ABC news

By Christiane Amanpour, Matthew Drake, Iva Zoric & David Miller | Around the World

Rebutted by Barry Secrest (in bold)

While there has been growing concern that the United States is slowly losing ground as the world's dominant Superpower, Robert Kagan, author of the new book, The World America Made, believes it's all in our head.

Cr edit note: Indeed, we are retreating from every known venue, cutting our military, our debt has just squeaked past our GDP, the Mideast is on fire, Iran's thumbing her nose at us, China is expanding, our Constitution is shrinking, but, yeah, beyond all that we're just peachy, and hoping we each remain healthy, at least until Socialized medicine is repealed.

"I think that the basic measures of power indicate that the United States really is just as strong as it's ever been," says Kagan, "People have talked themselves into this notion that we no longer have the capacity to play the role we've been playing."

Cr edit note: It's not so much that we don't have the power, but rather it's that we no longer have the will. Oh, we are yet strong, but that paradigm, as everyone can see, will quickly change in another four years. I mean come on, 300 hundred nuclear weapons, a discontinued F-22 air superiority fighter, a reducing in size Navy, troops being cut by 50,000 to 100,000 thousand. We are seeing a typical Liberal Regime carve our military into a "world equality" with other militaries. What? You thought redistribution and equality in outcomes only applied here at home? Get real!

But as the United States begins to pull troops out of Afghanistan, after already pulling out of Iraq, there are questions as to whether America has the resources to assert its power in future conflicts, including the brewing situation with Iran.

Cr edit note: Oh, we have the resources now, but will we in four more years?

"I don't think it's a question of whether we can afford it," says Kagan "we certainly have that capability,"

Kagan doesn't deny that countries like China, whose international power is clearly growing, are a threat to America. Rather, his point is that the threat is nothing new. "We tend to sort of fantasize about the past, a past when the United States was allegedly able to do whatever it wants whenever it wanted to, and that past never existed."

Cr edit note: Oh, but is actually new in that we have a leader who does not view the US as an exceptional country. But, indeed, this threat is very new. You see, for the first time, the threat is from within as well as from without. We have authoritarians who appear to be more belligerent with their own "subjects" than with opposing nations who despise us, while calling our President "Brother".

This current paradigm is also outside of a past that never existed.

Four more years of this, and many of us will be standing in soup lines, all the while wondering what happened? From Super power to "Souper Power" in eight short years. Now that's "Change we can believe in" right?

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