are our biggest enemies. The other countries are just waiting for us to fall in.

I think Rome and Great Britain are great example of America's future, I hope I'm wrong.

Answer 5

A key difference is that China and Britain had empires...

America is almost a victim of its own success, its people have lost the work ethic.

As a note the only reason chinese economy is doing well is that they pay people peanuts and they work in terrible conditions.

The cause of the failure of the British empire was because it was just too d**n big, given our national population I think its a testiment to Britain.

Answer 6

Per capita China didn't do that well in the Olympics, and it's the same in other fields for some time.

It does look like democracies might have some difficulties competing against non democacies in the future.

Answer 7

Let's just look at why the British empire fell apart.

Giving all the colonies independence was a  condition of the lend lease agreement with the USA.

Prior to WW2 the British Empire was the largest trading block in the world. Unlike other colonial powers we had not raped our colonies but invested in them heavily to create an infrastructure for development. Because of the money spent on that, Britain had few resources when the war broke out.

The USA, saw the chance to cripple it's major competition and took it.

After the war the USA war aid to Germany saw her recover far quicker than Britain and condemned us to many years as the poor man of Europe. Rationing here went on until 1954 the longest of any European country.

Britain finally paid off the crippling war loan to the USA in December 2006.

The USA has long been a bully in it's foreign policy, caring not whether a government was elected or not, only whether they would follow the White House line.

Britain still has many friends internationally. How many has the USA?

American foreign policy is the biggest single reason for the growth in terrorism, and it's highly likely the the USA will get it's come uppance.