In 1986, when a different Asian country looked like it would permanently unseat America as the premier world power, Gore Vidal wrote a Nation essay asserting that our victory in the Cold War was a Pyrrhic one, weakening our foundation. And while I wouldn’t count us out yet now that the challenger is China rather than Japan, Vidal was right about the wastrel Cold War spending, which continued with the War on Terror, further siphoning our attention and resources. An excerpt:

“As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, ‘The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.’ Thirty-five years later, they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per capita income, to forty-sixth in literacy and so on, until last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we—the white race—have become the yellow man’s burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan’s advanced technology with China’s resourceful landmass. Europe and the United States will then be, simply, irrelevant to the world that matters, and so we come full circle. Europe began as the relatively empty uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.”