Engdahl first provides an accurate early history of the would-be hegemon, the US Empire, after the conclusion of WWII, and follows this with factual information about the dramatic contrast of today's debt-burdened US.
Now, its domestic economy a hollowed-out shell, its transportation infrastructure in horrendous decline, its skilled labor force increasingly non-existent, its university engineering and science students mostly from abroad–mainly China and India–the United States of America is in the throes of a terminal decline, a decline caused by no one but her own people who tolerated the looting and destruction of a once-beautiful nation by a greedy, power-addicted cabal of bad people with names like Rockefeller, Gates, Russell, DuPont, Buffett and others whose names are hardly known to the broad public.He then supplies us with a most depressing indicators of current US weakness. This is the end result of the sociopaths of US capitalist leadership which adopted the methods and operations of the earlier sociopaths known as organized criminal gangs ("mafias") to loot everything in site. (Read The Money and the Power by Denton and Morris, Double Cross by the Giancana brothers, and Gangster Capitalism by Woodiwiss--in that order.) I think that this tendency to work with criminal gangs and the use of their methods is endemic to capitalism because the system eventually and inevitably seduces ruling classes with its drugs of wealth accumulation and power to commit all sorts of crimes against humanity. Capitalism is a perfect system for sociopaths--both capitalist and criminal types.
The crisis that the USA faces today as World Hegemon is the fact the nation has become bankrupt, morally, spiritually, intellectually and economically, in an eerie manner much as the British Empire after onset of their Great Depression of 1873.
A few basic indicators says volumes about the rapidly-growing limits to America’s global power projection and why Washington’s “bully” tactics are being increasingly scorned by the rest of the world.
Although he see the current weak condition of the US Empire as "a blessing in disguise", I think just the opposite. I think that this armed-to-the-teeth Empire because of its precarious position in the world is likely more dangerous than ever.
