For 66 years, the USA has been one of the most potent nations ever to stride across the world stage. Ever since we were practically the only economy to emerge from WWII with any semblance of vitality, we've ruled the way things are done in this era.
But the Teabaggers have managed, with one ill-considered act of childish intransigence, to bring all of that to an end. I'm talking about the debt limit.
Because for all of those years, US treasury bonds were considered the safest asset you could own. The US always paid interest on bonds on time in full every time all the time no matter what. The Teatards, having tied raising the debt limit to some childish, fantasy-world version of sticking to their guns, have done a great job in shaking the world's confidence in the USA.
What follows is a power vacuum.
Now, I find it interesting that at the same time all of this debt limit nonsense was going on that somehow a major scandal managed to pull the hidden thread on Rupert Murdoch's sweater and cause the entire Fox News/News International/Right Wing Network to start to come unraveled. One can speculate about older, wiser, wilier powers behind other thrones deciding that Murdoch, his fake propaganda network, and the monster that it helped create in the form of the Tea Party being just one final straw on a back that couldn't handle it anymore, but in any case the power frames of the civilized world as they've become established over the last 3/4 of a century are coming massively apart.
For the US, we had our decade of buffonership under GW Bush, which definitely shattered the world's confidence in our credibility as a democracy (I remember a wonderful line in the movie Lord of War, when Nicholas Cage's character is lectured by some African warlord that the SCOTUS' chicanery in selecting GW Bush means that the USA has to 'shut up forever' about rigged elections -- ow, that really hurt). We had the unnecessary, outrageous, expensive, destructive Iraq War, which wasn't booked on the US' budget. We had the failed, lazy half-assed Afghan war, which also wasn't booked on the US' budget.
And we had the Bush Tax Cuts, which were never matched by any credible spending cuts because of course the GOP isn't really interested in balancing the budget; they are only interested in using deficits to bludgeon Democrats.
All of this political haymaking over the budget deficit, and the constant, unremitting lies from the GOP regarding budget deficits, has destroyed the only power that matters in the modern world: credibility. As long as the US was credible about her finances, we had power. The moment we stopped being credible, we lost our power. It will be another decade, perhaps two, before it becomes apparent that other forces are taking up the power vacuum that was once occupied by the US.
Or, we will suddenly get marching orders from our new foreign overlords. Either way, the GOP has sold us out for short-term political gain. It's a sad way for an empire to end, but I also submit this empire was never going to last, as none of them do.