RE: Dateline 1931

> No one will ever replace the United Kingdom as the world hegemon.
>  Although
> great powers in the past have faded, the UK, unlike those,
> actually controls
> a subcontinent from which it can get a never ending supply of
> profits.  Many
> Europeans in the 1920s worried about the US--look at them now!
> Their version
> of capitalism is supine, a failure for all to see, and an
> opportunity for any
> Europeans (such as the British) who have cash to buy bargains.
> In any case,
> the 20s supplied definitive proof that the US could never be a
> world leader.
> When Wilson tried to sell the League of Nations, the US political class
> revolted.  This proves the US has no global ambitions it can
> realize.  And
> look at Britian's other challengers--Germany is a morass of
> hyperinflationary
> chaos (in any case, the UK, US and France will never allow them
> to rearm).
> The Soviet Union is too worried about trying to feed itself to
> have global
> ambitions.  There are malcontents in the colonies, but no power
> to play off
> the UK--so they will be easily crushed

One more thought in response.

But it was not the colonies that were crushed, but the UK, and for good.  A
world war now might alter the current situation for the US, as implied, with
a re-armed Japan or Germany.  But this seems an unlikely scenario if we
consider the systemic rupture that US hegemony created, which gave rise to
the present predicament of continued US military power:  the elimination of
that feature of capitalism which lead to world-wars, that is, the
elimination of territorialism.  Core states don't fight to control territory
and advance their capitalists anymore as they did.  On the contrary, with
the political incorporation of the periphery, all states protect core
capital (even as they loose legitimacy), and increasingly so.  Meanwhile,
core capital becomes ever integrated.  So what's to fight about?   Ah,
perhaps a cataclysmic depression to pit them against each other.  I think
that would merely lead to a strengthening of the instruments of
world-governance, i.e. levers to Empire.  Or possibly socialist
world-governance.