The United States owes its historical dominance to being the world's biggest exporting nation. It no longer holds that position. The country that does is set to play a more dominant role in world affairs.
by Melvin Rhodes
My local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal, has been running a series of articles from Associated Press, under the collective heading "Drowning in Debt." The articles have been looking at the massive amounts of debt in the United States, both personal and governmental.
No country in the history of the world has ever had so much debt. The potential consequences, as the articles show, are horrendous. It is difficult to see how America can remain the world's sole superpower with its finances in such disarray.
Debt has been a major contributory factor in the decline of other great powers in history. The question now is: Who will replace the United States as the dominant economic power?
Go back a couple of centuries and Great Britain was the "workshop of the world." As the greatest exporter and investor, Britain was rapidly on the rise to world ascendancy. The British Empire, largely a mercantile empire, dominated the world for the best part of 200 years.
In the late 19th century it was clear that Britain's economy was in decline. A number of nations were growing more rapidly than it was. A century ago Germany and the United States were both rapidly challenging the United Kingdom for global economic dominance. Germany's rise was thwarted twice by two world wars in the first half of the 20th century.
At the end of the second global conflict, the United States emerged as the dominant economic power. The country was by far the biggest producer and exporter of goods, just as Britain had been before her. But the United States has been in relative decline ever since, gradually losing out to other nations that have annually taken a bigger piece of the global pie. Although the United States is still a big exporter, it exports very few manufactured goods—America's exports today are mostly high-technology items, food and entertainment.
