This rather grim tale has been circulating the lefty net. This version is from The Nation. Pic related.

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report titled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America’s global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next fifteen years—in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” it stated definitively, the country’s “relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

That, of course, was then; this—some eleven months into the future—is now, and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was underway, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment’s fifteen-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China’s stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

The article concludes:

How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.

It’s get off stage gracefully or try and take everyone else with you, I think. Bush tried the second one. It doesn’t work, and the planet doesn’t have the resources to support it.

(The Nation: Welcome to 2025: American Pre-eminence Ends Fifteen Years Early)