We’re not going to make it as a first rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. I mean, you know, empires end. And that doesn’t mean cultures end completely and it doesn’t mean that even nation states… You know, I mean, if you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys. You’d have said, “Man, you know, what’s going to be left?” But, you know, Britain’s still there. And they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do.
Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. And a lot of our foreign policy represents that. And a lot of our— you know, this notion that the markets were always going to go up. And that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity, out of magic. Out of nothing.
