[is] the American superpower is also experiencing a terminal illness, with its decline marked by the dollar's downward drift

Michael Hirsh | In the Realm of the Dying Dollar | The plunging greenback threatens to cripple U.S. power. Why are the candidates ignoring this critical issue? | Nov 23, 2007 | Updated: 3:50 p.m. ET Nov 23, 2007

Great powers die slowly. It took years before the world realized that Great Britain was an imperial corpse, sapped of its strength by two world wars. The funeral finally occurred on Feb. 21, 1947, a freezing winter day in bomb-torn, bedraggled London, when the British wrote their own epitaph. ...

One has to wonder now whether the American superpower is also experiencing a terminal illness, with its decline marked by the dollar's downward drift. ... Yet the signs of imperial decadence are unmistakable. The world is losing confidence in the dollar, in no small part because it has lost confidence in America's strategic judgment and in its sustainability as a great power in the face of record budget and trade deficits, which are forcing the United States to borrow ever more money from future rivals like China and Russia. ...

... The irony for George W. Bush, of course, is that more than anything else he began as a president who wanted to build up American power, which he presumed to have been frittered away by Bill Clinton. ...