Essay on America's Foreign Economic Power

Submitted By jpeschell
Words: 1078
Pages: 5

In Joseph Nye’s Article, “The Future of American Power”, he claims America will continue to be a successful and powefulr nation for many decades to come. Nye states that America, China, and Europe are the main economic powers in the world today. He believes America will not gain or lose any power on the other two countries between now and 2050. We will address 3 areas that might weaken American power. Three factors we believe might cause America to fall to China the other leading power are education, death of the petrodollar, and war on Syria. These are three very important and relevant issues in our country today. If drastic changes in one or all of these issues do not happen, America could fall to another country and lose all her power. Education is a key component to America’s future success. Other countries are investing huge amounts of resources into their education systems and if the U.S. does not follow suit we will continue to decline. In recent years, China and other prominent foreign countries are graduating almost double the college students in America. We also scored 16th out of 23 industrialized nations when last tested. The United States is failing its citizens by not giving them a proper education. This could be due to lack of federal funds, non-qualified teachers, lower testing standards or several other factors. Without a higher education, young Americans will lose job opportunities to foreign students who are more qualified for the job. The unemployment rates are skyrocketing in the U.S. right now and if the government does not stop it we may never catch up to foreign competitors. The U.S. may fall far behind other countries in modern medicine and technology if foreign countries keep producing more educated citizens. This could cause a global crisis and make us more dependent on them for trade and resources. The petrodollar is a U.S. dollar earned by a country through the sale of its oil to another country. During the 1970’s, the U.S. and almost all other countries agreed to have the trade of oil be backed by the American currency. The Federal Reserve would then take gold from other countries and give them American printed currency in exchange. Over the years, a high demand for the U.S. dollar for trade has given America much power over other countries. This power has come from the fact that we have not had any restrictions on how much money we could print and now the U.S. dollar makes up 60 percent of all foreign currencies in the world. Recently, China has secretly agreed with many of its allies to change their foreign trade currency to gold. This would weaken the U.S. dollar considerably and even more importantly throw our economy into a downward spiral. Oil is the only thing that has kept the American currency from losing its value for so long. There are conspiracies about how America has gone to war with recent countries such as Iraq, Lebanon and now possibly Syria because they were trying to do the same thing China is trying to do. If the petrodollar is changed from the U.S. dollar to gold our economy could fall into the hands of China or another leading country. The war on Syria is a hot topic at hand today. President Obama has stated he is willing to try democratic action before using military force. There is speculation that Syria will use nuclear or chemical warfare on their people. This is a threat to all those in that area, but we are not sure why America wants to step in and take control of the situation. All we know, there are going to be several repercussions if we do. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. If war starts in Syria then these surrounding countries will be affected as well and they might have no choice but to join the war as well. Oil prices will go up in America if this war begins. This will also cost the U.S. billions of more dollars and the war on Iraq already cost us more than $1 trillion. Our