USA "the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world"

One of Walt's favourite socio-political writers, Mark Steyn, is thinking seriously of moving back to Canada. He left the Great Not-so-white North in a huff, after having to defend himself before Canada's kangaroo court [Human Rights Commission, surely! Ed.] against charges of racism related to his warnings that the West risks being overrun by militant by Muslims.

His most recent books -- best-sellers highly recommended by Walt -- are America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. Reading between the lines of an interview with the Notional Post last week, Walt senses that Mr. Steyn has given up sounding the alarm and calling for a return to small government and economic discipline. In his opinion, changing the direction of the Obama maladministration will be very difficult. "America is the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world," he told Jan Gerson. Here's more from the interview; the emphasis is Walt's.

Q: Let’s have that discussion about how terrible things are about to get: Brokiest broke of all the brokiest countries in the world.

A: On its present trajectory, America is looking at $20-trillion debt by the time this president leaves office, just the federal debt. That will mean the 44th president has run up more debt than the previous 43 presidents combined. It was $10-trillion when he took office. No one has ever spent that much in the history of the planet. And he has nothing to show for it.

The question then becomes, is serious political course correction possible in the United States? And I think the answer to that is very difficult. The question then is whether the rest of the developed world sits back and watches America drag everybody else over the cliff, or whether they start making plans, as Australia and certain other countries are doing, for the post-American world.

The post-Second World War American order is over. [The West] didn’t ask for [this]. The Americans did this to us; we didn’t do it to them. But, you know, it’s a new world out there and we have to look for other partners.

Q: When do we know that we’ve reached the tipping point of the end of the American age?

A: Goldman Sachs thinks that China will become the world’s biggest economic power sometime around 2016. In other words, and if that year is right, let’s just suppose for the sake of the argument it is, it means Barack Obama will end his term in a position no president has been in since Grover Cleveland. We’re in a post-American world. And at that point the question is whether it’s a gentle decline, like for the European empires after the Second World War, or whether it’s, you know, Mad Max on Interstate 95.