The short answer is no, not with the strategic choices that are being made by our government. The long answer is that there is no reason for America to not be a superpower for generations to come, if we make the right strategic choices.

Two main factors will influence the future fortunes of America. They are foreign policy and military capability. A perfectly successful foreign policy will protect us against most transient difficulties that arise over trade disputes and border squabbles. When foreign policy is not perfect or when we encounter an intransigent enemy, military capability is essential for our survival. Military capability also supplements foreign policy for that reason. It is better to deal from a position of strength, although not from a position of belligerence.

Foreign policy is a messy business. Our trade, military strength, and sociopolitical objectives must be balanced with like interests of foreign powers. Reluctance to be aggressive leads to disrespect and belligerence leads to fear and hatred. America has emerged as a superpower because we have had the right balance of reluctance and aggression in the past. We have broken with that record of benign world stewardship in recent years and the world community sees us giving away our future for profit.

Iran is willfully defying the U.S. in particular and the E.U. over nuclear technology. North Korea flaunts a nuclear weapon and delivery system. Through the actions of the Bush Administration, the tiny cadre of Al-Queda has burgeoned into hundreds of active anti-American factions with tens of thousands of active members and millions of sympathizers that threaten to overwhelm any and all reasonable solutions to U.S. security. Russia is disaffected. China is busy building a new global military capability rivaling Russia and the U.S.A., paid for by Milton Friedman and the Republican supply side economists.

Still, we could always depend on military superiority. This is changing. At the outset of World War II, 1939, America had an obsolete navy, no tanks, and several dozen obsolete bombers and fighter planes. By 1945 we had produced tens of thousands of tanks and planes, enough to supply us and two other nations, and duplicated a navy only modern. At a time when defense contractors produced weapons as a side business, America, if it had depended on existing production lines and designers, would have lost the war. We enlisted every engineering and manufacturing company in the country to produce whatever it had the ability to design and produce, and we won, with the considerable help of the Russians. We did not have the best scientists, well maybe one. We did have the industrial manufacturing skills, and that is what made the difference.

Industrial, manufacturing and engineering skills also gave us enough competitiveness with the Soviet Union in the worlds largest and most technical and expensive arms race that we were able to contain communism until it folded in on itself. That was the America that made things. We are becoming a country that does not make things.

Factories are more important strategically than economically. More profit can be made for investors when the cheapest possible labor is used, now offshore. But there is much more at stake in the world than profit. Universities can teach rudimentary skills, and they are rudimentary. The skills and discipline of industrial scale manufacturing are taught by doing. If you do not have factories, you do not produce industrial engineers that can build and run factories, nor do you produce design engineers that can create products, weapons or logistical systems that can sustain armies. A university educated industrial engineer can learn to build a factory on his own but in a factor of ten times as long as it would take an engineer that has built one. Young engineers are important contributors in innovation, but the repository of knowledge of practical manufacturing in scale is in people with experience.

So if we do not build and operate factories, we lose the ability to do so if we have the need to do so. We are one generation away from losing that ability. Many young turks assume that they know how and that they can do it. That is like your three year old who has learned to tie his shoes telling you he can make shoes out of animal hides and petroleum distillates.

It is not only factories that we will no longer be able to build, it is high technology that we will no longer have the social order to produce. If you can’t get a job as a software or electrical engineer, why study it? Its hard and you will not get paid any more than a Burger King manager if you do it. We have already lost the dynamism that was Silicon Valley. It has given way to a cult of Microsoft profiteering and incrementalism. Even more dire is the loss of high technology hubs of M.I.T. and Stanford. The new hub is Bangalore.

Perhaps it is more illustrative to think in the perspective of tangible strategic products that we will lose the ability to produce if American trade policy does not change from shipping technical and non technical strategic engineering and manufacturing offshore. If we do not produce helicopters we will lose the ability to produce helicopters. If we do not produce corn, we will lose the ability to produce corn. If we do not produce trucks, computers, wood products, machine tools, agricultural chemicals, sewing machines, clothing and a host of other things, we are not only hostage to foreign governments to meet our daily needs, we are less able to produce what we need in the event of war. And for every day that we do not produce these things we grow less able to relearn how to produced them.

One of the rationalizations for globalization is that it promotes peace by binding nations together economically. It does, but those bonds are more easily broken if you hold the keys to production than if you do not. For instance, economic trade sanctions are a routine consequence of being a bad geopolitical neighbor. If trade sanctions will not harm you, then you are stronger. For every day that we become more dependent on foreign labor, we lose the ability to assert our will on the world, even as to our own well being.

Finally, foreign policy and military capability are both enabled by economic power. The power to invest and the power to consume both contribute to the willingness of other nations to listen to us. As America’s economic power declines relative to the global economy, we will be less able to influence other nations, and less able to fund a military to back up our concerns. And make no mistake, the current U.S. economy is declining. The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is starting to show. Our tax base is drying up because the rich pay no taxes and the poor can’t. Administration after administration has played statistical games, reporting of key economic statistics is fudged by 2-3% per year, to cajole us into believing we are doing ok. In reality, that 2-3% fudge per year translates into a 40% pay cut for Americans in the last 20 years. That literally translates into less economic power. Other countries know this, even if we refuse to believe it, and they are moving to replace us as the global centers of research and manufacturing.

Profit is transient. The U.S.A. could last until a better political system inspires the minds of men, if we make the merely reasonable strategic choices to let that happen.