This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelors

and Germanicus is here and I I presume on Germanicus he's spoken of lessons learned at

Ukraine lessons earned at NATO but I want to look to the future for just a moment, because that

is what we do looking into the future, but here the question is how America, how the United

States of America sees its future and is it ready is it willing

does it accept a role where it is no longer the superpower, a superpower, the marshal on the beat, all the wonderful

metaphors we've had since 1950.

Does the US accept that? Does it embrace it to become a power? How does it

conduct itself? Germanicus, I'm asking you to speculate about how the Imperial City will accept its demotion.

Let's take a page from the past, not our past, but the past of Western modernity.

And let's look at Spain in its imperial peak in the 17th century when the king of Spain was referred to as

El-Rae Planeter, the Planet King for the giant empire that Philip the

fourth surveyed and the place of dominance that Spain occupied over European politics in the Spanish Netherlands

and the capacity of its fantastic Tercios and its armadas to essentially bid for mastery in Europe and the world as a whole.

That all came crashing down after 1660. And what happened in the next 50 years is that Spain

went through an agonizing process of rethinking, re-thinking, revising, and ultimately reimagining what it was.

And it emerged from this rather arduous and bitter process in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714,

where Spain found itself not the dominant power in Europe and it would never be in a position again

divide for European mastery and it accepted that and yet it still had a huge empire in

the Americas and in the Pacific and it had all the the silver from the Americas and it had the third largest

navy in the world so that it was the swing navy it could it could go to the French

and they could overwhelm the British etc etc so and and the

...