More than one hundred years ago, in speaking of America, British historian Lord Macaulay warned:

"Your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions."

The October 3 Seattle Times headline on the opinion page in a column by Lance Dickey read:

"As American empire wanes, the world shrugs its shoulders."