John Robb over at Global Guerillas tosses off verbal bombs that open new holes in the firmament as easily as someone else tosses a salad. The real superpower today, is not Fortress America (we've hocked our future building stuff that blows shit up and shipped off our industrial might over to China), it's the UNREGULATED GLOBAL MARKETPLACE. Makes everything so much more understandable.
The idea that America would thrive in this global marketplace was a fairy tale. Especially since we've been spending so much time and effort building the mightiest military state in the known universe. We can't kill them all, can't blow up enough shit to make the rest of the world like us. They may fear our rain of bombs, but without allies, we are ultimately a big bully that no one else really respects.
It's kind of like we've been playing two games simultaneously, Risk and Monopoly. We concentrated on Risk and borrowed against our Monopoly funny money to build up our armies on the Risk board. So we have become this enormous military beast, but we find ourselves in hock up to our eyeballs. And the Monopoly game has gotten bigger, more complex and interconnected. And no one can keep track of the rules anymore. Soon we might not be able to feed ourselves, but at least we have Britney!