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       At times, perhaps understandably, a cold fear pervaded the country that even the illusion of liberty was about to be grabbed away, and the public might awaken one day to find its nominal freedoms gone, with millions of people on their way to concentration camps. And one had to admit that the infrastructure, legal and material, for such measures was already in place and could be activated at any time, given an adequate “crisis” and sufficiently unscrupulous leadership. In a single generation, leaders had lost the trust of the people, and the empire had lost the unifying mythologies – lies, but effective all the same – that had unified it for so long.
 With the fear came hatred: sometimes cold, sometimes passionate, but always potent, and curiously omnidirectional. Hatred was the stuff of entertainment, lectures, table talk. William Hazlitt’s thoughts of the “pleasures of hating” came to mind:

…We regarded [one another] as no more … than “mice in an air-pump; or like malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the dissecting-knife. We spared neither friend nor foe. … The skeletons of character might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air like flies in cobwebs; or they were kept for future inspection in some refined acid. The demonstration was as beautiful as it was new. There is no surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen. We grow tired tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

     A nation with this collective mentality cannot help passing some of it along to its individual citizens, and vice versa. So it became acceptable, and in some circles even fashionable, to hate others for their job, skin color, language, religion, income level, or sexual behavior, and even to advocate mass murder – “ethnic cleansing,” “social engineering,” or whatever expression one chose – as a remedy for the “problem.” 

       In that context, it was chilling to recall how Hitler (whose minions had tried to carry out their own “final solution” to a social and cultural “problem”) had identified hatred as the basis, and chief characteristic, of his philosophy and political power. Long after his death, far from the Chancellery where he met his end, such hatred filled the air again.

       It came to my attention vividly one day when I saw a poster, affixed to a telephone stall, showing Hitler ranting. The caption read: “Someday the world will know that I was right!” No one had bothered to remove the poster. That fact said something. Fear and hatred of “the other” – anyone who differed significantly from oneself, and presented competition for anything one desired – was ubiquitous, and could give one chills even in the humid heat of summer. And with each passing year, it seemed, more “others” appeared, both foreign and home-grown.

     The hatred bred more violence. With greater violence came more fear. That fear in turn led to increased hatred … and so on, indefinitely. It was no wonder that a book appeared with the title Only the Paranoid Survive.
Technological and military threats, shifts of geopolitical power, domestic paranoia: all these and more contributed to the insecurity and anxiety of the United States of America as clocks ticked off the final hours and minutes toward the year 2000. 
 Only a few years before, America had been the sole superpower, the colossus that bestrode the world. Now America still stood tall, but a close look showed its knees to be shaky; and if the giant’s feet were not truly made of clay, then at the very least, the ground beneath them no longer seemed entirely firm.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

     Readers, of course, were able to guess on the first page the identity of this “empire.” If the rhetoric above seems unsophisticated, then one must understand that it was meant to strip away illusions surrounding the United States, just as a crude tool is sometimes needed to clear land or dispel fog. 
     Before this work proceeds, please let me define its scope and aims, and my qualifications for writing it. 

     A white American in his late forties, I was born into a prosperous family in Virginia, next to the great harbor and military bases of Hampton Roads, at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay. I grew up on a small estate just across the river from an Air Force base, and at an early age learned to identify jet aircraft as easily as country folk identified birds. 

       I attended local public schools, which had not yet become shooting galleries, and went on to college, majoring in geology and picking up both a love for journalism and a deep skepticism about its workings. Since then, I have spent much of my life as a journalist (covering aerospace technology and contracting) or public relations, and have become familiar with how the so-called free press operates. 

       Along the way, I have lived in some of America’s most beautiful and most dismal cities, and have spoken at length with Americans from almost every class and walk of life, from congressmen and White House officials to beggars on the streets. I have taught on the university level in the U.S., and later at a private school in Korea. 

       Most Asians would consider me an AWASP, or American White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That is an error. I am Celtic by descent (“Ritchie” is a Scottish name, not Anglo-Saxon) and Greek Orthodox by religion -- making me, I guess, an “AWCGO.” Since that sounds like a sneeze, I prefer to call myself an “American-Asian”: an American who prefers to live and work in Asia. 

       In shirtsleeves and tie, I look much like a NASA engineer, which in fact my late father was. From him, I inherited a prominent nose and a basic cynicism about the way American society works. 

       From my homeland, I brought away an essential disenchantment with its character and dynamics, as well as a sharp awareness of its deep internal divisions and contradictions. 

       From my time in Asia, I have acquired an expatriate’s perspective on the U.S., which looks far different from Seoul or Tokyo than from Seattle or Tallahassee. 

       And from my conversations with Asian friends, I have come to recognize how little Asians actually know and understand about the United States.  Some still see it as the grand Land of Opportunity; others as a friend whose word is not quite its bond; and still others, the “Great Satan.” 

