John Gray, in The Guardian (excerpts):Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolicial shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over...
The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed...
Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now... it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future...
The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt... Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different...
Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate... A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.
