Gatorade Frost

While I completely support America, I believe this statement reeks of "to the victor goes the spoils" and since we won, America's writing the history on the subject. Of course had America fallen and the USSR controlled the world, America would be the evil capitalist nation who starved children and didn't have universal health care, etc. They would be saying 'If the USA won, there would have been serious repercussions to us and our smaller Communist allies.'

I don't think there's ever technically a need for a single superpower, but whether it ends that way isn't exactly subject to what the world needs. If a country ends up as a super power, I suppose that's good for them and they have more sway in the world.

If America just collapsed at this very second? I think that Britain, Russia, and China, would fight for dominance. At the moment the Middle Eastern nations are too fractured to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, so as far as I can tell that couldn't happen. I say Britain because as a whole they've been a fairly steady power, and at the moment they have their military in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. which gives them more sway in the Middle East and in world affairs. This is just from an American perspective, though, so as to whether they're as powerful and independent as I think they are could just be my ignorance on the matter. Russia of course is still powerful, just a bit broken. They're still militarily strong; while their standing manpower is iffy their access to the black market and to basically be ing the arms super power in the world to the highest bidder makes them a powerful force. Of course China is an obvious choice to become a super power because they have the world's largest standing military, access to nuclear weapons, a huge economy, etc. but at least from my perspective they seem a bit est ranged from the world culturally, governmentally, by language, etc. so their ability to gain dominance wouldn't expand as much as it potentially could.

Back to the original poster, I haven't ever seen a real reason that America should be compared to the rest of the 'Western powers.' From what I can tell our style of government has worked out for us for the last 250 years and both through that and our access to land we have grown from a small group of colonies to the world super power.

If at some point the majority of the American public decided that the death penalty wasn't soemthing that represented them it could, though infeasibly, pass an amendment to make it so. Or they could move from whatever state their in to a state without the death penalty. At this moment too many people support the death penalty for that to change, and honestly that's ok for the American people.

In the future I suspect that many other nations will have to give up on their health care programs. Not necessarily because I have any facts to back me up at this moment because in all honesty I don't, but universal health care seems too expensive to me in the long run. Not enough people contributing equally to it without a proportional cost for running it in a reasonable manner.

__________________
I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."
Emo Philips