My hope is that our precarious position was caused and continues to be caused by the worst administration in my lifetime, perhaps in history. If that is the case, then perhaps changing to less corrupt, less moronic leadership might rescue the country. I was all for marching after anti-West militant Islam, wherever it may run and hide. We started on the right foot with Afghanistan, botched up the round up, then proceeded to invade the wrong country for the wrong reasons. The last thing on Earth we should have done is take down a brutal secular regime in that region. Think of how much strength we have provided the religious nuts by taking out Saddam and occupying Iraq. He's responsible for over a million Iranian deaths. What better way to keep that belligerent Islamic country in check could you hope for? The asshole could have been bought too, with a small fraction of what we've spent taking him down and occupying his country.
Now we're mired there as we were in Vietnam, probably worse. We do not have the power to invade and occupy anywhere else right now. Our manpower is already spread too thin. We certainly can destroy the entire power base of our mortal enemies, but that would leave behind a radioactive vacuum, the hated of most of the civilized world, and possibly a harmful change to the biosphere. A single Ohio-class submarine can do it--it ain't gonna happen, not without an American city getting nuked by the Islamists beforehand.
I have no confidence that we're going to turn this around. The damage our executive branch of government has done is beyond belief, and the other 2 are not fulfilling their obligation to force changes. You may be right. History eventually may show that after the boom of the latter half of the 20th century, America sank into the muck too quickly to understand, unless one lived those years and kept abreast of the folly, firsthand. It's too depressing to contemplate for long.
