Will the US soon be finished as a global superpower?

No one knows what is coming next, as America teeters on the brink of economic disaster.

In his seminal 1952 book, American Capitalism, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote: ‘‘The Great Depression of the 1930s never came to an end, it merely disappeared in the great [World War Two] mobilisation of the 1940s.” By the 1950s, in an effort to prevent another depression, ‘‘the permanent war economy was born’’.

For decades, then, a not-yet bankrupt ...