10 key signs show U.S. decline

"Many Americans are angry, confused and worried . . . 58% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, suffering an economy that's sick, a politics that's broken, a culture that is growing more violent, coarse and scary, and a government that's out of control. They want things to get back to normal but increasingly feel that there is no normal any more. Nearly every aspect of American life seems to have veered off course into uncharted territory with unforeseeable consequences."

So wrote former Wall Street Journal reporter and Des Moines Register editor Jim Gannon in a Dec. 8, 2009, USAToday editorial titled "There Is No Normal Anymore." He seems to have perfectly captured the mood of much of the country.

It's no wonder the American people seem so troubled. They suffer enormously from the consequences of failing to obey the great God who gave them their bountiful land. We all reap what we sow (Galatians 6:7).

Cultural commentator Jim Nelson Black, in his 1994 book When Nations Die, identified and documented 10 crucial factors—the inevitable fallout from rejecting our Creator's way of life—that afflicted past civilizations and inevitably led to their decline and fall. They are:

1. Increase in lawlessness.
2. Loss of economic discipline.
3. Rising bureaucracy.
4. Decline in education.
5. Weakening of cultural foundations.
6. Loss of respect for traditions.
7. Increase in materialism.
8. Rise in immorality.
9. Decay of religious belief.
10. Devaluing of human life.

All of these factors, bad enough at the time he identified them, are far more evident today in American society and culture. These social and moral cancers seriously threaten the country's very existence.

Shifting loyalties in Latin America

Even the economic mirror of Latin America reflects declining respect for the United States. National resources south of the border are increasingly being shipped to China. The dragon across the ocean has become Brazil's largest export market.

The United States has always been the primary market for Venezuela's raw petroleum. But already a Chinese company has interests in some small oilfields and is planning more such investments. President Hugo Chavez is no friend of his northern neighbor.

In brief, the British magazine The Economist sums up this distressing situation: "Latin America is tilting toward China, Iran and the global 'south'—and away from the United States" (Aug. 15, 2009, emphasis added throughout).

The economic emergence of China and Southeast Asia

A few months ago The Sunday Telegraph of London reported: "China, Japan and South Korea have vowed to push ahead with plans for a new union that would reduce their economic dependency on the West. The three countries, dismayed at falling levels of trade and investment from the US and Europe, met in Beijing to plan for more structured levels of co-operation.

"The move came as HSBC [The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the world's largest banking group] warned there is likely to be a 'shift in the world's centre of economic gravity from West to East'" (M+alcolm Moore, "New Order Takes Shape in East," Oct. 11, 2009). Based in London since 1992, HSBC issued this statement in the wake of opting to relocate its chief executive officer back to Hong Kong.

Asia's emerging economies are recovering more quickly than those in other parts of the world. Fortune magazine proclaimed on its Oct. 26, 2009, cover, "The Chinese have $2 trillion and are going shopping," and asked, "Is your company and your country on their list?"

Inside, an article reported that "while most of the global community casts a wary eye on Tehran's nuclear ambitions, China has been quietly buying up the nation's [i.e., Iran's] oil resources."

But the Chinese threat is not confined to commerce. As author Joshua Cooper Ramo related, "The Chinese military [in the autumn of 2002] had a doctrine of developing what they called 'assassin's maces'—computer viruses, antisatellite weapons, microsubmarines—which would use high tech to knock out bigger powers (read: the United States) that might one day attack China" (The Age of the Unthinkable, 2009, p. 83).

China views American hegemony, particularly in Asia, as an impediment to its own geopolitical ambitions. After World War II, the Pacific virtually became an American lake, not only militarily but economically as well. "The United States had already defined a 'great crescent' of defence around east Asia. In 1951, it sealed Japan's subordinate independence in a treaty of mutual security" (Geoffrey Hawthorn, The Future of Asia and the Pacific, 1998, p. 9). But are we now slowly drifting back into the hostile commercial conditions that defined the Pacific in the pre-war 1930s?