How Will the U.S. Meet Its End?

Great Debates
1

Nothing lasts forever. Empires crumble. Republics become dictatorships. Great civilizations lapse into obscurity.

The United States is riding high now – probably the greatest power the world has ever seen. The question is – when and how will it end?

Will it eventually be absorbed into a world union?
Will a dominant China in the 23rd century reduce it to a supplier of grain and cheap labor?
Will it gradually conquer more and more of the world, become a true empire, then a dictatorship, then slide into decay and internal warfare?
Will it be made irrelevant in a future dominated by multinational corporations and their private armies?

Thoughts?

2

Yes,

It will also cower in utter horror, along with the rest of the world, as life as we know it is incinerated from nukes and God-sent asteroids.

3

We’llgo to our graves fighting the Invader Zims from planet Moenim, but by God, we’ll save the world, and rightly earn a place among God’s Really Big Mead Hall of Heroes.

regardless, why do you think the US wil simply die? Britain has been around since Roman days, with different governments and rising or falling in power.

Of course, they never had the technological and educational superiority of the US…

4
5

Within 10 years, a terrorist will take down a commercial aircraft with a SAM. That missile will have either been brought over from cold war Russian stock or bought legally in the US.

In either case, all planes will be grounded, first by the FAA, then by overwhelming national fear. (and like Sept 11th the borders will close). Simple paranoia might even spread to include all “potential targets” like trains, cars, bridges, boats.

If the last two years as taught me anything, democracy can’t fight terrorism.
All airlines are forced into bankruptcy, along with their parent companies causing a massive dropt in the stock market taking consumer confidence with it.

9/11 had planes shut down for a week; this would last much longer, leading to obvious economic loses in tourism and general business. Combined with the thousands of jobs lost in the airline industry, then tourism industry, another depression would bottom out the stock market.

At the same time, the government would be mobilizing troops throughout the US trying to a) capture bin Laden II and b) convince people to fly/shop/go to the movies.

My point really is just that the US is a superpower because of its economy, which is self-supported by consumer spending. Once consumer spending is eroded, it all goes down. Whether logical or not, consumer confidence is directly tied to the stock market which will go down really quick with the fall of the giant airlines, giant tourism conglomerates, and then the trickle down effect.

I see two paths to the classic dictator problem: 1.) A second (or series of) attack(s) on US soil increase military presence and eventual control as a democracy struggles to fight terrorism leading to a military state. 2.) In the midst of depression, the government will take control of everything it can to get things rolling again. This usually means government supplied jobs. Isolationism. And a host of other classic communist/dictator approaches to problem solving. The crisis will never abate, so the current president or admiral will never accept to step down or call elections.

6

Naw, it is the begining of the end now…
The economy is sliding the world is no longer quickly accepting the US point of view so readily and is actually resisting. Beligerent countries are openly defying the US and trying to acquire Nukes stretching the military resources while Terrorist groups threaten the population by the mereist hint that somthing might happen. Oh yes any moment the whole thing will come crashing down around us.

But then again the aliens might be on their way first.

7

Wow was the written on one breath?

My WAG - it’ll never happen. World Union would happen before the united states fails.

The land, and natural resources are just two vast. SAM’s hitting an airliner, have no effect on the business except to make more people lose their jobs and security around airports gets even tighter.

8

Heat death of the universe. :slight_smile:
But seriously, in the next couple of centuries the US is going to have to deal with the rising power of China and to a lesser degree, India. Both places have a billion+ people, so assuming they aren’t nuked, stall in economic growth over the long term, or China doesn’t do its typical “I don’t need foriegn trade, just leave us alone you smelly barbarians” thing it has done in the past when it was the most powerful nation. The US has to keep its total GDP rising at a faster rate than China or India, to maintain economic domiance, which is going to be a hard thing to do.

9

I really don’t see the US disappearing any time soon. The Roman and British empires fell apart, leaving merely Rome and Britain in their place. However, the US is not an empire (despite the cries of some of its naysayers), so it can’t lose power through loss of its territories. The US could certainly lose its status as World’s Sole Hyperpower, though even that won’t happen in the foreseeable future.

The US derives its power from three main sources: military, economy, and democracy. The first ensures that nobody is going to invade us. The second ensures that we’re not going to go broke. And the last ensures that the people here are happy enough to not rock the boat too much. Sure, there’s constant change going on, but nothing on the order of revolution, and no serious group that could plausibly institute such revolution. We’re pretty strong, and we’re pretty stable.

So what could affect that? Democracy? It’s not going anywhere, and nobody’s pushing to get rid of it. The people here rightly recognize that democracy is the best way to get things done, so as to preserve everybody’s rights, while keeping the majority happy. The economy? The freedom we enjoy here keeps our economy pretty much self-sustaining. We have our ups and downs, but at our worst we’re still ahead of most other places in the world, and an order of magnitude better than the third-world folks.

That leaves the military, the only front where there’s anything approaching a significant effort to hobble our capabilities. Of our three strengths, this is the one I could foresee falling apart, at least a bit. Given a long enough period of prosperity, the anti-military people could coerce the government into severly downsizing our forces, until our ability to project (and protect) ourselves drops down to European levels. However, if that were to happen, eventually someone would hit us, and that would be all it took for our military to ramp back up to existing levels.

