Said much more succinctly than I could do after two vanilla bourbon manhattans.

For your thoughts on the global hegemony, take Parag Khanna's The Second World. Khanna explains how the U.S. gained much of its prowess after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but has been handing it over to the EU and China in spades ever since. He also says that global influence is centered on resources, stability, power, and conflict and that the United States'power comes from military power and the enforcement of what it views as basic human rights. That is the scary part. We go around policing the world based on the ideals of some fringe member of our society. Meanwhile, second world powers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are cleverly allowing the big three (US, China, EU) to duke it out, while they gain deeper control over the areas around them. Although the U.S. economy has seen better days, the global economy isn't slowing down and foreign investors are getting better ROI from second world markets than U.S. markets.