BBC: end of the American era

This doesn't have to be a bad thing.

US superpower status is shaken
By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower.
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Some see this as a pivotal moment.
The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: "Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.
"The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over... The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated."
"In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.
"How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees."

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