I think the only things that could seriously destroy the country are either the sort of things that are impossible to predict (say, an asteroid wiping out the eastern seaboard), or are so far off in the future that it becomes impossible to make any educated opinions. In 10,000 years, who can say? But I feel it’s a safe bet that the US will still be here in several hundred years.
Jeff

10

Welcome to the world… today
Corporations have the money, money buys politicians, politicians command the armies.
Iraq = Oil , like it or not.

11

Well, when we reach the singularity, such concepts as “United States” will be pretty much meaningless. When do we reach the singularity? When we reach the point where we can design AI or genetically engineer people smarter than us. If we can create entities smarter than us, those smarter entities can create entities smarter than them. Pretty soon nothing makes sense to the regular people. Could be a paradise, or it could mean the extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens.

12

By mid-21st century, increasing economic entanglement with Mexico and Canada reduce the need for those national borders. Individual states and provinces start cutting deals with each other for sales of electricity and road maintenance. The Mexican standard of living gradually rises to near-parity with the poorer U.S. states and hispanic populations grow significantly in influence.

Meanwhile U.S. and Canadian social programs converge (the Americans spend more, because their aging population demands it, while Canada spends less because they can no longer afford it).

Canada eventually discards the monarchist trappings and becomes a republic, while Mexico’s government corruption falls out of fashion.

After a generation or two, the various federal trade barriers make less and less sense, and currency unification follows. After another generation passes, using the new North American Dollar, the significance of being a Candian/American/Mexican citizen seem less important and eventually fade.

Barring a full-scale nuclear war, if the United States “ends”, it will be because of gradual economic change (some great-grandson of NAFTA), not military or terrorist action.

13

god but you people are tiresome.

14

Look, the US isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. How long has China been around? Thousands of years? Unless friggin space aliens come down and wipe out the Earth or we all wipe ourselves out with nuclear weapons I’m willing to bet that the good ole US of A is going to be around as a geographic and political entity for a long time.

Maybe we won’t be the big boy on the block in 20 years. Maybe we will become part of of a united North American Union or the UN becomes a de facto world government. Who knows.

This country has survived two world wars, a Cold War, a Civil War, dozens of smaller conflicts, a Great Depression, several smaller depressions and recessions, the turmoil of Vietnam and the 60s and the worlds worst terrorist attack ever. So get a grip. You will be kowtowing to our military and economic might long into the future!! MUHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Ok that got a little out of hand…but you get the idea.

15

I think it only takes a couple of simple things to make the United States as irrelevant as the rest of its own hemisphere. A hypothetical (and overly simplified) six-step program:

  1. Offload most heavy industry and manufacturing capabilities to other nations in order to capitalize on cheap labor.

  2. Denude the nation of its remaining natural resources…

  3. …Like opals…

  4. …For immediate profit to a pampered corporate elite.

  5. Allow the nation to assert its remaining political power and attempt to reverse the trends started by items 1) through 4).

  6. Watch one percent of all Americans find a way to offload half of the nation’s wealth and instead float it on the world market, raising the amount of available capital everywhere else but America.

America is left with debts it can’t pay without either consuming its own remaining wealth or generating new wealth by forcing unwilling neighbors into a real empire. End of story, sooner or later.

Now, I don’t buy that anti-globalization bullshit for a minute, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t heard a couple of tumblers click in the lock in the past couple of years.

16

Lemur866 is right- but the universe will remember America as a human attempt at paradise-
just like Britain and China and Rome
historical curiosities -
they might even make a historical theme park :slight_smile:

http://www.orionsarm.com/

17

The United States will change its trade, tarriff, and taxation policies to allow american companies to close all their factories over here, and relocate to foreign lands like Mexico, asia, and eastern europe.

Its policies will also allow all high tech or all high paying jobs(computers, engineering, accounting, legal, insurance processing, etc) to be outsourced to asia where labor is cheap.

The H1-B visas and L-1 visas will continue to be expanded, allowing more and more foreign non-citizens to take american jobs.

Its policies will allow 100,000 more immigrants to come into the country to compete for the remaining jobs.

There will come a point, where there will be so much unemployment, that the tax revenues will no longer be able to pay for what is currently being spent. The dollar will nosedive, and all foreign goods will be quite expensive for the few remaining americans who still have a job.

With no income, no high tech employees, no factory workers, and no manufacturing base left in america, it will cease to be a world power - it simply will not be able to pay for anything anymore. Another war in the future would mean that america would be dependent on other nation’s factories to produce war material, but america will have no money to pay for such things.

All of these policies are in place, it is just a matter of time.

18

About the future dominated by corporations and private armys, there was a Video Game about a year ago called Ace Combat 3 that dealt with that scenario quite extensively (the Japanese version of the game anywhoo) The future was bascially ruled by three corporations which had their own armies but were supervised by a future version of the U.N called the Peacekeeping corps. However, the compaines bgan to war with each other, and evenutally WWIII ensued. Sounds hokey, but the way it was detailed out, it could happen.

As for the U.S losing it’s status as a world power, that’s been predicted years before, and if it does scuumb to a One World Order type thingie, expect 1,000,000,000 Religous folk to say “I told you so!”

19

the govt. will spend itself into bankruptcy. no credit left. all govt. employees not paid, quit. govt will shut down. states will leave union, form new countries.

when? 100 years or less.

20

Anybody remember “Syndicate” ?
Awesome game about corporations dominating everything and recruiting, training and technically enhancing hitmen to do the dirty jobs.
Sound plausible to me :eek: