Who will replace us?

Matthew Parris of the London Times waxes wishful about the much anticipated decline of the American empire:

The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. “Yes, we can” was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.

But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.

The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.

First off, America's recent economic decline is part of a global economic retrenchment. Noone is gaining on the US on a relative basis.

Secondly, the Iraq war, as much as wobbly internationalists wish to portray it, was/is not a disaster. Our war aims were acheived - Saddam was deposed, the possibility of Iraq serving as a base for the development of WMDs has been negated, a democratic government is in place in Iraq and the security situation is improving daily. In what way has the Iraq policy been a failure?

To answer my own question, Iraq has been a failure in the eyes of Parris and other wobbly defeatists for the same reasons that all wars, in their eyes, are failures. It was bloody, destructive, and didn't proceed according to the original, overly optimistic plans. It was a failure because mistakes were made. It was a failure because its unpopularity contributed to the defeat of the Republicans.

But if the American foreign policy "empire" is gone, what has taken its place? America will continue to be the world's superpower by default, because no other nation or entity (UN or EU) can replace it. Parris wants the US empire gone because is wishful for a new world order of peaceful cooperation and coexistence through the rise of trans-national entities like the UN and its spawn of countless NGOs and CSOs. Parris thinks that its time for the soldier to give way to the diplomat, the combat boot to the wingtip. Ain't gonna happen.

Iraq has strengthened our position in Asia, it has not diminished it. Likewise Afghanistan. You gain no power or influence by being disengaged from the world's hotspots. Wingtips without combat boots are worse than useless.