For future historians the global legacy of George W. Bush’s two term presidency (2000-2008) will be the beginning of the end of the United States after 50-years as top dog. More and more political analysts are coming out openly …both inside and outside America’s borders…with the opinion that Bush and the NeoCons have lost the plot.

The official line in Washington is of course to deny this vigorously…on the record. But off the record the US Foreign Policy Establishment fears that the clear-minded realists might be right. George Dubya Bush has a lot to answer for.

Twenty years hence what will America’s decline mean for the English? In an article Whose Century is the 21st Century? Immanuel Wallerstein predicts that United States will enjoy one last fling…a revival of power…in the absence of any serious military contender, China will displace the United States as the world's superpower and the rest of us will become ‘an arena of anarchic and relatively unpredictable multi-polar disorder’. I don’t think so.

Wallerstein’s Dismal American Future begins with the US Dollar…a basket-case sustained by massive infusions of bond purchases by China and Japan and goodness knows where else. This is too good to last and when the US can no longer barter its Funny Money for wealth produced elsewhere in the world the American Standard of Living will plummet. So what? Send in the Marines! Not that easy.

Iraq has shown that airplanes, ships, and smart bombs are not enough. You need boots on the sand to crush local resistance. The US does not have enough marines and the Bush Presidency has squandered the chance of getting them from patriotic fervour within her borders or from carefully crafted alliances outside. Of course America might try to bomb the rest of the world back into the Stone Age. But it will lose its wars…and the world will draw their own political conclusions. This is already happening.

The UK media has been quiet about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its members are Russia, China and the four Central Asian republics…with invitations extended to India, Pakistan, Mongolia and Iran. The Boston Globe calls this ‘an anti-Bush alliance’ and a ‘tectonic shift in geopolitics’. Right on both counts! All Washington and Tel Aviv can do is huff and puff and try to whip up a United Nations campaign against the Iranians. No chance!

What about Wallerstein’s prediction that China will emerge as number one on the global stage? This seems plausible enough with the Chinese Empire doing well economically, expanding militarily and projecting power far beyond its borders.

But China is not politically stable. The one-party structure has economic success and nationalist sentiment going for it. But it faces the discontent of the half of the population left behind…and the discontent of the other half who want more political freedom. But China also has neighbours to deal with. It wants Taiwan back in the imperial fold and the Koreas unified. And coming to terms with Japan psychologically and politically is fraught with difficulties. Chinese Global Hegemony 20-years hence may be plausible…but it is hardly a dead cert.

However Wallerstein’s dismissal of the rest of us as a motley crew of loose cannons ricocheting about in post-industrialist Brownian Motion is faintly ludicrous. Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland have shown us another way. In the 21st century it is dangerous to threaten others.

The English must shed their inherited imperial pretensions by getting out of the Killingry and Money Laundering businesses and severing connections with International Financial & Lawyer Capitalism…and its global institutions like Central Banking and the IBRD, IMF and WTO.

The English need a Constitutional Makeover that embraces Dual Nationality…inherent in the emerging New World of Diasporas…and dissolves the old British State into an array of Self-Sufficient Principalities. The English need to adopt the governance structures that held sway from the Age of King Alfred to the invasion of William The Conqueror.

Key to the 20-year transition will be the Old English County Governance Structures and a new Magna Carta to be signed in 2015 on the 800th anniversary of Runnymede. A Lord Lieutenant Department in Whitehall with cabinet status is a good way to start. The English Energy Brief will give it power and Charter 2015 will give it kudos.