"The United States has in my view three assets at the present, from an imperial point of view. Possibly four. One is, it has enormous techno-military superiority. Way beyond what anybody else can possibly reach.
Second, it is, thanks to the fact of having virtually uncontrolled immigration, of the developed countries of the world, the old Western developed countries, the only one that is still growing. It's a very big country which keeps growing, unlike Europe, for instance, which demographically speaking is not growing.
Third, it has an enormous accumulation of wealth and economic influence. But especially, over the last fifty years, the enormous accumulation of what you might call the rules of economic transactions have been very largely since 1945 rewritten in North American terms. In much the same way that international world credit agencies, Standard and Poors and others, are actually U.S. agencies which determine what other states can borrow or not.
And finally I suppose you could add, although I'm not quite so clear about it, the cultural influence of American popular culture and the English language.
As against this, the United States, even big as it is, is a small and a relatively diminishing part of the global population. The United States is a distinctly diminishing part of the world economy. A lot of people keep asking, is the growth of the world economy going to resume? The growth of the world economy has resumed, but not so much in the West. It has resumed in China and in Asia. We see the relative decline of the American economy; not so much as a holding company of people who own things, but as an economy it is declining."
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