All change for North Africa

So we've seen a succession of protests and grass-roots political upheavals recently and one can't help but wonder of this in anyway connected to the diminishing power of the USA. Even as I type that it feels weird to write. I am from a generation that grew up under the shadow of American dominance. I just about remember the twilight days of the USSR but every day since we have been reminded how America valiantly crushed it and how good and noble triumphed. We've been fed a diet of MTV culture and rosy sitcoms where nobody seems to worry about money or work and where everyone basks in the American dream. Amongst this plethora of subtle and not so subtle propaganda has been an element of self-flagellation X-files springs prominently to mind, a show made in the USA and exported globally in which an FBI agent repeatedly stumbles upon insidious underhanded and general "evilness" by dark and mysterious forces within the upper echelons of the US government. Then we have these thoughts confirmed as, at the very Zenith of the US projection of global power, we hear of dark deeds by unknown actors working for the US military in jails such as Abu Ghraib or the "secret prisons" which were to be the vacation destination for some retched soul undergoing extraordinary extradition. All this lead to a very healthy fear of the USA as a towering and unshakeable force in the world.

So to see the USA now slipping into its own internal economic abyss, and at the same time retracting its tentacles from every corner of the globe, to see it start to look, well, vulnerable! is as shocking as if one morning my cat spoke to me whilst I fed her her morning breakfast. What we are witnessing here is the decline of an empire. It was the first of its kind, an empire not where it simply "occupied" as much geographical land space as possible, but where it sought to control through treaties, economics and intelligence networks. It did a sterling job for a long time but it's that latter, the intelligence networks that are poignant here with regard to the North African states. As it’s these networks around the globe that allowed the US to keep potential rivals down, whether it be supporting despot rulers of supplying arms to warring factions, the US government knew how to manipulate. I say "knew", well, they must have missed something somewhere along the line as China's meteoric rise seems to have caught them unawares. I wonder what designs this new Asian leviathan has for these malleable states such as Libya, Egypt and the such like?....