Does Syria mark the end of American world dominance?

Will historians see the Syrian war as ‘the start of the historic American retreat’? Syrian media seems to think so, and they’re not the only ones; there’s a big market in ‘America is doomed’ literature, although the fact that lots of people are out there buying books suggests it maybe isn’t yet. I’m sure that, within weeks of the British victory of 1759, some miserablist pamphleteer was saying that Britain won’t last the century.

Yet just because doom-mongers have been wrong in the past, they could still be right now – I call it Weigel’s law.

And America has big problems, on top of the fact that China will soon overtake it as the world’s largest economy. While China has difficulties with corruption and inevitable population decline, as with Japan their low fertility won’t last forever. As the population falls family formation may become more affordable, and as the labour supply dries up they will mechanise quicker than the West.