Great Powers never see their decline coming. It took Britain thirty years after its devastating losses in the First World War before it began seriously to dismantle its empire. The collapse of the United States as a Great Power will happen so much more swiftly, because its wounds are self-inflicted. Yet there is no certainty that awareness of its plight will occur any faster than it did in Britain.

Current political discussion in the United States finds absolutely no one among the pundits or politicians facing up to the awful reality confronting America. It is as if the U.S. still holds unrivaled hegemonic power across the globe, as if its military power is as puissant as it is feared, as if its economic strength towered over all other nations, and as if its moral standards can be regained and polished to their former luster.

These are illusions on every single count. America’s soldiers and marines have been stalemated by Saddam’s insurgents and their home-made IEDs, and America’s air power has shown itself to be a counter-productive force of destruction, matched in intensity and affect by car bombs and suicide bombers. Decades of wasteful domestic consumption and the dismantling of its manufacturing base have been accompanied by staggering amounts of internal and external debt. America as a beacon of personal liberty and defender of freedom is like a maiden who has lost her virginity but insists on lecturing all others about her moral superiority.

What is especially revealing is the fantasy that prevails in the U.S. that a country can commit its most catastrophic foreign policy decision, yet avoid catastrophic consequences. Even critics of the war who foresaw its vile results still insist that the U.S. must do everything it can to avoid the break-up of Iraq into a failed state that will become an even more hospitable training ground for terrorism than Afghanistan under the Taliban. Supporters of the war insist that “if we pull out of Iraq now, we will just be back there in ten years battling an even worse enemy.”

How is this battle to be joined? If the country was not ever willing to discuss enforcing conscription in the face of “World War IV” and its “greatest enemy since Hitler and Stalin”, where is it going to get the strength now or ten years from now to raise the 500,000 troops it will need at a minimum? And even if it did, how are these average Americans, steeped as they are in complete ignorance of the world outside their borders, and utterly unfamiliar with any other language or culture, going to be successful in fighting an insurgency in the Middle East? If the U.S. military is right that it takes at least ten years to overcome an insurgency, where is the plan here and now to educate tens of thousands of Americans in Arabic to prepare for living a decade or longer in a foreign culture?

Lacking such a plan, is America going to train its Rottweilers to be even more vicious? Will it alter its existing rules of torture now to allow damage to vital organs or death? Will its smart bombs be implanted with more intelligent chips? Is it ready to issue a few hundred billions of dollars of debt to replace all of its Humvees and Apache warships that have become victims of the Iraqi desert, and will Japan and China happily buy this debt in addition to all they own?

It is simply fantasy to think that the U.S. can fight any more wars like this war in Iraq. Young men and women anxious for a paid college education or a green card are not going to be fooled a second time, and Americans are not willing to give up their pampered existence by raising their taxes for the true costs of this “Long War”, much less reinstating the draft. America’s enormous investment in technological warfare has proven to be a vast wastage in the face of the real nature of war in the 21st century.

Catastrophic decisions have catastrophic consequences. The North Atlantic alliance has been shattered by the hubris of the Bush administration, and no future president can rightly be called Leader of the Free World. Europe is likely to be of only modest help if America withdraws from Iraq only to find itself trying to defend its Saudi, Jordanian, Turkish or Egyptian friends.

If $50 is the floor for a price of a barrel of oil, and $100 or more the average over the next ten years, so be it. What can the U.S. do to stabilize and revitalize the Iraqi oil industry that hasn’t been done to date? What realistic energy conservation plan is afoot in the U.S. that will provide alternative sources? How can the U.S. be taken seriously in the discussion of Global Warming if its own government is in complete denial of its possibility?

The additional half trillion dollars of debt for the Iraq war, added to its annual current account deficit of $800 billion, only hastens the day when the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world. When this happens - when oil is priced in Euros – the real consequences of its debts will become apparent. U.S. corporations will be relatively unaffected, since they will have long since moved their manufacturing out of the country, but ordinary Americans will feel the harm.

And which country any longer will wish to emulate the fabled American exercise in democracy? The U.S. has abandoned its historic system of checks and balances, just as quickly as Americans have abandoned their cherished freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without legal representation. In a functioning democracy there would be outrage over these travesties, demands for a war crimes trial for George Bush and his administration, and insistence that the Republican Party, which has treated the Constitution as if it were toilet paper, put itself out of existence. But this is an America which shudders in fear at the name of Bin Laden, and distracts itself with a fascination for celebrity culture.

America’s decline is as ineluctable as it is currently invisible to America itself. Its decline will happen in lurches, interrupted by moments when it appears the country is back in form. Perhaps its decline is inevitable in the face of a resurgent China. But it certainly didn’t have to happen so quickly or as the result of ill-conceived actions by George Bush, a man whose definitive biography will not be written by an historian, but by a psychiatrist.

The historians will be left to marvel at what once was, and how quickly it was lost.