US Role in World Still Unchallenged

The Economist has an interesting article on US predominance in the world, despite bad press. The US still produces 27.5% of the world's GDP [Japan is second at 9%] and predominates in every category, though New York is ebbing as world financial capital. This jibes well with a lot of the statistics and polling results of last week's Foreign Policy article on Failed States, which puts the US [and Ireland] at the top end of the least risky states in several categories, including religious tolerance. The article ends on an upbeat note which puts recent history after WWII into perspective:

Robert Kagan, a prominent commentator, is confident that the American-dominated "unipolar" world will endure. America has weathered worse disasters than Iraq, he says, not least soon after victory in the second world war, when the Soviet Union developed the hydrogen bomb and communists took power in China. Certainly America faces stronger regional antagonists, but none is yet competing for global supremacy, whether alone or in concert. If anything, many states want America's help to “balance” a rising China and a growling Russia. “A superpower can lose a war—in Vietnam or in Iraq—without ceasing to be a superpower,” says Mr Kagan, "so long as the American public continues to support American predominance, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbours."

Although there are nutroots and moonbats who want to abolish US borders and turn the country over to nanny-state hyper-gov, the common sense of the American people, which mouth-breathing slack-jaws like Michael Moore calls "the dumbest people on the planet," values individual freedom much more than self-centered navel-gazing.

Though in California and the other left coast, this might not be as true as it used to be.