On a completely different note:
Hayden White was a historian who believed that history constitutes a mere chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. Thus the historical work is "
a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them". This is the post-modern view of history, everything is belief and perspective. The ruling ideas propel that nation and solely are the nation's health. Description illuminates proper action, straight into pedantic folly and inaction.
Paul Kennedy, on the other hand, is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He described the situation in which an empire extends itself beyond its military-economic capabilities and often collapses as a result of this policy. Imperial overstretch, also known as Imperial overreach, was popularized in his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He believed that "
the triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's position steadily alters in peacetime, is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime." This is the realist view of history, everything is always and necessarily a field of conflict among actors pursuing power. The expanding strategic commitments (or Output) leading to increases in military expenditures that eventually overburden a country's economic base (or Input), and cause its long-term decline. The ruling ideas create a balance between Input and Output, which is itself solely the nation's health.
You can guess which of these men is popular in Washington? Its the one whose beliefs are thick enough as to seem smart yet critically lack any substance at all. Washington DC hurting and collapsing America is easily avoided, but it won't be because it has already spiritually collapsed and like a headless chicken America still struts about for longer than you think. But no-one is driving the car, they quite calmly don't believe a steering wheel does what you hysterically say it does while we sit in a car speeding down a highway called Geopolitics. That is the American Decline, like Rome, Moscow, Madrid, and Paris (between the Wars) before Washington. The problem is intellectualists, and that is a hard thing for a society to think on.
Heterodox parallel societies are the only way to survive that which is coming, the vast kool-aid drinking of great empires before and all businesses failed by their barking buffoonish leadership. It happens so slowly at first that its denied, but then the turn comes and all those still aboard it perish. The obviousness of hindsight is the poor man's foresight.
