The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world’s only superpower.
On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.
On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue infavour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.
Pivotal moment?
Some see this as a pivotal moment.
The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as aprofessor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paperThe Observer: “Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which thebalance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.
“The era of American global leadership, reaching back to theSecond World War, is over… The American free-market creed hasself-destructed while countries that retained overall control ofmarkets have been vindicated.”