I had recently been reading Fareed Zakaria's book "The Post-American World." Consider these stats from his book:

**The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. **The largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. **The biggest refinery is being constructed in India. **The largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. **The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi. **The biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. ** The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. **The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. **The Mall of America in Minnesota(once the largest in the world) now doesn't even make the top 10!! **In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. -AND we used to be numero-uno in each of those categories!!

Shit huh?? Well, we do still trump everyone with our military. On this point though people can have different views. Personally, I think we need our military might to keep being a power in the world(especially when one looks at how we rank globally in terms of education...terribly!). As Eisenhower was my fav president though, I agree with him that we should use a lot more of that money to build up ourselves domestically in an attempt to halt this decline into becoming the big dumb bully on the block. The rise of everyone else though is not really something to fear(unless we don't get environmental issues taken care of). Take our recent economic crisis-it was a good thing that other countries were strong and could help out and prevent the whole world from going down with us. America can remain strong if we continue to be open with our immigration policies.

For example: Foreign students and immigrants account for almost 50 percent of all science researchers in this country. In 2006 they received 40 percent of all PhDs. By 2010, 75 percent of all science PhDs in this country will be awarded to foreign students. When these graduates settle in the country, they create economic opportunity....but if they leave, they take that with them. Americas strength has always been our ability to remain open and flexible and absorb other people's cultures, languages, ideas, etc. We must not become overly nationalistic and close ourselves off to the rest of the world-our survival as a global power depends on it.

A few issues that do come up with the rise of the others is now they can be a little more tough with us. Take this for example: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/china-warns-barack-obama-that-meeting-dalai-lama-would-hurt-relations/19341118 -If you're lazy and don't want to read it, basically China said Obama better not meet with the Dalai Lama or it may "hurt America's prospects of economic recovery." We also plan on selling Taiwan $6.4 billion in weapons-prompting China to threaten sanctions....China would not have dared this 10 years ago.
An important player then to pit against China becomes another rising giant-> India... if we do not continue to make the mistake of ignoring them to please Pakistan. If anything we should allow India to continue to build-up Afghanistan(as they have been attempting to do for years now)-even if this is to undermine and piss off the Pakistani government and their influence in Afghanistan.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that the American Empire is in decline. It is now for us to decide if we will embrace the rise of other countries as powerful global actors or will we try to fight it and get snuffed out?