America must manage its decline?: Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”. That may be all well and good for the British, but their decline came as the sun finally set on their empire. That is the consequence of being a tiny island nation that didn’t always have enough to get by. But the promise of America lay in the bounty of our resources as well as our people. And we must learn to use them again. After all who is there to turn towards if we decline . . . China?


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Only in the sense of relative decline, as there appears to be little we can do about China's rise to superpower status. But I figure we can oppose their preeminence effectively forever, if we are smart about it. Otherwise we'll be looking out at a Chinese solar system in 200 years because they grabbed it all
Agreed - it's not just people, its resources. Unless of course, we start fueling our power plants using stinky hippies and old people ie. Logan's Run.
'the management of decline', isn't that what the FED has been doing for the last 100 years?
http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2011/10/nearly-100-years-later-and-this-is-what.html
Excerpts from a book written in 1912; by Alfred Owen Crozier.
"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."
Thomas Jefferson