> B. wrote:
>
>> [$1.6 trillion in US dollars is, like, what, 300
>> British pounds now? :) -B.]
> ============
>
> The times they are a changin': -)
>
> "What really matters...is the strength of the currency. Britain has
> nuclear weapons, but the pound is weak, so everyone pushes it around.
> [JFK]
===============================================================
What may matter more is the depth of the home market. The USD has been
declining and nuclear weapons are irrelevant in the assymetrical guerrilla
wars of Empire, but access to the US consumer and capital markets is still a
very powerful incentive to secure the cooperation of other countries. This
is so even when the US exercises its economic power indirectly, as when it
coerces foreign banks and suppliers to curtail their relations with "rogue"
regimes like North Korea and Iran or themselves face US sanctions. Britain
no longer had that power in the postwar world. The Chinese are lately
acquiring it; it's domestic market and capital are becoming increasingly
integral to the world capitalist economy.
So while the times are indeed a changin' - more rapidly, in fact, than we could have imagined at the beginning of the Bush presidency - unless there is an unstoppable run on the dollar and the resulting American economic and social crisis proves insurmountable, the Empire will remain intact, and may even be strengthened as a new Democratic or Republican administration takes stock of the reckless follies of the Bush era and reverts to a multilateral foreign policy based more on American economic than military power. In this context, it would be wrong to assume, as many on the left do, that the US is on a collision course with a rising capitalist China or capitalist Russia as it was to assume that the established British Empire would inevitably come into conflict with the rising American colossus at the turn of the last century.