A shifting of global power - the changing of the guard

Unfortunately, this has not happened in the last 40 years.

We should recall Toynbee's warning, "Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder".

Although it is hard to believe that those who formulated and implemented United States policies ever had any such intention, United States administrations could hardly have set out on a course of self-destruction more effectively than in recent decades.

Equally, it is hard to believe that such countries as Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ever had any intention to be accessories to American suicidal tendencies. Nor did they ever intend to self-destruct themselves. But they have done or are doing both.

It is not too late to take another course. The awesome potential of the United States in every field of human endeavour is still there. It can be revived.

Perhaps we might look back to the decade that followed the Great Crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. During that period, the United States was on its knees, millions of its people unemployed and poverty-stricken, its industry seeming to be grinding to a complete halt.

But the United States revived to demonstrate its power not only in war but also in its unequalled capacity to handle the post-war challenge from 1945 to 1969.

So we can imagine a United States again as great in its moral as well as its material leadership around the world.

However, we must also make a distinction between the world as it was in the 1930s and the world as it is today.

In the 1930s, there was hardly a country anywhere in the world that was not suffering the most intense economic and social distress and that was not threatened with political and strategic turmoil.

Now the situation is very different. United States policies have not only been self-destructive but they have also been constructive to an unprecedented extent and at unprecedented speed in the development of other countries which might now reasonably be expected soon to sit at the top table of global power and influence, and possibly assume the mantle of leadership that the United States has worn in the past.

The unprecedented development at unprecedented speed of several economies which were lagging behind prior to 1969 and especially before 1980, is of course something to be welcomed in many ways. It is the sort of peaceful change that, in and by itself, should always be one of our primary goals.