We, the United States need to identify the vision for our future. The path we are following has been followed before. Spain was once top dog, it no longer is, but it is still a splendid country, with a present and a future. The Netherlands followed a similar path, then Great Britain.
Each suffered needlessly by fighting against it's decline instead of taking it into account. Wasting what they had by clinging to what they thought they once had, like Grandma Moses putting aside painting and deciding to scale Everest.
The US was once a great independent nation with a boundless future. Then along came former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson who convinced Congress to declare war on Germany and enter WWI. We've decided we need to be the world's policeman ever since. I think our ability to be that is rapidly running out.
We showed up at a party with a gun, shot a few people and robbed them. Did the same at the next party. At the first party, World War 1, we came along late and joined one side and helped them win. At the next party, World War 2, we supplied the weapons and the USSR did most of the fighting. After that we were the lead or sometimes the only bandit, and we have usually lost.
I'm not sure anyone other than some of the US public were ever fooled by the 'we are the world's policeman' claim. Our motivation has usually come from our own big oil companies seeking oil fields abroad, and our weapons makers wanting to sell more weapons, to anyone but often just our own government. So we leave Afghanistan and leave all the weapons behind, so our weapons makers can make a whole bunch more.
The people who run our country have put through the media the same message they have used so many times before, and been wrong every time: 'if we lose in Vietnam the whole world will fall to communism.'
We would be happier and better adjusted to life in the real world if we did not think the entire world depends on us. The US public falls for that claim again and again, because 69% of the US public has never been outside the US and the few who have mostly went to see the sights and didn't absorb the culture and the way people think. I spent 42 years outside the US, and people outside the US spend most of their lives unaware that the US even exists. When they do think of it they usually think of it as a new country. But other people take the US very seriously. Some Iranians I met had traveled through the SW US, and some Dutch had been to Disney World. Lets get ourselves in perspective, drop our egos and take our place with the other people of the world. We are not losing anything we ever had.
In all honesty we didn't lose in Vietnam we just decided it was time to leave. It just got kind of gory and politicians don't like that when they have to run for reelection.