       Some Asians admire America for what it is or once was. Others loathe it for what it has become. Somewhere inbetween, I believe, is the majority view, a complex love-hate relationship like that between Dido and the not always heroic Anaeas. 

       However Asians may view America, they take its existence for granted, and seem to have no doubt that it will survive for an indefinite time. From one day to the next, this assumption seems valid. The odds are greater than 99 percent that Uncle Sam will still be there tomorrow, just as today. 

       Yet, the disintegration of once-solid nation-states is the most striking trend of our time. The Soviet Union crumbled in months. Former Yugoslavia dissolved almost as quickly as sugar in coffee. Canada came close to splitting asunder during Quebec’s referendum on independence in 1995; and at this writing, in late 1999, Indonesia – the fourth largest nation on earth – is coming apart at the seams. 

        Now, among Americans, there is muted but serious discussion of how this trend may affect them. Is the U.S. immune to disintegration, or a sudden fall from superpower standing? 

       Like the former U.S.S.R., America is riven by many fissures, economic, racial, cultural and otherwise. It surely is conceivable that parts of the seemingly solid “union” might decide to go their own way if dissatisfied with Washington’s rule. Already there is talk -- not always accompanied by discreet coughing -- of the western U.S. forming two new countries, one dominated by a population of Hispanic descent and the other by the descendants of immigrants from eastern Asia. In a recent bestselling novel, these two hypothetical lands were dubbed respectively “Hispanica” and “Sinica.”

       A groundless fear? Perhaps. Yet if Moscow’s totalitarian power proved unable to hold the former Soviet empire together, what would be the chance of Washington succeeding where the Kremlin failed? 

     With the collapse of the Soviet Union, America has become, one might say, the global linchpin. China remains a rising superpower. Europe has yet to knit itself together. The “Asia-Pacific community” exists in name only. So, for one reason or another, the whole globe looks to Washington. At least for the moment, America is the center of the world. 

       But what if, as W.B. Yeats put it in his poem “The Second Coming,” the center loses its hold? Suppose the day arrives when America loses cohesion and suddenly finds itself reduced to near-helplessness, due to fragmentation at home or the threat of ruin from abroad, or both? 

       That scenario, a paranoid fantasy only yesterday, seems considerably less so now. An extraordinary set of circumstances made the United States, if briefly, the leading power on earth. But now circumstances are changing, and may diminish American influence so quickly, greatly and soon as to leave the world without the stabilizing bulk of American might at the start of the new millennium.

     In other words, America may not survive much longer.

     This startling hypothesis should not be taken too literally. Residents of Mexico and Canada will not find one morning that their huge neighbor has slid into the ocean overnight. 

       Neither should this book be viewed as a treatise “proving” that America’s fall is a foregone conclusion. This is because a nation’s career is much like an aircraft’s flight. It may proceed safety and smoothly under careful guidance, or end in sudden and needless tragedy under improper control. 

       One also should understand that this work represents the research and opinions of a sole person, whose qualifications have already been described. I see America from a limited viewpoint, but in considerable detail. So I hope readers will accept my report as a set of sincere observations, reported as honestly as the author’s perspective and experience will allow.

       Rather than risk speaking with no authority, I have tried to focus on topics with which I have professional experience or personal acquaintance, such as military technology, natural hazards, urban decay and crime, race relations, information systems, and education. At the same time, as I have little or no background in areas including economics and law, I refer to them only in passing, when at all. 

      Unlike certain other authors, who purport to chronicle America’s decline in huge tomes citing everything from industrial productivity to substandard service in hotels, I have chosen to make this memoir brief. An analogy from art shows why.

        In Korea, where I live, a skilled watercolorist can depict a complex scene with a few quick movements of a brush. There is no need to limn all the scales on a fish, nor all the ripples on a pond. A rapid brush stroke is enough to indicate that they exist.

       In similar fashion, this book is not a vast, comprehensive survey of America’s prospects for survival. Instead, it is a short and (I hope) easily understandable portrait of a great country in great trouble, and why the rest of the world should be deeply concerned about it. For readers who do care to examine every scale on the fish, so to speak, a list of sources is included in an appendix.
Some scenarios and opinions expressed here may strongly contradict the reader’s own. That is inevitable in a work of this kind. All I can say is that this book is not written as a polemic, nor to cause deliberate offense. Certainly it is not meant to promote discord, verbal or violent, within the United States itself. On the other hand, America’s internal divisions and vulnerability to external assault can no longer be ignored, either by the United States or by any other nation. So, it is time for a book such as this one to explore a theme: 

     What will the rest of the world do if America, or at least the America familiar to us, ceases to exist in the near future?

     It could happen. Let us consider what may ensue if it does.